I’ve never read a book that took place in Uruguay before. All I knew about it is that Uruguayos have my favorite Spanish accent. It’s like Argentina’s Italian slanted castellano, but softer. Unfortunately Uruguayan dissidents didn’t have a much softer time of it than their compañeros across the Rio de la Plata in the 1970s.
Angry high school art
punk adventures, in graphic
novel format. Mwah!
Holy fuck another potentially huge teen novel series by a Mormon author!
You find out what’s going on in this 1980s (date assumed because of a cassette tape as an item of importance) British dystopia, bit by bit, just as its subjects do, so I’m hesitant to write much about it. I do think you should read it, and without knowing too much going in.
It sucks to be a fundamentalist Mormon if you’re not a future God of your own universe (i.e. a man with multiple wives and children, preferably with some prominence in the community). It sucks especially bad if you’re a pretty girl about to be married off to the highest bidder. This angry and compelling, if not especially sophisticated, novel takes on the injustice and cruelty of polygamy as practiced by fundamentalist Mormons. You know what you’re in for with the dedication, “To all the victims of polygamy.”
Marlie, a Toronto teen, starts keeping a journal in August 1990 and keeps it up through October 1992. In that time she obsesses over the the Pretenders, learns to play guitar, discovers riot grrrl, starts a band, makes and loses friends, falls in love with a girl, falls in love with a boy, sees a lot of shows, and basically embraces and releases her inner fierceness.
Twilight meets The Historian. The protagonist is a witch, but vampires figure prominently. Diana Bishop is a renowned scholar on alchemy doing research at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. She pages an enchanted book and all hell breaks loose in the creature community (which includes daemons as well as witches and vampires). The research part is interesting, but the story devolves into the overprotective male vamp, gendered power struggle, and abstinence porn that drove some feminists crazy about the Twilight series.
As you can imagine, this zine pretty much had me at the title. The contents are 20+ pages of colored-in stick-figure old women engaged in nefarious activities. Some of them are mild: “When I am an old woman I will throw things out of trees at people.” Some are gratuitous: “When I am an old woman I will use impractical implements of destruction for everyday purposes.” (Accompanied by an illustration of a crazy-haired lady taking a hatchet to a lone mushroom on a counter top. Some are what you might expect from an eccentric elderly lady: “When I am an old woman I will cheat rampantly at Bingo.” (I’m looking at you, Sister Loud Melissa.) And others are quite illegal: “When I am an old woman I will take vacations soley for the purposes of gambling and drug-smuggling.”
No one’s conscience escapes unscathed from war, not even a loving mother and shelterer of freedom fighters. I found Rehana’s story hard to get into at first, and I recommend other readers brief themselves on Bangladesh’s fight for liberation before digging in. With a little patience I did grow to care about Rehana, her son and daughter, and her various friends and neighbors.
So you don’t think I’m completely cold-hearted after reading the majority of my recent teen fiction reviews, A Time for Dancing really got me. I was drawn to it because it appeared to be about dancers, and while that’s kind of true, the dancing part wasn’t what I was hoping for. I was pretty much sucked in by the sob story, told in the voices of a pair of best friends, navigating cancer. Both points of view are credible and moving.
