I see three challenges for any Christmas book:

1. Find an original angle that's grounded in something real but allows reality to bend for Christmas
2. Evoke the spirit of Christmas without being too saccharine
3. Make me care about the people as people rather than as avatars for Christmas messages

Allen Russell's "St. Nick" manages to pass all three tests. He managed to make me laugh at bad Christmas jokes that I hadn't heard in a long time and cry at the unfairness of a universe in which children get cancer.

"St. Nick", tells the story of Nick Pappas, a San Deigo cop who has been through a recent trauma that has him suspended from the police force. It's Thanksgiving and he's living alone in a shoddy apartment and seriously contemplating eating his gun. He gives himself a reprieve to help his former partner catch some muggers at the shopping mall he runs security for. To catch the muggers, he goes undercover as Santa.

From there, Nick's life gets taken over by the responsibilities that come with the new uniform he's wearing. It brings him into contact with a terminally sick boy with an impossible Christmas wish and sends him searching for Laura, a little girl whose letter to Santa is so moving that Nick ends up starting a search to find her and help her.

Along the way, he builds relationships with a relentlessly cheerful Head Elf, a nurse in the Pediatric Oncology ward and a woman TV reporter who films a segment from his lap and the quarterback from the San Diego Football team.

Throughout, Nick remains the cop he always was. He never loses touch with reality but he does allow himself to re-engage with hope and drives himself to do the right thing for children who need him.

This is an engaging read, with a great pace, a good mix of laughter and tears, a plot that surprises but remains believable and a spirit of Christmas that is about finding the hope and the love to push through the depression and the pain that life offers us. I think it's a perfect  December read.

"St. Nick" was my first Alan Russell book. Looking at his bibliography, it seems that he writes all kinds of fiction but always starts by imagining a real person in a real situation.

In this interview, "True Confessions Of St. Nick",  he explains how he went about writing "St. Nick", including the time he spent working as a Santa in San Diego.

as I got further into Suffrajitsu, I fell further in love. Not only does it have some BA women doing BA things, but I love the dialogue. Now, I will take this time to remind potential readers that this is an alternate history and events did not go down like this. However, this graphic novel is less about the suffragette movement than it is about the actions of these specific suffragists. It's the kind of graphic novel that you have to know a little about the subject matter to really enjoy but the little that is required is totally covered by the Suffragette movie that came out last year, which can be streamed on Amazon Video here. I might be a fan of this movie. It just does a great job of not romanticizing one side or the other. It shows the hardships the women went through without over glorifying it and lets the viewer make their own decisions about their actions. There are also plenty of books that cover this part of history.

Getting back to Suffrajitsu, I enjoyed it, particularly after realizing what it was. This is not a graphic novel overview of the historical events. It's just a set of comics that use some of these women as characters. It's a fun read but not the kind that a reader should take their history from. Definitely fiction. Definitely interesting. Definitely fun. I loved the main characters. I've known quite a few women like this. They could be sitting in a bar talking about anything and I would love to read about it.

While I didn't technically buy books today, I did pick up a few digital comics for my girls and I to peruse.  But since they're a) comics and b) digital, they don't really count towards my self imposed book buying ban, right? Right?  Ah well, at least I don't have to rearrange my physical book cases to fit these in.

Since I'd been reading the Graphic Novel version of the Hobbit the last few days, I'd been inspired to find some other adaptations to read... and by inspired, I mean I was procrastinating typing up a lab report that's due next week.  

So I did my usual, check out what free comics Comixology has, and after downloading those noticed a couple of sales they were having. I picked up Wool: The Graphic Novel, an adaptation of Hugh Howey's books of the same name.  Not that I've read the Wool yet, it's been recommended to me numerous times and I really enjoyed Sand last year, so I thought the graphic version might be a good choice for study breaks.

Since I'm always on the look out for ways to encourage my middle daughter to read, and comics are one of the few ways that seems to draw her in, I picked up some of the Marvel discounted comics too, especially since they all featured female leads.

I'm quite looking forward to reading the first issue of Thor 2014, which caused a stir by making the god of thunder a woman. I also picked up a couple of Spider variants: Gwen #1 (2015) and Woman #1 (2014), She Hulk #1 (2014) and the one I think will be the biggest hit, Princess Leia #1 (2015).

They also had the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1 (2015), Ms Marvel #1 (2014), Black Widow #1 (2014) and Captain Marvel #1 (2014), all of which we had already. I've only read the first 2 so far, and I highly recommend them if you're looking for a good "girl power" read.

Now to stop myself from reading them before I get this report done.  It's going to be hard.