I have a strong but mostly theoretical affection for stories about fairies. I say “mostly theoretical” because I do not often find myself pleased by books that deal with these topics. Of books that bother about The Faerie Realm, the reigning champion is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which manages the necessary but apparently really difficult task of making the world of faerie interesting, creepy, and specific. Other books I have loved that have Faerie Realms in them (like Fire & Hemlock) tend to shunt the faerie realms off to the side and just hint at what’s going on in…
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Magazine-making is a career not far off from my own that I am not sure I would like to attempt. Fact-checking maybe. Copyediting yes because I am amazing at copyediting. Quickly because this is great: Robert Gottlieb was writing about the differences in editing for books and for magazines, and he told a story about this one copyeditor called Miss Gould, who was the queen, evidently, of all the copyeditors. When she would mark up a proof, it would be so brutal in its mark-up-edness that most authors could not be permitted to see it, because the radiance of the…
9 CommentsA More Diverse Universe is a blog tour hosted by the lovely Aarti to spotlight speculative fiction by authors of color. Hence, I tried Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch (my word, that cover is gorgeous). It is all about an albino girl, Sunny, who comes to live in Nigeria, where she feels utterly out of place. Her parents are African but she has grew up mostly in America. She can’t go in the sun but she loves playing soccer. One day at school as she is being bullied, a boy called Orlu comes to her defense, and through him, she learns…
25 CommentsOMG y’all. THIS BOOK. READ IT NOW. It’s taken me a little while to spit this review out, because I feel like this is or will be one of those books that gets a lot of hype. I don’t want my review to become one of an avalanche of reviews that raves about a book, and then you are like, “Hey the people really love this book, Imma read it too,” and then you read it with your expectations sky high and when it doesn’t turn out to be the second coming of The Color Purple you’re like, “Why is…
27 CommentsThere are two main threads of subtext (well, not always so sub-, as examples below will prove) that run throughout Mark Edward’s memoir of being a psychic, and they are these: All psychics, including Mark Edward, are frauds, and some of them do harm by being deceitful and wicked. Mark Edward does no harm but always tries to do good. That sounds okay, except that Mark Edward fails to distinguish between the deceitful and wicked psychics and himself. Whether this is because there is no difference between them, or because Mark Edward is incapable of articulating the difference that exists,…
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