Lou and her Soul Brothers hit the road in this sequel to one of my favorite books. They are Black teen singers who are exploited by their manager, amass gambling debts, struggle with drugs, have romantic entanglements, and suffer car trouble.
In Roth's future dystopia, people are divided into five factions, based on shared aversions to particular evils (selfishness, cowardice, lies, divisiveness, and ignorance). They get to decide at age 16, whether they want to stick with the faction their parents chose or try their luck with a new one. If it were me, I'd pick Erudite, the faction that thinks that ignorance is the world's greatest problem, but it turns out that in Roth's vision, the Erudite are fascistic.
Alice Bag, whose name was Anglicized from Alicia in elementary school, and whose last name is a moniker from her late 70s punk band The Bags, shares her coming-of-age story in short, episodic chapters, that are not unlike punk songs. They're hard and fast and sometimes leave you wanting to slam into something. The essays are not polished, a characteristic that takes nothing away, and adds to their authenticity.
There was a point in our musical development where our live shows were all energy and chaos, and I felt like I'd inadvertently unleashed the wrath of Kali upon the world of punk.
One night while I was onstage, I noticed that the landscape was changing before my eyes. As I looked out into the audience, I could see that the once quirky men and women artists who prized originality above all else were being replaced by a belligerent, male-dominated mob who became anonymous, camouflaged by their homogeneous appearance. I didn't mind the belligerent part; in fact playing for a belligerent group of individuals can be quite satisfying. What I didn't like was the sameness. In the past, audiences were full of men and women in wildly colored plumage; now the black leather jacket was emerging as the uniform of the new regime.
I mentioned in my review of Delirium, the first book in Oliver's dystopian trilogy, that I was already halfway through Pandemonium when I was writing that review. I didn't mention that in order to procure Pandemonium, I left work about 90 minutes earlier than usual (since the closest branch of NYPL that had it was closing at 7). In other words, I was hooked.
First of all, thank you St. Paul Public Library for owning this small-press, originally self-published mystery and sharing it with me via Interlibrary Loan.
The protagonist is the ultimate anti-heroine, a fat, middle-aged Black lady. She's smart, capable, self-deprecating but not too, and has the obligatory detective novel quirky pet, a green cat named Seamus.
Detritus: Fragments and Scraps, issue 19.0 of A.j. Michel's Syndicate Product series is a sweet ¼ size zine comprised of A.j's unpublished, unfinished and other hanging works. She's been organizing and clearing out her stuff lately (including donating a bunch of her zine and minicomic collection to Barnard), and publishing her this-and-that in one volume seems to be a great way to file the pieces under "done."
The second book in Mira Grant's Newsflesh series is just as compelling as the first, though I don't like the narrative voice quite as much. (It's a boy.) This time the focus is less on media (though of course blogging and fancy tech are still major elements) and more on medicine, medical ethics in particular.
I almost put The Mockingbirds down after the first clumsy page or two, but I stuck with it, and am glad I did. It's the story of date rape and students taking the law into their own hands because the school administration is too impressed with itself to acknowledge and address the school's imperfections. The rapist is a water polo player, for dog's sake!
Future dystopia space teen love story. Reasonably compelling. Some surprises. Just the kind of thing I like to read these days.
One of the first lessons Eldest gave me when I moved to the Keeper Level was about Sol-Earth's religions. They were magic stories, fairy tales, and I remember laughing myself silly when Eldest told me how people on Sol-Earth were willing to die or kill for these fictional characters.
Marie Curie--what a smarty, except for the sleeping with a bottle of radium by her bed. This 28cm tall art biography might just rock your world.