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Author: Gin Jenny

November Reading, Plus an Advert for Ted Lasso

We made it through another month! And this one was a really hard one to make it through, on account of we had to wait for days and days for the election results, and then there was this whole stupid slow-motion effort to pretend that the election didn’t have results, and what with one thing and another I have aged approximately two hundred years. The true headline of November has been my discovery of the sweetest and dearest sitcom since The Good Place got me through the 2016 election. It is — and I do not say this lightly —…

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Review: Phoenix Extravagant, Yoon Ha Lee

When Jebi signs up to take the examination for the Ministry of Art, they expect two things: a job, and for their sister Bongsunga to get really really mad at them. Which she does: The Razanei government oppresses Jebi and Bongsunga’s people, the Hwaguk, and the last thing Bongsunga wants is to see her sibling assimilating. She throws Jebi out, and the next thing they know, they’ve been forcibly recruited to paint the magical sigils that power the Razanei army’s automatons. Most particularly, Jebi has been tasked with finding out what went wrong with the dragon automaton Arazi, which went…

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PODCAST – Episode 139 – Spoopy Books and Kwana Jackson’s Real Men Knit

So, the election was yesterday. When we recorded this podcast, we didn’t know what the election results were going to be. As I write this post, I don’t know what the election results are going to be. Probably as you are reading this, you don’t know what the election results are! But I hope you are being very very gentle with yourself in this, the scariest Halloween week we’ve ever known, and I hope this podcast provides a very small escape. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you…

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Fixing the Great British Bake-Off: A Links Round-Up

Are you snappy with your loved ones? Incapable of focusing on a task, even by the unfocused standards of 2020? Well, don’t worry, because everyone else is in the exact same boat! It’s a horrible, leaky boat, and we all hate it here! Remember when there were nice things and we liked those things? How nostalgic I feel for the time of nice things, such as “seeing friends in different cities” and “going to the grocery store” and “not feeling miffed when I saw a stranger’s nose while standing in a building.” Hopefully by the time I do my next…

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Farewell, October!

We have reached another Halloween in which I completely forgot/failed to read anything for RIP, despite its being one of my favorite blogging events! I suppose, in retrospect, that Lobizona totally counted. Why did I not call it an RIP read when I was reviewing it?? WHO AM I. October Reviews Well, obviously the biggest deal this month was that Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief came out, but I believe I have flailed about it sufficiently in its own post. I also read and adored Romina Garber’s werewolf YA novel, Lobizona, which has a pleasing amount of sportsball…

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Review: Lobizona, Romina Garber

I’ve probably said this before, but one of the most joyous things to me about the increasing author diversity in the SFF genre (slowly, slowly increasing) is the opportunity to see a wider range of authors take on familiar types of stories. To my immense delight, Romina Garber’s novel Lobizona has not just werewolves but a magic boarding school. This is great for me because while I have mixed feelings about Creatures, I adooooore a boarding school story and even more adore a magic boarding school story. Manu and her mother are undocumented immigrants, and Manu has spent the bulk…

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HOUSE MEAL, a Revolutionary Concept: A Links Round-Up

It’s another Friday that feels like a Monday! Not in a good way! But this Friday-that-feels-like-Monday isn’t like the other Fridays-that-feel-like-Mondays, because today is Oscar Wilde’s birthday! Oscar Wilde’s birthday! He would be, let’s see, one hundred and sixty-six if he had not died tragically young of ?stomach cancer? and if he had also died of nothing else due to advances in science that allowed people to live to be sixty-six. Hooray! I also watched an episode of Star Trek: Discovery and it was x-tremely enjoyable and I was in favor of it. I have not seen other episodes of…

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Return! of! the! Thief!, by Megan Whalen Turner

I only sort of believed this day would come. Part of me really thought that Return of the Thief would be like King Arthur returning to save the country in its hour of greatest need. I wasn’t even sad about it. In some ways I thought the promise of Return of the Thief was even better than actually having Return of the Thief in my own two hands. But now Return of the Thief has come at last, and it honestly is like King Arthur returning to save the country (of Queen’s Thief fans) in our hour of greatest need…

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Episode 138 – Fictional Travel Destinations and Elizabeth Little’s Pretty as a Picture

Happy Wednesday, darling friends! We have dedicated much of today’s podcast to indulging in escapist fantasies, and I have to be honest: They made us feel really nice. We highly recommend taking a short break in which you pretend you do not live in our present dystopian hellscape, as it is beneficial to one’s mental health. On today’s podcast, we also talk about our non-escapist democracy preservation efforts, as well as reviewing Elizabeth Little’s totally delightful mystery novel, Pretty as a Picture. Join us! You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to…

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Review: Spoiler Alert, Olivia Dade

tl;dr: TEN THOUSAND STARS Are you salty as fuck about how Game of Thrones ended? Have you spent time surfing the “Pegging” tag on AO3? (sorry Mom that I am talking about pegging on the internet again) Do you yearn for more fat romance heroines? Cease your peregrinations, your search is at an end! Olivia Dade is here for her you with her latest novel Spoiler Alert, which is all about a fat fanfiction-writing geologist who goes on a date with the star of the biggest fantasy show of our time (who secretly also writes fanfiction). It’s not Game of…

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