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'm a librarian. I have good research skills. I didn't lose my job because nobody cares whether or not librarians are 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.
Following Legend, Prodigy is a tale of a divided, dystopic America, from the perspective of the commie side's two most notorious outlaws, both fifteen. They discover that the corporate side is no heaven either, nor is the resistance of the former that they've been drawn into supporting.
A middle-class white American who grew up atheist comes out as Muslim. Though she has to convert officially to be square with Egypt, the way Wilson describes her relationship with the religion calls to mind realizing or accepting that you're gay, not becoming so.
Personality, that compromise between one's soul and one's culture.
The Ralph Steadman of illustrations evoking a the drug-saturated and otherwise seriously fucked up mind of Hunter S. Thompson has published a book of cat drawings. I bought it for Eric for our solstice gift exchange, because I'm that thoughtful. I may have enjoyed the book more than he did, but I would have never bought it for myself. He's welcome.
This is a kids' book that I think parents will enjoy more than their kids, and probably not more than once or twice through. I wanted to like it because it's about a young female labor leader, but it's all tell and not a lot of claim on your emotions. The illustrations are pretty great, though, enhanced with collaged fabrics, patterns and text.
Through the first two parts of this well-written novel, you feel sorry for the poor little rich girl, whose heiress single mother is a cruel parent, when she can be bothered to pay attention to her daughter.
Amy Webb, a journalist and serious data geek decides she's going to meet her husband through JDate. After a few bad dates she realizes that it's going to take more than posting snippets from her résumé into her profile and responding to invitations from whatever guy seems cool to find her beshert, so she launches an obsessive data gathering operation, which ultimately works.
I read Beautiful Creatures because it's vampire YA, and I tend to like that sort of thing, but what I liked most about it was the depiction of life in a small southern town. Although authored by women it's told from a teenage boy's point of view. Since I mostly eschew books written by men, don't meet a lot of male narrators, and it's kind of neat to spend time in a dude's head once in awhile.
Sarah had me at the title of her 24-hour zine about her anxieties, and I'm probably going to emulate the concept in my next zine. I feel your pain, girl! Sarah's fears are wide-ranging: from pop culture (Kiefer Sutherland) to practical (data errors) to the sociopolitical (cultural miscommunication). While Kiefer Sutherland doesn't bother me, I do relate to a lot of Sarah's worries, and more essentially, that she has them at all and that they're central enough in her life to make a zine about them.
This time our visually impaired private detective is tracking a killer of werewolves, which she didn't even know existed until the end of the first chapter, and she's doing so in rural Ontario. A lot of times I didn't entirely follow Huff's connections, but I still found the book compelling and am intrigued enough by the hint that a cop character could be transgender that I'll read the third installment.
I borrowed this kids' book for the Scrabble geekery, which only kind of worked. I'm sure the book is fine, it's just out of scope for me.
The first entry in my menopause book club with Kate Haas, The Hot Flash Club did not meet many of the criteria for what we're looking for in middle-aged lady lit, but it wasn't the worst read either. The Club consists of four women, ages 52-62, all of them going through changes, if not The Change.
With my read of book eleven of the Hollows series, I've logged enough time with Rachel Morgan that I'll probably stay with her indefinitely. That's why I stuck with this entry, even though it was pretty far off the rails with lots of mystical shit like balancing ley lines and detecting aura signatures.
A companion to Life as We Knew It, The Dead and the Gone tells us what it was like in Manhattan after the moon got knocked out of place and messed up life on Earth.
"Do you still love him?" I asked.
"With all the bile in my body."
That exchange between a Filipino daughter and mother was basically the high point of the novel for me.
Sloan Skye is a summer intern at the FBI. She got bumped from the Behavior Analysis Unit to the Paranormal Behavior Analysis Unit, a joke of a new department. They're tracking a vampire serial killer, but Skye doesn't believe in the supernatural. Of course she gets disabused of that notion, but it takes longer than you might hope.
Do you really need me to say an anthology was uneven? Do I really need to say it? Unfortunately, I do. I loved some of the chapters and was less taken with others. You might chalk up the difference to writing quality and/or to my personal taste. I prefer the contributions that make their point by telling a story, rather than with a straight up essay.
A young adult novel about a smart loner girl's last summer before college, this book felt substantial while I was reading it, but ended up a teen romance. Not that a teen romance has to be a bad thing.
Ayun's first graphic novel (I can call her Ayun, because we're friends) is a story that should appeal to tweens about a girl who moves to a new school and tries to make herself more interesting by faking a dire peanut allergy.