Zach
Minus one star for drawing out the Saktimuna plot beyond all reason (I figured it out a quarter of the way through the book), plus one star for ending with magical lesbians.
The first traditionally fantasy novel I've been hooked on in a while. For some reason I got a lot of Monica Furlong feelings out of this book, but it was on the whole a unique take. My heart really couldn't handle the will-she-or-won't-she heterosexual nonsense about Kance, but aside from that, I have little to quibble with.
I only like this book because I accept that it is Rick Riordan being self-indulgent. I appreciate his foray into non-straight characters, but aside from that, it's kind of a Percy Jackson-retread, prophetic dreams and all.
3.5 StarsI'm not slamming this book at all when I say that it feels like Disney is trying to cash in on the popularity of Jeftoon's Twisted Princess stories. There was more than one moment when I caught glimpses of imagery similar to that– the tiger claw marks, Jasmine nearly turning to the dark side definitely made me think of Jeftoons and other iterations of “dark Disney”.But I'm definitely not putting the book down for it. Braswell writes an engaging plotline that will probably have young and new adults fascinated. She doesn't skimp on the violence– the plotline follows an altered timeline, where Jafar gains the lamp and wishes and becomes sultan, and people die, sometimes in horrible ways (and the things Disney allowed her to do to Genie and the Carpet startled me). But there are still some funny and very human bits.Also, a very pleased nod for the occasional acknowledgements of Aladdin's origins (his street rat friends are named for other characters in 1001 Nights, and there are a few other bits where Braswell alluded to middle eastern origin of the story). It's no [a:Saladin Ahmed 4025591 Saladin Ahmed https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1325700680p2/4025591.jpg], but it has its moments.
It's pretty shocking how few books of Hindu apologetics exist in English. This was a concise, clear-eyed religious defense of Hinduism, written in a way that people who have no knowledge base in Indian history or Hinduism will be able to understand.
A lively combination of history, religious doctrine, linguistics and scholarly politics, it keeps the readers attention with succinct chapters on a variety of topics. Many Many Many Gods gives the uninformed reader a nice little dip into the broad cultural knowledge needed to understand a religion which has lasted for thousands of years and influences the politics of billions of people.
The only time the book lost me was in last couple of chapters– Achuthananda dipped into Wendy Doniger and her cohorts, and his bitterness at her kinda got a little overwhelming. I mean, I'm all into thinkshaming Wendy Doniger et al's shitty claims, but it could have been done in one chapter instead of three.
This would be a five-star book (I devoured it in less than a day, staying up until 2am to finish) except the treatment of mental illness bugged me a LOT.
There is no such thing as “Borderlines”– people with BPD have a range of symptoms and the narrative treats it like a monolithic experience that is Special and Unique. This wouldn't have been a problem if there had been other perspectives on mental illness (the consistent judgement of therapy and therapists as “mediocre” bugs me hugely as a mentally ill person who has found therapy exceedingly helpful). I hope this will be remedied in the next books– which I fully intend to read– but in THIS book, it's hard to escape the assumption that people with mental illness (or at least BPD) are some sort of weird monolith who all have the same symptoms with the same severity.
Also, the treatment of Gloria is super super shitty, yo.
As always, Judith Viorst knocks it out of the park. I've loved her books since I was a child, and “What Are You Glad About? What Are You Mad About?” definitely hit all the right notes. It's sweet and funny, with forays into all of the emotions a person might need a poem for.
She's right, but you won't appreciate her for saying so.
This book lays out concise historiographic and ethnographic evidence for a new understanding of the dysfunction at the heart of heterosexuality. Ward brings insight and wit to the discussion, and her overview of the history of what she terms the “heterosexual repair industry” will be appealing to most readers. There are few people who won't be fascinated by the roots of “straightness” (as opposed to men and women coupling), and the racial and gender implications of modern straight culture. Also her commentary on what used to be pick up artistry and is now men's self-improvement retreats is amazing.
And then Ward diagnoses the problem. She does this by doing what she calls “reversing the ally gaze” or, what I call “treating straight people the way they treat us”.
Instead of looking at straightness as the default, she solicited a sampling of queer understanding of straightness, and overlays interviews with queer participant-observers on top of straight culture, revealing patterns that a heterosexual understanding of love relationships cannot parse. In doing so, she centers queer concern about the unhealthy nature of straightness over straight culture's belief that it inherently healthy. If a sexual “orientation” as understood in queer culture means being oriented towards, uplifting and respecting /as well as lusting after/, why in straight culture do heterosexual men and women seem oriented away from each other? Why is straight culture so dead set on seeing the gender binary as a battle of opposites rather than orienting itself towards simultaneous respect and lust for the fullness of each other? What do straight people get out of being straight and what can straight people learn from their answers to that question?
Of course, many straight folx will probably be uncomfortable with the lack of straight subjects— Ward has little interest in heterosexual understanding of itself. She chooses to focus solely on the queer subject looking at the straight object, and thereby explaining straightness to itself.
I have my own issues with the book— most frustratingly that it skirts around its use of transphobic writers (Adrienne Rich and Cherie Moraga for ex) without acknowledging that using their writing has questionable valances for trans readers.
But it is well worth a read. Queer readers will hopefully love it asmuch as I do. Straight readers... try not to get too defensive.
