Kat Reads Anything She Bloody Well Wants To

LJ

bookblather — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 02:20:03 GMT

If you're on DW this doesn't affect you.

If you're on LJ, yeah, I'm done. I'm still going to keep the LJ for commenting purposes, but I won't be cross-posting anymore. I'm sorry, I can't take this latest User Agreement change that criminalizes me and everything I am.

Bye guys. It's been real.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/427189.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Assorted Nonfiction

bookblather — Sun, 02 Apr 2017 20:34:10 GMT

The Unquiet Ghost, Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild is a favorite nonfiction author of mine, because he always seems to land right on the most painful parts of a historical topic and refuse to shy away from them. In this case, it's an exploration of Stalinism in the USSR, made mostly via oral interviews with survivors of Stalinism during the final days of the USSR's existence. The fact that Hochschild managed to get so much information out of these people and this country in what was still a repressive regime (if not as bad as Stalinism was) is really impressive, and what he does with that information is more impressive still.

It's a heartbreaking book to read. Hochschild talks to survivors and employees of the gulags, the children of both, people struggling with their complicity in the events of the Purge and other Stalinist events and people fighting to ensure it's remembered. The final product is a brutal but necessary account of the Russian experience of Stalinism, and a meditation on the nature of denial-- deliberate forgetting, the denial necessary for survival, the destruction of evidence to ensure denial, and, eventually, the attempt to erase that denial, to forge a new knowledge in the face of so much resistance.

I am not Russian, and I don't have any family ties to the place, but reading this book felt very familiar anyway, because I am an American, and we are doing something very similar to black people and other minorities in this country (currently, Hispanic, Muslim and Jewish folks are getting the short end of the stick, but it's not like we've been discriminatory in our discrimination). This is the kind of denial that's been entrenched here. This is the kind of denial we have to refuse if we're ever going to make any progress.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. It's an explicit condemnation of Stalinism, fascism, and all that it represents.

Unlikely Friendships, Jennifer S. Holland

Adorable nonsense. This is a short book about a bunch of interspecies friendships, complete with pictures, that I feel like I would have loved if not for the rather loose definition of "friendship." A number of these friendships lasted only hours or days. I would've liked to see more of the the longer-term ones, such as Owen and Mzee, or Koko and her kittens, both of which were in the book.

Ah, well. Cute stories, cute pictures, will make you feel good, but ultimately rather forgettable.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 1--fascists have no problems. It's just nature.

Driving the Saudis, Jayne Amelia Larson

Jayne Amelia Larson is a producer and actress, and once she was a chauffeur who was hired to drive a visiting Saudi royal family around Los Angeles and nearby points. The memoir is exactly as surreal as one might think. Also, it is apparently an adaptation of a one-woman stage show, but, you know, it works perfectly well as a book. Insofar as it works.

Larson begins by talking about what brought her to chauffeuring in the first place, then gets to why everyone picked up the book to begin with: the Saudi royal family and their frankly ridiculous life, fueled by even more ridiculous wealth. I think the central idea of the book is that wealth, particularly the kind of wealth the Saudi royal family has, completely distorts your point of view and makes you totally ignorant, of, well, everything. There's a pretty moving part in the book where a young Saudi princess genuinely does not know how to pay for things at a store, because servants always did that for her and for her parents. And there's also a moving chapter in which Larson drives a (different) princess around LA on her last night in the States before she returns to Saudi Arabia to be married that actually brought tears to my eyes. But the rest of it?

I don't know. I didn't actually like Larson, or at least her voice, very much. She seemed fairly oblivious to the difficulties of life under the Saudi regime while at the same time condemning them, and she blamed a lot of it on the practice of Islam rather than the possession of incredible wealth and the disconnection from society. Finally, she spends the whole book talking about how wealth and fame can wreck your view on life while being in pursuit of wealth and fame herself. I think this could have been an interesting contradiction, but she never explores it; she's more interested in talking about the Saudis and how bizarre their lives are. I don't know. It was interesting, but it left kind of a bad taste in my mouth, and I don't think I'd read it again.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Larson is white, but the majority of her coworkers and other sympathetic characters are not, and she explicitly condemns such fascist-centric ideologies like the capitalist dream of being wealthy enough to never, ever have to care, and the total disregard of women and servants as unimportant. She does condemn Islam too, though, which is why it's not a four.

It Made Sense at the Time, Ursula Vernon

This is a colllection of sketches that Ursula Vernon has done at one time or another, and as such there's not a lot to say about it. There's a brief interview, and notes from the author on every page, and a lot of really awesome/weird sketches, including the basis for the Sea Serpent and Sockpuppet painting, and it's adorable and lovely and worth it. I really like it, and I'm really glad I bought it.

The only slightly awkward thing is that it was published while she was still married to her first husband, as opposed to Kevin, and as a devoted listener of Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap I was a little bit uncomfortable when the first one popped up. That said, the sketches remain amazing and the commentary is the same brilliant hilarity I've come to expect from Vernon. Ursula Vernon, A+ as usual.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. I mean, she's a woman and she's talking about how cool her stuff is, but apart from that I think they'd be just confused as fuck.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/426782.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Monthly Goals: April

bookblather — Sun, 02 Apr 2017 03:53:59 GMT

1) Mend two items of clothing.

2) Write down everything I spend and earn.

3) Review three-quarters of my books read within a week of being read.

4) Make 5k progress on at least one novel.

5) Post 2 stories to RF.

6) Finish two beading projects.

7) Finish the January talking meme at long goddamn last.

8) Brainstorm short story ideas.

9) Read 19 books-- five TBR, two floor, two borrowed (library doesn't count).

10) Resist the government via calling reps, signing petitions, writing letters, and marching if possible.

If these look kinda similar to last month's, it's because I kind of fell down on the job. So.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/426548.html. Please comment over there if possible.

April Fool's Day: Again, Not Here

bookblather — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 19:53:44 GMT

Okay, guys, as April first is Saturday, I hearby pledge not to post any pranks, jokes, false links, or screamers. Nothing originating on this blog will be a prank or deliberately incorrect. If I repost or link to other people’s pranks, which I may, they will be clearly marked so you don't click on them and think they're real.

No screamers will ever appear on this blog. If one does, it's a hack or something changed; please let me know immediately so I can get rid of it.

Stay safe out there, my lovelies! I got your back.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/426256.html. Please comment over there if possible.

bookblather — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 03:29:30 GMT

The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal vol 1: Poor Boys and Pilgrims, EK Weaver

Okay this was cool.

The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal (henceforth referred to as TJ and Amal) actually started life as a webcomic, which as far as I know is both complete and available for free at that link. But because my brother loves me, he bought me the first volume in print, which contains the first six chapters. Thanks, Tim! Love you too.

TJ and Amal follows our two heroes on a roadtrip across the country, a roadtrip drunkenly entered into after Amal came out to his parents and got disowned and understandably got drunk. He's on his way to see his sister's graduation. TJ's reasons for traveling are a little more obscure. But our heroes get to-- Reno, I think, in this first volume, and are already into each other.

It's funny and clever and heartbreaking at the same time, with great art and interesting notes in the back. I found it occasionally confusing and a bit slow to start, but once we actually got onto the roadtrip I started having a lot of fun. I'd definitely recommend this book.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Amal is brown and our boys are both at least into dudes generally and each other specifically. I kind of question TJ's hair though.

Habibi, Naomi Shihab Nye

Habibi is the story of Liyana Abboud, a fourteen-year-old American girl transplanted to Palestine when her Arab father decides to return home and bring his family with him. With her brother, grandmother, new friends, and even a budding relationship to Omer, a Jewish boy she meets in Jerusalem, Liyana begins to settle into her new home, and to question the assumptions that her neighbors and her family make.

This is a children's book about the Middle East sooooo it's a little simplistic, I think. The situation is extremely complicated, and Nye seems to boil it down to "why can't people get along and love each other," which... well, I mean, yes on the one hand, but on the other hand, she brings it up: Liyana's Palestinian family was evicted and lost all their assets when Israel was created, but Omer's family lost a bunch of members in the Holocaust, and will do anything to prevent that happening again. And even that's simplifying the situation. So, idk. I liked the book, I sympathized with Liyana, and I thought it was well written-- Nye is a poet, and it shows-- but man. It just seems really simplified to the point of absurdity.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. The only white person is Liyana's mom, and it is all about love conquering hate. Plus Jewish AND Muslim people are presented as sympathetic. The main characters are American, which is the only thing that prevents this from being a hat trick.

Agnes of God, John Pielmeier

I picked this up because it looked interesting and it... was? I'd rather have seen it staged, I think.

Agnes of God is a play in which the titular Agnes, a nun, is accused of murdering her baby. The main-ish character, Doctor Martha Livingstone, is called in to assess Agnes's sanity or lack thereof, but Agnes's Mother Superior determinedly tries to keep them apart. Is the Mother Superior hiding something? Who got Agnes pregnant? And who really killed the baby?

The play is a bit difficult to follow in writing, but I can see how it would be staged, the Doctor kind of monologuing and fading into and out of flashbacks. It's kind of about faith and kind of about science and the interplay between the two, and kind of about saints, and kind of about femininity. Anyway. You learn a lot about Agnes over the course of the play, but I think the Doctor is really the main character.

There's a lot of fucked-up stuff in here, by the way, including infanticide, rape, incest, and child sexual abuse, sooo... be aware.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. There are zero men in this play and everyone's Catholic. Or an atheist.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/426239.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Historical Fiction/Fantasy

bookblather — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 03:43:51 GMT

The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo

I somehow did not realize that there was a major supernatural element to this book, so, for those of you also confused, there is a major supernatural element to this book.

Okay.

Li Lan is the well-born daughter of a very poor family, and she doesn't much expect to be married. However, a wealthy man, one of her father's old business partners, approaches her to marry his son-- his dead son. Li Lan is understandably not thrilled by this, but as it turns out, she may not have much of a choice. She is haunted literally by the dead son and metaphorically by her desire to marry the dead son's cousin, Tian Bai, and literally again by a bunch of demons and a gentleman named Er Lang who is way more than he seems.

I did enjoy this book, but... I dunno, it felt like the author tried to cram in a few too many subplots. There's the espionage subplot, a sort of courtroom drama going on, Li Lan's search for her (dead) mother, the possession subplot, something I never quite understood that was going on with the dead son's mother, the question of whether the dead son was murdered, and a whole bunch more. Like... I felt like I would have enjoyed the book more if there was maybe one or two subplots instead of twelve.

Still, I enjoyed reading about Li Lan, and the plot, though convoluted, was actually pretty clear for its complexity. Plus, author and characters of color! Recommended, but, you know, watch those subplots.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. There's like, one white guy. And he's a ghost and there for about two seconds.

Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine

Ah! My childhood! This book was a delight then and it's a delight now.

