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Author: Jenny Hamilton

Review: We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory

Note: I received a digital galley of We Are All Completely Fine from the publisher for review consideration. DARYL GREGORY AUTHOR DISCOVERY YEAR CONTINUES. Not only has Daryl Gregory produced another fine piece of science fiction — this one a novella — but I have at last discovered why I love his books so much. It’s cause his wife is a psychologist! (He thanks her in the acknowledgements.) No wonder Gregory wrote about crazy people so brilliantly in Afterparty. No wonder he is always writing about confronting impossible, insane situations with the only available tools (science, therapy) and knowing all…

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A read for Women in Translation Month that I can’t tell you about

Bibliobio is hosting a Women in Translation Month right now, to call attention to the gender disparity in books translated into English, and to celebrate the works of female international authors whose books are being translated into English. It’s a wonderful initiative, even if you are like me and you have a hard time with books in translation, and you should definitely check out the hashtags for the month (#WITMonth or #WomeninTranslation) to see what folks are reading! I have struggled long and hard to write a post about the first book I read for Women in Translation Month, and…

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Review: Sinner, Maggie Stiefvater

Note: I received an electronic copy of Sinner from the publisher, through NetGalley, for review consideration. Coming down from a book hangover after reading The Raven Boys and The Dream Thieves was tricky. As of this writing, I think I am mostly okay; I just need to really figure out what my next read is going to be. Alternating Maggie Stiefvater books with unreviewable academic texts is probably not a sustainable direction for the blog (though very fun for me). Anyway, part of my hangover recovery process was binge-reading The Lesser Works, i.e., Shiver, Linger, and Forever, which are about…

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Things in my week that were awesome

First of all: The absurdly delayed results of my Alias Hook giveaway! Random.org picked a winner, and it is Jeanne! Of Necromancy Never Pays! Congrats, Jeanne, and I will ask the publisher to send a copy of the book your way. Secondly, I decided to do a links round-up post today, of bookish and nerdy and feminist stuff that interested me this week. I always love link round-ups, and this week I got jealous enough to make one of my own. In honor of the release of Marvel’s weirdest movie yet, Guardians of the Galaxy, I give you two conflicting…

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Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.26: Movie Adaptations, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and an Adapted Title Game

The Jennys return to talk book-to-movie adaptations in the upcoming months! We discuss some of the movies that are coming up, and then we review Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and then we play what some have called the greatest game ever on the podcast. (Judge for yourself.) You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 26 Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very…

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Someone has to decide which animals go extinct

Have y’all ever thought about that before? I had not! But I was reading the 2013 Best American Science and Nature Writing, edited this year by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and an essay by Michelle Nijhuis from Scientific American blew my mind out of the back of my skull. Someone has to decide which animals go extinct! Even if that is not the exact decision that gets made, it’s effectively still true: When resources are finite (and they always are), choosing to save one species means you have chosen not to save another one. If you aren’t in denial about this truth,…

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Review: The Last Illusion, Porochista Khakpour

The albino boy Zal is born in a rural Iranian village to a mother horrified by his appearance. She calls him the White Demon, puts him in a birdcage, and keeps him there for the first ten years of his life. Finally, he’s freed from his cage and brought to America by a behavioral analyst determined to give Zal a normal life. Zal reaches adulthood(ish) still haunted by the dreams of his past as a bird, and as he tries to figure out how to be normal, he becomes involved with an artist called Asiya who has visions of disaster…

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Review: The Dream Thieves, Maggie Stiefvater

Note: There will be some spoilers for The Raven Boys in this post, but I will try to steer clear of spoiling The Dream Thieves. After finishing The Raven Boys, I wanted to go out to the bookstore and buy The Dream Thieves in hardback. But since I almost never buy new hardbacks, and some people didn’t like The Dream Thieves as much, I instead put a sensible hold on the ebook copy at my library. The hold came in (blessedly promptly), and I read twenty pages of it, then the end, and then I went to Barnes & Noble…

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Review and Giveaway: Alias Hook, Lisa Jensen

Note: I received a copy of Alias Hook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. When publishers release their seasonal catalogues, I make note of all the books that sound interesting, in my TBR spreadsheet. This is to stop myself from immediately requesting 50 review books, which would only lead to my having way too many books to read and not enough time to read them all. So usually what happens is that I forget about all of them until they’re already published and I can just get them from the library. In the case of Alias Hook,…

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