So Mary Francis Shura’s The Josie Gambit is where I learned pretty much everything I knew about chess. Twelve-year-old chess geek Greg is spending six months with his grandmother, and he reunites with his old friend and chess partner Josie. Josie has an absolutely hateful friend Tory, whose utter nastiness everyone is at a loss to explain. And the book is, essentially, all about why Tory is such a nasty girl. When I was small, I liked this book because everyone ate a lot of food, and I learned interesting things about chess, and there was a very unpleasant Lhaso…
11 CommentsCategory: Favored authors
The Thirteenth Child, Patricia C. Wrede
Published 31 Jul 2009
by
Gin Jenny
Verdict: Not racist! (Phew.) I read somewhere that The Thirteenth Child was racist, and it stressed me out because Patricia C. Wrede was one of my favorite authors when I was coming up, and I didn’t want her to be racist. Especially because she’s the other author besides Jane Yolen that I wrote to in my youth, and she wrote me back a really nice email telling me to keep on reading and pay close attention to the things my favorite authors were doing, and that’s how I would get to be a better writer myself (which is what I…
5 CommentsThe Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie
Published 27 Jul 2009
by
Gin Jenny
The Enchantress of Florence is all about a Florentine stranger who comes to the court of Mughal emperor Akbar the Great (heehee, get it?) with a story to tell. He claims that he is Akbar’s uncle (ish), the son of a great-aunt Akbar never knew existed. It’s a bold claim, but the stranger is a bold man; and in the days that follow, he entrances Akbar with the story of three Italian friends (including Machiavelli because, you know, it’s Salman Rushdie, and why not?), and the parts they played in the tale of the stranger’s purported mother, the “hidden princess”…
13 CommentsWe Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Published 20 Jul 2009
by
Gin Jenny
Creeeepy. I read The Haunting of Hill House and liked it a lot, but when I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I thought, “Oh, yes, there’s the lady who wrote ‘The Lottery’.” There are some of the same themes here, particularly towards the end, that mob mentality and the fear of things being different. My review’s going to contain spoilers, because I don’t know how to talk about the book without any spoilers at all. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is about two sisters, Merricat and Constance, who live with their uncle Julian, the three…
17 CommentsFire from Heaven, Mary Renault
Published 19 Jul 2009
by
Gin Jenny
I will preface this by saying that I can understand how you might not like Mary Renault’s writing. But I like her a lot, and this, the first of her books about Alexander the Great, is the first thing I ever read by her. It takes us from Alexander’s childhood through to Philip of Macedon’s death, and it is a damn good book. I love how Mary Renault makes silence and implication work for her: how something will happen, and you don’t think anything of it, and then the characters react in a way that makes you go back and…
9 CommentsHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
Published 17 Jul 2009
by
Gin Jenny
Oh, the seventh and final Harry Potter book. This post will probably contain spoilers for a number of previous books, and likely spoilers for this one as well. Sorry. Can’t help it. Don’t know how to talk about Harry Potter without spoilers. Harry and Ron and Hermione have left school now because they are questing for Horcruxes! They spend all sorts of time running around the countryside trying to find the damn things, and getting into all sorts of scrapes, and at last, you will be pleased to hear, Voldemort gets defeated and everyone is happy. Except the ten thousand…
16 CommentsSmoke and Mirrors, Barbara Michaels
Published 12 Jul 2009
by
Gin Jenny
For some reason, I’m attached to Smoke and Mirrors. It’s not one of Barbara Michaels’s most elaborately plotted books, and there don’t turn out to be any ghosts, which is one of the things I tend to like about her books. I think I like it because it’s all set in a political campaign, and I think that that is interesting. Every time I read this book, I’m all I should work on a political campaign! before I remember that the two politicians I really like, my mayor and the President, have already been elected.
2 CommentsTHE SEVENTH FABLES BOOK MWAHAHAHAHAHA
Published 7 Jul 2009
by
Gin Jenny
I mean, not really mwahahahahaha. I didn’t particularly need an evil laugh there, just because I finally read the seventh volume of Fables; though it was nice to read it, and it reminded me how cool and fun the Fables books are. I stayed up last night to read it, which I thought would be okay, and I’d still get eight hours of sleep, but I wasn’t counting on a) the fact that I was going to start, and then insist on finishing, Ordinary Victories, and b) how much there were going to be wild dogs fighting furiously outside the…
4 CommentsC.S. Lewis: Letters to Children, eds. Lyle W. Dorsett & Marjorie Lamp Mead
Published 3 Jul 2009
by
Gin Jenny
So my life has been in a smidgy bit of an uproar lately, for various reasons – my library card expired, for one thing, right on the day that half my books were due to get renewed! I had no idea the expiration date was so soon; it feels like I just renewed it a few weeks ago. And, see, I have this friendly blue library card with an elegant number that I have memorized, and it has one of the earliest extant drafts of my signature, which I had only invented recently when I got the card in 2001. …
10 CommentsLove Is Blue, Joan Wyndham
Published 27 Jun 2009
by
Gin Jenny
It is difficult for me to review Joan Wyndham’s second volume of diaries. What really can be said? Here is what I have to say about Joan Wyndham’s second volume of diaries: “Aha!” he exclaimed. “Ein liten pinsvin,” which translated literally means “a little prickle pig”. The hedgehog had a very winning little face, but smelt abominable. We sat and played with it for a bit but then I could see a certain look on his face and he took his glasses off – always a bad sign – so held the ‘pinsvin’ firmly in my lap like a living…
1 Comment