In trying to clear stuff off my desk, I excavated a few old Sandy Berman petitions to the Library of Congress and have a couple of new ones to share, as well, from today's mail.
Sandy Berman is calling for LC to add headings for:
Anarchafeminism
Ethical fashion
Paleophilia
Robin Hood Tax
Bucknell and Monti collect mixed-race themed science fiction/dystopic stories, some of which also feature queer characters. Sounds good, right?
Somehow I didn't realize at first that this book has two novels in one volume. I was relieved when I got to the end of Glass Houses halfway through the thick book. As far as teen paranormal fiction goes, GH is less compelling and believable (you know what I mean, that the unbelievable has a logic to it that makes sense) than some others of its genre. It's also different from many others of its ilk in that the vampires are all for-real bad guys.
Thank goodness this was a compelling read because I had only a few days to finish it before it was due back at NYPL. I came home from the Zine Librarians unConference to five books ready to be picked up, three of them two-week loans. Now I have just over a week to finish the other two. Never mind, they were both renewable. Phew!
So yeah, Orphan Train shares parallel stories of two quasi-orphans making their way through harsh adoption/foster conditions about eighty years apart. The elder, an Irish immigrant at a time when the Irish were viewed with open hostility in the US, is taken to the Midwest via orphan train in the 1920s after a fire claims her family. In the name of Christian goodness, children were given away, often to be used as servants. Flash forward to the early 21st century and you get foster parents paid to "care" for a child they seem to hate.
Three impoverished sisters with a dead father and an absinthe-addicted mother try to survive in late 19th century France. One of the ways a girl could make money at the time was to be in the Opera ballet school and eventually perform with the ballet. Or pose for Degas.
Wolitzer gives us six friends, who met at an arts camp in the summer of 1974 when they were teenagers and follows them through their lives to middle age. The book is 468 pages long, and I didn't want it to end. The book is mature, feminist, loving, harsh, sad, privileged and privilege aware and truth telling. It's both big and small, in that in covering several characters over thirty years it's rather epic, but it's more about the passive reality of its characters lives than what happens to them.
"I know we live in a very sexist world, and a lot of boys do nothing except get in trouble, until one day they grow up and dominate every aspect of society."
"Though he hadn't been born into privilege, he too had been helped up the ladder over time, though the talent he possessed was squarely his."
"But in a lot of ways she could never leave her family drama, and I get that. The past is so tenacious. It's just as true for me. Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life, and this one is hers."
I don't know how to talk about this novel. Plot points and themes include gang rape, weight and body image, mental health and life in a traveling circus. I appreciate the protagonist's emotional progression throughout, but I'm not sure the conceit of her imaginary "fat girl" companion really works. It's still a good book. Read it and tell me what you think.
Attempting to fill the void left by her Newsflesh Trilogy, Mira Grant gives us another near-future made dystopic by a health cure gone wrong. This first entry in the Parasitology series brings us likeable characters, a quasi-believable medical threat (though to be honest far less plausible than how she envisioned zombies), corrupt business practices, mad egomaniacal scientists, strained family relationships and two sweet dogs.
Vanessa Davis is only about ten years younger than me, but reading her memoir comics and sketches I felt like a youth culture voyeur, sort of like I did when I watched the Girls pilot, featuring characters closer to twenty years my junior. Davis was 26-32 when she drew the comics collected here, so maybe my reaction isn't too far-fetched. Anyway, that's not to say that I didn't like her work, not at all! I just felt a little distant from it. Some of the issues, feelings and experiences rang true for me, but as in "I get it," rather than "I feel that."
Ramsey, whose zine List I've long been a fan of, moves from Chicago to Philadelphia and documents her first year there in one-week chunks. I've read a fair amount of daily comics, which I also like, but I appreciate how an artist giving herself a week allows her more space and the opportunity to be more selective about what she chooses to illustrate and share.
Cover image from author's website.