What a nice looking small press book, so well-produced! I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but SSPT is just lovely. Oh yeah, the language and characterizations, too. Crawford takes her time exploring her characters and their worlds.
This book is kind of light and chick-litish, but it’s about women’s roller derby, so it’s at least a little bit awesome. What separates it from typical chick-lit is that while there’s definitely a dude involved, it’s really about not getting the guy.
Okay, I was super-stressed and considered removing the stressor from my life. Instead of working on the conference presentation I've been worrying about I borrowed the fourth in the Mercedes Thompson series from the library when I returned the third. A friend talked me down from my panic, but I already had the book, so I figured I may as well snarf it up. I also wrote the first part of my presentation.
The only vacationy thing I’ve done on my staycation is this pleasure read. The third in the Mercedes Thompson series has Mercy doing more brave, rash things and getting herself into and out of some bad situations, with a little help from her wolfy friends. As in Sookie Stackhouse’s world, the fae are kind of dicks.
This is such a Rivington Street readalike that it’s hard not to compare the two. Both begin in Russia around the turn of the 20th century and move to the Lower East Side after a pogrom. Both are about young Jewish female union workers and both have lesbian characters, and both depict the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
“You sound like a capitalist, all excited about machinery,” I said. “Aren’t you afraid that [linotype] will put printers out of work?”
“I was, but now I understand that the more books and pamphlets there are, the more men will read.” He dropped his voice. “And with this machine, we can make up our own pamphlets when the boss is out and melt the evidence before he comes back.” He leaned back in the sunlight, very pleased with himself.
The Williamsburg Bridge was its own sin. Its construction, Lena told me, made hundreds of people homeless when their buildings were torn down. A little like pogrom of progress, burning anything in its path, making Jews take to the roads with everything they owned on their backs, or move in with their relatives and landslayt, crowding more than we were ever crowded in Kishinev.
Sookie has long since lost her innocence, but in each book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, she becomes more resigned and sometimes in harmony with the the motivations and mores of the supernatural company she keeps. Vamps are hot, but they’re also a little...bloodthirsty, not to mention unfeeling. Sookie is neither of those things, but she’s getting more accustomed to vamp justice.
I’ve read this book a bunch of times, the first of which was when I was 9. I needed a book to read and asked my dad for a suggestion. Vonnegut is what he gave me. I reread BoC in order to write about the experience of reading it at such a young age for Celia’s comp zine Atlas of Childhood about children’s books.
"Every time you went into the library," said the book, "the Creator of the Universe held His breath. With such a higgeldy-piggeldy cultural smorgasbord before you, what would you, with your free will, choose?" p. 263
To my memory I’d never read a SVH book before, nor really desired to. While on zine tour my concentration was quite poor, so I took Celia up on her offer to lend me the first in the SVH series. It was about all I could take--both reading concentration wise and SVH wise. I can’t entirely decide if it’s good-bad or bad-bad, but my lack of interest in number two leads me to believe it’s the latter.
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” Todd yelled. “We’re going to stage a sit-in right on the football field.”
I picked this up from a leave one/take one shelf at a cafe in Alabama, and was super excited about it, forgetting that V.C. Andrews® books are no longer written by V.C. Andrews. I normally don’t trash books here, but this installment of the “V.C. Andrews” Shooting Stars miniseries is just awful. It has V.C. Andrews themes of religious repression, incest, artistically gifted young girls, and first lusts. It seems like it’s aimed at a younger audience than Flowers in the Attic and the non-® V.C. Andrews admittedly trashy books were. The 1st person narrator, about to graduate from high school, refers to her parents as Mommy and Daddy throughout. I assume the author (or computer) won’t be insulted if he/she/it reads this review, because clearly this is one of those things that you laugh at while you’re writing it. That’s not to say that some people won’t enjoy reading it, with the same guilty pleasure as one watches the worst reality television.
At first I was dazzled by Toews’ clever and funny language and her decreasingly subtle but accurate depiction of adolescent depression. Eventually it started to wear on me, though. It’s the same thing that annoys me about Jasper Fforde: the cleverness is relentless. But, I still think this book will appeal to people who like reading about religious sects (the protagonist comes from a Mennonite family and town), enjoy women coming-of-age stories, or who can handle a lot of clever. Also--Look at the cover closely; it’s as perfect a match to a novel’s contents as I’ve ever seen. Kudos to Kelly Hill, designer.
