So I’m pretty late to this party, but colouring book fans are right: colouring is relaxing. I remember when I was a child, an aunt had a colouring book she loved. It featured prismatic patterns, and would probably fit right in with the current trends in adult colouring. I don’t know if adult colouring was a big thing back then, but I prefer to think my aunt was a couple decades ahead of her time.

The current trend in adult colouring began with Johanna Basford‘s books last year, I believe. I tried to get a copy for my sister (who had read about it online), but Indigo stores were completely out of stock. I didn’t quite understand the trend at the time; I had coloured a bit in adulthood, but it never quite stuck.

But over the past couple of months, I’ve really gotten into the activity. Part of it is that I’ve started using coloured pencils rather than crayons, and I find I really prefer that. I tried markers at the Penguin Random House Canada #DigitalDetox event colouring table and it makes the page look even prettier, but I think markers make me too nervous about making a mistake. Coloured pencils are much more forgiving.

Also, I find that colouring is extra fun when I’m listening to an audio book or when I’m watching Netflix or any one of my British mystery DVDs that I’ve seen before, so I don’t have to concentrate fully on the plot.

So here are the colouring books that I’m loving right now:

Boy Bands: A Colouring Book

My current obsession with adult colouring books began with a friend’s Christmas gift: a Boy Bands colouring book from Team Art. What self-respecting 80s or 90s kid can resist the opportunity to colour in the Backstreet Boys? A young Justin Timberlake even makes an appearance in the preview below:

Team Art has an amazing collection of other titles as well, including Parks and Rec and a Beyonce-themed colouring book.

Sherlock: The Mind Palace

This purchase was an impulse buy at Toronto indie bookstore Book City. I was in the shop looking for a birthday gift for someone, and I ended up getting not just the birthday gift, but also a cookbook and this Sherlock colouring book. After all, Benedict Cumberbatch’s illustrated face was looking right at me from a table display, and I could hardly leave him hanging, now could I?

There are a lot of great scenes from the series in this book, and similar to Basford’s treasure hunt-themed colouring books, clues to each mystery are hidden throughout these pages. (For example, on one page, I wondered why a bottle with two pills was rather incongruously displayed in the scene, then I remembered it was a clue from the very first Sherlock episode.)

If you live in Toronto, I highly recommend Book City or any one of the other independent bookshops around. Otherwise, it’s fairly easy to find at Indigo or Amazon.

Cats in Paris

I discovered Cats in Paris at the Penguin Random House Canada #DigitalDetox event, and really, that cover is utter catnip to crazy cat lady bookworms everywhere (ahem: me). I took one look at that cat adorably draping itself around those books and fell utterly in love. I tried to push it to the back of my mind as a someday treat kind of thing (after all, I still had the plenty of Boy Band pages to fill in),  but really, all it took was needing to add a few extra dollars to qualify for free shipping on an online order, and I had my excuse to add this to my shelf.

There are lots of colouring books out there with hyper-detailed, oddly patterned cats, but I just love Won-Sun Jung’s whimsical style, which made the cats look sinuous in motion and/or just plain adorably fluffy. Look for it at your local indie, Indigo or Amazon.

Paris Street Style

I also discovered Paris Street Style at the Penguin Random House Canada event and found myself immediately intrigued. This is probably the one in my collection that’s most similar to the colouring books I had and loved as a child, with various outfits to fill in with wild colour combinations. (My childhood version was princess-themed rather than Paris-themed, but the source of pleasure was the same, I think.)

I love the overall look of this colouring book; it’s a bit smaller than the average colouring book, and designed somewhat like a journal, with a ribbon marker and elastic closure. Look for it at your local indie, Indigo or Amazon.

All the Libraries Toronto

For anyone who loves Toronto and/or libraries, Dundurn Press has published a beautiful colouring book featuring all 100 branches of the Toronto Public Library. The publisher held a colouring contest a few months ago, and the entries show just how creative you can be with a bunch of buildings that are likely coloured fairly neutrally in real life. (The winner even drew a dragon on top of the Dufferin/St. Clair branch!)

The illustrations were created by Toronto artist Daniel Rotsztain, who apparently began the project as “a love letter to the Toronto Public Library.” It’s a pretty cool project, and I just love the idea of paying tribute to a city’s library system. I assume that the Page and Panel comic book shop at the Toronto Reference Library would have this book in stock (I haven’t verified this myself, so I could be wrong, but it seems logical, no?), but if not, this book is available at Indigo and Amazon.

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Have you also rediscovered your love for colouring books? What got you started and what do you like to colour? Let me know in the comments!

When we last left Flavia de Luce at the end of The Dead in their Vaulted Arches, she was to be sent to a Toronto boarding school. I’ve always loved Bradley’s irrepressible heroine and cozy mysteries, and I especially love Flavia’s having adventures all around the Buckshaw estate. So I wasn’t quite sure about the new Maisy Dobbs-ish direction the series seemed to be taking, nor in the switch in locale, much as I love Toronto.

As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust retains some of that cozy mystery feel I loved so much about the series. A schoolgirl prank is interrupted by a skeleton falling out of a dormitory chimney, and the mystery behind this skeleton’s identity plunges Flavia right back into super sleuth mode.

