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Category: 3 Stars

Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor

A More Diverse Universe is a blog tour hosted by the lovely Aarti to spotlight speculative fiction by authors of color. Hence, I tried Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch (my word, that cover is gorgeous). It is all about an albino girl, Sunny, who comes to live in Nigeria, where she feels utterly out of place. Her parents are African but she has grew up mostly in America. She can’t go in the sun but she loves playing soccer. One day at school as she is being bullied, a boy called Orlu comes to her defense, and through him, she learns…

25 Comments

The Thorn and the Blossom, Theodora Goss

Over the past five years or so, I have discovered in myself a strong and enduring attraction for BOOKS IN BOXES. By which I mean, not that really delightful moment when you have finished a move and you finally get the joy of unpacking your books and organizing them as you see fit (although that is awesome), but rather books that come in boxes. I love box sets of books that go together, especially as a box set means the books all match, which I also love; and possibly even more, I love books that for some reason just happen…

21 Comments

Review: The Twisted Thread, Charlotte Bacon; and a question about a literary trope with which I have lost patience

The Twisted Thread is a book I’d never heard of by an author I’d never heard of, but it was marked as a book about boarding school in the library catalogue so I was all over that. It’s boarding school + MURDER + pregnancy scandal, with a side order of class tension, and you guys, I like all those things. Hence it was an excellent book for several days on the subway, though it never reached the point where it was so absorbing I couldn’t put it down and had to read it while brushing my teeth and cooking and…

26 Comments

Review: Entwined, Heather Dixon

“The Twelve Dancing Princesses” is one of several fairy tales that I truly love and only rarely find satisfying adaptations of. That isn’t a criticism of the world and its life choices, exactly, because I can see how “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” would be difficult to adapt well. It’s an odd little story, and the ending’s not the best ever, and even when I do read adaptations of it, I rarely feel they’ve done a good job exploring the potential of the original story. That was the case with Entwined, even though I did enjoy it. Azalea is the oldest…

35 Comments

Review: Copenhagen, Michael Frayn

Ah plays. I bought Copenhagen in 2009 at the glorious glorious book sale in my hometown (oh my God that book sale, I dream about it sometimes) because it was fifty cents or something and I like plays, and then I chronically didn’t read it for a year and a half, and then I moved to New York and left it behind because I didn’t love it because I hadn’t read it, and then in January when I was at the library getting plays I was all, Dammit, I need to read this damn play. So I checked it out…

6 Comments

Review: Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer

Joshua Foer, brother of a fiction writer whom I frequently mix up with Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, was writing a story about the world memory champions, people who can memorize the order of multiple decks of cards in five minutes, people who can repeat with perfect accuracy lists of thousands of complicated, unrelated items. Without exception, the memory champions he speaks to assure him that they are not special, their brains are not exceptional, and that anyone could learn to be a memory champion. Foer decides to put this theory to the test by seeing if he can become the…

29 Comments

Review: The Observations, Jane Harris

Y’all have heard me bitch about the New York Public Library in the past, and I will probably bitch about it in the future. Here’s the big thing about the New York Public Library, and I will preface this by saying that I am well aware these are problems created by a larger system and a greater number of patrons, rather than some sort of inherent crappiness on the part of the NYPL. I KNOW THAT. The big thing about the New York Public Library that makes me not love it is that I cannot get a large number of…

26 Comments

Review: The Egyptologist, Arthur Phillips

I’m worried that I’m maybe losing my ability to love new books. You know that phenomenon where if you buy a something, you’re more likely to consider that something worth the money than if you just test it out in a store? I’m worried that the reverse thing to that is happening: that my desire to pare down my library to meet space requirements is keeping me from loving new books the way they deserve to be loved. The last book I truly loved, like the last book where I thought, Damn, this book has to keep happening, was in…

19 Comments

From Doon with Death, Ruth Rendell

I kind of get a kick out of reading books that have Shocking Content (for their time), but because of the way society has evolved, the content that was shocking before is no longer shocking and indeed has become sort of — you know. Sort of wincey, and you feel bad for the author because it’s not her fault that the plot device she employed has become an awkward, lazy trope that a writer now would catch all kinds of flack for employing. And you know the author who did it when it was Shocking was a product of her…

6 Comments