For the, like, five of you who haven't read this, Ella Enchanted is a fractured fairy tale retelling of Cinderella. The title character, Ella of Frell, is cursed at birth with obedience; whatever orders anyone gives her, she must obey. For most of her life, this is avoidable, as her mother and her cook/friend Mandy are the only ones who know about it, and protect her. But then her mother dies, and Ella must contend with her horrible new stepmother and stepsisters, her greedy father, ogres, fairies, giants, and her own curse to find her happy ending

Anyway, I really love this book. It's sweet and cute, with a wonderful, strong-minded, and rebellious heroine at the head, and a truly charming prince charming for her to eventually marry. The other characters are just as well-drawn as Ella, some loathsome entirely and some delightfully wonderful. Though I am presently a little worried by the characters' ages, it's a good story written well with good characters, and I think I will always love it.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. How dare a woman not want to immediately obey.

Somewhere in France, Jennifer Robson

I found this in the plain literature section, but I sort of think it would be better off in romances, since that's essentially what it is.

At the outbreak of World War I, Lady Elizabeth Neville-Ashford wants to help in any way she can, but her overbearing mother won't let her. Her overbearing mother also won't let her correspond with Robert Fraser, a Scottish surgeon who is her brother Edward's best friend. The majority of the book is about Lily and Robert's romance, with a side story that follows Lily's coming of age as she breaks away from her parents and seeks to become her own person.

Anyway, it's a historical romance, and the majority of it is just, you know, fine. I'd have rated it just okay, but the author did one stellar thing, and that was to evoke the time and emotions of World War I in England. The giddy joy at the outbreak of war, the slowly breaking morale as the war goes on and on and on, the determined, gritty patriotism of the people caught up in it, it's all captured, as is the sheer bloody horror and destruction of the war itself. So if you're into war stories, this is actually a good book to read, but if you're here for the romance, meh, there's better.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. It's about rich white people, but it's also really anti-war.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/425952.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Things That Are Not Sexy Part I Forget

bookblather — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 23:49:56 GMT

SURPRISE BONDAGE. SURPRISE BONDAGE IS NOT SEXY.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/425661.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Random Reviews

bookblather — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 05:37:46 GMT

By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Agatha Christie

Tommy and Tuppence what what.

In this latest installment of the adventures of the Beresfords, Tommy and Tuppence are grandparents and dealing with an even more elderly aunt who enjoys being cranky. Sidebar: Aunt Ada is one of the most amazing people in this book and I'm really sad that she dies one chapter in. Not of anything sinister, she's not murdered, she's just old. Bless.

Anyway, after Aunt Ada dies, she leaves our heroes a painting that contains a house Tuppence is sure that she's seen somewhere. Add to that the disappearance of another elderly lady from the nursing home where Aunt Ada was living, and Tuppence starts to get her instincts up. She goes to find the house, sure that it can explain the lady's disappearance, while Tommy is away at a conference, and trips headlong into... well, I'm not sure how many plots, but they all tie up in the end.

So, as usual, I love Tommy and Tuppence, I love their interaction, and I love their marriage. That said, this was one of the messier plots I've read from Christie. I had trouble following what was going on, and I'm still not completely sure what happened in the end. Also, Betty (from N or M) just kind of disappeared? IDK, she wasn't mentioned at all in this book. I mean, I'll definitely read it again because I love Tommy and Tuppence, but this was a more confusing book than I'm used to.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. Pretty much everything in this book happens because Tuppence had a gut feeling and Tommy trusts her with his life.

Where Am I Now?, Mara Wilson

So Mara Wilson is my new personal heroine.

Where Am I Now? is a collection of essays on various aspects of her life-- her relationship to sex, existentialism, her mental illness-- that made me sit up and go "OMG THAT'S FUCKING ME ARE YOU ME." Spoiler alert: Mara Wilson is not me, as I am neither famous nor Jewish, but we're very close in age (she's a little under a year older) and both mentally ill and this book resonated so much with me, like she was personally plucking my heartstrings.

The vague arc of the book is growing up famous and learning how to be after child stardom, but it's also just sort of about growing up out of place and trying to accept yourself, and maybe not 100% succeeding but 100% working on it. She's articulate and funny and I just really want to be friends with her, okay. Plus her entire essay on Matilda made me go "oh god yes."

Actually the whole book made me go "oh god yes." So maybe you wanna read it.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. Hilarious Jewish girl calls out assholes and herself. A+.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur Vols 1 and 2, Amy Reeder et al

Oh my god this is the cutest comic you guys.

I'm not the biggest fan of comics lately, particularly Marvel, as they all seem to be like "CIVIL WAR II" and I'm like, no one wanted Civil War I, why is there Civil War II, not even Ms. Marvel can make me care about that bullshit. But this adorable little book, much like my other favorites Ms. Marvel and Squirrel Girl, has zero Civil War and 100% amazingness.

Our heroine, Lunella Lafayette, is the cutest nine-year-old you'll ever meet, and definitely the smartest. She's underchallenged and bored in school (boy, do I know that feel) and trying very hard to neutralize her latent Inhuman gene before she changes-- into what, she doesn't know. Moon Girl is something her classmates call her, because she spends so much time in her own head. Her life is about to get complicated, however, when a Kree Omni-Wave Projector falls into her hands and... well... summons a T-rex and a bunch of prehistoric monkey folk who want to kill her.

The T-rex adores her, though.

It's very much a girl and her T-rex story with occasional bursts of superheroing, with bonus Ms. Marvel in one issue-- and lo, internet, I shrieked with joy and my roommates thought me insane-- and some fangirling naturally ensues. Plus the Hulk pops up a couple times, but apparently he's not Bruce Banner? IDK, I'm not keeping up with that, it's not a line headed by an awesome young lady. Like Lunella. Who is amazing.

Just go read this, guys. It's a delight, and Lunella is my new favorite along with Kamala Khan. Lucky me, they're friends. :D

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. Lunella is a nine-year-old black girl and explicitly the smartest character in the Marvel Universe. Also, she has a T-rex.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/425289.html. Please comment over there if possible.

My Horses From Other LandsI

bookblather — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 00:10:58 GMT

I collect model horses from around the world-- well, I collect model horses full stop, but the ones from around the world are like a collection within a collection and slightly more carefully curated. At some point I offered to show them to someone and promptly forgot. So here is the fulfillment of that long-ago promise which I just remembered.

This one's actually a wall hanging made of sheepskin and wool, from Scotland.

Here we have something a little more chaotic. There's horses from Nepal, Jordan, Sweden, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, Estonia, Israel, Turkey, Albania, France, Romania, Ireland, China, Japan, South Korea, and Denmark in this picture. I'll try to pick out which one is which if you want, but it seemed extensive on its own.

And here's the other half, which overlaps slightly with the first. Discounting ones in the first picture, we have South Africa, Mexico, Argentina, Portugal, Russia, and Germany.

So there's my collection! I am quite proud of it.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/425117.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Some Anthologies

bookblather — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 04:30:44 GMT

A Glove Shop in Vienna and Other Stories, Eva Ibbotson

I love Eva Ibbotson. Her novels have that wonderful combination of nostalgia and realism and idealism and romance that it's just like hearing the most wonderful love story that your friends have to tell. Even her children's books, even the books set during the Holocaust, they still have this sort of air of innocence and magic that just gets me right in the heart.

This doesn't always translate well into her short stories. A few of them are impenetrable or unmemorable. But most of them are the same kind of nostalgically lovely stories about people in love, about people torn between different kinds of love (for self, for lover, for family, for country), about long-lost loves and miraculous reunions and, of course, Vienna.

If you've already read Eva Ibbotson, you know whether you like her books or not, and I'd definitely recommend her short stories. If you haven't, I wouldn't start here; pick up one of her children's books, The Secret of Platform 13 or Which Witch? to begin with, and then make your way up to her adult stories. But this anthology is still gorgeous, and I still loved it.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Explicit criticism of some totalitarian regimes and romanticization of others, women have rich interior lives but most of the characters are white, etc.

Great Tales of English History vols 1 and 2, Robert Lacey

In Which Robert Lacey basically tells a bunch of anecdotes from English history. And it is specifically English history, by the by. He says in his introduction that he would quite like to write Great Tales from Scottish, Welsh, and Irish History serieses as well.

Anyway. Lacey makes sure the anecdotes are as historically accurate and well-sourced as he can manage, but apart from that, this is basically just a bunch of good stories arranged in loosely chronological order. I enjoyed it, but I already had a reasonably good grasp of English history. If you're new to English history, these books will only confuse you. However, if you've got a pretty good handle on it already, these books do a good job of bringing history to life, of picking up on good stories and telling them well. He also, and this I really liked, picked up on the stories that are not true, or at least that cannot be proved, and explaining his theories as to why they've endured. For example, the story of Alfred and the cakes is unlikely, but Lacey thinks it humanizes Alfred and makes him into the considerate and compassionate king that England needed after a long time of Vikings. It's a good read, and one I enjoyed.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. It's factual history; they don't seem to like that much.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/424884.html. Please comment over there if possible.

More Late Reviews

bookblather — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 02:53:28 GMT

Hurray!

Four Weddings and a Sixpence, Julia Quinn et al

Regency romance short story collection woot woot.

The conceit of the overall anthology is pretty good: four friends find an old sixpence in a mattress, and decide that it will bring them good luck in finding husbands (apparently the rhyme used to run "something old/something new/something borrowed/something blue/and a sixpence in her shoe"). Each story, then, is the story of one of the friends meeting and marrying her husband. So, to the individual stories:

Something New, Stefanie Sloan: This one I loved. Anne has to marry before her twenty-first birthday, and because of some childhood issues, she doesn't want to marry for love. The Duke of Dorset doesn't care much about marriage one way or another but he does want to spend a lot of time around Anne. I enjoyed this (except for the sex scene, which was pretty unnecessary) because it was a lot of pining and denial and then adorableness, all of which is my kryptonite.

Something Borrowed, Elizabeth Boyle: Meh. I was expecting to like this, but it just ended up too silly for me. Cordelia made up a fiance to get her aunts off her back, but now that her friend Anne is getting married, she has to produce him or deal with her aunts again. So she asks her old friend Kipp to help her out. Sounds fun, but, yeah, just ended up kind of silly and strange.

Something Blue, Laura Lee Guhrke: Lady Elinor is trying to marry a gent in order to protect her father from possible prosecution. The prosecutor (and her old flame) Lawrence thinks this is a terrible idea and wants her to marry him instead-- and also wants to maybe get her father hanged-- so he steals her sixpence. Elinor spends most of the story trying to get it back, and trying not to investigate her father. I think there's the seeds of a good story here, but it really needed to be a novel. As is, it's kind of unbelievable, forced, and again, the sex scene was not necessary.

...and a Sixpence in Her Shoe, Julia Quinn: My second favorite. Fourth friend the astronomically-minded Beatrice almost literally runs into Lord Frederick, who is partially blind, hermiting in the country, and somewhat understandably grumpy. Now, feature for me, but possibly a bug for others: there isn't much conflict in here. Bea and Frederick fall in love pretty easily and sweetly, and mostly just by interacting and talking about their lives. I think it's a very sweet little story (and for bonus points, Frederick proposes to Bea after taking her to an observatory) but others may think it lacks interest and/or plot. Still, definitely one of my favorites.

