Helga Crane, the protagonist of Quicksand is never happy in one place for long. Through her eyes the reader gets to experience life as a light-skinned African-American in the south, Chicago, Harlem during the Renaissance, Europe, and then the south again. Although the book takes place mostly in Crane's 20s, I see it as something of a coming-of-age novel.
Lisa Darms, Senior Archivist, Fales Library, NYU
Sara Marcus, writer and musician, author of Girls to the Front
Molly Neuman, musician, zine publisher and founding member of the riot grrrl movement
Gretchen Wagner, Assistant Curator, MOMA, panel moderator
This is just the title since I used a ton of images I don't have permission to share. I would be happy to distribute the whole file to individuals who want to see it, though. Email zines@barnard.edu for a copy.
The latest zine reviews column, this time contributed by Bat Annex zine librarian Lacey Prpić Hedtke, is up. Lacey reviews the Doris Antidepression Guide, an issue of Dwelling Portably, the first Dames on Frames, Radical Pet #4, and HPV.
I don't want to be mean about a book on this blog. Usually if I don't like a book, I just don't finish it, but for some reason I stuck with Conception, even though it rankled. I guess the story was relatively compelling. I had two major problems with the book--its narrators: the protagonist and the talking fetus. I didn't find 15-year-old Shivana Montgomery likable, or even sympathetic. I had a hard time getting past the unborn child having a voice and the somewhat pro-life stance of the novel. When I could get over my politics, I still couldn't get into its tales of its previous martyred mothers. African-American women don't have much of a chance in the past or present of Conception. If that is Buckhanon's point, she makes it successfully, but not in a way that reaches me emotionally. I'm interested to know if any of y'all have read this book and whether you had a different take on it. (Celia, give it a try during the winter break. It takes place in Chicago, if that helps.)
A 12-year-old is ashamed of her trauma onset epilepsy and is aided in coming to terms with it by a fugly one-eyed prizefighter. I wanted to like this book about a pre-teen Mexican-American girl named Chula more than I did. It's an award winning book, so I blame my lack of enthusiasm on my documented difficulty with the tween genre. This was a book club selection, so maybe I'll understand what I missed when I discuss it with La Celiacita. She'll be able to school me, I'm sure because getting some extra education in children's lit.
"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
Zinester turned school librarian turned novelist Julie Halpern tells what seems like a very accurate depiction of life inside a teen mental health facility, complete with check out date determined by your insurance coverage. When I say "turned" that's misleading. Halpern manages to be all three at once, not giving up her ziney roots or her librarianship while publishing her books. Her protagonist Anna Bloom is likable and believable, but not too perfect; same goes for the rest of the characters. While she doesn't portray the hospital as a beacon of healing, she doesn't slam it too hard, and in fact at the end you feel that Anna's mental health has improved. However, you don't know for sure if that's because or in spite of the therapy. The main thing that Anna learns is how to be mad and be bad--two things that are vitally important for a young lady.
