Lower East Side Librarian

Catherine "Jayne Manslaughter" Mabe's loving history of the roller derby's current female driven "by the skaters, for the skaters" incarnation is visually appealing--full of photographs, images of memorabilia, and other tidbits. The first two chapters offer a brief history of the roller derby, while the next four focus on today's version of the sport. She describes contemporary skaters:

In novelist Rachlin's autobiography, she tells of her life through high school in Iran (1950s and 60s) and then of her building a new life in the United States. In the beginning I was afraid I wouldn't get through it because the early parts are so tinged with anger and resentment, even at family members she later forgives. At the age of nine she is stolen by her father from the childless aunt who was raising her in Tehran and brought to live with her birth family in far away Ahvaz. There she finds indifference from her mother, jealousy from one sister, and love from another. Her father, perhaps just because that's how it was in Iran, exercises near total control of her life. All she wants is to escape an arranged marriage, like those that oppress her sisters, and the chance to learn and write, in America. By the time she lands at a small women's college near St. Louis, the writing becomes less heavy-handed. She survives four troubled years there and graduates before escaping to New York City where she finds shelter at a Judson Church housing community and does graduate studies in psychology at the New School.

I really enjoyed the first Weather Warden book, Ill Wind, and so perhaps had too high expectations from its successor. Unfortunately the protagonist, Joanne Baldwin, in contrast to the heroine in the last paranormal fiction series book I read doesn't seem more layered now that I know her a little better. I'll still read the next book in the series, but I'm not in a big hurry. It may be that reading these two books back to back put me off.

I liked this second installment to Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series more than the first, which is kind of unusual for me, but I don't think for this type of series. I think a lot of them get stronger as the basics are laid out and the characters have time to develop. Like the first, this novel is narrated by werewolf Elena Michaels, the only female of her kind in existence.

This is a placeholder for the review I will write after I talk about this with my book club (i.e. Celia), augmented with some quotations.

My father gave me this book, a translated (from Yiddish) autobiography and supporting essays about a turn-of-the-century Jewish farm wife, saying that it was one of the best books he ever read. It didn't quite touch me in the same way it did my father, who has more sentiment for his immigrant parents than I do for the immigrant grandparents I never knew, though of course our family was urban, located in Newark, NJ.

Trial novel meets
screenplay. Young black man, called a
monster by the law.

I am happy to have this book to point to whenever anyone asks me, "But are people still making zines?" The answer, with about 100 zines published in the last year excerpted and another 75 or so listed as honorable mentions, is an emphatic "Yes!" I loved seeing the zines, reproduced as closely as possible to how they originally appeared, but even more, I was inspired by Katie Haegele and Cindy Crabb's loving introductions. And I gotta say the Zine Libraries Index Julie Turley and I contributed is also pretty hot.