Lower East Side Librarian

Student council president Holland Jaeger was finds herself less interested in boyfriend Seth than in transfer student Cece. Cece is totally open about her sexuality, but makes some mistakes as she helps Holland understand hers. Of the three queer YA novels I've read lately, this was the most affective (i.e tear-jerking). Strangely though I didn't love the writing, I found the book deeply compelling (except the day I accidentally left it at work and had nothing to read on the subway home). In addition to being a coming out story, it's also about parent/child relationships, learning to be open-minded about people from wacky subcultures (e.g. goths), and finding oneself as an artist. I'd say more, but there are too many spoilers to worry about.

This meticulously researched book was perhaps too meticulously researched. It felt like Sarah Dunant needed to include every salacious tidbit she gleaned about 16th century Italian nuns. That's not to say it's a bad book. I liked it okay; I just thought it tried to tell too many stories and was about 100 pages too long. First there's the noble woman sent off to the nunnery against her will story (happened all the time at the time), then the anorexic nun story, both with subplots about the strict yet fanciful novice mistress, the political abbess, and the dispensary nun who herself had been resistant to her "calling."

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.