Skip to content

Tag: racism

Review: The Liminal People, Ayize Jama-Everett

The marvelous Bina reviewed The Liminal People some time ago and mentioned that it’s frequently compared to X-Men, which naturally was all the inducement I needed to buy it and its two sequels a few AWPs ago. “X-Men meets [literally anything]” = a sales pitch that will win me over 10/10 times. Taggert, our hero (ish), is a healer with the power to magically repair any ailments of the body, from wounds to asthma to cancer. He has wandered the world for most of his life, desperate to meet more people with powers like him, and his wanderings have washed…

2 Comments

I Read a Book about the Comoros and Didn’t Tell You: A Links Round-Up

Happy Friday, friends! I am trying to get back into the regular swing of blogging now that it is the new year, but some of these links are slightly old. Oh well! Maybe you haven’t seen them yet! In which case, lucky you! What to do if you are white and straight and cis and male and not all the stories are about you anymore (Star Wars spoilers included herein). “More as heroines than damsels”: How Disney gave their Princess dolls business to Hasbro. Nichole Chung on microaggressions and the certainty that you are the only person who can make…

12 Comments

Review: The Rock and the River, Kekla Magoon

If I may borrow a phrase from Renay, this book punched me in the soul. I have a thing where anything about slavery and civil rights struggles and that business immediately makes my heart hurt and then when the inevitable family member dies or gets sold or whatever, I cry and cry, and that’s why I don’t really read that many historical fiction books from those periods. But Jill said The Rock and the River was good, and I happened to see it at the library, so there you go. I had the hugest lump in my throat from page…

51 Comments

Review: Thank You, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse

Every time I have checked out a Jeeves book from the library, it has been because I went looking for something in the W section and failed to find it.  In this case, the library claimed they had several Jeanette Winterson books in, when what they meant was that they had absolutely no Jeanette Winterson books in at all.  In particular they did not have Sexing the Cherry, which is the one I was after.  I drifted gloomily down the shelves and checked out two Jeeves books instead. I do not advise this as a strategy.  It invites comparisons, and…

19 Comments

Bayou, Vol. 1, Jeremy Love & Patrick Morgan

Jeremy Love‘s Bayou, evidently the first physical book to be created from DC Comics’ webcomic imprint Zuda, is about a little girl named Lee who lives in 1930s Mississippi with her father.  When he is accused of raping and murdering Lee’s young white friend Lily (who actually got eaten by an enormous monster in the bayou), and carted off to jail, Lee sets out fearlessly to find Lily and thus save her father from death. Before I head off to bed*, I just wanted to say, Holy God, this book was scary.  I read about it (where else, for my…

10 Comments

Sisterland, Linda Newbery

Ah, Linda Newbery. I’ve been meaning to read one of her books for about a year and a half – I very vaguely remember wanting to buy it at the Foyle’s on the South Bank when I was there in January 2007 with the family. Something with clocks. Sisterland is about a girl called Hilly who has a problematic sister that’s got a crush on a racist kid (British kids are scary! I’m never raising my kids in England cause those British kids are way too frightening!), and her grandmother has got Alzheimer’s and is forever talking about someone called…

2 Comments

The English Governess at the Siamese Court, Anna Leonowens

Okay, the truth comes out.  You won’t believe it, but Anna Leonowens did not, in fact, have a hot but platonic romance with the King of Siam; or if she did, she kept remarkably quiet about it in her book.  Although I’m not ruling out the possibility that all the late-night “translating” she was doing for the king was actually sexual favors.  Because, you know, she acts like a proper Victorian lady but who knows? Seriously, though, I feel that this memoir (travelogue) lacked a certain something.  Taking into account the prejudices of her time, she was still kind of…

2 Comments