Overall, cute book, worth reading, maybe not worth buying.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. Women have interior lives, and one character is disabled, but everyone's white, upper-class, and well-off.

Good Riddance, Cynthia Copeland

I've been reading a lot of graphic novel memoirs recently, it seems like. Anyway, this is Cynthia Copeland's graphic memoir of her divorce.

Copeland, as far as she knew, had an ideal family life with her husband, "TJ" (all names have been changed), and their three kids. And then, one May afternoon, she found love letters to him. That weren't from her. After questioning, TJ admitted that he loved the other woman, and Copeland asked for a divorce. This is all in the first five or so pages.

The majority of the memoir is the aftermath of this moment: the long process of the divorce, the anguish of parenting three children whose father seems unable to turn up places on time, the heartbreak of learning your husband of twenty-odd years no longer loves you and maybe never did. It's beautifully written, and both heartbreaking and affirming to read. Divorce can be survived, by everyone involved. You can leave the past behind, even if you'll never forget it. You can be okay again.

If it has a flaw, it's the art, which is weird and sometimes cartoony and always rather sketchy. That said, it doesn't detract from the story, it just doesn't support it as well as I'd like. Recommended.

Fuck Fascists Factor: Eh, I don't know. It's about a (white and relatively wealthy) woman's inner life... so I guess 2--fascists have slight problems.

Cold-Hearted Rake, Lisa Kleypas

I read this to check off a line on my reading challenge, namely, read a book where a character has your first name, so, yeah, that was weird for me.

Devon Ravenel has just inherited an earldom. He's not thrilled about that. The earl's widow, Kathleen Lady Trenear, is even less thrilled about that, because Devon intends to just sell off the estate and forget about it, instead of trying to fix it up and take care of the people it supports. The book is mostly a long meditation on the responsibilities of an aristocrat and a sort of coming of age for Devon, which I think is why I don't like it so much? Most romance novels that I enjoy are about the heroine more than the hero, who's there to be hot and supportive.

I also don't particularly like our main characters. They're combative and aggressive, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's not a quality I enjoy reading about. Their romance is also resolved very abruptly, and a large part of the second half is taken up with setting up for the sequel. That said, the book is written with Kleypas's trademark humor, and the plot is concerned to a large extent with horses, which I love. Also, Devon's brother West is SO MUCH FUN, and I did actually enjoy the setup for the sequel.

So, you know. It was fun, but I probably won't reread it.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. It's about rich white folks, but a large part of the message is "poor people matter" so yeah.

Poe Dameron Vol 1: Black Squadron, Charles Soule and Phil Noto

Poe Dameron is my cute, sweet, ridiculous space son, so naturally when I saw a graphic novel about him, I picked it up. This volume collects the first six (? maybe four?) issues in the series and two separate story arcs in one long quest to find Lor San Tekka. It's essentially a prequel to The Force Awakens, and explains how Poe got to Jakku in the first place. Sort of. Part of the way there, anyway.

I have to admit, the first arc is ehhh. We see Poe hanging out with a strange sort of egg cult, trying to get Lor San Tekka's location from them, and then the First Order finds him. His squadron tries to protect him while he tries to get out. The action is kind of unconvincing and standard.

The second arc is much better, or at least I enjoyed it a lot more. Lor San Tekka's next stop was a Hutt on a prison planet. Unfortunately for Poe, the First Order arrived there at roughly the same time, and the Hutt proposes a contest: whoever breaks him out of the prison will get the information. Cue prison break movie. It's a great deal of fun.

Finally, they added a short little comic at the end that is essentially "BB-8, MATCHMAKER" and it's perfect. Love it.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. It's Star Wars. Also Poe is a space Latino!

El Deafo, Cece Bell

EL Deafo is Cece Bell's memoir of growing up with hearing impairment after a bout with meningitis as a toddler, and it's really good. Bell's art can be a little cartoony for me-- she portrays herself and her friends as anthropomorphic animals, in her case a rabbit-- but that's a mileage may vary situation, and anyway it's what you do with it. Her memoir focuses mostly on trying to fit in, to find friends who treat her as a person instead of a disability, and along the way we get to watch her grow into a talented and dedicated kid. Well worth the read, for everyone.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Representative characters, main character is a little girl, and *gasp* disabled people are people.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/424660.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Children's Books

bookblather — Sun, 19 Mar 2017 01:30:27 GMT

Plus a late review. Guess which one.

Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, Barack Obama

Ok but it was a picture book written by the President. I had to read it.

It's pretty good, too. It's a very sweet letter to his daughters, about how wonderful they are and how much he believes in and loves them, told through the stories of thirteen (mostly) Americans. And it's a diverse group, too, from Sitting Bull to Georgia O'Keefe to Maya Lin to Albert Einstein (our mostly; I'm not sure if he ever considered himself American). The attributes he praises range from cleverness to patriotism to creativity and back again. Plus, the art is gorgeous. It's a great and sweet book for kids.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. It's written by the first black American President and all about diverse people for two little black girls to be awesome, so... yeah.

Princess Princess Ever After, Katie O'Neill

AHHHHH THIS IS THE CUTEST BOOK.

Princess Princess Ever After is an adorable little graphic novel aimed at children in which Sadie, a sweet and compassionate princess entrapped in a tower, is rescued by Amira, a princess who is more into adventuring and rescuing people than being kind to them. Together, Amira and Sadie have adventures, pick up a prince who doesn't really want to be princing, convince an ogre to stop destroying a town, and defeat the sorceress who put Sadie in a tower.

Oh, and they get married.

NO REALLY THEY GET MARRIED.

This is the most adorable and everyone should read it.

Fuck Fascists Factor: Amira is black, Sadie's kindness and traditionally feminine qualities are played up as good, they're in love, and everything is butterflies and rainbows, so of course 5--fascists will froth at the mouth.

The Boy Who Was Raised By Librarians, Carla Morris and Brad Sneed

Cute, sweet, short picture about, well, about a boy raised (more or less) by librarians. Our hero Melvin goes to the library every day with homework assignments and interesting questions and new parts in plays. The librarians Marge, Betty, and Leola are always there to help him through. We get to watch Melvin grow up, and then at the very end, we get to see what becomes of him. The art is cute, the story cuter. It's a sweet love story to the library, and so I love it.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. All three of the librarians are female, and one is black, but it's still about a white boy.

19 Varieties of Gazelle, Naomi Shihab Nye

19 Varieties of Gazelle is a collection of poetry about the Middle East, and that's about the extent of the commonalities in the poems. Some are about violence and peace and the ability to eliminate one and gain the other, and some are about fig trees, and some are about emigration and the need to find home again, and some are just about beauty and what you see when you look at people. A few of them were a bit opaque for me, but generally the poems are lovely and worth reading. The book's pretty short and quick, too, for bite-sized poetry moments or for reading in one go.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth.. It humanizes the Middle East! And it doesn't talk about oil! And it condemns Western imperialism.

Gossip Girl, Cecily von Ziegesar

You've probably heard of this one. Gossip Girl is the first book in a long-running series that inspired an equally long-running TV show. And it's pretty much exactly what you'd think it would be, with a side of disturbingly casual sexual assault.

Our main characters are Blair and Serena, who used to be best friends before Serena went off to boarding school. In the intervening time, Blair has realized that she's always been playing second fiddle to Serena, and is understandably more interested in shining on her own now. But now Serena's back, and she wants to go back to how things were. Blair isn't interested. Other characters include Blair's boyfriend Nate (who's in love with Serena), Dan Humphrey (who's also in love with Serena), Dan's sister Jenny (who is largely characterized by naiveté and bra size, ew), and Chuck the Rapey One. And, of course, the eponymous Gossip Girl.

Now, this book didn't seem realistic to me at all, but then, according to the book itself, it isn't really supposed to be; these are the richest of the rich kids, the children of the 1% of the 1%, and they're rich and bored and doing shitloads of drugs to get through it. Even Jenny and Dan, the Poor Kids of the book, are basically the 1% as-is. It's sort of a soap opera version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, with additional drugs. And no one gets pregnant. Yet, I guess.

The most enjoyable parts of the book for me were Gossip Girl's interpolations, when she comments on the proceedings with a good bit of irony. She's not really taking the kids seriously, and neither does the author, I think, but heaven knows they take themselves seriously, and the contrast is kind of interesting. The writing is also kind of fun. It would be a pretty enjoyable but forgettable book if Chuck the Rapey One wasn't present. However, Chuck the Rapey One is present, and his sexual assaults (at least two!!) are treated as "lol that's just Chuck" rather than the serious crimes that they are.

So, yeah, it's entertaining enough, but UGH Chuck the Rapey One. Just, you know, get rid of him and you have a decently enjoyable book, but with him? No way. No recommending no how.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. I mean, it's Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, plus Chuck the Rapey One, but it is primarily about women (the book revolves around Blair and Serena's relationship) and it criticizes the lifestyle, even if only implicitly.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/424274.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Some Late Reviews

bookblather — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 04:32:46 GMT

With more to come tomorrow.

Star Wars: Empire, Volume 1: Betrayal, Scott Allie, Ryan Benjamin, and Curtis Arnold

Graphic novel, Star Wars tie-in, you know the drill. No longer canon thanks to the Disney buyout, but that's okay.

Here's where I would ordinarily describe the plot, but I'm not actually sure what it was. The book was pretty confusingly put together. There was some kind of fake Jedi wandering around that Vader was trying to nab, and also a conspiracy of Moffs was trying to take down the Emperor, but that's all I got; I couldn't tell you why anyone was doing these things, or what was up with the fake Jedi, or really anything. Plus the art was weird and difficult to follow with some very strange anatomy.

Would not recommend, and will not be continuing the series.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Outwardly critiques the Emperor's fascist government, although the uprising is squashed in the end.

Black Swan, Mercedes Lackey

This is another in Lackey's proto-Hundred Kingdoms series, a sort of loose companion to Firebird. Black Swan is based off Swan Lake and set somewhere in a vaguely German/Holy Roman Empire area that's never really defined. But then, this is a fairy tale and it doesn't matter that much where, exactly, it is, so long as the feeling is right.

The feeling is right, and as long as you don't think about it too much it's a pretty enjoyable novel. Our heroine, Odile, is the daughter of Baron von Rothbart, he of the enchanting women to be swans by day and women by night. Odile doesn't really see anything wrong with this, due to her upbringing, although that changes via character development, as she guides and guards her father's flock and becomes friends with Odette, the Swan Queen herself. And honestly, if the book had been just them, I would've loved it so much more (and believe you me I am writing the slash fiction in my head as we speak). However, we also get Queen Clothilde and her son Prince Siegfried aaaaaand my sympathies this time around did not land where the author expected them too?

