Author Archives: Goddess in the Stacks

Sunday Funday – Baltimore Book Festival

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Today is Day 3 of the Baltimore Book Festival, so I’ve been attending panels and meeting authors and been generally quite busy. After this weekend, things finally slow down for me. We went straight from 9 weeks of Maryland Renaissance Festival to our Halloween party to the Baltimore Book Festival, so I’m about ready for a month of sleep. Too bad we’re running right into the holidays!

I also recently learned about Sirens, a conference held in Denver concentrating on women in fantasy and science fiction, and WOW THAT IS RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS. A good friend of mine attended this year (I think it was her second year? I’m not positive.) and I REALLY want to go next year, but it’s in Denver. So airfare. (And just flying in general. I hate flying.) And the admission cost is kinda steep, too. But 3/4 of the guests of honor next year are authors I love, and I’ve already read a good chunk of both their 2020 reading challenge and their 2020 suggested reading and it’s just – AAAAH THAT’S MY JAM. I just don’t know if I can make it happen.

But back to the Book Festival! My weekend was absolutely made within the first hour I was there on Friday, when I got to meet K.M. Szpara and get an ARC of his debut novel that’s coming out in March, Docile. I’ve been super excited about this book, and the ARC made this weekend a win no matter what else happened. He was an absolute DELIGHT to talk to, too.

I attended five panels on Friday – Virtual and Augmented Reality, World Building (in the context of Romance novels), A Love For All Hearts (Diversity in Romance), Magic Systems in SFF, and Genre-Bending. I think my favorite was Virtual and Augmented Reality; one of the panelists was Elsa Sjunesson-Henry, a deaf-blind woman who made the point that she lives in Augmented Reality because of her adaptive devices. (This point was revisited on Saturday, but I’ll get to that!) Elsa is one of my new favorite people – I’ve read one of her short stories, just bought the two issues of Uncanny Magazine that she edited (again, more on that later) and followed her on Twitter. She’s one of several authors I have total squishes on after the first two days of the Festival! I just want to pick their brains and read everything they’ve written.

Saturday began with a panel on Books That Renew My Love of Reading, which I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea to attend. My TBR does NOT need more titles, but it sure has more now! After that was the panel that was the absolute highlight of the day, Disability in Sci-fi and Fantasy. This panel had a FANTASTIC cast, which included the aforementioned Else Sjunesson-Henry, as well as Victoria Lee, the author of The Fever King (which I finished on Thursday night, I’ll be working on a review this week – short answer, it’s EXCELLENT!). Sunny Moraine, Day Al-Mohamed, and A.T. Greenblatt rounded out the panel. These authors were absolute FIRE. The topics ranged from invisible disabilities to what actually COUNTS as a disability (have you changed your life to accommodate something? That’s a disability) to how far representation in SFF has come and how far it has to go. They discussed Cure Narratives, magic hand-waving, and the lack of disabled people in post-apocalyptic narratives. This panel was absolutely the best one I’ve seen in the first two days. If you’ve read many of my Sunday posts, you probably know by now that I have a couple of autoimmune diseases and my husband is autistic, so this panel hit pretty close to home for us.

Saturday we also attended panels on Beyond the Monarchy (which, unfortunately, was all about monarchy, which I thought was odd, I thought it was going to be about other power structures!), Romantic Suspense, and Dark Fantasy and Horror.

I finally picked up the first of Ruthanna Emrys’ books, Winter Tide, which is Cthulhu-esque fantasy, and Bob Angell’s queer science-fiction romance novel, Best Game Ever. (Which isn’t on Goodreads? ACK!) The bottom three books in the cover photo were giveaways.

Today is another full day of panels, with the Blogger panel at the romance stage, and then everything else over at the SFF stage – Comics & Graphic Novels for Adults, YA and MG SFF, Dystopias, News Media in SFF, and Building Queerer Worlds in SFF. I am very excited about that last one, the list of panelists is FANTASTIC. (Also, I looked up the one unfamiliar name on that panel, Alison Wilgus, and realized we talked to them at some length today with no idea who they were, which I find hilarious. They were pretty cool, and I have now followed them on Twitter! I have followed SO MANY new people on Twitter this weekend!)

Last but DEFINITELY not least, I finally got to meet Lisa from Way Too Fantasy in person – we’ve been friends on Twitter since last Book Festival, so it was really neat to meet her for real! We chatted between panels, and I’m hoping to see her again today.

