Lower East Side Librarian

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.

This time the lesbian teen is a different type of orthodox: Cuban-American from Miami. Laura gets busted with a love note from her girlfriend the last day of junior year and gets kicked out of her house for being a degenerada. Luckily she's got a best friend with and understanding mima who take her in. The book is Laura's journey out of the closet. I found it a little too much, like the author was trying to hard to pack everything in, and the cover reminds me of what they did to Leilaina's film in Reality Bites, turning it from a thoughtful documentary about lost youth into an MTV high concept/low content pre-reality show reality show. That's just the cover and crazy fontage I'm vilifying. The story is fine, but one of those YA novels that is better left to its intended audience instead of middle-aged ladies like me. It has plenty going for it: transgender and genderqueer characters, Cuban Spanish idioms, sexy round chicks, and standing up to homophobic bullies.

About an Jewish Orthodox lesbian teenager, this book couldn't possibly have lived up to its promise. I won't bother telling you not to read it, because I know you will anyway. It's not bad; it's just not as great as you want it to be.

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?

You know how I'm always complaining about stories told in multiple voices? (They should come with a warning on the cover!) Well this is another one. Maybe because they take turns so frequently in this book that you don't get attached, it isn't as much of a problem as usual. Still, maybe because I didn't get attached to any of the characters, it feels the whole time like you're waiting for the book to happen. The connecting stories are compelling enough, but what's really interesting is the look at life in Kuwait. I don't know much about the country, other than remembering learning how rich it is. In elementary school we didn't talk about how you can't be rich without having poor people take care of you. In Kuwait, all Kuwaitis (not including Kuwait-born Palestinians) are pretty well off, which means they have to import their servants and even many of their professionals. Most of the characters in the book are American, Filipino, Indian, or Palestinian, rather than Kuwaiti. It takes a lot of non-rich people to take care of the rich people, I guess.