Lower East Side Librarian

A.j.’s consumption zine this year contains short reviews of what she read, saw, and listened to, but details what she anti-consumed, i.e. gave away. A girl with a library degree, and a case of packratitude, she purged her book collection. Because she is a big old library geek, not to mention a comics geek and exhibits several other flavors of geekish predilections, she provides a helpful methodology for ridding herself of her books.

No one’s conscience escapes unscathed from war, not even a loving mother and shelterer of freedom fighters. I found Rehana’s story hard to get into at first, and I recommend other readers brief themselves on Bangladesh’s fight for liberation before digging in. With a little patience I did grow to care about Rehana, her son and daughter, and her various friends and neighbors.

So you don’t think I’m completely cold-hearted after reading the majority of my recent teen fiction reviews, A Time for Dancing really got me. I was drawn to it because it appeared to be about dancers, and while that’s kind of true, the dancing part wasn’t what I was hoping for. I was pretty much sucked in by the sob story, told in the voices of a pair of best friends, navigating cancer. Both points of view are credible and moving.

Why is historical fiction looked down upon in publishing? Because women like it? I like it. I think it’s a great way to get a taste of important events and eras. This retelling of the U.S. woman suffrage movement is told in three voices: Lucy Burns, Mary Daly, and Kate Brennan. Brennan, a recent Bryn Mawr grad who somewhat accidentally gets arrested at a White House protests and spends two weeks in prison as a result carries most of the book.

This is a book club book, so I don’t want to say much about it before I get the chance to talk about it with Celia. And that’s fine, because I don’t have a ton to say about it. A young goth punk alcoholic in recovery, whose father died a few years prior discovers Debbie Harry, falls in love, and realizes he’s a transvestite. It’s an area that’s not covered adequately in the literature, but I’m not sure it’s covered adequately here, either.