I’ve always enjoyed boarding school stories, and I love how Chimney Sweepers gives Flavia the opportunity to interact with girls her own age, rather than the adults in and around Buckshaw. Bradley is great at creating vibrant, interesting secondary characters, and while I miss Dogger and other characters from England, I did enjoy reading about this new cast. The mystery itself is puzzling enough, and it was fun seeing Flavia out of her comfort zone, having to conduct experiments and hunt around for clues in a city she isn’t familiar with.

It’s somewhat sad to see Flavia grow beyond Buckshaw, though I suppose with the events in Vaulted Arches, there really is a big shift due in Flavia’s life. I do like the boarding school element, and admit the characters had begun to grow on me by the end.

SPOILER ALERT!

Part of me is glad that the story ends with Flavia returning to Buckshaw, but that whole twist just makes the interlude in Toronto feel even more random. I can understand a complete shift in the series’ tone and setting, but if Bradley was planning to keep Flavia in Buckshaw after all, what was the point of a random semester in boarding school?

/END SPOILER

Overall, Chimney Sweepers definitely stands out from the rest of the Flavia de Luce series. It is far from my favourite in the series; I personally prefer the earlier titles (check out my reviews of Red Herring without Mustard, Speaking from Among the Bones, and my all-time personal favourite I am Half-Sick of Shadows). Still, it’s an enjoyable read, as all Flavia books are, and I’d be interested to see where Bradley takes this series next.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I can still remember how I felt when I opened up the first issue of the Archie Comics reboot and saw Sheila for the first time:

So excited about this character!

Sheila is the girl in the middle, and the caption is the one I used in my original blog post about the issue. When I posted that review, and when I squee’d over this panel on Twitter, I knew nothing about the character except that she was Asian and she appeared to be a main character in the new series.

I admit that my reaction surprised me, because up until that point, I don’t think I ever quite really thought much about Riverdale needing an Asian character. It’s a lack that I didn’t realize so much until it was filled, and that’s really important, because as an Asian woman growing up with Sweet Valley and Nancy Drew and, yes, Archie Comics, I never really expected to see myself in those pages. I wish now I’d appreciated more the character of Claudia Kishi in the Baby-Sitters Club, but I’d always been drawn more to Stacey the math genius and big city fashionista. Growing up, I never really noticed how few Asian main characters there were in the books I read and loved, and it’s sad to realize that the presence of a character like Sheila is so surprising to me.

I even remember a story Archie Comics did a few years ago, where a Japanese student started at Riverdale High. It was a one-off story in a digest, and basically had the student explaining her life in Japan and how the customs are very different in America. I remember wishing that Archie Comics had given that student a story beyond making her an object lesson in Japanese culture, but also found myself happy that they featured a Japanese character in the first place.

Sheila’s addition to the gang is huge to me. She is an aspiring fashion designer who appears to have grown up with Archie and the gang, and in a recent issue, was even unwittingly a part of one of Reggie’s schemes. She’s like a Dilton or a Midge who will have her own part to play in the Riverdale story moving forward, and I think that’s awesome.

All this to say that I really love the new direction Archie Comics is taking. Kevin Keller, who was introduced a few years ago as the first gay character in Riverdale, has since become firmly entrenched as a main character. I love that, because unlike that Japanese student whose name I can’t even remember, Kevin’s inclusion in the series is as a fully fleshed out character, whose story arc is developing right alongside Archie’s and Betty’s and Veronica’s.

And then Archie Comics goes ahead and does this with the rebooted Jughead #4:

It’s one thing to make a classic, beloved, main character like Jughead gay — and Archie Comics didn’t even dare do that in 2010, opting instead to add a completely new character — and it’s quite another to make him asexual. Can you think of any asexual character in popular books, movies or TV right now? I can’t. Gay and lesbian characters are thankfully becoming more visible on screen, trans characters are starting to become more visible, and while a lot more work can still be done in terms of representing the full gender and sexuality spectrums, I can honestly say that I can’t think of any character in books, TV or movies right now who is asexual.

And now we have Jughead Jones, probably the smartest, savviest character in the Riverdale universe. Bravo to Archie Comics for, not just featuring an asexual character, but also daring to do this with an already established main character, instead of adding a completely new one whom they can keep or discard depending on public response.

Here’s the thing: I’m imagining how many Archie Comics readers are out there who are asexual and who never expected to see themselves in a book, never mind in a comic book series whose target audience is children and whose main story revolves around a love triangle. How many of them will see this and squee with excitement much as I did when I first saw Sheila? It’s too early to say if this is a one-off, or if it’ll even be picked up in other Archie series. But even this one panel is huge.

To be honest, I don’t know how readers who are asexual feel about this panel, if they are as excited about it as I am and as media outlets are, or if they wish Archie Comics had handled it differently, much as I felt about that Japanese student story. I’d be interested to find out, but for now, I hope that it meant at least as much to them as having an Asian character in Riverdale meant to me.

What does the new Archie Comics have coming up next? I’m excited to find out, but more importantly, I’m excited because now I actually feel like I can dare to hope. I hope that a Filipino character eventually moves to Riverdale. I hope that a plus size woman joins Riverdale High and is considered hot enough to capture Reggie Mantle’s eye. I don’t even know what else I hope for, but I do hope. And for once, I don’t feel like I’m daring to hope — I’m just hoping. Because the new Archie Comics has already proven its willingness to push boundaries and inject reality into Riverdale, and now the possibilities are endless.