Note: There will be some spoilers for The Raven Boys in this post, but I will try to steer clear of spoiling The Dream Thieves. After finishing The Raven Boys, I wanted to go out to the bookstore and buy The Dream Thieves in hardback. But since I almost never buy new hardbacks, and some people didn’t like The Dream Thieves as much, I instead put a sensible hold on the ebook copy at my library. The hold came in (blessedly promptly), and I read twenty pages of it, then the end, and then I went to Barnes & Noble…
22 CommentsCategory: Favored authors
Review: My Real Children, Jo Walton
Published 21 Jul 2014
by
Gin Jenny
Jo Walton has carved out a very nice niche of deniably speculative fiction, in which supernatural elements are so lightly present that you could blink and miss them. Among Others caps off a full book of uncertainty about the reality of magic (by the reader — Mori believes it all along) with a legitimately otherworld fight that puts paid to any doubts you might have had. My Real Children (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) goes even lighter on the magic; when Patricia makes her decision at the end, she might as easily be senile as brave. Patricia Cowan is…
15 CommentsGin Jenny Becomes a Cog in the Maggie Stiefvater Propaganda Machine (a review of The Raven Boys)
Published 14 Jul 2014
by
Gin Jenny
One time a while ago, Anastasia tweeted at me “OMG THE QUEEN OF ATTOLIA IS SO GOOD SEND HELP” (The Queen of Attolia is indeed so good you will definitely need help to be sent). While I was reading The Raven Boys, I wanted to take that whole tweet, substitute The Raven Boys for the title, and tweet it approximately every twenty pages. After a rocky start in which I engaged in some cranky grumbling about all the times Ana and Memory and Anastasia and Jill had been simultaneously wrong about a book (NB this has never happened), around page…
31 CommentsReview: The Property, Rutu Modan
Published 9 Jun 2014
by
Gin Jenny
Rutu Modan draws the people in her comics as if they are made of human bodies. There’s no good reason this should be so striking and touching, but somehow it is: Her characters are not at all times trying to appear to best advantage. They are made of human matter. Sometimes they look their best, and other times they do not. The Property is Modan’s first full-length comic since the acclaimed Exit Wounds in 2007, and it’s well worth the wait. Mica has come to Poland with her grandmother, Regina, to reclaim the property that Regina’s family lost during the…
6 CommentsReview: Afterparty, Daryl Gregory
Published 26 May 2014
by
Gin Jenny
Note: I received a copy of Afterparty from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Not to be repetitive, but I’m going to go ahead and start this review the same way I’ve started all my Daryl Gregory reviews this year: I am so excited about Daryl Gregory. There are writers in this world I love better and will reread oftener, but I am excited about Daryl Gregory because he has such good ideas. He has such good ideas that I enjoyed a zombie novel. He has such good ideas that I annoyed my relatives by forcing them to…
17 CommentsBook / Art Pairing: The Town in Bloom, Dodie Smith
Published 12 May 2014
by
Gin Jenny
It occurred to me the other day that although I like both books and art, I only ever talk about one of them here. Perhaps I am not the only person around the blogosphere of whom this is true. Hence, I’ve decided to try a new thing with some of my book posts where I pair the book with a piece of art that I’ve liked. Please let me know in the comments what you think about this idea for a new feature: Good? Indifferent? Hopelessly pretentious? The Town in Bloom, Dodie Smith’s third adult novel, was a gift from…
24 CommentsReview: The Lucy Variations, Sara Zarr
Published 25 Apr 2014
by
Gin Jenny
Show of hands in the comments: Who played an instrument in their youth? What instrument and for how long? Why’d you start, and if you quit, why’d you quit and do you miss it? I had piano lessons for part of middle and high school. My second-grade teacher, who was really primarily a music teacher, came to my house once a week and taught me and Social Sister how to play. I was okay. I have big hands, so that was good, but I never had a really good feel for the way the music flows. If I were wealthy,…
19 CommentsBoy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi
Published 17 Mar 2014
by
Gin Jenny
Note: I received this ebook from the publisher via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. The beginning: That’s the first line of Boy Snow Bird, and doesn’t it remind you of how much you’ve missed Helen Oyeyemi? In her newest book, a girl named Boy runs away from her abusive father, a rat-catcher, to a small town called Flax Hill. There she meets a man called Arturo Whitman, and maybe she falls in love with him, and she…
17 CommentsDWJ March: ALL MY BOOKS
Published 1 Mar 2014
by
Gin Jenny
Once again, the wonderful Kristen of We Be Reading is hosting Diana Wynne Jones March! She’s put together a fantastic schedule of events for the month. If you’re a Diana Wynne Jones fan or interested in becoming one, make sure to stop by her blog every day this month to see what she’s got going on over there. To kick off the month, she’s asking people to post pictures of their collection of DWJ books. Fortunately, since I haven’t yet organized my books onto bookshelves in my new apartment, all of my Diana Wynne Jones books were pre-strewn about the…
33 CommentsEmma Readalong part three
Published 22 Feb 2014
by
Gin Jenny
The third volume of Emma is best understood as the volume in which all the terrible people are terribling everything up, and even the nice people aren’t at their radiant best. The particular nightmare of volume three is the dreaded Mrs. Elton. State Senator Scumbag Elton’s new wife is unburdened by social graces and makes everyone monumentally uncomfortable in a hundred small ways: overfamiliarity with people she barely knows (Emma is annoyed with her for calling Mr. Knightley “Knightley”, and Frank notices with evident irritation that she calls Jane Fairfax “Jane”); talking about her lofty place in the social structure…
11 Comments