Like, okay, Siegfried most of the time is shown as a pretty cool dude, but he straight-up rapes a girl early on, and Lackey uses this as a springboard to redeem him. No. No, not cool. He's a rapist, and he never really talks about it after his redemption arc, and I'm done. Clothilde, on the other hand, spends most of the book maneuvering to keep her throne, and I can't blame her at all. She's doing a good job ruling the kingdom and her son is a huge dick with an unconvincing redemption. She's ruthless, yeah, but she's a ruler. My support landed wholly on her side there.

So, on average, resounding meh. Odile and Odette's side of the story is lovely, but everything that takes place on Siegfried's side is annoying and difficult to sympathize with. Unfortunately I can't recommend this book anymore, lovely as the description and Odile and Odette are.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. They'll hate Odile and Odette, but Siegfried is probably right up their alley.

Criminal Minds, Jeffrey Mariotte

I was-- actually, am-- on a true crime bender and I ended up picking this book up because, well, true crime, and it had my favorite team from Criminal Minds on the cover. This book is a sort of overview of the various killers and criminals that inspired the Criminal Minds show through the fifth season.

Overall, it's very good. The book is well-written, with well-told stories and nice throughlines that tie its chapters together. It's not super tied in to Criminal Minds, so you can read it if you've never seen the show, but at the same time it nods to the show a lot, so those of us who are fans can see the ties between them. It delves more into the lives of serial killers than it does into their crimes, which is nice for those of us who aren't really gore fans.

That said, there's a few nitpicks. A few times references to the show are inaccurate. Once the author refers to "bisexual" as a lifestyle one of the killers was trying on, which is just... ergh, and there was at least one other moment like that. I'd recommend it, but with that one warning: sometimes there will be a comment that will just smack you in the face, and it may be hurtful depending on who you are.

Also, of course, it's about serial killers, so, yeah.

Fuck Fascists Factor: I honestly have no idea how fascists would feel about this book.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/424082.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Some Books about/by POC

bookblather — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 04:38:34 GMT

Guardian, Julius Lester

Okay, so, first of all? This book is about a lynching. You need to know that right off the bat. The second thing you need to know is that it's about a white boy's experience of a lynching.

Specifically, it's about Ansel Anderson, who has to watch as his black friend Little Willie's father is lynched for a rape and murder committed by Zeph Davis III, grandson of the town's founder. Worse, Ansel and his father know that Big Willie saw the crime committed, and they saw the immediate aftermath.

That's the core of the book, but the emotional arc belongs to Ansel. There's a complicated series of reasons as to why he's sympathetic to black people to begin with, but it is perfectly believable, and so is Little Willie's reaction to everything: there's actually a part I loved after the lynching where Ansel runs to Willie to apologize, and then stops, because he knows that he can't ask forgiveness of Willie, not after what happened.

It's a really good book. If it has a flaw, the ending is too abrupt; there's a lot of buildup and character development before the lynching, and then after it's like ten pages to the end. Still, it's a fast read, but one you won't soon forget.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. Do I even need to explain why?

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu

This was amazing?? omg this was amazing.

Ahem. The Paper Menagerie was a book club selection that I am actually reviewing within about a week of finishing it, go me! But aaahhhh it's so great, guys. It's a collection of about fifteen short stories-- more if you include the preface, which I and my book club both think you should-- that are mostly about cultural collision and the process of, or failure of, translation. It's mostly about Chinese and American cultural collision, but there's others in there too, including the actual short story Paper Menagerie, which won a buttload (technical term) of awards and deserved all of them.

It isn't my favorite story in this anthology, though, which should tell you how amazing it is. My favorite is probably The Literomancer, about a Taiwanese man who reads fortunes in words. Or maybe The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species, which is about memories and stories and books and transmission. Or The Waves, about what it means to be human. Or The Litigation Master and the Monkey King, which is a comedy until it's not, and is about the power of stories and the strength to do what's right. Or All the Flavors, which must be read to be believed. Or really all of them. Can I say all of them? Look just go read this okay.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. I'm reasonably sure that the only white protagonists are also little girls. Everyone else is a POC. And just. Fuck. It's so good, guys. SO GOOD.

Allegedly, Tiffany D. Jackson

I devoured this book until literally the last three pages, at which point I got mad, and I can't even tell you why because it's a major spoiler. But anyway.

Mary B. Addison allegedly killed a baby. Allegedly. She never admitted it, but a baby (white) died while her mother (black) was babysitting, and Mary was the one everyone blamed. That was seven years ago. Now, at sixteen, Mary is in a group home and volunteering at a group home, where she meets Ted. Ted is the first person to really believe in her and love her. He believes she can take the SATs and go to college, so she works on that. He believes that they can get married and take care of their baby together, so Mary works to make that happen. To keep Ted and her baby, she'll have to tell what really happened to the baby, and what her mother is really like, and who, and what, Mary Addison really is.

Sounds great, right? It is. It's tautly and suspensefully written, with a believable cast of characters and painful realities coming back from the past. It ate me not once, not twice, but three times, to the point that I actually ended up coming back from my break about seven minutes late (fortunately I work in a library and they get it). It's really good! AND THEN THE END. I THINK THIS BOOK HAS ENOUGH TWISTS. OH MY GOD. Suffice to say the twist completely ruined it for me. I'm just. So mad.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. The injustices of the justice system, sympathetic black characters, and people working (and succeeding!) at bettering their life. They'll hate it.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/423889.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Comedy

bookblather — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 22:59:51 GMT

Ish. Comedy-ish. I thought Phantom was funny, anyway.

The Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Nameless House of the Night of Dread Desire, Neil Gaiman and Shane Oakley

This is silly, my friends. Like How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Forbidden Brides is a graphic novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman's short story, and it's just a delight. The original story skewered the conventions of Gothic fiction through the form of our narrator, a man living in a Gothic world trying desperately to write realistic, slice-of-life fiction. Every so often, though, he'll find a joke slipping into the narrative, or a character will react as if in real life, and it's just beautiful. Plus, the obligatory Edgar Allen Poe joke is really funny.

It's also a parable on "write what you love," as the narrator argues later in the book that he must write literature instead of fantasy, where his real heart lies. This is a good book. I found the illustrations occasionally somewhat hard to follow, which knocked it down a star, but the rest of the time they enhanced the text considerably. The adaptation also jumps around a bit; there were times I thought I was missing pages. But for all that, it's very entertaining, and I've read enough Gothic fiction to laugh at all of it. Would definitely recommend.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. There's a prominent female character, but mostly I think they'd just be confused.

Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux

Ah yes, Phantom of the Opera. The great-grandaddy of musical smash hits. I've seen the musical twice, and eventually I thought to myself that I had better just read the book.

Which I loved okay.

The Phantom of the Opera is a weird little almost tongue-in-cheek horror/thriller written by Gaston Leroux in 1909, starring the Paris Opera, with cameos by Christine, Raoul, the titular Phantom, and all those other characters we've grown to know through the musical. The story begins with frightened ballerinas telling each other about the Phantom, and switches to Raoul meeting up with his childhood friend Christine again. She's being stalked by a mysterious angelic voice. Contrary to the musical, we actually spend most of the book following Raoul around, with a wry omniscient narrator who's really telling the story.

I've seen the musical too many times to be surprised by anything in the book, but I actually found it really engrossing for all that. Leroux's narrator was a wiseass, which I enjoyed, and his little asides kept making me laugh. Then, too, the book itself is over-the-top and a great deal of fun. I think I would recommend this, even if (especially if?) you didn't like the musical.

Also, for those of you who have seen the musical, there's a lot of stuff that the book explains that I can only imagine Webber threw in as a nod to the book. For example, we learn why there's a lake underground, and where the heck that horse came from, and where Christine got the nickname "Little Lotte." Worth it.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. A major character is Persian, and in more of a fuck Nice Guys factor, the book deconstructs the Nice Guy stalking his love interest from afar.

Nine Goblins, T. Kingfisher

I think I actually encountered some of the characters from Nine Goblins on Kingfisher's LiveJournal, so I went into this already attached. That said...

Nine Goblins follows the titular goblin battalion as they accidentally get transported away from a war and into a random forest. They don't know where they are, or why they're there, or how they got there, or how to get home, so they're pretty screwed. At least, they are until they run across Sings-to-Trees, an elf veterinarian living not far from them.

Goblins and elves hate each other, at least in theory, but Sings-to-Trees and the goblins get along pretty well after a few linguistic misunderstandings-- well enough that when Sings-to-Trees finds an entire human village empty, they tag along to help him find out why. The ending is much more disturbing than the rest of the book; it kinda kicks it up a notch in the dark factor. But the whole book, underneath the humor, is a rage against war and hatred, and how useless they both are. Brilliantly done and another great read by T. Kingfisher.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. There aren't really any representational characters for the fascists to hate, but it critiques their entire worldview.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/423537.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Regency Romances

bookblather — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 02:50:42 GMT

Plus one Jennifer Crusie.

Trust Me On This, Jennifer Crusie

This is another of Crusie's early books, and it's, well, it's an early Crusie all right. It's a screwball comedy that takes place at a literature conference in Ohio (Crusie check). Our heroine Dennie is a reporter with an inside tip: one of the conference's speakers, a marriage expert, will soon be getting divorced. Dennie wants to write that story, as sympathetically and kindly to the woman as possible. Unfortunately, the woman interprets it as harassment and causes a lot of problems for Dennie.

Also causing problems for Dennie is Alec Prentice, an FBI agent after a notorious con man he's been chasing for years. He thinks Dennie is said con man's assistant, and a number of screwball comedy turns keep him thinking that. Also present, his aunt Victoria, a friend of the woman getting divorced, and his boss Harry, middle-aged and cranky and head over heels for Victoria as soon as he sees her. Hilarity ensues over a three-day conference until everything comes to a head.

This is one of the better early Crusies, I think. I'm not super fond of Dennie or Alec, but Victoria and Harry are adorable, and the subplot about the woman getting divorced is handled very sensitively and kindly to everyone involved. Also, the ending is not quite what you'd expect from a romance novel, and I actually really liked it; it subverted expectations without sacrificing the happily ever after. Good book, fun screwball, occasional sour notes because it's an early one.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Quite a bit of feminist discussion and love, plus Victoria's boyfriend (not Harry) is the kind of person they'd be proud of and the majorest drag you ever met.

Friday's Child, Georgette Heyer

Georgette Heyer is the place to go for the most accurate Regency romances you'll ever read, plus humor and amusement. In this one, our hero, Lord Sherrington, proposes to Hero Wantage in a fit of pique because Isabella Milborne refused him. This is not the best reason to propose to someone, but Sherry and Hero get along very well, and so their marriage has a prosperous beginning. Sherry brings Hero down to town and introduces her to his friends, Gil (nice, considered the smartest), Ferdy (amiable idiot), and George (who is CONSTANTLY ANGRY and in love with Isabella Milborne).

Hero is pretty naive, so she starts copying Sherry, but in Regency London, what is good for the gander is decidedly not good for the goose, and she starts ending up in trouble. After a particularly big blowup, she runs to Gil and begs him to hide her from Sherry. Hilarity ensues.

The book is funny and pretty sweet, and mostly avoids Heyer's unfortunate classist and anti-Semitist issues, so it's a good comfort read. One of my favorites by her.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 1--fascists have no problems. Dunno what they'd see in this to care about, to be honest.

