Monthly Archives: December 2018

Library Loot Wednesday

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I didn’t have one of these last week because, for once, I didn’t check anything new out of the library! I know, weird, right?

This week, however, I checked out five, and they are all amazing!

Brandon Sanderson’s newest, Skyward, is more for my husband than for me, but I’ll still read it. He’s the Sanderson fanboy though! Heidi Heilig’s For A Muse Of Fire finally got to me and I am SO EXCITED about that! The Spy With the Red Balloon, sequel to Girl with the Red Balloon, also finally got to me. Unbroken is an anthology of stories about teens with disabilities, and Annalee, in Real Life involves a girl using an MMO to avoid her social anxiety.

TTT – Cozy or Wintry Reads

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Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s topic is “cozy wintry reads.” She has a whole list of links to other blogs participating, so go find your next book to curl up with!

Winter is actually my favorite season, so this was a fun list to come up with.

First, a few I’ve already read and written about:

 

Spinning Silver is a wonderful fairytale loosely based on Rumpelstiltskin and an amalgamation of other stories, and has a wintry, icy theme running throughout it. Girls Made of Snow and Glass is another fairytale retelling, but it’s about the relationship between the “evil” queen and her stepdaughter, and it is absolutely LOVELY. The Wolves of Winter is a dystopia written after climate change has thrown the world into disarray, and the main character is living in a place of near-endless winter.

A duology and a trilogy, the third of which is due out in January:

 

The Crown’s Game and The Crown’s Fate are a duology about two magicians fighting for the position of the Tsar’s Sorcerer, and they are heartbreaking and gorgeous. The first one made me ugly cry, the second one began the healing process. These two books are just beautiful.

 

The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower, and The Winter of the Witch are ALSO based on Russia, and are also lovely, though not quite as emotional as the duology was. (That’s probably a good thing, The Crown’s Game BROKE me.)

Last, we have a standalone and a duology that I have read but the reviews are going live over the next couple of weeks.

 

Wintersong and Shadowsong are basically Labyrinth fanfiction. I enjoyed them, and they do introduce some new ideas, but there are also DEFINITELY recognizable elements from the old Jim Henson movie. (Which I loved, so that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) It was interesting to see the movie deconstructed and put back together in an entirely new way, though.

krampus yule lordThe last book I have for you is Krampus, the Yule Lord, by Brom. How do I sum up this book? It’s Appalachia Gothic, with cops in cahoots with the local criminals, a bit of domestic violence, and weird things happening in the woods. And it’s ancient gods with grudges, with Krampus locked in an eternal fight with Santa Claus. Whatever it is, it’s great.

What are you reading this Christmas?

 

 

 

 

 

Book Review: Don’t Call Me Princess

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don't call me princessDon’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life
by Peggy Orenstein
Nonfiction/Essay Collection/Feminism
378 pages
Published February 2018

This is an interesting collection of essays because it’s drawn from the author’s previous work, so some of the essays are a little…dated. Each essay is preceded by a few paragraphs about it, though, talking about what was going on when Orenstein wrote the essay, or how the subject has changed since the essay was written, so instead of being out-of-touch, it’s more like a historical look back in time. Some of the essays even update other essays! In particular, one essay is about her first fight with breast cancer, and beating it, and a second essay is about when the cancer comes back years later. Similarly, there are essays about her issues with infertility and miscarriages, and later about being a mother.

I really enjoyed these articles, especially since I was reading the book while sick, and 3 or 4 page essays were about the limits of my attention span! I could sit down and read one (or two, if I was feeling particularly good) and actually absorb the contents. I tried to read a novel and wound up setting it aside because I couldn’t focus! I enjoy keeping anthologies and short story collections in my stack for that reason. Sometimes I just need something I can take in small bits, and this fit the bill nicely.

The essays ranged from profiles of remarkable women (Caitlin Moran, Gloria Steinem, Atsuko Chiba) to essays on the author’s personal life, to essays about our educational system, sexism in daily life, and intimate issues like cancer and infertility. It’s a wide range of topics, but all dealing with being a woman, and/or having a uterus. There are a couple of essays in the very back about masculinity, but it’s mostly a woman-centered book. That doesn’t mean men shouldn’t read it, quite the opposite! While the book isn’t quite as engrossing as some of the other feminist nonfiction I’ve been reading lately, it’s still quite good, and does deal with topics that I don’t see discussed often, like breast cancer and IVF, so it might be more interesting to people who have a personal connection to those topics. Well worth reading, though!

From the cover of Don’t Call Me Princess:

Named one of the “40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years” by the Columbia Journalism Review, Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silence on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture, and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation, and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.

In Don’t Call Me Princess, Orenstein’s most resonant and important essays are available for the first time in collected form, updated with both an original introduction and personal reflections on each piece. Her takes on reproductive justice, the infertility industry, tensions between working and stay-at-home moms, pink ribbon fearmongering, and the complications of girl culture are not merely timeless – they have, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, become more urgent in our contemporary political climate. Don’t Call Me Princess offers a crucial evaluation of where we stand today as women – in our work lives, sex lives, as mothers, as partners – illuminating both how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.

Book Review: This is Kind of an Epic Love Story

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this is kind of an epic love storyThis is Kind of an Epic Love Story
by Kheryn Callender
Young Adult/LGBT/Romance
286 pages
Published October 2018

This incredibly cute queer romance was the YA_Pride Book Club pick this month on Twitter. What I didn’t expect when I picked it up was just HOW GOOD the representation is in this book. First, Ollie, the main love interest, is deaf, and communicates via ASL or written word. This isn’t a huge deal; people just work around it, which is really lovely. There’s a lot of passing phones around with things typed out on them, plus lip-reading and some limited use of signs, many of them described on the page for the reader.

The other amazing representation is how the book treats bisexuality. Both Nate and his best friend Flo are bi; they dated each other before the beginning of the book, but Flo is dating a woman when the book opens, and Nate has a huge crush on Ollie. This is not treated as weird, or even remarkable enough to be noted. They just are interested in more than one gender and it’s completely normal. I love it.

The story itself is really cute; Ollie was a childhood best friend that Nate had a crush on, and he’s come back to town several years later. Turns out Nate’s crush still exists, and the boys start an awkward romance. Nate is the kind of overthinker that constantly sabotages his own happiness, and we see that play out in more than just his relationship with Ollie.

I also really liked that the book didn’t play into the “the first time with the right person is magical and perfect” trope when it comes to sex. No, first times are awkward and sometimes not all that pleasurable, even with the right person. But with the right person, you can get past the awkwardness and try again. It was a much more realistic first sexual experience, I think.

This book was a quick read, with great minority rep, from racial to sexual to disability rep. The story was great. I liked also that the romance wasn’t the only focus of the story; Nate’s relationships with his friends were also important to the plot. Great book.

From the cover of This is Kind of an Epic Love Story:

Nathan Bird doesn’t believe in happy endings.

Although he’s the ultimate film buff and an aspiring screenwriter, Nate’s seen the demise of too many relationships to believe that happy endings exist in real life.

Playing it safe to avoid a broken heart has been his MO ever since his father died and left his mom to unravel – but the strategy is not without fault. His best-friend-turned-girlfriend-turned-best-friend-again, Florence, is set on making sure Nate finds someone else. And in a twist that is rom-com-worthy, someone does come along: Oliver James Hernández, his childhood best friend.

After a painful mix-up when they were little, Nate finally has the chance to tell Ollie the truth about his feelings. But can Nate find the courage to pursue his own happily ever after?