If you ever feel I’m not giving enough love in this space to Brenna Yovanoff, there just is not a good answer I can give you. I thought The Replacement was quite terrific, and if I hadn’t heard bad things about Fiendish, I’d have read it way sooner. I regret the error. Fiendish is about a girl called Clementine who lies sleeping inside the cellar of a burned-out house, tangled in leaves, for ten years. When she wakes up, the world has changed. Her mother is dead, her own aunt doesn’t remember her, and her town hates and fears people like her, people…
4 CommentsCategory: Favored authors
ODY-C, Matt Fraction (vol. 1)
Published 20 Jul 2015
by
Gin Jenny
Note: I received an e-book copy from the publisher for review consideration. ODY-C: What. And look, I didn’t want to say What in that disparaging, not-really-a-question sort of tone. I wanted to say, Hooray! Matt Fraction! Trying things! So to be clear off the top: I support trying things in this bold manner. When you find yourself confronted with a comic that gender-swaps the whole Odyssey and transposes it to a science-fictional universe in which Zeus (a lady) prevented anyone from ever having sons ever again, you have to pause to admire the attempt. I will give you a second to do that. Here is my problem, apart from…
5 CommentsShirley Jackson Reading Week (a round-up)
Published 14 Jul 2015
by
Gin Jenny
I read Hangsaman for Shirley Jackson Reading Week, you guys, and I feel like I did not understand one single thing about it. ?Cultural differences? So instead of reviewing that this week, I’ll be writing about “The Lottery” on Thursday (inshallah). Anyway! It’s Shirley Jackson Reading Week around these parts, and people are writing awesome posts: Words for Worms on We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Helen of a gallimaufry on the short story “Paranoia.” Desperate Reader on The Sundial (my fave!). Emerald City Book Review on The Sundial (my fave!!). I will round up more later in the…
11 CommentsBinny in Secret, Hilary McKay
Published 29 Jun 2015
by
Gin Jenny
Note: I received a copy of Binny in Secret from the publisher for review consideration. Oh frabjous day when Hilary McKay has a new book! Hilary McKay — in case you have not heard me sing her praises in the past — is a British children’s writer who should be much more famous than she is. She writes the kind of old-fashioned children-doing-adventures books you loved as a kid, like Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet or, more recently, Jeanne Birdsall’s Penderwicks books; but with more carefully-drawn family dynamics than the former and more humor than the latter. Binny in Secret, the follow-up to Binny for Short, sees…
10 CommentsThe Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies, Martin Millar
Published 17 Jun 2015
by
Gin Jenny
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 CommentsShirley Jackson Reading Week (13-18 July)
Published 10 Jun 2015
by
Gin Jenny
Get pumped, you aficionados of the weird and creepy! This July 13th through 18th is going to be Shirley Jackson Reading Week, a time to revisit everyone’s favorite spooky-ass author or, if you’ve never read one of her books, meet her for the first time! Simon of Stuck in a Book, Ana of Things Mean a Lot, and I are the co-hosts for this event, and we hope you’ll join us! Lucky for you, the good folks at Penguin have put all of Jackson’s books back into print, so you’ll have the pick of the litter. If this is your first time out,…
25 CommentsThe Just City, Jo Walton
Published 29 May 2015
by
Gin Jenny
So, hmmm. At the start of The Just City, Apollo can’t work out why Daphne chose to be turned into a tree rather than mate with him. When he goes to discuss it with his sister Athene, he finds her deep in the process of planning an experiment where she will put together a working version of the Just City envisioned by Plato in The Republic. Adult devotees of Plato from all throughout history will oversee the city’s establishment (with some robots to do the heavy lifting), and freed slave children will live there with the adults, learning and growing…
18 CommentsThe Precious One, Marisa de los Santos
Published 13 May 2015
by
Gin Jenny
If I haven’t recently recommended Marisa de los Santos’s Love Walked In and Belong to Me, let me take the opportunity to do so now. She’s a writer along the lines of Jojo Moyes or Rainbow Rowell, where the books feel light-hearted even when sad things occur, and where the author seems to be the direct puppeteer of your heart strings (in a good way! not in a manipulative way!). Falling Together, de los Santos’s third book, was kind of a disappointment. I had my doubts about her fourth one, The Precious One. But I am glad to report that…
18 CommentsThe Kingdom of the Gods, N. K. Jemisin
Published 3 Apr 2015
by
Gin Jenny
There will be no tricks in this tale. I tell you this so that you can relax. You’ll listen more closely if you aren’t flinching every other instant, waiting for the pratfall. You will not reach the end and suddenly learn I have been talking to my other soul or making a lullaby of my life for someone’s unborn brat. I find such things disingenuous. I have this imagined thing when I’m trying to read more authors of color where I worry that I’ll reach a point at which there are no more books by authors of color that I want to read.…
16 CommentsThe Darkest Part of the Forest, Holly Black
Published 20 Mar 2015
by
Gin Jenny
The last sentence of Holly Black’s newest book sums up everything I loved about it. I can’t quote it here, because it’s got all the spoilers, but if you are the sort of person who reads the end, go check it out yourself. If I were in middle school I would draw hearts around it after writing it in the back of my school notebook. (I mean, I wouldn’t hundred-percent rule that out as a possibility now.) Hazel and Ben (both named after famous rabbits) live in a town that the humans share with the faeries. For years and years, the two groups…
7 Comments