Do You Want To Start a Scandal?, Tessa Dare

I'm quite fond of Tessa Dare's novels, because she's intensely funny, albeit at the expense of accuracy, but I'm not really reading these for accuracy, and when I am there's Georgette Heyer. Do You Want To Start a Scandal? is her latest novel, and a loose sequel to Say Yes to the Marquess.

Charlotte Highwood is the daughter of a matchmaking mother, and knowing that there's a marquess around, she goes to warn him, and tell him she doesn't want to marry him. Unfortunately, she and the marquess in question, Piers Brandom from Say Yes to the Marquess, get trapped in the room by a couple having noisy sex, and are then mistaken for that couple. If they want to avoid being forced to marry, they must discover the identity of the couple in question. Cue romantic comedy.

This is actually pretty cute. Charlotte and Piers are fun (though Piers needed to get over himself already, he was much more sufferable once he finally did), and the resolution to the mystery couple thread was hilarious and adorable. Plus, Rafe from Say Yes to the Marquess briefly showed up, though no Phoebe, alas. Cute, silly, funny, would read again.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. Again, women have rich interior lives and you shouldn't be a dick to them.

A Gentleman Never Tells, Eloisa James

Resoundingly fine. A Gentleman Never Tells is a novella set in one of Eloisa James's series that I'm not familiar with but maybe should become so, as one of the better bits of this novella is the characters. Lizzie is a widow whose husband died a humiliating (for her, probably just deathy for him) death in someone else's bed after being a tool for their whole marriage. Oliver was a dick when he was younger, but seizes the opportunity of escorting his fifteen-year-old niece to a house party to apologize to the women he was a dick to and meet Lizzie. It's a pretty rushed romance, but it is a novella, so I'll cut it some slack. The characters are interesting enough that I saw it through to the end, and thought it cute, but pretty forgettable.

I will seek out more of Eloisa James's books, though. Her characterization is excellent and worth the work.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. Women have rich inner lives and should not be lied to.

Where's My Hero? Lisa Kleypas, Julia Quinn, and Kinley MacGregor

This is a collection of three short stories/novellas by two romance novelists I really like and one I've never heard of, and sadly I didn't really enjoy it that much, despite my previous experience. Most of these collections have a very tight theme, but this one's more loose; a hero appears to help out a heroine, which could describe pretty much ever romance novel ever.

Kleypas's story is a sequel to one of my favorite books of hers, Dreaming of You, in which Derek and Sara's daughter Lydia decides to marry for security, but ends up (with help from her mother locking a strategic door) falling in love with a doctor. I enjoyed the bits with Derek and Sara, but Lydia I didn't like so much, and I really didn't like her love interest Jake- I thought he was simultaneously too arrogant and too humble, which was a difficult trick. Mostly I feel like it wanted to be a novel. As it was I just didn't get enough of either of them to like them.

The second story, MacGregor's, I didn't like at all, although I don't think that's MacGregor's fault; it was an interesting premise, but set in a time period I don't know much about, and therefore found confusing. Someone more interested in early English history may like it better. Finally, Quinn's story was light and frothy and forgettable. Generally her characters and plots are more memorable, so I was a little disappointed. She's usually great, but this is just fine.

Overall, not my cup of tea. Alas.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 1--fascists have no problems. This is pretty run of the mill normal romance, without much to complain about or enjoy.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/423217.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Five-Second Review: Criminal Minds, Jeff Mariotte

bookblather — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 05:37:08 GMT

A more intensive review on this book is coming when I finish it, but for now...

Dear Mr. Mariotte;

Bisexual is not a lifestyle. Educate yourself.

*glare*
me

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/423017.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Random Late Reviews

bookblather — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 03:35:02 GMT

Jam-Packed FoxTrot, Bill Amend
and really, Welcome to Jasorassic Park and Take Us To Your Mall too

I read three FoxTrot books lately and they're all pretty much the same: very entertaining, rarely monotonous, usually very funny, and make me sympathize with Jason way too much. Bill Amend does pretty well at juggling his cast, so everyone gets their own time in the limelight, though it does seem to me like Jason usually gets it-- probably because Jason is the funniest and in some ways deepest character.

Anyway, I like FoxTrot, it's a fun comic, and if you enjoy it you'll enjoy these books. If you've never read it, but enjoy slice of life that's heavy on the humor and iguanas, you'll probably like this too.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. Jason's best friend Marcus is black, and Peter's girlfriend is blind, and neither one is played for humor or as anything more than a fact, although there is one punchline along the lines of "if the intent of your driving is to make me GLAD I can't see..."

Blood Ties - Jango and Boba Fett, Tom Taylor

I'm a fan of Star Wars and I'm a fan of weird dads so this seemed perfect for me.

In this two-part story, Jango Fett is given an assignment by ~~Christopher Lee~~ Count Dooku, (who says he's not going to give Jango parenting advice-- I laughed really hard). I won't say what the assignment was, but he doesn't quite complete it, and that causes trouble for his son Boba, twenty-odd years later when he goes on his own assignment. It's full of violence and some gore and is oddly heartwarming for all that. Plus, the art is oddly realistic, especially given that we only get a little bit of Jango. Very weird to see Boba Fett with his helmet off.

Anyway, violent and oddly sweet tie-in, and Jango Fett is a surprisingly good dad, if prone to throwing his son into dangerous situations without warning. I enjoyed it. So might you.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Temuera Morrison, the actor who played Jango Fett and all the clones in the prequels, is Maori, which means that both Fetts and the clones (who play a small but important part) are brown men, which means this entire book is about brown men dealing with family.

Foundations of Chinese Civilization: The Yellow Emperor to the Han Dynasty (2697 BCE - 220 CE), Jing Liu

A graphic account of Chinese history, or rather, part one of a four-part series of graphic accounts of Chinese history. If you've been around here for a while, you know that I always wanted to study Chinese history, and got a little bitter because I couldn't ever take a class on it. Well, Jing Liu heard my cries of woe and answered them with this.

The actual series is called Understanding China Through Comics, and so far (I'm halfway through the second book) it's informative and easily understood. I'm really enjoying learning about China so far! Now, this is very outline history-- there's no way you could cover more than two thousand years of history in a hundred and sixty-eight pages otherwise-- but that's exactly what I need, a sort of fleshed-out timeline that will give me a handle on the overall story before I can dive in deeper. If you, like me, are annoyingly ignorant of Chinese history, this book (and by extension this series) is a great place to start.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. You're learning about Chinese history with nary a white man in sight, and there are so many good things that the Chinese did and created.

Challenger Deep, Neal Shusterman

I am a certified nutjob. My particular diagnoses are chronic severe major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, and let me tell you they can fuck me up. They're not romantic, they're not fun, and they can't be cured by love, and this is the very first time I have read a young adult novel that represents mental illness as the awful, painful thing it is.

Challenger Deep follows a teenage boy named Caden Bosch as his mental illness begins to take over his life. It's told in a dual narrative: Caden's "real" life, and the increasingly in-control hallucinatory-- or perhaps metaphorical-- life. The parallels between the two grow stronger as Caden grows more ill. The words are surreal and beautiful and languid and lovely and painful. The book almost makes you feel like you're drowning.

Now, as I've said, I don't share Caden's diagnosis, but Shusterman's son apparently does, and the book is based heavily on his experiences. His artwork even appears in the book. It really seems like a labor of love, and one I'd recommend to people who want to know, if only a little bit, what it's like.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Sympathetic mentally ill people? Say it ain't so.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/422680.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Books By or About POC

bookblather — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 23:45:15 GMT

So apparently by "tonight" I meant "two days from now."

You Can't Touch My Hair, Phoebe Robinson

Someday, I want to be a quarter as smart, funny, and insightful as Phoebe Robinson.

You Can't Touch My Hair (And Other Things I Still Have To Explain) is an incredibly funny and insightful collection of essays on race, gender, pop culture, and the intersection thereof. Robinson is a black female comic, so her stories can be very raw, and yet her talent is such that they're hilarious anyway. It's clever and awesome and such a great book. Go read it immediately. Everyone. Well, every adult. I mean it.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. Robinson is black and female and hilarious and critiques many fascist viewpoints at the same time, how dare she.

A Wreath for Emmett Till, Marilyn Nelson and Philippe Lardy

Half poetry collection, half art project, A Wreath for Emmett Till is something called a sonnet cycle, which is an absurdly complicated style of poetry that I encourage you to look up if you're interested. I've tried to write one. They are not easy.

Anyway, there's not a lot to say about this book. We all know who Emmett Till was, and we all know he died much too early and too cruelly. The art is painful and disjointed in contrast to the smooth sonnet lines. It's a good, if painful, read.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. They murdered this boy. This book makes it clear.

Gabi: A Girl in Pieces, Isabel Quintero

Okay so this book is much darker than I was led to believe. That said, I did enjoy it. It's your pretty standard high school coming of age story.

Gabi Hernandez is a senior in high school dealing with your average teenage difficulties-- college applications, dating, dieting, poetry-- and your not-so-average teenage difficulties-- her friend Cindy's pregnancy, her friend Sebastian's difficulties with his family after he came out, her father's meth addiction. Gabi channels her fears and her joys into her diary, where she writes about her entire senior year, with occasional inclusions of poetry.

Gabi is a very likable and realistic protagonist, who goes through way more shit than any teenage girl should ever have to, and yet comes out more or less intact at the end. Or, well, if not intact, at least still stuck together, all of her broken pieces meshing into a beautiful whole. I really enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to more or less everyone over the age of fifteen or so.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Gabi and Cindy are both Latinx, and Sebastian is gay; I don't recall if he's Latinx as well. Also, the heroine is a teenage girl.

Spirits of the Ordinary, Kathleen Alcalá

This is a lovely magical realism book set along the Mexican-American border in the late nineteenth century. The story doesn't follow any one character in particular; it's more a tale of an extended family and their struggles with obsession. To me it really echoed One Hundred Years of Solitude, with that same languid feeling and sprawling nature of the story.

Zacarius is monofocused on the search for gold in the mountains. His father Julio searches through the Kabbalah to find God's perfect order. Their obsessive desires come close to destroying their families, their wives Estela and Marina, and Zacarius's children. Between and around those obsessions lie stories of Jewish mysticism and Catholic intolerance, the love of nature and the love of order, how clinging too hard can destroy something, and how dreams coming true sometimes fall apart.

I thought the book was a little jumpy in places, but it was really a lovely story. Like an impressionistic painting.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. If there was a white person in this book, I don't remember them. Oh, wait, there's an Irish priest. But he's kind of a jerk. Also, Jewish people are awesome and don't deserve to be persecuted.

Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, Meg Medina

Piddy Sanchez is minding her own business when someone tells her that Yaqui Delgado wants to kick her ass. Piddy's never met Yaqui. Piddy doesn't even know what Yaqui looks like. Piddy definitely doesn't know what she did, or what she can do to make it better. All she can do is avoid Yaqui, try her best at school and her weekend job, search for information about her unknown father, and hope everything turns out for the best.

