Ordinarily I would start a review by describing the book’s premise, but Helen Oyeyemi’s Peaces, like so many of her books, resists the idea of a “premise.” As time goes on and Helen Oyeyemi approaches a Helen Oyeyemi singularity, it becomes harder and harder to encapsulate her books into anything as mundane as a “premise.” There is a train; some newlyweds and their pet mongoose are traveling on the train; things go a bit wrong. Former Oyeyemi premises include: A male author writes a lot of female deaths; things go a bit wrong. Twins live in a haunted house; things…
Leave a CommentAuthor: Gin Jenny
Intisar Khanani has a new book! And it’s out today! Can you believe our good fortune? The Theft of Sunlight is the first wholly new Intisar Khanani book I’ve read in what feels like a thousand years, and it felt like coming home. The Theft of Sunlight is a companion novel to Thorn that doesn’t (in my opinion) require prior knowledge of Thorn in order to read it. It follows Rae, a country girl who comes to the royal court and becomes handmaiden to the new queen, Alyrra (Thorn from Thorn!). There she begins to learn how to navigate the…
Leave a CommentLast week I was reading a bunch of things where people said that quarantinaversary was going to be very hard for everyone so we should go easy on ourselves, and I was like, la la la, I’m doing amazing, I’m not even slightly having a hard time, I have escaped the trauma of quarantinaversary. And then this week came along, and my brain now comprises a (1) scrambled egg. Pride goeth before a fall! All of this to say, please be gentle with yourself if you’re having a hard time right now. Here are some links! Gabrielle Bellot writes about…
Leave a CommentHappy Monday, friends! The Ex Talk, Rachel Solomon Here’s a twist on fake dating I’ve never seen before: Fake exes. In order to save their small public radio station, Shay Goldstein has to team up with the pretentious hotshot at her work, a man named Dominic Yun who’s beloved of their sexist boss and can’t stop talking about his master’s degree in journalism. They’ll be working on a podcast called The Ex Talk, where two exes discuss the world of relationships and dating, as well as their own unsuccessful relationship. Except Dominic and Shay have never dated; they’ve barely even…
Leave a CommentMy Year Abroad is a book about appetite, about wanting more (and more and more, and infinitely more). It’s a story about how our appetites can make us and unmake us. It’s… very weird, if that’s your thing. Being a small-c catholic reader who came from fantasy means that I have a great appetite (appetite! a theme!) for weird literary fiction, where weird can mean anything from “xenophobic haunted house” (White Is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi) to “eating turtles to be immortal” (The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanigahara) to “inventing a fictional blues song whose made-up singer then…
Leave a CommentIt’s a buddy read! My lovely pal Jeanne, of Necromancy Never Pays, suggested recently that we do a buddy read, so I proposed one of the books that has languished for ages and ages on my TBR list: Joan Vinge’s classic SF novel The Snow Queen, which was published in 1980 and won a Hugo Award. Here’s our conversation. Jeanne: There are lots of good things about Vinge’s classic science fiction novel The Snow Queen (published in 1980). There are also lots of less good things. There are just lots of things, as it’s 465 pages long. Jenny: The thesis…
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