Note: I received a copy of The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies from the publisher, Soft Skull Press, for review consideration. Martin Millar writes books like classic British sitcoms, where there is a central organizing event (or several) around which the action is oriented, and the characters all have their separate and incompatible visions for what is to happen at this event, and everything goes magnificently to hell, and then in the end it all turns out okay, or doesn’t. Whether or not this works for you as a structure will most likely be the determining factor in whether you…
12 CommentsCategory: 4 Stars
By a stroke of good fortune, I happened to read Joanna Russ’s feminist classic How to Suppress Women’s Writing just prior to reading Anne Jamison’s Fic (Smart Pop Books), which made for an interesting pairing. On one hand, Russ’s book feels depressingly current: You need only spend a few minutes on Twitter to witness all of the tactics for suppressing women’s writing that Russ details. But on the other hand, even with all of these tactics being leveled at the (mostly female) writers of fanfiction (especially the “poor author too pathetic and forlorn to get a man” trope), here we…
20 CommentsIn one of those cases of odd internet synchronicity, I have seen many unrelated people on the internet talking lately about the similarity between YA fiction as currently constituted and the three-volume novels of the Victorian era. And can I just say, I am FOR THIS. I’d have been for it if I’d lived in Victorian times, and I am for it now. I have formerly griped about how everything in YA is trilogies, but I have now decided to withdraw that complaint and substitute a life policy of not starting unfinished YA trilogies, and I think that will solve…
25 CommentsI bought One Hundred Years of Solitude as a treat for myself right before I went to live in England for a year, and it was like if I had bought myself a bag full of delicious Reese’s peanut butter cups for a plane snack and then when I got on the plane I discovered it was just lumps of jicama inside the wrappers. (I hate jicama so much, I can’t even tell you. It makes my skin crawl just to think about it.) So I will never be won by a plethora of reviews comparing any book to Gabriel…
10 CommentsNote: I received an e-galley of this book from the publisher for review consideration. My first experiment with Ana’s beloved Frances Hardinge was a mixed bag. A Face Like Glass started slow and continued very strange before getting abruptly very exciting towards the end. But Cuckoo Song looked more my speed from the word go, a story about Britain in World War I, about sisters, and about a changeling. (British authors and cuckoos, have you noticed? They can’t resist them! The cuckoo has infilitrated the British subconscious and hatched its eggs there.) Triss wakes up one day scrambling to recover her…
14 CommentsThe Devil in Silver is something like a horror thriller, set at an inpatient mental health facility in New York City, where the patients are being stalked–and sometimes killed–by the literal devil, who lives in their facility on a locked ward. Our protagonist Pepper teams up with a bipolar teenager called Loochie, a schizophrenic lifer called Dorrie, and a Ugandan immigrant, Coffee, to fight back against both the devil and the rigid structures of the hospital. This book vibrates with anger at the mental health system. The text itself is shot through with anger, and the acknowledgements afterward include a…
18 CommentsNote: I received a copy of Sunbolt from the publisher, through NetGalley, for review consideration. So all the bloggers have been on and on about the wonders of Intisar Khanani, and I finally got the chance to read one of her books (thanks, NetGalley!). Sunbolt is the novella beginning of a new series, about a street thief named Hitomi who’s part of a resistance force against the oppressive sultanate, and who secretly is the daughter of two (deceased) mages and thus a fairly powerful mage in her own right. I’d have already been in at street thief in a non-Europeanish…
26 CommentsIt’s time again for a round-up of my comics reading! So many recommendations on this earth! Through the Woods, Emily Carroll Yeah, I can only assume that Emily Carroll knows me personally and designed Through the Woods to cater to my interests. It is a collection of some hella creepy stories about living near a forest. Girls go into the forest, and they come out different, or they don’t come out at all. This may be very shallow of me, but I love graphic novels where the lettering looks like proper handwriting. Though Saga has many charms, an early and prominent draw for me was…
23 CommentsWell this was just a delight. It was such a delight that I was reading it, I wanted to propose it for podcast. We are supposed to propose books for podcast that we haven’t actually read yet, so I was considering perpetrating a teeny, tiny fraud* on Whiskey Jenny. But the book was such a delight, and we were stuck in a car in Agra because some VIP’s visit to the Taj Mahal had shut down the roads our driver needed to use to get us to Jaipur, that I could not resist reporting bits of it to her as I was reading. Here…
11 Comments