I pretty much love everything about this book. It has some turns of phrase that I'm not sold on (“anal resilience” is... not what I would have called that bit of theory), but even the theories I didn't think were convincing were written in a compelling way.
But, yeah, you gotta be good with constructivist and value-neutral approaches to sexuality, because Ward doesn't hold back when it comes to dissecting the not-gay homosexual sex straight white dudes are having.
The prose is just so dull and textbook-dry. This could have been a lively read about gay gossip, or a thoughtful piece about the complexities of queer political struggles, but it never manages to find a hook for the narrative to hang on
For a book ostensibly about Rani Lakshmibai and her rebellion, this book sure spent a lot of time on things that were utterly made up and not at all about Rani Lakshmibai.
I couldn't help but compare it to “The Moon In The Palace”, about similarly cool historical lady, Empress Wu. Bu where “The Moon In The Palace” was narrated by the Empress and slowly explored the palace intrigues and the people who made up her court, this book is narrated by an invented character about her invented family life and spent an inordinate amount of time showing us characters who had nothing to do with the Rani. The amount of the book taken up with “the Rani didn't call me into her chambers for a month, so I'm going to pine over this random love interest” was fucking ridiculous. If I wanted to read about court women who didn't get to do anything interesting, I would have picked up a romance. I started reading this book because I wanted to read about Rasni Lakshmibai! Hell, the rebellion that gave her the title used for the novel doesn't even appear until the last 10 percent of the book.
I enjoyed the first quarter, until I realized that the book relished all of the bullshit fictional characters way more than it gave a crap about providing me an enlightening view of a fascinating historical figure.
Definitely NOT my favorite of the Charlie Parker books.
It's, as always, tightly plotted and well written, with some little hints dropped about the greater universe, but... it's also a book about Nazis written by a non-Jewish, non-Rromani author, and that's always a crapshoot. There were no Jewish POV characters, just a bunch of dead Jewish bodies. OTOH the Nazis got some definite sympathetic “well I've been NOT a Nazi for 70 years, doesn't that count for something?” POV bits. The revelation at the end (which, honestly, I was waiting for) just added that one last twist of the ‘the Jews don't actually matter in the grand scheme of this story ostensibly about Jews' knife.
I would have been much happier if Connolly had done for Rabbi Epstein in this book what he did for Louis in The Reapers– give him a book about his community, and his night horrors. Connolly's done some very sensitive writing on US race relations (for a white Irish man writing a horror thriller series), but none of that sensitivity was evident in this book, and that was a shame.
With all the fairytale rewritings around, it's nice to see someone breaking the Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty/Beauty and the Beast mould. Based on a fairy tale known various as “The Six Swans,” “The Twelve Brothers” and “Udea and Her Seven Brothers”, Spinning Starlight takes on a fairly challenging tale in a fascinating way.
In the traditional story, the brothers are turned into swans– and the only way to break the spell is for their sister to spin each one a shirt out of nettles and stay silent for seven years. For Liddi Jantzen, our heroine, this means that her brtoehrs are stuck in a strange transdimensional tube, while she herself is implanted with a chip that will kill them if she speaks.
Over the course of the book, Liddi grows from a frightened young girl with doubts about her own abilities to a strong young woman, who has learned to communicate despite the obstacles, with the original story woven into the fabric of the novel in some surprising ways. Despite some minor flaws in pacing and worldbuilding (I'm a librarian– it's hard for me to suspend disbelief about nearly seven worlds of humans abandoning writing systems), the novel is solid, and engrossing enough the put off going to bed in order to finish it.
Ugh. Just go read Alice in Wonderland– that's a book about a smart young girl trapped in a creepy world, who has an adventure.
THIS is a book about a cardboard cutout of a character who makes little to no choices on her own and is pointlessly obsessed with two dudes, neither of whom seem to have any redeeming qualities.
A solid 3.5
Started a bit slow and self-consciously goofy, but by the end I was defo onboard, as the kids might say. I look forward to the sequel.
God, I tried SO hard. The prose was decent, but the characterization felt flat– and if you are going to make Ariel use sign language maybe keep that plot point around. And plot was just... Why is Ursula doing Any Of That? At least give her some personality beside flat villainy. “I want to send this country to war” OKAY WHY. Give My Girl some decent motivation or S O ME TH I N G.Honestly, the entire time, I was just wishing I was rereading [b:The Mermaid's Daughter 30531543 The Mermaid's Daughter Ann Claycomb https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1484016287s/30531543.jpg 51057146]
Not quite The Walking Dead fuck-murder-zombie plague through the eyes of an incredibly sheltered and probably autistic (/gen) Catholic girl with a gay brother. Probably fun for someone who didn't find the protagonist tediously childish or didn't mind not getting any of the big picture of wtf is going on.
DNF. I barely got to page 80. I don't know if it's the characters or the pacing or what, but even though it's p much everything I like (urban fantasy murder mystery in academia with a biracial Sephardi protag? Holy fuck) I just could not convince myself to care about Alex or Darlington or most of the other recurring characters.
I read the first in Mead's “Age of X” series and was entertained enough by it to pick up the second book. It's one of those books where every couple of pages I have to groan and go “religion doesn't work that way”, “biology doesn't work that way”, “I'm fairly certain America doesn't work that way”. And yet I enjoy the characters and when they focus more on the thriller plots instead of the author's misunderstanding of how religion works, I find the books really fun, so I will probably read the third, despite some really ridiculous plot twists.
