Lower East Side Librarian

Soledad is an 18-year-old Cuban-American dancer from Miami making plans to go to NYC and audition for ballet companies when she's presented with the opportunity to go pro with a drum and bugle corps. (Right? But it sounds like a really cool thing, and a great way to spend the summer after graduating from high school, not to mention with the hottie who suggested her for the gig.)

That queer feminist Nicole Georges would call regressive right-wing meanie Dr. Laura Schlessinger for advice about how to navigate a family secret is what makes Nicole and her story so interesting and surprising. Maybe it's just me, but I had the idea that Nicole, a long-time maker of zines and minicomics, was tough and a little scary. (There's a good chance I have her minicomics collaborator Clutch McBastard to blame for that impression.) The Nicole I met in this graphic memoir is not scary; she's scared. Dr. Laura makes her cry, her mom makes her go silent, and she's easily hurt by her girlfriend, Radar.

There's a lot to love, literarily, in Ruth Ozeki's metafictive split narrative novel, but it's not the fastest read. I was completely engaged in the parts of the book that are the diary of a bullied, out-of-place Japanese teenager, but found the second person story about the characters Ruth and Oliver (the author and her husband's real names) and their cat Schrödinger (not their cat's real name) less compelling. I didn't dislike it, but it was a struggle, like Ruth's life.

I think I've read too many YA dystopias lately, because I can barely keep them straight. This one is the end of the trilogy that started with Delirium. The concept, that love is regarded as a disease, and that people are surgically cured upon turning eighteen, is pretty cool. In Requiem we find our heroine wondering if she'd prefer to be happy (cured) or free (starving in the Wilds). Frankly I often wonder the same thing, regarding how medicated we modern folk are.

If it's not bad enough that menopausal women feel invisible, in Ray's world, a pharmaceutical cocktail of antidepressant, bone density, and hormone pills with a one-time spritz of Botox causes some women to actually go invisible.

I probably shouldn't take full credit for reading this one. Basically I looked at the pictures and read only the stuff from the 3 women (vs. 22 men) with interviews in this oral history.