Carey's new paranormal series has a wide variety of magical creatures, including mermaids, norns (?) and your run-of-the-mill vampires and werewolves. The protagonist is a halfie, herself, a hell-spawn doing her best to not invoke her birthright and thereby destroying the world. She's also a file clerk at the local PD, doing supernatural detective work on the QT.
If you want to know what it's like inside an eating disorder, this is your chance. It's hardcore, but reading it, you understand how it happens. At least I could see it.
De Rossi (not remotely her real/given name) is a serious overachiever from childhood, the kind of kid who goes undefeated in classroom times tables challenges for years because she's drilled them so hard, even though she's not especially adept at math.
Also, I was scared of lesbians. In fact, I would cross the street if I saw one coming toward me. One time I didn't cross the street and I ended up sleeping with a lesbian because I felt sorry for her.
Did you know it's easier to be transsexual in Iran than homosexual? According to the novel and Wikipedia, the only country in the world that does more sex reassigngment surgeries than Iran is Thailand, and many of the surgeries are subsidized by the government. Being born the wrong gender is an ailment, being queer is a sinful aberration. So that's what our heroine Sahar is dealing with as her best friend, who she has wanted to marry since the girls were six years old, gets engaged to a dude.
I plugged the word "dance" into a search of ebooks available for checkout from NYPL, and this was the first result. Charlaine Harris's story, about a survivor of a brutal sexual assault trying to distance herself from her past is readable (as in fuckable). It's set in the same universe, or at least with the same rules about vampires as the Sookie Stackhouse novels. The protagonist is similar to Sookie, personality-wise, but doesn't have her mind-reading ability. Her vampire dance partner is a still-waters-run-deep Irishman.
Special thanks got to Doris Ann Norris, reference librarian to the stars, who can look up the inner dimensions of a sarcophagus faster than I can whistle "Dixie." (Charlaine Harris)
Cartoonists who are not Delaine depict their miserable high school years that were miserable. There's angst about popularity, getting beaten up, horrible teachers, bad hair, and more than I expected about boys' libidos. I mean, as a woman, I understand from pop culture that adolescent boys are sex-obsessed, but I didn't fully grasp that the arty nerdy guys are just as strung out as meathead future frat boys.
Fishman follows eight high school dancers studying at The Ailey School, trying to discern what exactly talent is and what makes it go. She doesn't separately profile each student. Instead it's one narrative with themes (like eating disorders and weight, sexuality, race and friendship) explored by chapter. Although you can tell Fishman cares about her subjects, she manages not to get too sucked in. I like her researched but relatively casual approach.
A three-years-orphaned college professor loses her husband and daughter in a car accident, finds out she was adopted and goes off to find her roots. I don't want to give anything away, but I should warn you, everything in this novel takes forever. And if you're sensitive to misspellings and typos, stop being petty, but in case you can't, brace yourself. (What's up with the lax proofreading Indiana University Press?)
Canadian zine maker Teri's short stories are so good, and I don't even like short stories. (I can call her Teri because we're social media friends, and I've read most of her zines.) Her protagonists come from a variety of backgrounds. Most are young, but there's also a mother (of a stripper in his 20s), and one of them is male. I found all of narrators relatable and real.
I put this book on hold at NYPL after watching the first episode of the TV series. I only made it through one and a half more installments of the show, but when my copy of the book became available, I figured I'd see how it compared. It's better, but not great. Some major plot points are surprisingly different.
It is the rare piece of literary fiction that I can get through these days, but I sailed through The Ghost Bride. It's literary, also historical and magical. The story takes place in 19th century Malaysia and in heavenly realms.
My menopause book club with Kate Haas is about as regular as a perimenopausal woman's period, since we're on our fourth book since February. This mostly non-fiction anthology is my favorite entry so far. I liked one of the novels quite a bit, but Off the Rag is the first to get into what menopause is like, which is what drove Kate and me to start our club.
I miss being a fertile woman about as much as I miss my wisdom teeth.
As a feminist I couldn't accept that I was a chemically-driven being!