BOOK FESTIVAL. I’M GOING TO BE SO TIRED TOMORROW BUT BOOOOOOK FESTIVAL!

 

Book Review: Ayesha At Last

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ayesha at lastAyesha At Last
by Uzma Jalaluddin
Contemporary Fiction / Retelling / Romance
348 pages
Published June 2019

Ayesha at Last is yet another Pride and Prejudice retelling – I might need to make a book list of these! Pride and Prejudice through an Asian lens seems to be really popular, between the Pakistani Unmarriageable, the Indian-American Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, and now this Muslim-American version. (The characters here are from a mix of countries.) The Muslim and Asian custom of arranged marriage fits well with the original plot of Pride and Prejudice, so it’s no real surprise.

Ayesha is a really strong character here, as she should be to be the stand in for Elizabeth Bennet. I disliked Hafsa; yes, she’s flighty like Lydia, but Lydia was never intentionally mean, and Hafsa is. There is no elder perfect sister in this version; Hafsa and Ayesha aren’t even sisters, but cousins, and Ayesha’s best friend is already in a long-term relationship. There’s a lot of parts of the original that are shaken up and mashed together in different ways in this retelling, but the core plot of “awkward rich dude keeps younger girl’s reputation intact and gets revenge on the man who would have ruined it while falling in love with the slightly-older spinster” is intact.

A lot of the action in this book takes place in the mosque; the mosque’s daily operations are a fairly big plot point in the book. I enjoyed the peek into the mosque-as-community-center. The other big aspects of this retelling are the family dynamics, from the Aunties brokering marriage offers to the adult children struggling with their elders’ relationships – in some cases, revering them as relationships goals, in some cases being completely in the dark as to what their marriages looked like at all! Ayesha’s grandparents are totally goals, but it takes most of the book to learn the mystery of her parents’ relationship.

This book lacked the lush descriptions of fashion that characterized Unmarriageable, and the mouth-watering descriptions of food that were the specialty of Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, but I would still rank it somewhere between those two – above the latter but below Unmarriageable. All three are excellent, though.

So. Another excellent addition to the Pride and Prejudice pantheon, but very similar to both Unmarriageable and Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors. I do have to say the manner in which our Wickham is taken down is hilarious, and VERY modern. I laughed out loud and read much of the chapter aloud to my spouse to explain why I was so amused.

From the cover of Ayesha At Last:

Ayesha Shamsi has a lot going on. Her dreams of being a poet have been set aside for a teaching job so she can pay off her debts to her wealthy uncle. She lives with her boisterous Muslim family and is always being reminded that her flighty younger cousin, Hafsa, is close to rejecting her hundredth marriage proposal. Though Ayesha is lonely, she doesn’t want an arranged marriage. Then she meets Khalid, who is just as smart and handsome as he is conservative and judgmental. She is irritatingly attracted to someone who looks down on her choices, and dresses like he belongs in the seventh century.

When a surprise engagement is announced between Khalid and Hafsa, Ayesha is torn between how she feels about the straightforward Khalid and the unsettling new gossip she hears about his family. Looking into the rumors, she finds she has to deal with not only what she discovers about Khalid, but also the truth she realizes about herself.

Friday 56 – You Are Your Own

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you are your ownThe Friday 56 is hosted by Freda’s Voice. The rules are simple – turn to page 56 in your current read (or 56% in your e-reader) and post a few non-spoilery sentences.

This week’s quote is from one of my rare nonfiction reads, You Are Your Own, about being an ex-evangelical woman. As an ex-Christian woman myself, a lot of this hits very close to home, and it’s a pretty difficult book to read.

While this may sound ridiculous or possibly not even that big of a deal, it’s important to recall that for a girl growing up in Evangelicalism, the only option available to me for stability was submission as a wife to an Evangelical man. Pursuing an education or becoming a working woman were largely discouraged – and are discouraged even still today. This idea may sound old fashioned, but for so many cisgender girls and women it is very much alive and well within that belief paradigm. So, if one of those women were to compromise her “purity”, she would effectively be compromising her entire future.

Book Review: Meddling Kids

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meddling kidsMeddling Kids
by Edgar Cantero
Young Adult / Horror
322 pages
Published 2017

Happy Halloween! Today I’m reviewing the spookiest book I’ve read this month. Probably my scariest book since Into The Drowning Deep! I knew I was in trouble with this one when I was sitting up late, reading in the dark on my Kindle, and my cat reached out and touched my bare foot with her toe-pads, and I jumped so hard I almost fell off the couch! I decided at that point that this was clearly a daytime read, and further that I should not be alone in the house while reading! I’m a wimp when it comes to spooky reads, though, so I’m sure this would not be that scary for someone who regularly reads horror.

