I am eternally searching for murder mysteries that scratch a very specific itch. I have extremely high standards and a very particular set of criteria for my ideal mystery novel, which are: The mystery must be a satisfying puzzle; there can be none of that nonsense where the author springs a crucial piece of information … Continue reading A Murder Mystery After My Heart: Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neely
On the heels of my Brontë reading extravaganza, I finally picked up Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and pushed through the sad animal deaths in the beginning chapters. And am I ever glad that I did. The book is a beautiful, complicated wonder. It tells the story of Mr. Rochester's first wife (Bertha Mason in … Continue reading “There is always another side, always”: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Keeping in line with my inadvertent summer theme of fantasy novels, I recently turned the last page on A Deadly Education, the first book in Naomi Novik's projected Scholomance trilogy. This has been by far my favourite Naomi Novik book—for me, neither Uprooted nor Spinning Silver lived up to their hype. But this one I … Continue reading A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, Romanian folklore, and some thoughts about perfectionism
Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about language. Since I am an editor, writer, book reviewer, and library branch assistant, this might not shock you. But, specifically, I have been thinking about the way in which language shapes reality, and the unconscious choices that we make with our words, … Continue reading Language Matters
I’m a discerning reader. Well, okay, some might call me picky. For many years I maintained that I didn’t like contemporary fiction at all, and I only read old books (not always classics—I had, and still have, a deep love of the so-called "middlebrow" novel). Of course, I was simply looking in the wrong places. … Continue reading Something Old, Something New
Literary paper dolls. Has anyone had a better idea, ever? I'm a little bit late to this party, but starting in May 2019, The Paris Review writer Julia Berick partnered with illustrator Jenny Kroik to create: "what us bookworm-clotheshorse child-adults have always wanted: literary paper dolls." The first one in the series was my very … Continue reading Rereading Old Favourites: an Interlude (with Paper Dolls)
I just finished reading Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, and I have emerged from its pages feeling sunburned. The novel is set in Almería, in southeast Spain, on the Mediterranean Sea. It's an unfriendly landscape, with blazing sun, burning sand, and harsh salt. There are sweltering plastic greenhouses, unlovely gas canisters lining the beach, and … Continue reading Mothers, Daughters, and Jellyfish: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy
March is here. It came in like a race between the lion and the lamb…yesterday we alternated between glorious sun and blue sky, and wild squalling blizzards. Today is grey and cold; when I tried to let my cats out, they blinked in the frigid air, flicked their paws, and went back to bed. I … Continue reading Careful Attention: Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
I used to say, only sort of in jest, that I was in favour of public shaming. I didn't mean that I thought we needed to bring back the stocks or anything like that (okay, okay, I may have joked that we needed to bring back the stocks), but I had an idea that people … Continue reading Ideas and Revolutions: I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom
Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive by Kristen J. Sollée is a book with a solid premise at its core. It explores the history of women who have been (at times literally) demonized and persecuted, and draws parallels between the medieval and puritanical witch hunts; the women who in the early 20th century fought … Continue reading Witches, Sluts, Feminists by Kristen J. Sollée (plus a bit of a rant)
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