I read this dude-penned book because my dad recommended it and because the next book in the series includes an encounter with Jennifer Miller, a favorite performer of mine and the person who conducted my wedding ceremony.
Like many zine folk I was irritated by Microcosm's use of the term "bookette" in association with zines, but when I got the WNHP Greatest Hits compilation, I was like yeah, this little thing is pretty much a "bookette." It's an adorable half-legal sized, 80 page paperback that weighs 4 ounces. The volume brings together sixteen of Andria's favorite essays, one poem and one comic from the first eight issues of her literary comp zine We'll Never Have Paris, "narrative nonfiction 'for all things never meant to be.'"
This first installment in the Soup Lover's Mystery series introduces us to Lucky Jamieson, who has just returned to Vermont in the wake of her parents' death in a car accident. She has just taken charge of their restaurant and is already in danger of losing it, due to her cook being charged with murder and a subsequent falling off of business, and also some money woes that go unresolved, presumably to be revisited later in the series.
My biggest problem with this book is that the eponymous character isn't actually named Digit; she's called digit, rather than her real name, Farrah. Digit/Farrah is a high school math genius hiding her ability from her seemingly shallow friends, hoping to live a normal life until she meets her destiny at MIT. But destiny can't wait.
So Yale-bound Allee isn't as Yale-bound as she'd like to be because her family is too rich for financial aid and too poor for the Ivy League...until she gets discovered in a model search at a mall. Before hitting the Miami casting scene Allee, who is of Jewish and Cuban distraction, is nerdy and not at all interested in fashion.
A long-time best-friendship between a teenage boy and a girl is tested when the latter comes out and their school makes a stink about her wanting to wear a tux to the prom with a girl as her date.
After a summer of subsisting on the literary equivalent of carbs (i.e., genre fiction), I started the school year off with Jeanette Wintersen then dipped close to chick flick territory, followed that with an international memoir and then feminist essay collections back-to-back. Not that I don't love my vampires and young adults, but it's satisfying to get back to spending some time in the minds of smart grown-up humans for a change. It helps that Jennifer Baumgardner is so damned likable in F'em.
Disclosure: I'm friends or friendly with about half of the contributors to this book, for which I also wrote a chapter. I think I'd have loved it even if that weren't the case, but then again it couldn't have not been the case because the world of feminist archivists isn't as big as you might imagine--or hope!
I loved reading DeWoskin's twonovels, and I also love memoirs, especially about being caught between two cultures, so I was jazzed to finally get around to Foreign Babes. Usually that's a set up for disappointment, but although I didn't find FB quite as dramatic as her fiction, I still read it with great interest.
