Note: I received this book from the publisher for review consideration. This did not affect the content of my review. The book is just so honestly extraordinarily good. Before I read Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine’s last book before Testosterone Rex, I thought that I had a pretty good grip on what it would contain, given that I already agreed with her arguments; and then when I actually did read it, it blew my mind straight out of the back of my skull and onto the wall behind me, and that was five years ago and I’ve been tucking splattery…
29 CommentsCategory: Favored authors
March Magics: The Lives of Christopher Chant
Published 6 Mar 2017
by
Gin Jenny
Did I ever tell you that The Lives of Christopher Chant was the first Diana Wynne Jones novel I ever loved? And did I ever tell you that when the seventh Harry Potter came out and I was feeling disappointed in Dumbledore, I went back and read The Lives of Christopher Chant and Charmed Life and Witch Week and Conrad’s Fate to experience a non-disappointing omniscient wizard man? March Magics is upon us, hosted by the wonderful Kristen at We Be Reading, and I am celebrating this week with a reread of the book that made me certain (at age,…
17 CommentsReview: Memories of Ash, Intisar Khanani
Published 22 Feb 2017
by
Gin Jenny
AT LAST I have read the sequel to the wonderful Sunbolt! Intisar Khanani is a fantasy author who really deserves a good, let’s say, 75% more fame than she is currently receiving, so let’s all get on spreading the word far and wide, okay, team? Read the novella Sunbolt if you haven’t yet, and then get straight on to the superb sequel, Memories of Ash. Our protagonist, Hitomi, is learning magic from the secretive, kindly mage Stormwind, with whom her vampire friend Val left her at the end of Sunbolt. Many of her memories of her former life are gone,…
7 CommentsReview: The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
Published 23 Jan 2017
by
Gin Jenny
Well, not review exactly. There’s not much more to review in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, given how personal it is, and how tremendously of its time. But it was the first book I read in 2017 (by design), and there are elements of it that I’d like to talk about as we all stagger back to work and try and get moving again after the holidays. One thing that strikes me about James Baldwin is how little ideological slack he’s willing to cut anyone. (That is a compliment.) He’s clearly worked hard to fight free of easy answers,…
14 CommentsReview: They Can’t Kill Us All, Wesley Lowery
Published 5 Dec 2016
by
Gin Jenny
I’m in a strange, post-news-outlet state where I follow individual reporters more than I follow entire news outlets. This is possibly symptomatic of my increasing distrust of institutions in the wake of the recent election? And troubles me because of the echo chamber conservative news media insist that I (but not they) are in. I am not sure what the solution is. (Weirdly, the only outlet besides NPR’s Code Switch that I specifically follow on Twitter is the National Review, for like, ideological balance.) So Wesley Lowery has long been one of my most trusted reporters on the Black Lives…
14 CommentsTell the Wind and Fire, Sarah Rees Brennan
Published 18 Jul 2016
by
Gin Jenny
Note: I received Tell the Wind and Fire from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. Okay, despite having shared that article about how people should stop hating so much on YA love triangles, I am slightly over YA love triangles, not because there aren’t authors who can write them well, but because YA authors who can’t write them well insist on writing them anyway. So to read a book like Tell the Wind and Fire, which is about a girl and two physically identical dudes, and which specifically and deliberately steers away from love triangling, made a refreshing change.…
20 CommentsThe Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge
Published 22 Jun 2016
by
Gin Jenny
When Faith’s family moves suddenly to an out-of-the-way island to conduct an archaeological dig, they do so under threat of suspicion and fear, though fear of what Faith isn’t told. (She’s only fourteen, and nice young ladies in the year 1868 don’t ask questions.) But Faith herself hopes that this will be her opportunity to show her father, a prominent archaeologist, that she can be a scholarly companion to him, that she is worth taking seriously. Once they reach the island, though, it becomes clear that her worth remains what it has always been: She’s as valuable as the trouble…
26 CommentsThe Raven King, Maggie Stiefvater
Published 2 May 2016
by
Gin Jenny
The first part of this post will not contain spoilers for The Raven King, or indeed for any book in this series. I will clearly mark the end of the non-spoiler-y part of the post, so that you can bail before I start shrieking about specific, spoilery things. I mainly want to tell you what I love so much about this book and this series. The Raven Cycle is about figuring out how to be a person. Or more specifically, how to be a person when your world as it stands is not — is nowhere near — enough. One…
41 CommentsThe Last Witness, K. J. Parker
Published 22 Feb 2016
by
Gin Jenny
tl;dr: A fantastically unreliable narrator; a twisty and intricate plot containing many machinations; a short but intensely KJ Parkery introduction to political fantasy author KJ Parker. The subtitle for every KJ Parker novel, including this Tor novella The Last Witness might be, The Death of All Hope. Be warned of this before you go in. A lot of things will happen, you will experience feelings of suspense, and at the end, nobody you care about will get anything they want. Or if they do, they will find it is a cold and hollow victory. Anyway, if you’re unsure about KJ Parker…
26 CommentsFlood of Fire, Amitav Ghosh
Published 19 Oct 2015
by
Gin Jenny
Flood of Fire is the culmination of the least trilogy-like trilogy that ever trilogied, Amitav Ghosh’s The Ibis Trilogy, of which the first two were Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke (both excellent). In the sense that it got the band back together (sort of) and shifted the reader into the early days of the Opium Wars (about which I really will learn more soon!), it was a superb conclusion to the trilogy. In the sense that it pinged some ick sensors of mine, it was my least favorite of the series. Do you remember that feeling when you…
25 Comments