I so needed a new-to-me paranormal fiction series! The protagonist is a coyote shapeshifter. So far there don't seem to be others of her kind, and having been raised by werewolves, most of her friends are of that persuasion. There is also the odd gremlin or vampire in her social circle--and someone really dangerous, an undercover cop.
Jesse Bennett is an incidentally queer teen with a whack job mom and social status anxiety. I like that the lesbian storyline, while important is only one of the three major themes of this adult, but suitable-for-young-adults novel. Jesse is a likable and believable character in a likable and believable novel. It's a pity I don't have anything brilliant to say about the book because it's a likely candidate for next year's favorites list.
When you're an anti-consumption mainstream-culture-eschewing car-hating vegan it's highly unusual and extremely gratifying to read a travel guide written expressly for your weird demographic. Even those who loved to shop and think no trip to NYC is complete without seeing Phantom and dining at the Hard Rock Café should find some stuff they'll want to do in here, much as I hope they don't. There are plenty of kid-friendly activities listed in the guide, but be warned, the f-bomb gets dropped 25 times in the book, more if you count Fly's signature spellings, "fck" and "fckn." While we're counting words, those orthodox in their food choices will rejoice as I did that the word "vegan" appears 85 times in the 256 page book.
Read the rest of the review.
I'm having a hard time writing this review because I love the book so much. I've read it a bunch of times (five? ten?) since I first encountered it as a child. It's about a 14-year-old African-American girl coming up in a poor neighborhood of an unnamed northern city. She wants to feel like part of something, and gets her chance when she wrangles a former storefront church with an old piano in it into a clubhouse for her and the kids who previously had to hang out on the street, dodging a vindictive cop named Lafferty.
"What just happened?" I wondered when I finished this episodic novel. Why did she put the last story first? Although the book left me unsettled it was a moving read. Ms. Lee can write. In broad terms this is a coming of age story about a light-skinned black girl/woman coming of age, from her childhood as a civil rights preacher's kid attending a Quaker school, integrating a private school, going to Harvard, and then doing the ex-pat thing in Paris.
What I'd been doing, in fact--what I did every morning--was reading. ... I would read with the kind of ferocious appetite that belongs only to garden shrews, bookish children, and other small creatures who need double their weight in nourishment daily. p.31
This balance was upset when I entered the Prescott seventh grade, a long-legged, eccentric-haired child of eleven--with a mouthful of braces--chafing in the regulation gray worsted tunic and white cotton blouse. I came from a family with a fixed optimism about the brotherhood of man, and I was fresh from the sheltered atmosphere of a tiny Quaker school where race and class were treated with energetic nonchalance. It astonished me considerably to discover a world in which lines were so clearly drawn, and in which I was the object of a discreet, relentless curiosity--a curiosity mingled with wariness on the part of some teachers, as if I were a very small unexploded bomb. p.53
I dogeared a bunch of pages of this book to quote here, but it's now been over a week since I finished the book, and I'm feeling mad lethargic, so I think I'm just going to say that Affirmative Action is a very good book. If you are a white person and you have ever remotely felt that people of color have all the breaks, or if you have ever thought that you lost a job or didn't get into a school because you are white, this book will help you understand how wrong you were.
Zine World is awesome. That is all for now because this review is severely overdue.
The end of the Hunger Games trilogy is as good as the first two and is the rare book that lives up to its hype. In this future dystopia one doesn't go to war without a camera crew.
I loved this issue of QZAP:META from the old skool looking front cover photo of sailors making out to the anthemic back cover drawing of a large naked women by Mara Schnookums proclaiming "Any sex I have is queer sex any zine I make is a queer zine." Nerdslut Milo Miller's introduction lays out what it is to record one's life and struggles in zines and to preserve them in libraries and archives. Ze identifies the Queer Zine Archive Project, QZAP, as "part of a vast Yellow Submarine fleet of libraries, archives, and infoshops that all recognize the importance of saving and sharing populist and underground media." Ze makes me feel so proud to be part of that! The essays in the zine ride the activist/academic line in the most delicious way. Plus there's art. What's not to love?
Tween Black Panther lit! Three kids travel to Oakland for the summer to stay with their estranged and unmotherly mother. She sends them out every day to Black Panther breakfast and summer camp while she stays home and writes poems for the revolution. The story is told from the oldest girl's point-of-view. At 11, and motherless for most of her life, she takes care of her younger sisters and is fearful about hanging out with the Panthers. Still, she takes in their message, and it makes her stronger. Not that she wasn't plenty strong already. Delphine is a nuanced and believable character, as are her sisters. I loved the tidbits defining African-American kids lives in the 60s/70s, them counting black people on television and how many lines they had, encountering white hippies in the Haight and Teutonic tourists in Chinatown, and most of all their getting to see the BPP as an aid organization.