This book is primarily about bullying, but it's also Piddy's coming of age as she probes into her past and tries to set up her future. It was hard for me to read, because the bullying gets really bad, but Piddy is a really sympathetic character, even at her most teenage, and I wanted to see if she could get out of this intact. Piddy and her community of women (there are very few male characters) are warm and strong and trying, and even Yaqui is very understandable and sympathetic in her awfulness. Finally, everyone in this book is Latinx, but the book isn't especially about being Latinx: it's background, casual. I am a white girl, so I don't know if this is an appreciable thing, but as a lesbian, it's really nice to see books where women are queer and the story's not about that, so I thought I'd include it anyway.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. I mean, It's about brown American women standing up to bullying.

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I read this book in three days. Not just because the meeting was coming up and I have a really bad habit of playing book club chicken, but because it was that engrossing.

Americanah is possibly Adichie's most famous book, and certainly an excellent one. It is the story of Ifemelu, a Nigerian girl who falls in love with a boy named Obinze. Eventually, she moves to America to study, and is separated from Obinze when his visa is refused. Years later, Ifemelu returns to Nigeria and reunites with Obinze, now wealthy, married, and a father. The novel mostly follows Ifemelu-- we do get little side looks into Obinze's life without her, but it is her journey, her struggles and triumphs and pains, that define the story.

This is a sprawling story, and one that doesn't really resolve well, but then what about life resolves well? There's a sense that everything continues, that we don't see everything but we see enough, that this is just a small segment of a much larger story, which is an accomplishment in a book that runs nearly five hundred pages. I couldn't really tell you what it's about, specifically: immigration, race, love, strength, homecomings, where home is to begin with, life. Suffice to say that it's a great book, and definitely one I'd recommend.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. In addition to this being a story about a black immigrant woman doing her own thing, Adichie strongly critiques race and race relations in America.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/422460.html. Please comment over there if possible.

March, Representative John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell

bookblather — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 19:51:45 GMT

March, Representative John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell

Representative John Lewis is a hero of mine, but until I read this I didn't know how much so. I mean, you learn about the civil rights movement in high school, but they don't really make it clear to you. We saw a few pictures, but no video. We read a few summaries, but no primary sources. March is about as close as you can get to a primary source narrating a video.

March is the story of Rep. Lewis's involvement with the civil rights movement from his time in college to the signing of the Voting Rights Act. The frame story is the inauguration of Barack Obama, our nation's first African-American president, and one of the best we've had. It's hopeful, but real. There is so much violence and pain and death in its pages, all of it inflicted by white people on black people just trying to get their legal rights recognized. It also contains some of the eeriest and scariest panels I've ever seen in a graphic novel, the more so because they are real.

I'm going to talk about more books by and about POC tonight, but I wanted to talk about March separately, because I think it is so relevant right now, and that everyone should read it. Right now, we are going through a backlash against the rights of women, Muslim people, Jewish people, black people, Asian people, Native people, queer people, disabled people, just all across the board, if you are not a white straight Protestant man you are getting hit. And this, March, it showed me that it's been done before. People have done this before. We can do this again.

We can stand up to power and we can say, "No. Not here." They may attack and injure and kill us, but we can keep coming back. We have done it before. We are doing that now. We have won. We can win again.

No. Not here.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. Obviously.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/422387.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Graphic Novels

bookblather — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 06:36:40 GMT

Assorted graphic novels plus one I just need to get off the list already.

Monstress vol 1, Marjorie M. Liu and Sana Takeda

Oh boy, Monstress. Where do I start.

Well, first of all, it's not for me. It's very violent and gory and I tend to like my media a bit more uplifting. That said, it's freaking amazing. Our heroine Maika Halfwolf opens the book up for bidding at a slave auction, but very clearly is only there because she wants to be: she is in control the entire time. And yet, she is not in control. Maika is on a quest for information about something that happened to her, some kind of possession that she still doesn't understand. Whatever it is, it makes her dangerous, and she can't quite control it. Together with a small fox child and a cat, Maika struggles through a violent and war-torn landscape to try and understand what lies inside her.

It's a beautifully illustrated book, with gorgeous artwork even for the most horrific things. And I think there's only one named male character-- wait, no, two, and one is a cat. Neither one of them moves the plot so much as Maika does; it is very much her story, and very much a story of women. The worldbuilding is great, not so much as to be infodumpy, not so little as to be confusing. But I don't think I personally will be seeking out the second volume, purely because it is not for me.

That said, if this sounds like your kind of thing? Go for it. Seriously. My girlfriend loves it, and it is really well put together.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. Women, women everywhere, and not a dude to see! Disabled women, women of color, good women, evil women! WOMEN. GASP.

Ghosts, Raina Telgemeier

This is the latest graphic novel from Raina Telgemeier, and I think the first that isn't autobiographical in some way. Ghosts follows Catrina and her sister Maya as they move north to a coastal California town, Bahía de la Luna. Their new neighbor shows them the local (and very real) ghosts, which Maya adores, and Cat fears. As Dia de los Muertos approaches, Cat has to learn to deal with her fear of death, and Maya's possible death in particular, in order to settle.

Now, I personally really enjoyed this book, but I got pretty uncomfortable toward the end. It seemed very much as if Telgemeier was conflating Dia de los Muertos and Halloween, and they are very, very different celebrations. I am the whitest white girl you'll ever meet, so I cannot speak to this, and I haven't seen any other reviews on the subject (for lack of time, nothing more). All I can say is that it makes me uneasy, and that I will seek out other reviews before opining further on the subject.

That uneasiness makes me reserve recommendation pending further research. Telgemeier's other books are good, though, so go read those while I look this up.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. It's about brown people and brown people's culture, with a disabled girl being the emotional heart of the book and a diverse cast.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Neil Gaiman, Fábio Moon, and Gabriel Bá

This is a weird one. But then again, it's Neil Gaiman, so really I should have expected it going in.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is a short graphic novel based off, I think, a Gaiman short story. Enn and his friend Vic go crash a party that one of Vic's friends mentioned. Vic, a confident ladies' man, almost immediately disappears with a beautiful girl named Stella, abandoning the more awkward Enn to some of the weirdest conversations of his life as it gradually becomes apparent that they crashed a very different party than the one they expected.

The art is gorgeous and the story eerie in the very best of ways. I can't talk much more about it without spoiling it, but I'd recommend it for sure.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. The two heroes are straight white English men, but the girls definitely have all the power in this situation.

Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life, Rachel Renee Russell

This is the first book in the Dork Diaries series, which seems like a sort of Diary of a Wimpy Kid aimed more at preteen girls. And, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, it's pretty meh to me as an adult. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the book, but the more I thought about it afterwards, the more meh I became.

Our heroine, Nikki, has just gotten a full scholarship to a snobby private school because her dad won the bug extermination contract for it. Nikki, being a teenager, is pretty embarrassed by this and how it hinders her efforts to become super cool. She really is a very engaging character, I will say that. Plus the writing makes her very sympathetic and keeps her on this side of likeable. I think if the writing hadn't been so good, I would have grown exasperated with her. But her artistic talent and her determination to do well trump the irritating teenage qualities.

Frankly, I do like this better than Wimpy Kid, mostly because it's significantly lighter on the grossout factor. Apart from that, they're very similar; artistic kid enters school and deals with bullies while trying to be themselves. Cute book, good for teens. Maybe a bit young for adults, though.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. White girl with a poor or middle class background (hard to tell) conquers all.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/422024.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Historical Fantasy

bookblather — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 06:20:49 GMT

This I've read more of.

The Great War, David Almond et al

Okay, so, strictly speaking, a lot of this is straight-up historical fiction. However, at least two of the more memorable stories have some supernatural elements to them, plus I didn't feel like writing another review yesterday, so it's in this post.

The Great War, contrary to its call number in my local library, is not nonfiction, but is in fact a series of short stories inspired by objects dating from World War I. There's things like a helmet, a zeppelin bomb nose cone, a soldier's writing kit, Princess Mary's Christmas gift to the soldiers, et cetera. And, like any short story collection, there are hits and there are misses.

For example, the story based off the Christmas gift is really excellent, about a boy and his sister examining one of the gifts, and the boy stealing a cigarette with far-reaching consequences. Then there's the zeppelin one (Don't Call It Glory, I think), which I found... curiously impenetrable, and the writing case one, which seemed largely unrelated to the War itself. Then there's Each Slow Dusk, toward the end of the book, which was the only story that actually hurt under my breastbone, the way some stories can get you.

It's a beautifully laid-out book, with marvellous illustrations but hit or miss stories. I wish there were more stories that talked about the Central Powers, as most of this book seemed to be set in England. I wish also that it wasn't categorized as nonfiction, because it really isn't. Still, it does a good job of showing the long-term effects of the war. Worth reading if you're interested in WWI, but maybe not for everyone.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. It is so anti-war I can't even, and a lot of the narrators are girls, but everyone's white and mostly British.

Firebird, Mercedes Lackey

Okay, now we're into straight-up historical fantasy.

Firebird is a long-form novel based off the Russian legend of the Katschei, an evil sorcerer who hid his heart away and was defeated by Ivan, a tsar's son, with the help of the titular Firebird. The description on Goodreads bears only a slight resemblance to the actual plot, so I'll try to write a better one. Ilya Ivanovitch is the least valued of his father's eight sons, to the point that he can remain more or less invisible among them despite being the smartest and best-intentioned among them. Though we only have Ilya's word for that, as he's the POV character. Someone begins stealing his violent father's cherries, and Ilya discovers that it's the Firebird before being beaten nearly to death by his brothers. He decides to pretend to be a fool, in order to protect himself. Things happen, and he ends up at the Katschei's palace, having fallen deeply in love with one of the Katschei's captive maidens, and determines to defeat the Katschei and save her.

This has a lot of the usual Lackey flaws. It's really infodumpy and heavy on the description, with most of the plot shoved into the last half of the book to disquieting effect, about three different plot twists in the last ten pages, and a few dropped plot threads. That said, it is entertaining, and Ilya is a reasonably likable protagonist, although there's a lot of really oogy attitudes toward sex and consent, particularly in the first half of the book.

Eh. If you like Russian mythology or are a Lackey completist, this is a nice book to read. If you don't, ditch it. Not worth the time.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. The Firebird is unmistakably the most powerful character in the story, despite being sidelined in favor of Ilya's efforts, but again, she is sidelined, and most of the book is about a white dude. Still, it did introduce me to the fascinating concept of rusalkas.

Magic Below Stairs, Caroline Stevermer

I think I may not be as fair to this book as one might hope, because it is a loose sequel to my beloved Sorcery and Cecelia, and does not contain my favorite character, which is to say Cecy herself. Also Kate is barely in it. That said, it's a competently written and very entertaining short book about a young boy who joins the Schofield household on the eve of their return to the Sir-Hilary-cursed house.

