Lower East Side Librarian

Vampires, werewolves, elves and lawyers are the dangerous creatures in this new series by Phillipa Bornikova (a pen name, so readers don't get confused between this and Snodgrass's sf novels). It's a fine read, though sometimes surprisingly amateurish for such a veteran writer. There are also typos and misspellings that the editors should have caught, like George M. "Cohen" for "Cohan" and "vise" for "vice," or the overuse of the word "saliva." (Four times denoting the narrator's hunger "Saliva burst in my mouth..." and only once a vampire's fangs.) So not to seem entirely petty, let me say that I like the protagonist because she's short.

My holds hadn't come in, so I grabbed this book from the YA shelf at the Tompkins Square branch of NYPL because I remembered the name Susan Beth Pfeffer from reading her YA books when I actually was a young adult. Weirdly the book didn't list all of her earlier works, just one recent publication, so I wasn't sure I had the person I remembered. I was shaky on her name and thought maybe Susan was the daughter of the Someone Beth Pfeffer I was thinking of. The Wikipedia page I viewed today didn't indicate any of the works I remembered either, but with a little digging, I found that she is indeed the author of classics like Marly the Kid, The Beauty Queen and Starring Peter and Leigh, none of which has a science fiction theme, btw.

When we first meet Mary Ann Singleton in Tales of the City, she's just moved to San Francisco from Ohio. She is naive and a bit of a ninny. There are eight TofC books, and although Mary Ann seems to be beloved by the author, truthfully, she's rather annoying. In book or two before Mary Ann in Autumn she's even worse--a self-centered, self-involved climber who abandons her friends and child. Still, Maupin gives her a chance at redemption.

A Toronto ex-cop with night blindness and decreasing peripheral vision, turned private investigator, finds herself hunting a demon. It's a compellingy told first entry in a vampire series. My only complaint is that there were some weird typos and spelling mistakes, e.g., MacDonald's for McDonald's and I Dream of Genie instead of Jeannie. I'm pissy like that, though.

My favorite elements of this amateur sleuth story are the examples of progressive/feminist/lesbian political collective culture of the time, like everyone automatically saying no to being fingerprinted to help the cops identify a vandal.

If a zine girl is going to write a memoir, I'm going to read it. Sheila does a better job than most at making the leap to the big spine. I don't have any complaints as far as that goes, like I often do. The editing and production are good. The only thing that bothered me at all is that I'm pretty sure I recognize one of the background characters, whose identity is concealed only by a very minor name change.