stillness is a lie, my dear
I’m still fuming over a nameless book I read earlier this year which I’ll leave unidentified so as not to pick at it entirely unfairly, although you may recognise it by its description. It is, shall we say, a story about a relationship between a heterosexual couple. One part of the story is told from […]
Amy at Sirens recommended this book to me when I asked for something incredibly creepy and more than slightly disgusting. She’s a good book recommender — if that was actually a full-time job that paid well, I’d definitely endorse her for it. I say that because with this, as with every single book she’s told […]
For white readers, when the race of a character is vague or unspecified, it’s assumed to be white. What else, after all, could a character be? We live in a white-centric world where everything around us is saturated in whiteness, where our heroes are white, where our entire worldview and framework is white. While nonwhiteness […]
The minute I saw S., at a party with friends shortly before the New Year, I knew that I needed to have it. And I promptly ordered it from the book store, only to have to wait patiently for nearly three months for my copy to arrive, because it was just that backordered. No wonder, too […]
One of the most frequent comments I encounter from people who are ignorant about fanfiction and other transformative works is that they are ‘unoriginal.’ They’re ‘based on someone else’s story.’ Creators are ‘just stealing someone else’s characters.’ These things are said with a sneer, intending to demean fannish people and the spaces they work in, […]
Do you like deliciously creepy, peculiar, strange short stories? You’re probably going to like Jagganath, which will take you on a whirlwind of adventure through strange magic, oddness, and weirdly compelling settings and people. As Tidbeck freely admits in her author’s note at the end of the book, these stories definitely have a Nordic feel, […]
After paneling with this Tiptree-winning author at WisCon this year, I knew I needed to bump Ancient, Ancient to the top of my reading pile instead of just making a note to read it ‘soon.’ That proved to be both a good and bad decision: good because it’s a fantastic book, and bad because I […]
In October, I attended the fabulous Sirens Conference in Stevenson, Washington, which consisted of two amazing days of programming with all sorts of interesting panelists and a lot of great discussions. Both inside specific programming and in casual conversations in the lobby and elsewhere about the lodge where we stayed, I came away with a […]
Lauren DeStefano’s Wither is set in a vision of the future where scientists, in an attempt to fix common illnesses, have done something drastically wrong. People may not die of cancer, and eliminationism has made the incidence of genetic conditions much lower, but men die at the age of 25, and women die at age […]
Rape-romance is a rather old and established genre; for those not familiar with it, it’s a subset of romance that involves things like ‘forced seduction.’ The basic storyline involves the heroine repeatedly resisting the advances of the hero, who eventually ‘forces[1. What a nice word for rape.]’ her, making her realise that she really does […]