Tagged with female

It's weird to me that Carrie Pilby seems to be marketed as a romance novel. Check out the Harlequin Teen edition cover. Although there is some dating, Carrie Pilby is not boy crazy. What she is, is crazy crazy, and seeing a shrink. A 19-year-old Harvard grad, Carrie is a little socially maladjusted, probably from skipping three grades. Her brilliant mind is inflexible, and she really can't make small talk. When we meet her, motherless Carrie has no friends and a frequently-traveling father. Her therapist gives her a to-do list and through completing the tasks on it (e.g., join something, go on a date, do things you love, etc.), she gets over some of her rigidity, superiority, and loneliness. It's surprisingly believable.

I delighted at the idea of this book, recommended to me by fellow Library Underground denizen Amy Mullin. I mean, who doesn't love a juicy tv child star memoir? What I didn't realize is that while Prairie Bitch, written by the actor who played the bad guy on Little House on the Prairie, does have some salacious details (What was up with Melissa Sue Anderson?!?), it's also a moving and funny account of the AIDS activist and incest survivor's life. Plus, she's huge in France.

This is a graphic novel prequel to Briggs's Mercy Thompson series. Mercy is drawn with some powerful gams! It's helpful to get a visual on the other creatures in Mercy's universe, especially Stefan. His grungy/rock-y/punky style is described in Moon Called, but I didn't really buy it until I saw the drawing in the gallery at the end of Homecoming. I'm not sure I'm really down with Adam's and Bran's depictions, though. The story didn't grab me so much, but I'm already so sucked into the series that I couldn't resist reading it. It's pretty slim and goes down fast.

Oh, Katie. I love your zines so much and the latest issue of White Elephants possibly even the most of all, because it's your most personal. Like much personal writing, zines can be full of complaints, insecurity, and calling people out on their evil ways, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's rather nice to read a mostly happy zine. The framework of WE4 is Katie's descriptions of her yard sale & flea market shopping, but as she asks near the end "Is this zine even about yard sales anymore?" It once was, and probably will be again, but for issue 4, something happens that eclipses Katie's joy over finding weird textbooks to repurpose into stationery, knickknacks with the previous owners' history attached or imagined, and vintage clothing items whose worth or potential can be ferreted out only by artisan shoppers such as herself. What Katie finds in this zine is love, revealing a little bit more about it with each section.