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Author: Gin Jenny

Review: Lower Ed, Tressie McMillan Cottom

FINALLY. Not that anyone cares,1, but my struggles to get my hands on my library’s copy of Lower Ed have spanned almost six months. If I wanted to wait six months to read a book I put on hold at the library, I’d have stayed in New York and only had a NYPL library card because BPL actually processes holds at a reasonable speed but what I’m saying is that NYPL is terrible at processing holds. And six months was too long to wait for Lower Ed. I’d have lost interest if I hadn’t been so darn interested. Lower Ed…

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Something on Sunday 10/29

Happy Sunday, friends! The weather in Louisiana has settled down to be beautiful at least for a few days, so my main Something on Sunday thing is that I can finally walk places again. It fulfills so many needs at once! I get my exercise! I have time to think quietly! The sun blondes my hair! It’s the best! The other thing is that I’ve started rewatching Black Sails with my sister, and I noticed in the pilot that Miranda and Flint have this book on their shelves. (I had never heard of this fellow Grotius.) Well not TWO DAYS…

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Still Mostly about Sexism: A Links Round-Up

I’m really tired this Friday. My week’s been fine, but I’m coming out of it feeling exhausted and discouraged, for no real reason I can identify. I wish my stupid period would start, as I guess that is maybe the reason I am feeling crummy. These are some links. Very good ones, I think! “Every comment allowed to pass, every rapist defended by friends and family and strangers, every man afraid of being falsely accused, creates a culture saying, ‘We have your back when you harm women.’” Natalie Degraffinried on how badly we need men to take on accountability for…

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Review: Hamilton’s Battalion

If you follow me on Twitter, you may already have seen me shrieking about Hamilton’s Battalion, a collection of novellas by three of my favorite romance authors. But I’d like now to review it in a more measured fashion, after some days with the text and a mature1 consideration of its merits. Ha! You thought I was going to put an all-capsy shrieky paragraph down here after the cover, didn’t you? You thought all that maTOOR business was setting up a joke, but it wasn’t. That’s just how I say mature, which shows that I am a sophisticate. The first…

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Something on Sunday: 10/22

Happy Sunday, friends, and welcome back to the third-for-me-but-fourth-overall Something on Sunday! I missed last week due to travel plans and being lazy, but from NOW ON there will be ALWAYS a Something on Sunday for y’all lovely people to splash around in. Here’s what I’ve got. Intisar Khanani, an author I adore and cherish, has landed a two-book deal with Harper Teen. They’ll be reissuing her book Thorn, a marvelous retelling of “The Goose Girl,” and she’ll be writing a companion novel to go with it, tentatively called A Theft of Sunlight. Intisar Khanani seems like a truly lovely…

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Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon: 10 Years in 10 Books

It’s Readathon Day, the happiest day of the year! Having just come off a vacation where I read far less than I planned to, I am excited to sit down and read and read and read. But first, I’m doing the readathon challenge of naming an awesome book published in each year of the Readathon. Buckle up, kids, you’ve heard me scream about most of these before and you might be tired of them but that won’t stop me. 2007 – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows THIS WAS BITTERSWEET REALLY. Do you remember this? The end of an era?…

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Review: An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon

Don’t you love a debut novel? Admittedly in this trashfire world I am prone to getting sentimental about things it is insane to get sentimental about, like tiny foods and sitcom episodes where people discover emotional truths about themselves; but I do feel sentimental about debut novels and the hope they represent. There’s something quite magical about an editor believing in a brand new author, and there’s something even magical-er about an author setting their first-ever book into the world like a message in a bottle, searching for their exactly-right community of readers. Which is why I’m mightily grateful to…

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Not My Cheeriest Ever Links Round-Up

Happy Friday the 13th, friends! Hopefully it brings you good luck, not bad. I’m having a strange, emotional week, but it includes a lot of wonderful friends whom I get to vigorously embrace, so that bit’s good. Have some links! “White men’s rage is burning down the world”: Sady Doyle on the profile of the mass shooter. Also, an older article but an evergreen reminder that a lot of these people do it for the glory. Use the shooter’s name sparingly, if at all, when discussing crimes like these. At a different point along the toxic masculinity spectrum, some thoughts…

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Review: Song of the Current, Sarah Tolcser

Either book covers have become more beautiful lately, or I have become more susceptible, but I find myself in a constant state of awe over book covers these days. Look at this one, for Sarah Tolcser’s YA novel of at-sea adventures, Song of the Current: With the moon? And the way it sparkles on the water? I’m into it. Song of the Current is about a girl called Caro who comes from a family of wherrymen favored by the river god. At seventeen, she’s never heard the river god’s voice and fears she never will. When her father is arrested…

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Review: The Bloodprint, Ausma Zehanat Khan

Note: I received a review copy of The Bloodprint from the publisher. This has not impacted the content of my review. As Katie always says, it would take more than a single copy of a single book to buy my loyalty. Arian is a warrior, linguist, and Companion of Hira, an order of women who draw their power from the Claim, a type of magic that draws its power from sacred scripture. They are battling against the Talisman, a movement led by the One-Eyed Preacher that seeks to eradicate scholarship and knowledge and the written word and to subjugate all…

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