Reviews

There's a post tv show world of Buffy!!! I found out about the comics from A.j. Michel's consumption log. I know it's lame that I didn't know about it already, but I'm really not much of a comics/graphic novels girl, which I know is also lame. So Wolves at the Gate is the third episode of Season 8, with an introductory story written by Mr. Whedon himself. The tone of the comics is the same as the show, though I think Buffy comes off a little more like her earlier seasons persona. The slayer army is still around, as are Xander, Willow, Dawn, and Andrew. Plus Dracula makes a cameo appearance. The biggest surprise, though, is who Buffy starts sleeping with. Now to get ahold of the first two episodes of the season, The Long Way Home and No Future for You, which are sadly n/a at NYPL or Columbia.

The latest in Harrison's Hollows series finds witch Rachel Morgan still mourning her dead vampire boyfriend and trying to regain her memory of his double murder. (Vampires die twice in this reality--first to become undead and then dead dead.)

At first I thought this book, about a woman's mentor relationship with a homeless teen was a lot like Erlbaum's previous memoir, Girlbomb, which I read last year and mostly liked.

First of all I love that Allison published this 1994 collection of essays with Firebrand Books, a feminist and lesbian press, rather than a large publisher, which surely she could have, based on the success of Bastard out of Carolina, published by Dutton in 1992. Instead of using her success, even to have a better platform for her message to advance her career, she used it to advance her community, to give back to the press that gave her a platform in the first place, with her first book, Trash. (A chapbook of poetry preceded Trash.)

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 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.

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.

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.

This is A.j. Michel's log of her year's reading (books, comics, and zines), listening, and television and movie watching. I've thought of trying to chronicle more than just my reading, but have been too daunted. A.j., who I believe is a card-carrying but non-practicing librarian, is geekarifically organized and precise, and she provides a fair use statement to justify her inclusion of the occasional zine excerpt.

I recommend this zine to anyone looking for things to read, listen to, and watch, but it's especially appropriate if you have a serious comics jones and like your science fiction okay. Since I'm seriously challenged when it comes to music, I can't be trusted to characterize her taste, but I think indie would cover it, though perhaps too broadly.