It is my belief that a woman my weight (a little under two hundred pounds) could go into an emergency room with a bleeding stump and her detached leg in her arms and the doctor on call would prescribe a diet.
On Friday I cataloged the first five issues of librarian Anne Hays' pretty gender and self-exploration zine. It started off as a compilation zine, focusing exclusively on gender. In number two, Anne shares a bunch of her friends' responses to questions about how they feel about bras, and the zine continues to evolve into a personal zine on multiple topics with each issue.
Cover image from Stranger Danger zine distro
In part two of Carlson's Blooded series, the only female werewolf in the world is on a mission to rescue her mate, a werecat (of an as yet unidentified genus) with barely a cameo role in this installment. She's fighting a powerful goddess and there are stakes beyond saving her dude, like preventing a war between supernatural sects.
Last year the note on Jessa's copy of my Winter Solstice Shout Out zine asked if she was going to make a dissertation procrastination zine. On the first page of Jessa's new zine she answers me, "Yes, Jenna. Yes, I am."
Rowell's first book is an adult romance novel. Yeah, a romance novel (set in Iowa), but for a geek set. Since I don't read many romance novels, outside of paranormal fiction, I don't know what they're like, but can they possibly be as smart and funny as this?
I was DEE-lighted to receive Delaine's book in the mail, a signed donation from the author to the Barnard Library. Somehow I had never read her zines, but I'd seen her always-adorable comics in A.j. Michel's compilations and maybe others. I always meant to… Well, her My Small Diary zines seem to be out of print, but you can still buy Not My Small Diary. Back to being delighted, the MSD collection is comprised of nearly a hundred one-page comics, similar to a daily comic. What's different, aside from the fact that the comics aren't dated to a single day (they're generally labeled with a season and year), is that the four to six images on each page aren't linear or even necessarily connected. They're more like a handful of illustrated Facebook status updates. (Forgive me for saying that.)
Note that the image above pictures page 45. If you're up on your memes know that the first sentence on that page describes your sex life. "What will YOUR fortune fish say?"
You may recall that I was enthusiastic about Min's first memoir, Red Azalea and her novel Wild Ginger. I expected to like Cooked Seed twice as hard. It starts more or less where Azalea leaves off--at Min's emigration to the US. Somehow, even after the stories of Cultural Revolution privations, cruelties and humiliations in the first part, Seed is harder to take. I guess because you can blame Min's problems on her, or maybe because you have to blame some of her problems on the United States.
Identical twin Cather (sister's name is Wren--get it?) writes popular slash fiction in the world of a Harry Potter like series where the lovers are the Harry-like character Simon Snow and his enemy, a Draco Malfoy stand-in Baz (who is also a vampire). Cath is also an introverted college freshman and virgin from Omaha at college in Lincoln. Her twin sister/best friend is blowing her off, their estranged mother is poking her head into their lives, and their dad is fragile. Plus there are some boy issues, what might be an anxiety disorder and a little schoolwork to worry about.
Fowler's first-person narration is like a lucid dream. The protagonist, Rosemary Cooke, is caught up, but self-aware and conscious of various versions of the past and present. This is kind of a spoiler, but if you read the book jacket you'll find out the same thing--that Rose spent the first five years of her life with a chimp for a sister. The two (two months apart in age) were raised together until the chimp, Fern, was sent away.
Fair warning, as it turned out--kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not.
I can't believe that being called Fredericka my whole life wouldn't have taken a toll. I can't believe it wouldn't have mind-bent me like a spoon. (Not that I haven't been mind-bent.)
"When I get married," I say, "I want the wedding to be in a car in a car wash."
When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.
I love all of Tatum O'Neal's child-star movies and her in them--especially Paper Moon (well, yeah, the book was better, but what can you do?), The Bad News Bears and Little Darlings. O'Neal's autobio fills us in on the horror behind her success. The nine-year-old youngest-ever winner of an Academy Award went to the ceremony sans her selfish, druggie parents. If this tell-all is even half-true, O'Neal's parents, stepmother Farrah Fawcett and husband John McEnroe were serious douches to her.