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Author: Gin Jenny

‘Tis the Season for Best Books Lists: A Links Round-Up

Oh, friends. Albeit the holidays are a challenging and tiring time for many, they are also the glorious occasion of Best Books of the Year lists, which I love so much. I am linking to, uh, a certain number of those lists. Make of that what you will. NPR’s Book Concierge for 2022 Brittle Paper‘s list of 100 Notable African Books of 2022. The Guardian‘s Best Books of 2022. Paste‘s Best Fantasy Books of 2022. Kirkus has a bunch of subject-specific lists of best books of 2022. The Globe and Mail‘s Best Books of 2022. Laura Miller’s best of 2022.…

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Twitter Moriturus Te Salutat: A Links Round-Up

I actually have no idea what is going to happen to Twitter, but this title seemed very funny to me. Hopefully it will not die? I feel very sad at the prospect of its dying; I feel like Obi-Wan Kenobi sitting in the Millennium Falcon feeling the deaths on Alderaan. So yeah, idk, here are some links. Nauru is a very tiny island nation that I learned about in the book How to Hide an Empire (which was good). Here is an article about the current state of things in Nauru. The villain is colonialism all along! “’I was a…

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It’s Scary How Many Links There Are: A Links Round-Up

LOL I keep meaning to post these links, and every Thursday evening, like clockwork, it falls right out of my brain that I have ever seen such a thing as a link in all my born days. So much has happened! Angela Lansbury died! Elon Musk might buy Twitter after all! Burkina Faso had its second coup of the year! I hope that y’all are all hanging in there as we head into spooky season. I hope your neighborhoods have lots of good Halloween decorations. I hope that the Locked Tomb fans among you are enjoying my scaaaaaaaaary Twitter display…

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Me over at Tor

Hi friends! My second and third Ships in the Night columns on SFF romance have gone up at Tor! In the second one, I talk about Suleikha Snyder’s wonderful Third Shift series and the power of community to sustain the fight for equality. (I got too cute in my bio for this one and therefore did not get tagged on Twitter when it came out and therefore did not promote it at the time, because I am a dope.) Then the third one is about the romance novel cinematic universe, specifically in Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling-Trinity series, and how it resolves…

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Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

WHO IS E WHO IS E OH WHAT THE FUCK WHO IS E Nothing gets me on my crazy Catholic bullshit like a new Tamsyn Muir book. When I finally (FINALLY) got my hands on Nona the Ninth, after ten thousand (fact check: two) years of pining for it, I curled up on my sofa with it and my Bible and unfortunately no wine because I was on a clean living kick, and read it and thought of tweets like “New Revised Standard Version in the streets, King James Version in the sheets”, a tweet you were only spared because…

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Sandman, Episode 7: The Doll’s House

We open on Dream paging through a book labeled “Rose Walker.” In a flashback, a boy and a girl are packing to leave for New Jersey, but then their mom comes in to say that their (clearly abusive) father refuses to let the boy, Jed, go with them. The girl, Rose, will go with her mom to New Jersey and then send for Jed to join them later. Ugh. Desire, played very sexily by Mason Alexander Park, summons their sister Despair to talk with them about their plans for Dream. This is my least favorite thing: As in the comics,…

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Sandman, Episode 6: The Sound of Her Wings

We open on Dream feeding pigeons in the park and doing the world’s biggest-ever sulk. He catches an errant ball without looking, and as its owner retrieves it, KIRBY HOWELL-BAPTISTE!!!!! walks up. (The owner of the ball is called Franklin. He’s adorable, but he’s also a race-bent character who I know is going to die by the end of the episode, which like… agh! This is happening too often! Please, Sandman casting people, contemplate the ramifications of these choices!) KIRBY HOWELL-BAPTISTE!!!!! as Death is the best casting in an altogether well-cast series. She’s warm and funny, and she has an…

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Sandman, Episode 5: 24/7

Oh, the diner episode. Oh, the apprehension I felt about this episode. In the comic it is extremely nasty, not least because all the characters John Dee kills at the diner are extremely nasty themselves—which feels very suitable to the time it was written. In 2022, for whatever combination of reasons, it no longer feels transgressive for everyone to be awful people hiding loathsome secrets. Many of the plot points are ported over directly from the comic, but they feel different here, perhaps because the episode pushes back hard against John Dee’s claim that he’s making a more honest world…

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Sandman, Episode 4: A Hope in Hell

We open with Dream and his new raven the only raven that matters now so please shut up about it, Dream, heading into hell. Give it up to the hair and makeup team and the costume design guys on this show, because every time I see Dream full-on with his black coat and black boots, and he’s approximately the width of two of my fingers, I’m like, yeah, I recognize him. This is the sulky fuckboy with near-infinite power that I remember from the comics. What you don’t realize about is that this is secretly an episode of The Amazing…

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Sandman, Episode 3: Dream a Little Dream of Me

Johanna Constantine dreams. I am in love with her. She’s wearing the worst pants in the world, yet she still looks beautiful. How? I don’t know. I am surprised to find this level of allegiance to Jenna Coleman within my heart. She’s such a little chipmunk face! There’s some business I don’t fully understand where she has to clean up the satanic ritual mess of an irresponsible drunk with an adorable daughter called Astra, but it doesn’t matter too much because in the next shot Constantine has woken up from her scary dream and is getting out of a cab…

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