Intisar Khanani has a new book! And it’s out today! Can you believe our good fortune? The Theft of Sunlight is the first wholly new Intisar Khanani book I’ve read in what feels like a thousand years, and it felt like coming home. The Theft of Sunlight is a companion novel to Thorn that doesn’t (in my opinion) require prior knowledge of Thorn in order to read it. It follows Rae, a country girl who comes to the royal court and becomes handmaiden to the new queen, Alyrra (Thorn from Thorn!). There she begins to learn how to navigate the…
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Last week I was reading a bunch of things where people said that quarantinaversary was going to be very hard for everyone so we should go easy on ourselves, and I was like, la la la, I’m doing amazing, I’m not even slightly having a hard time, I have escaped the trauma of quarantinaversary. And then this week came along, and my brain now comprises a (1) scrambled egg. Pride goeth before a fall! All of this to say, please be gentle with yourself if you’re having a hard time right now. Here are some links! Gabrielle Bellot writes about…
Leave a CommentHappy Monday, friends! The Ex Talk, Rachel Solomon Here’s a twist on fake dating I’ve never seen before: Fake exes. In order to save their small public radio station, Shay Goldstein has to team up with the pretentious hotshot at her work, a man named Dominic Yun who’s beloved of their sexist boss and can’t stop talking about his master’s degree in journalism. They’ll be working on a podcast called The Ex Talk, where two exes discuss the world of relationships and dating, as well as their own unsuccessful relationship. Except Dominic and Shay have never dated; they’ve barely even…
Leave a CommentMy Year Abroad is a book about appetite, about wanting more (and more and more, and infinitely more). It’s a story about how our appetites can make us and unmake us. It’s… very weird, if that’s your thing. Being a small-c catholic reader who came from fantasy means that I have a great appetite (appetite! a theme!) for weird literary fiction, where weird can mean anything from “xenophobic haunted house” (White Is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi) to “eating turtles to be immortal” (The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanigahara) to “inventing a fictional blues song whose made-up singer then…
Leave a CommentIt’s a buddy read! My lovely pal Jeanne, of Necromancy Never Pays, suggested recently that we do a buddy read, so I proposed one of the books that has languished for ages and ages on my TBR list: Joan Vinge’s classic SF novel The Snow Queen, which was published in 1980 and won a Hugo Award. Here’s our conversation. Jeanne: There are lots of good things about Vinge’s classic science fiction novel The Snow Queen (published in 1980). There are also lots of less good things. There are just lots of things, as it’s 465 pages long. Jenny: The thesis…
Leave a CommentWelp! Things are very cold here! And everything is awful! 2021 just won’t stop doing things — in this case, dumping a ton of ice on a bunch of places not structurally equipped to deal with ice or extreme cold! If you would like to be of service, Southwest Louisiana has been absolutely slammed by weather in the past few months, and this is a mutual aid organization that continues to supply aid to people who were hit by Hurricane Laura, and then Hurricane Zeta, and now this ice storm. So now here are some links! What I learned in…
Leave a CommentWelp! No One Is Talking about This is the absolute strangest book I have read in a while! But like, in that way where you’re thinking, “yep, this is who Patricia Lockwood is as a writer. Yep. This checks out.” Her entire career up to this point has followed a trajectory that must always have led to this: a book that is half about the asinine minutiae of the internet, and half about the grief of losing a desperately beloved baby niece, who was born with a rare disability that killed her after six months. A WARNING: If you are…
Leave a CommentAaaaaaaaand romance continues to get all its romance kissing cooties all over the genre of science fiction. Glorious! Long may it reign! Winter’s Orbit is about the rakish prince Kiem, who gets tapped to be part of an arranged marriage with his cousin’s widower, Jainan. Though neither of the two men is particularly interested in getting married, the alliances among their world’s nations depends on their engagement. But soon it comes to light that Jainan’s late husband, Taam, may not have died accidentally; and worse than that, Jainan may be a suspect in Taam’s death. Let’s start with the romance!…
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