For the most part I found City of Bones absorbing, yet predictable. There's one surprise I didn't see coming but should have, though. The protagonist, Clary, turns 16 during the course of the novel. I hope she catches onto things quicker as the series progresses and she gets older.
Gorokhova writes about growing up in 1960s and 70s Leningrad. I'd been curious about life in the USSR, and this memoir was exactly what I was looking for. She's a good writer, especially in her non-native but just as good English.
It seems like no one remembers or gives credit to the For Beginners series. Gladstone acts like no one has done a graphic history/politics book before, like this was some crazy new idea she hatched. Clearly I'm a little annoyed at that, but I started off liking the book plenty. The first page I dog-eared to quote says this "The American media are not afraid of the government. They are afraid of their audiences and advertisers. The media do not control you. They pander to you."
The Mercedes Thompson series may have joined the paranormal romance genre as Mercy joined with Alpha werewolf Adam Hauptman and took his name. Ugh. Really? I know there are lots of good reasons women take their husbands names, and I don't mean to diss them, but I just don't see this bad ass coyote shapeshifter auto mechanic having a drive to do so. Plus she's part American Indian, and aren't most tribes matrilineal?
Our coyote shapeshifter is out of the love triangle business and head over heels over her alpha mate. Unfortunately his pack isn't quite as gaga over her. As usual some fae are gunning for her. I know my description makes the book sound silly, but it is actually one of my favorite installments the Mercy Thompson series.
I have one serious complaint about Bossypants, and that is that its Cataloging-in-Publication data completely misses that its a book about feminism. I’d like to see one or more of the following:
Sex role on television
Sex discrimination against women
Feminists
Women on television
Women comedians
Women television producers and directors
Feminism and television (doesn’t exist, pattern Feminism and motion pictures)
Feminism and comedy (doesn’t exist)
Content-wise, Bossypants is a kick-ass book that I was sorry to see end. And I laughed out loud while reading it. On a New Jersey Transit train. Ask Eric if you don’t believe me. I made him read passages at least three times.
Kylie has is an unidentified supernatural. Is she fae? Descended from the Gods? Why can she see ghosts? So at 16 she’s at a camp full of supes to figure out and perhaps come to embrace her paranormal identity. Along the way, she’s going to need to decide between the potentially rogue werewolf bad boy and the fairy, who is gifted with people able to manipulate and ease feelings in humans and animals.
This is the kind of thing I eat up--teenage dancer dealing with race issues. Vicki is enrolled in a competitive program at the School of American Ballet. The 14-year-old hestitantly leaves her divorcing parents and younger sister in New Jersey and spends the summer with her aunt (mother’s best friend, not sister) on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Well, she’s psyched to do it; she loves to dance, but it is daunting.
Albert, in medical school while she was doing her ethnographic research with licensed prostitutes in Nevada, presents a good balance of nonfictiony background, history and data and the more interesting stuff--the women’s work and how they came to it.
Instead of lacking family values, as moralists contended, most of the women I came to know there possessed a profound sense of personal responsibility and an unwavering commitment to their families that ultimately drove them to do this “immoral” work.
After a little more inquiry, though, I found that sexual arousal occurred more frequently than not. In fact, over three-quarters of the women confessed to me in private that they had experienced sexual excitement with clients, and a full 70 percent admitted to having had an orgasm with a customer. Ten percent of the women confided that they orgasmed more often with clients than they did with lovers, and 8 percent said they did just as frequently.
Male owners were supposed to stay behind the scenes, leaving day-to-day operations to the female staff. Today, men are permitted to work more visibly--as cooks, bartenders, cashiers, and maintenance people--but wome still hold all the managerial and floor maid positions.
This is one of the best literary novels I’ve read in recent memory. I’ve been too mentally fatigued to enjoy much but genre fiction lately. Lucky Third Girl is both an easy and satisfying read. It tells the story of three generations of African-American women: a woman scarred by a 1921 race riot in Tulsa, her daughter who went to Hollywood to be a movie star and instead became a Playboy bunny and blaxploitation bit player in the 1970s, and then her daughter, who aspire to be a filmmaker in present day New York.
