If you ever feel I’m not giving enough love in this space to Brenna Yovanoff, there just is not a good answer I can give you. I thought The Replacement was quite terrific, and if I hadn’t heard bad things about Fiendish, I’d have read it way sooner. I regret the error. Fiendish is about a girl called Clementine who lies sleeping inside the cellar of a burned-out house, tangled in leaves, for ten years. When she wakes up, the world has changed. Her mother is dead, her own aunt doesn’t remember her, and her town hates and fears people like her, people…
4 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
Happy Wednesday! This week, we’re talking about adaptations of classic novels and reviewing Alexander McCall Smith’s updating of Jane Austen’s Emma. We’re also getting back to our roots with a polar explorer update! You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 44 Books discussed in this podcast are listed, in order, below. If any book is an adaptation of another book, the source material is listed in parentheses. Wicked, Gregory Maguire (The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum) Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory…
5 CommentsIn case you missed Shirley Jackson Week, about which I admit I was rather slapdash, I’ve put together a lovely round-up of the posts we were treated to last week! We Have Always Lived in the Castle Words for Worms Harriet Devine A Striped Armchair The Sundial (my fave!) Desperate Reader Emerald City Book Review Gaskella Life among the Savages & Raising Demons Shiny New Books The Road through the Wall Stuck in a Book Short stories! a gallimaufry on “Paranoia” ChrisBookarama on “The Daemon Lover” things mean a lot on “The Daemon Lover” The Cheap Reader on The Lottery…
4 CommentsAn infographic to explain how you should deal with your anger on the internet. At first blush, I think these rules are pretty solid! You? It’s about ethics in book reviews. On Twitter the other day someone tweeted that “Strange Fruit” was by two white dudes, and I thought, “On the Nina Simone tribute album, you mean?” Nope. She meant there is a new comic book called Strange Fruit featuring an enormously strong mute alien who looks like a black man, and the two authors of it are both white dudes. So, worse than my first thought. A story about…
11 CommentsIdentity is a complex and infinitely divisible monster. (Fight me sometime over the legitimacy of my claim to Southern-girl identity.) In the fascinating first few chapters of There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond, Meline Toumani explores the close bonds among diaspora Armenians, as well as the oodles of ways they have found of distinguishing themselves from each other: speakers of Western Armenian vs. speakers of Eastern Armenian, Armenians from Lebanon vs. from Brazil vs. from Turkey vs. from actual Armenia. What they share in common is a mistrust of Turks and a passionate desire to make the Turks and the…
3 CommentsNote: I received an advance e-book edition of Wylding Hall from the publisher, Open Road Media, for review consideration. At last, an Elizabeth Hand book suited to my needs! In the past when I have tried books by Elizabeth Hand, most of those attempts undocumented in this space because writing “meh” reviews is boring, I have found her books either dull or unsatisfying. But her new book, Wylding Hall, makes the most of its ellipses, letting the reader’s mind fill them with the very spookiest of explanations. Wylding Hall is set up as an oral history of the famed (fictional)…
15 CommentsSometimes, people in Russia hold these things called monstrations (like demonstrations without the de), which are like protests, but instead of protests they are performance art. And instead of protesting real things, they march all around with billboards that say things like No to colonization of Mars! and You are too boring to talk to! and WET PRIESTS. Ahahaha, Russia, you’re so weird! What a weird thing to do! Protests get stifled in Russia, so Russia has performance art protests instead. Ugh, that wasn’t fair. Sometimes Russia has real protests too. But they also have these fake performance art protests, and I think this should…
9 CommentsHappy Wednesday! This week, we’re sharing some thrilling podcast news, talking about time and place settings we’d like to see in more books, and reviewing Attica Locke’s new mystery Pleasantville. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 43 Links of interest Vulture reports on JK Rowling’s non-prequel play. The Vox article about leading slavery tours at a plantation. Books mentioned (those that have been reviewed in this space are linked to the review): Ada or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov (podcast readalong!) The Cutting Season, Attica…
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