Frederick, our hero, has also acquired a brownie friend somewhere along the way. Billy Bly may or may not have adjusted the livery to allow Frederick to be hired, and definitely came along to the house with Frederick, thereby saving several people's lives and Frederick's livelihood.

It's a sweet little story that doesn't quite gloss over the realities of belowstairs life, but doesn't really dig into it either. Frederick comes of age a bit, Thomas gets yelled at some more, and I closed the book feeling satisfied, if not thrilled. Entertaining, if not great.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. Frederick is a poor young orphan who makes good and several girls make the story possible, but other than that it's pretty conventional.

The Kingdom of Little Wounds, Susann Cokal

This book was described to me as "a fairy tale about syphilis," which meant of course that I had to read it.

Okay, first of all, people describe this book as young adult. It's not young adult. This is adult fantasy, with rape and murder and horrific deaths in gory detail left and right. And, you know, it's about syphilis. So there's that.

The Kingdom of Little Wounds mostly follows two people, Ava Bingham and Midi Sorte, as they try to survive the political infighting and bloody feuds following the death of the oldest princess on her wedding night. Further deaths only deepen the intrigues and plots, and both of them keep getting dragged deeper and deeper into the horrors that ensue. And make no mistake, there are a lot of horrors. I've mentioned the rape and the murder and the horrific deaths, but there's also a number of body parts kept as relics and a frankly nauseating thing made out of them later, as well as numerous other really upsetting things.

I was also uneasy about Midi as a character. Her portrayal felt vaguely racist in a way that I can't really put my finger on. Also, I am the pastiest white girl you'll ever meet, so if I'm wrong, please tell me, I am thrilled to be wrong about this. However, I was really glad to see a black woman in an otherwise lily-white book. She was, however, the only one, and there was a queer character but only one, and so on.

So, it was a good if very disturbing book, with some diversity that may or may not have been mishandled. I genuinely don't know whether or not to recommend it. To people who like court politics, maybe, but it's really gory, too. I don't know. If it sounds interesting.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Major characters are representational, even if they are only one.

Ghost Talkers, Mary Robinette Kowal

MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL HOW DARE YOU TEAR ME APART LIKE THIS.

Ahem. I picked up Ghost Talkers because I got to see Ms. Kowal in person and she read from it and it sounded like a fascinating premise. During World War I, the British army has developed something called The Spirit Corps, which on paper is there to encourage the troops and build up morale, but in reality is a bunch of mediums who glean information from the ghosts of the fallen. What a great idea for a book!

Our heroine, Ginger, is one of these mediums and an American heiress engaged to a captain in the intelligence corps. Ginger's comfort-- as much as there is in WWI-- is shaken when a ghost reports to her that he was murdered in that very camp, and destroyed entirely when a spoilery thing happens. Ginger's attempt to solve what's happening takes her from the Spirit Corps headquarters to the front (with cameo by JRR Tolkien himself!) to a POW camp. It's a pretty straightforward mystery, but it's beautifully (and heartbreakingly) written, with great worldbuilding for a great idea. It's also refreshingly diverse and female-centric, something that I have found sadly lacking in a lot of WWI-era novels. They're near the front lines, yes, but the Spirit Corps is largely composed of women and disabled people, with quite a few POC (including one major character and one minor one) scattered in between.

So, yes, this is a brutal book by virtue of the setting if nothing else, but it's wonderfully written. Kowal will make you thank her for every twist and heartbreak. Worth the read for everyone, IMO.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. Women, disabled folks, and POC save the day. War, particularly WWI, is horrific. Tolkien appears. All is well.

The Sherwood Ring, Elizabeth Marie Pope

Huzzah, my childhood!

The Sherwood Ring is the story of Peggy Grahame, an orphan sent to live with her uncle in Rest-and-be-thankful, their ancestral estate. While there, Peggy meets a nice young man that her uncle inexplicably orders out of the house, and then she meets a series of ghosts who explain the Revolutionary-era spy shenanigans that took place in the house, as well as why her uncle dislikes the nice young man so much. The ghosts know they're dead, but they don't seem to care very much. It honestly seems like they hang around Rest-and-be-thankful because it's a nice house and there's not much better to do, and Barbara can mock her brother in peace.

It's such a charming and delightful story. There's no real fear in the ghosts, just amusement. Peggy is having fun with her new mystery story and nice young man. Uncle Enos is the only one who doesn't seem delighted by all events, but there's a reason for that and he chills out toward the end of the book. Cute story, adorable characters, and spy shenanigans. Also contains a young man proposing to a young lady as he is passing out because she successfully drugged him and apparently that turns him on. Recommended to everyone.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. Peggy, Barbara, and Eleanor are all major viewpoint characters, but they're also white, as is everyone in the book.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/421839.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Historical Fiction

bookblather — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:00:25 GMT

Of which I've read surprisingly little lately. Featuring two book club selections.

Isabel: Jewel of Castilla, Carolyn Meyer

Yes, this is one of the Royal Diaries. What of it?

For those of you who don't know, the Royal Diaries are kind of an offshoot of the Dear America books which purport to be the diaries of various princesses throughout history. This one is Isabel of Spain, as in Ferdinand and, though of course she's not married yet. It recounts her preteen and early teenage years.

Now, it's very accurate, factually speaking, and there are some things that ring true when compared with Isabel's later actions, like her strong-mindedness and her determination to make herself Enrique's heir, her deep piety and respect for the church, and her somewhat judgmental nature. There's some things, though, that seem very false, like her sympathy for Jewish people of any stripe but especially the possibly imaginary ones who pretended to convert and continued to practice Judaism. If you know anything about Isabel, you know that's not at all what went down.

So I guess, overall, it's okay. Good for girls who need a strong role model, but maybe keep an eye on them and make sure they're not going to start any inquisitions.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. Teenage, Spanish-speaking girl speaks her mind and encourages defiance of men.

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

So, Barbara Kingsolver is a great author and I always finish her books feeling satisfied, but I never really know how to talk about them afterwards? I always feel like I've missed layers of symbolism that I can't quite explain.

Essentially, The Poisonwood Bible is the story of the Price family, who follow their patriarch Nathan Price to be missionaries in the Congo. The eldest Price turns out to be unbending and unadaptable-- adaptation is a theme of the book, I think, though there are a lot of those-- and the family disintegrates, then, slowly and painfully, each member rebuilds themselves over the next three decades. I think they're a metaphor for the Congo itself? Maybe? Destroyed by the stubborn self-centeredness of an old white dude and built up again through painful effort? Man, I don't know. Colonialism is bad.

I am really not doing this book justice, guys. It's really incredible. I had a few issues with the ending, but generally speaking it's intricately crafted and beautifully written and very, very worth the reading.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. It's all about women! There are black people all over the place! It would give them bigger problems if any of the viewpoint characters were, in fact, black, but I guess we can't have everything.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon

Or, Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay need to rethink their lives and their choices, THE NOVEL.

I think I would have enjoyed this book quite a bit more if I was more into comics. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay follows two young Jewish boys in New York City who end up hip-deep in the Golden (and later, Silver) Age of Comics. Joe Kavalier is the artist, atand his cousin Sammy is the writer, and together they create some iconic (and fictional, sadly) comic books, from the Escapist to Luna Moth. There is much emotional turmoil and complications, but it ends pretty well, I think. You'll have to decide for yourself.

This is another book that I don't think I can do justice to. For one thing, I read it back in July for my book club. For another, there's SO MUCH here. Not quite as much as the Poisonwood Bible, but easily four or five different themes going on. It's really good, but try to schedule more than a month for reading it in, and definitely take your time with it.

Most importantly, never forget: Antarctica is trying to kill us all.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 5--fascists will froth at the mouth. Advocates the apparently politically controversial opinion that Nazis are evil fuckers. Also about two Jewish boys, one of whom is gay. Screw you, fascists.

Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline

Another book club selection, and a surprisingly good (if somewhat predictable) one. Which is not to say that my book club routinely picks bad books, because we don't; I think there's only one I really disliked and that was because it desperately needed about three more editing passes. That said, Orphan Train!

Orphan Train is about three-quarters the story of Vivian Daly, a rider on one of the very last orphan trains ever to go west, in 1929, and about one quarter the story of Molly Ayer, six months from aging out of the foster care program and wondering what, if anything, she can do next. Molly is our frame story; she has to do fifty hours of community service for trying to steal a library book (which, sidebar, no librarian on earth is going to call the cops because one kid tried to steal one book, and the most beatup copy of Jane Eyre, no less. We're going to take the book away and tell the kid to knock it off, or, worst case, call their parents. No one's going to juvie because they tried to take a book. Come on, author). Anyway. Molly spends that community service helping Vivian go through her attic and clean it out. Not a lot of cleaning out happens, but Vivian tells Molly her life story along the way, and they bond.

It's really sweet, and very smoothly written. I did enjoy it a lot. It was just that thing about librarians-- seriously, we don't do that, it is so much not worth the trouble-- and that I didn't think we got enough of Molly. I would love a whole book about Molly and her life. Vivian was cool, but more Molly please.

Still. Good book. Good to read.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. All about women, and Molly is a Penobscot Indian. Vivian's white, though, or it would have earned a 5.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/421454.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Shakespeare Extravaganza!

bookblather — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 04:03:27 GMT

We all know (or I hope we all know) that Shakespeare's language is good, occasionally bordering on the sublime, and that personally I think everyone should see at least one play at least once, right?

Okay, good, because I got hold of a Complete Works and I'm reading it in order and now I'm gonna talk about how weird these plays are at length.

The Merry Wives of Windsor is a play with two very loosely related plots and a whole lot of slapsticky nonsense. I also read it out of order, which is why it's not alphabetical. Sir John Falstaff, a former member of Prince Hal's court, is now hanging around Windsor trying to seduce two different married ladies at the same time. One of the married ladies has a daughter who has three different suitors, two of whom are ethnic stereotypes (Welsh and French) and the third of whom is the guy she actually marries. There are many sex jokes and very little good language and a lot of, well, slapsticky nonsense. This is the play you put on when you're bored and want to tell a lot of dick and fart jokes. Entertaining, but does not contain any of the sheer bizarre weirdness that makes a Shakespeare play memorable.

All's Well That Ends Well might be the only play of these five where someone doesn't get murderously jealous of someone else. Shakespeare, these are comedies. There's a lot of murder for these comedies.

I keep getting All's Well confused with As You Like It, so to be clear, this is the one where the male lead is a goddamn douchebag and the heroine is pretty much a stalker. Helena is in love with Bertram, the son of a count, and after she cures the king of France, she asks for Bertram's hand in marriage (creepy). The king gives it to her, but Bertram tells her he won't call her his wife until she has the ring off his finger and his baby in her belly, and runs off to fight in Italy (??) (dick). Helena goes on pilgrimage and then fakes her death (??) in order to play a bed trick on Bertram in which he sleeps with her instead of the hot girl he's been courting. Naturally, at the end of the play, she has the ring he gave the hot girl and is pregnant with his child, so Bertram does an about-face and falls in love with her, or claims to. Also, there's a long subplot about some friend of Bertram's being a traitor.