As it is a horror book, it should probably go without saying that there are some triggering issues discussed – the biggest of which is probably suicide, but there’s also an insane asylum, sexual assault, a fair bit of alcohol, some adventures in VERY tight cave spaces, and Cthulhu-esque horrors. I might be forgetting some, but that’s the main gist.

OH. Andy is a tomboy lesbian, and a good example of being cis but rejecting gender roles, but the villain is coded as trans. I thought it was well done, but a trans person may think otherwise. So that probably deserves a warning as well.

So in Meddling Kids, we have a version of the Scooby gang. In this take, the Blyton Summer Detective Club operated when they were – thirteen-ish. They solved several small mysteries, then got the absolute bejeezus scared out of them on their last case. They “solved” it – but they all think things were unresolved, and they were all haunted with nightmares, flashbacks, and other traumatic symptoms. So thirteen years later, Andy, the tomboy, decides to get the gang back together to go really find out what happened in Blyton Hills. The gang, sans Peter, who killed himself years ago, fairly readily agrees, and back to Blyton Hills they go.

There are so many twists and turns from here on that I can’t say much. The adults in Blyton Hills are surprisingly helpful, in a way that they never would be in real life. We do get a fair amount of “wow this isn’t nearly as large as I remembered it from when I was a kid” which is pretty realistic, and amusing.

The book is very funny. It captures the spirit of Scooby Doo almost exactly, just injected with an extra dose of spooky. Despite being creeped out, I enjoyed it immensely, and would highly recommend it as a spooky read!

From the cover of Meddling Kids:

1990. The teen detectives once known as the Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in the Zoinx River Valley in Oregon) are all grown up and haven’t seen each other since their fateful, final case in 1977. Andy, the tomboy, is twenty-five and on the run, wanted in at least two states. Kerri, one-time kid genius and budding biologist, is bartending in New York, working on a serious drinking problem. At least she’s got Tim, an excitable Weimaraner descended from the original canine member of the team. Nate, the horror nerd, has spent the last thirteen years in and out of mental health institutions, and currently resides in an asylum in Arhkam, Massachusetts. The only friend he still sees is Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star. The problem is, Peter’s been dead for years.

The time has come to uncover the source of their nightmares and return to where it all began in 1977. This time, it better not be a man in a mask. The real monsters are waiting.

Library Loot Wednesday

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Two more books this week, that seems to be my average! Girl of Nightmares is the sequel to the excellent Anna Dressed In Blood, and My Time Among the Whites is a book that came to my attention because some college students decided to burn it. I love how that has backfired by giving the book more publicity. I’d never heard of it until they pulled their stunt!

Top Ten Tuesday – Spooky Settings

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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s theme is a Halloween Freebie, and I’ve chosen books with spooky settings.

jane eyre
Topping my list is Jane Eyre. I should probably read it again, as I haven’t read it since high school, but I adored Jane’s story, and Rochester’s mansion was definitely read as haunted until she discovered the secret in the attic!

Next is Gideon the Ninth, one of my favorite books of the year. The manor the group works in is absolutely haunted, and discovering how and why is core to the book. Similarly, figuring out what and why the mansion is haunted is also core to Meddling Kids, a grown-up, horror-filled Cthulhu-esque take on the Scooby gang. I haven’t reviewed it here yet, but it was… slightly too spooky for my normal reading! I wound up only reading it during the day when someone else was home! I’ll get that review up soon. Probably Thursday, on actual Halloween!

Other spooky reads from this year include Anna Dressed In Blood, about a ghost haunting an old Victorian, and The Suffering, set in Japan’s Aokigahara forest.

Number six is Mira Grant’s Into The Drowning Deep, with a sidenote of its novella predecessor, Rolling In The Deep. Both books are set over the Marianas Trench, one of the most mysterious places in the ocean.


Seven is The Good Demon, a haunting southern gothic story about a girl and her demon. Eight is House of Salt and Sorrows, another very gothic story, this one a take on the Twelve Dancing Princesses fairytale.

And eight is all I can come up with! I don’t read a whole lot of horror; I always push myself a little bit in October to read some spooky stories, but even the spookiest of what I read isn’t that bad. (I would call Meddling Kids the spookiest of these.) But all of these have a very haunting, doom-filled sense of place.

I hope you have a Happy Halloween!