So, yeah, the play where everyone's unsympathetic and the ending's triumphant but not happy. Not enough dick jokes.

As You Like It is the one with the crossdressing! Also an excellent heroine and a lot of hoyay.

Our Heroine Rosalind is the daughter of a duke who got usurped by his brother and sent off to the Forest of Arden. On a scale of Duke Senior to Prospero, how well do you take being usurped by your brother? Anyway, Rosalind's uncle kicks her out, so she and her cousin also run away to the forest of Arden, although not before they meet Orlando, who has also been thrown out of his house by his older brother, who is now trying to kill him via wrestler. Yeah. Rosalind decides to pretend to be a boy named Ganymede (o rly) and her cousin Celia becomes her sister, the symbolically-named Aliena. Orlando, who has fallen in love with Rosalind at first sight, ALSO runs to the Forest of Arden, where he leaves love poetry on all the trees until Rosalind-as-Ganymede trips over him and makes him stop by telling him to woo her while pretending that she-as-Ganymede is his love Rosalind.

YEAH.

The play only gets more convoluted from there, but in the end there are no less than four (4) marriages, thanks to the clowns hooking up, a subplot about a girl who fell in love with Rosalind-as-Ganymede and her stalker shepherd boyfriend, and Celia at the last minute falling in love with Orlando's no-longer-murderous brother Oliver. Also the usurping duke found Jesus and became a monk so Rosalind's father can have his dukedom back. Oh, and the god Hymen appears. It's pretty nuts, but entertaining as hell, and while I can't say that anyone's actions necessarily make sense, the play is still really funny and definitely worth watching. Unlike, say, All's Well.

Me, I think that Oliver figured out what was up with "Ganymede" the moment he saw her, and spent the interact time going "??????" at Celia, who went "!!!!!!!!!!" back until they fell in love by sheer virtue of being the most done people in the play. But, you know, headcanons.

Comedy of Errors! The one where everyone's a douchebag and the two people who are explicitly searching for their long-lost twin brothers never once suspect that hey, maybe the reason everyone here recognizes us and is telling us we did things that we never did is BECAUSE THOSE BROTHERS ARE HERE.

Yeah, Comedy of Errors is founded on the premise that a man and his wife had twin sons, as did a poor woman in the same house, so the man bought the poor women's sons (as you do) and raised them to be his sons's servants. However, when they were young, he and his family got in a shipwreck and were separated. He ended up with one of each set of twins, and now is looking for the other two boys. They all have the same name, by the way. The sons are Antipholus and the servants are Dromio. And apparently they are dressed alike and sound exactly alike, because the entire play is people mistaking them for each other, one Antipholus hitting on the other one's sister-in-law, several people getting arrested, and a whole lot of just. Shenanigans. This play would be utterly irredeemable were it not for the pretty cool language. A lot of people speak in rhyming couplets with each other, which is just fun. Apart from that, it's confusing and short and just weird. Just... weird, guys.

THIS PLAY.

Okay, first of all, the play is called Cymbeline but it's not really about Cymbeline, it's about his daughter Imogen. Second of all, no one in this play is what they claim to be except Cloten. He's an evil fucker but at least he's honest about it? Finally, there is a TOTALLY RANDOM appearance of Jupiter (yes, the god). The play was semi-realistic if a bit full of crossdressing before that, and then ABRUPTLY JUPITER. Okay.

The play begins with an infodump, wherein we learn the identities of everyone involved, and that Imogen has married Posthumous (whose entire mostly irrelevant backstory we learn in the first scene) while her father wanted her to marry her stepbrother, Cloten. Posthumous has been banished and Imogen is getting pressured. Also, the king had two sons who disappeared a long time ago. Oh, and they might be at war with Rome.

So there's like, five plots here, that weave in and out of each other. First, there's Posthumous and his weird Roman friend who bets Posthumous that he can get Imogen to sleep with him. He can't, obviously, but he manages to convince Posthumous that he did, so Posthumous sends his servant to kill Imogen and then has a change of heart after he hears she's dead. He spends the rest of the play trying to get himself killed before running into a very much alive Imogen. Then there's Imogen herself, who fends off Cloten, runs away when Posthumous tells his servant to kill her, starts crossdressing, runs into her long-lost brothers, thinks Posthumous is dead, accidentally takes poison, and wakes up just in time to resolve the plot. Then there's Cymbeline himself, whose wife convinced him to go to war with Rome. Then there's Imogen's long-lost brothers and their adoptive father, who stole them when Cymbeline accused him of treachery like twenty years ago, because that's a good plan. Cloten starts running around trying to find the missing Imogen and eventually gets himself killed. And finally there's Cymbeline's wife, but I don't even know what she thinks she's doing. Trying to get her son on the throne, I gather, but there's way too much poison and goading people to go to Rome for that to be the only motive.

Anyway, at the end of the fourth act Posthumous has been arrested after he pretends to be Roman (for reasons) and is sleeping in his cell when the ghosts of his parents and dead brothers show up and call on Jupiter to protect him. For some reason Jupiter actually answers this call, and drops a random prophecy on Posthumous's chest that a random soothsayer interprets at the end of the play. It serves absolutely no point and does absolutely nothing to the plot, but hey. There's a god.

SHAKESPEARE IS WEIRD, Y'ALL.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems, because the women are usually right but the values are of four hundred years ago. The problems might be bigger but I don't think they'd understand the words.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/421351.html. Please comment over there if possible.

Late Reviews

bookblather — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 04:43:05 GMT

No theme again, just ones I'm late on.

The Children's Blizzard, David Laskin

This is a pretty harsh read, just fyi.

The Children's Blizzard is the story of the great prairie blizzard of 1888, in which hundreds of people died, most of them children on their way home from school. Laskin sets up the story rather well, I thought, if somewhat tediously, with a couple of chapters on the social and geographical makeup of the prairie and the function and setup of the United States Signal Corps, the people responsible for weather forecasting. Then he gets into the blizzard itself, told in a particularly chilling (hah) series of chapters from the point of view of the people trapped out in it. Finally, he talks about the aftermath, the fates of various survivors, and the ultimate outcome for the Signal Corps.

The book can get rather dry sometimes, between the in-depth weather forecasting discussion and the long digressions into the biographies of some of the people involved. That said, the chapters actually about the blizzard are some of the most compelling nonfiction I've read all year. If you're interested in weather, this book will really engage you. If not, well, maybe skim that bit. And, as I said, it's a pretty harsh read. Most of the dead in the blizzard were young children on their way home from school after the first nice day all winter.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 2--fascists have slight problems. Deeply sympathetic immigrant characters.

Echoes in Death, JD Robb

This is, as far as I know, the most recent of the ...In Death series, following up on Apprentice and Brotherhood in Death and a whole lot better, IMO. There's still some sketchy shit going down, but it's a murder mystery concerning a serial rapist who's escalated to murder, but it's much less grody than Brotherhood, and it doesn't ask you to sympathize with the rapist. Which, good. Fuck that motherfucker.

Ahem. Eve and Roarke are on their way home from a party when a bloody, naked young woman stumbles out in front of their car. They take her to the hospital, where she is identified. A quick trip to her house later, they find her husband's body, and Eve's off on another investigation.

There's not a lot of continuity in this one, which is nice. Instead we get a lot of family bickering while they struggle to catch the killer; the same kind of procedural, in other words, that I regularly go to for happy brain places. That, plus the characters I've grown to love, plus Eve and Roarke who are at least entertaining (and a bit more Married in this one than they usually are), plus the cat, plus a nice little twist in the ending, made this an excellent installment in the series. Good times.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. Teetering on the edge of five, but Eve's world is pretty fascist to begin with. Aaaanyway we have a major female character recovering from severe abuse sympathizing with other victims of abuse, an irredeemable asshole committing crimes who is of course caught, multiple other female characters being awesome, and many of those being POC.

The BFG, Roald Dahl

This right here? This is my childhood, and that may explain quite a bit about me.

The BFG is pretty representative of Roald Dahl books, I think. It's incredibly weird, with made-up words all over the place (sometimes I think he wrote this book just because he'd made up all these weird synonyms and mixed-up sayings and wanted a place to use them), and the plot features a lot of bodily harm done or threatened to children. There's one (or two, depending on how you count the BFG) useful adult, and it's a child who saves the day (more or less) since the rest of the adults are idiots, malicious, or both.

Our hero, Sophie, is abducted from her bed in the middle of the night by a giant. Sophie is (quite reasonably, as it turns out) afraid he'll kill and eat her, but no, she has been kidnapped by the only vegetarian giant in existence, the BFG (Big Friendly Giant). There are, however, nine other giants who do kill and eat children every night. Once Sophie hears this, she determines to put a stop to it, with the help of the BFG and the Queen of England. It's silly and threatening in that very strange way only Roald Dahl can manage, and a great deal of fun to boot. Definitely recommended.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. Little girl saves the world, how dare she. But she's white and British so that dilutes it somewhat.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up The Marvel Universe, Ryan North and Erica Henderson

Y'all have been around here long enough to know that I love Squirrel Girl, right? Well, if you haven't, I love Squirrel Girl. This installment is a standalone graphic novel that may or may not actually link into the larger Marvel Universe, but I find I don't care either way, because it's literally what it says on the tin. In this book, Squirrel Girl beats up the Marvel Universe. Including Deadpool.

Okay, well, technically, it's her evil twin beating up the Marvel Universe, but whatever, it's Squirrel Girl, and her evil twin isn't really all that evil. Also Tony has a rather large part in it, most of which is him being either a science dork or in his underpants or both, and of course there are squirrels everywhere, and really Squirrel Girl is always a delight and if you're a fan you should pick this up immediately, because, again, Squirrel Girl beats up the entire Marvel Universe.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 4--fascists have major problems. It would be five but Squirrel Girl is white. Well, maybe it is a five? I mean, Allene's entire plan is basically to run a fascist government for the benefit of squirrels... but then again she's not entirely wrong or depicted as being entirely wrong so, yeah, four. Whatever, it's Squirrel Girl, she's a delight.

How They Choked, Georgia Bragg

First of all, this book has some really excellent illustrations by Kevin O'Malley, so if nothing else check those out.

How They Choked is one of those short tales from history collections aimed at children, with its theme being failures of the rich and famous. Now, being one of those collections aimed at children, it's not strictly accurate to history (or at least our best understanding of history). There were definitely times I read a bit and was like, "no... no, that's not right." Also, the selection of failures was... interesting? I mean, you have people like J Bruce Ismay and the Titanic, which, all right, though the Titanic's fate was a lot of little things adding up, but then you have people like Isaac Newton and Susan B Anthony, whose failures I'm still not sure I understood.

But it's entertaining enough, and if you've got a kid into history or schadenfreude they'll probably enjoy this. Plus, O'Malley's illustrations are great.

Fuck Fascists Factor: 3--fascists have problems. I think they'd have major problems since it's about white faves fucking up, but there's also women fucking up, and generally I think it would confuse them.

This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/421029.html. Please comment over there if possible.