Red Sister–Mark Lawrence (the first book in the Ancestor Series). I’m a sucker for books about orphan children with special talents at magical schools. So I’m a sucker for this book. I’m starting book two tonight. A

The Invisible Library–Genevieve Cogman (first book in a series). Steampunk? Libarians? Sexy demons? Cogman’s book has all the things I usually love, but I was underwhelmed here. It’s a fast read, and there’s even a twist or two, but it didn’t really capture me the way I wanted it to. B-

People of the Book–Geraldine Brooks. Brooks writes beautiful prose. Here, in a multi-protagonist, time-sweeping narrative, she explores a famous illustrated Jewish text. This is based on the true story of a rare manuscript, a Jewish text illustrated in a medieval Christian style, protected by Muslim scholars. A+

How to Marry a Werewolf–Gail Carriger. A disgraced American and a prideful Werewolf? Everyone around them can see it’s love at first sight. This little novella captures all the things that makes Carriger’s books popular. B

I’m Just a Person–Tig Notaro. I knew a lot of this story, since I’ve seen all of Tig’s comedy and One, Mississippi, the series based on her life. I read this all in one sleepless night. It’s funny and moving, just like Tig. A

Above the China Sea–Sarah Bird. A former student who just returned from a trip to Japan recommended this to me. Two stories overlap in this story of Okinawa: a multiracial military brat grieving her sister in the current time, and a teenage girl working as a nurse in the Imperial Army’s cave hospitals during the American invasion (WWII). Both stories are compelling, but I was drawn to the historical tale more, which is impeccably researched. A

This summer, I got to be in the same room with Peter S. Beagle.

It was WorldCon, and we were celebrating The Last Unicorn, which will soon be reissued, with Beagle’s notes.

I love both the book and the movie (Angela Lansbury as a hag? Yes, please!). Not only did I watch the hell out of my VHS copy when I was young, but I’m sure I damaged it by spending a whole afternoon pausing, rewinding, and re-playing each song so I could write out the song lyrics by hand.

Here are a few things Beagle let us in on at WorldCon:

Christopher Lee, when agreeing to be the aging King in the film, said he wanted to do it because it was the closest he would get to playing Lear.

The butterfly’s ramblings contain a reference to Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil by Stuart Walker.

The butterfly is Beagle’s “self portrait.”

Molly and Schmendrick weren’t in the first draft at all, which Beagle says is especially surprising since “Molly is the heart of the book.”

I’m looking forward to learning more when the special edition comes out.

Until then, I’m just gonna keep watching this cover of theme song by Ninja Sex Party.

All I knew about The Bone Doll’s Twin, the first book in the Tamir Triad, was that it was a fantasy novel written by a women. I couldn’t remember which internet list had recommended it to me.

The series takes place in a medieval-type world, in country long ruled by women. Once a male in the royal line takes power, he attempts to secure his patrilineal line by doing away with women who could claim it back. There’s a prophecy and a ban on training and allowing women to be warriors, although they had been for aeons.

There’s a prophecy, difficult choices, madness, and magic.

This is also a thoughtful meditation on gender, sex, and sexuality, asking what it means to foster and fight sexism, what happens when your true self is denied, and what difference a body makes to the self.

As in much contemporary fantasy, we explore class, gender, war, battle strategy, othering, education, love, and friendship.

Many will enjoy the LGBTQ themes in the book; I enjoy that our cast is varied, just as our world is.

The Bone Doll’s Twin was published in 2001, followed by The Hidden Warrior in 2003, and by Oracle’s Queen in 2006. I’m looking forward to reading the companion series, The Nightrunner.

This week, I was engrossed in Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark.

According to the introduction, Moon wrote the book to work through her experiences with her autistic child. She imagined a future in which children like him had access to even better therapies earlier in life and in which businesses would provide more resources (for a tax break, of course).

Our hero, Lou, narrates most of the book, though we get flashes of other points of view in third person. He is high functioning, high functioning enough to critique his mandated therapy appointments with a therapist who underestimates him.

Lou navigates pressures at work, including a new boss who thinks people shouldn’t get accessibility resources, his fencing club, friendship, and a crush.

One of the pressures is that his new boss wants him and other employees like him to try a new therapy to become “normal.”

Should we treat children with autism? Should we try to cure the hearing impaired?This is a contentious topic in disability studies–we do not have consensus on how to balance understandings of disability with difference, defect with culture.  In our current social model, of course, “disability” is a key word–without that label, protections and accommodations aren’t guaranteed. In other words, if we took the “disability” label off students who were hearing impaired, they would no longer be eligible for signing translators in their classes.

Lou and his friends have to try to both figure out how to advocate for themselves and to decide whether they want to try to be “normal” instead of who they are.

While the book was compelling, I didn’t find the ending satisfying. It felt a bit rushed.

Still, I recommend this thoroughly. I couldn’t put it down.

The other day, while browsing through my library’s awesome graphic novel collection, I happened upon Liz Prince’s Alone Forever: The Singles Collection.

It’s weird that I hadn’t heard of Liz Prince before, since I’m into comics and sadly often on the dating scene.

This collection is a quick read; it’s also funny and familiar, from the wild things our minds do when we first crush on someone, to the judgmental ways we read each others’ OKC profiles.

Reading this also answered a question for me.

In the last few years, it’s been hard to find a guy without a beard (I can deal with trimmed ones, but those bushy ones turn me SO off–I think it’s because that beard signaled, in my Southern childhood, a redneck/racist/civil war obsessed guy.)

Someone must like guys with beards, I’ve been thinking to myself. Who?

They couldn’t all have them if someone didn’t want that.

It’s Liz. Liz wants that.

Two Waltonens agree: this book is a fast, enjoyable read.

Gonzales lets you experience the attack of the Regional Office through two points of view–the attackers and the ones being attacked. In doing so, he challenges our traditional action, superhero, and scifi conventions.

Is the agency that recruits assassins good? Or are those who resist good? What does everyone know and when? If you don’t know what your agency really does, are you culpable? Is extra-judicial justice by those with certain powers or talent ever justified? What if the other recruits don’t you? If your whole life is ruled by a secret agency, what happens when you date (within that agency)? And then what happens when the relationship sours?

The narrating female voices are distinct, dangerous, and fun.

I wanted to like this more than I did. It is reminiscent of early LeGuin–practical sci-fi, with an often cool detachment. But I couldn’t get into it deeply, emotionally.

I really liked the way the author created a full world and real characters, especially given the premise of the novel, one in which a small group of survivors of planet annihilation have to rebuild their lives and their gene pool on an alien world, inhabited by other hominids.

The small group of survivors are a lot like Vulcans in temperament, so I kept easily imagining this story as one that might happen after Vulcan’s destruction.

The main Vulcan finds his Uhura, which is rewarding, though I thought the two leads were coy about their attraction for each other for way too long.

I first heard about this novel on NPR. The reviewer read the first sentence, and I’ll start with that too: “The baby is dead.”

It’s in medias res storytelling–starting quite close to the end and then circling back, and this classic structure works well for the tale.

I know a lot of my friends who have recently had children won’t be able to read this, but if it helps, you don’t actually see what happens to the child(ren). You only know that something did.

This novel was originally written in French and won the Goncourt, making Slimani the first Moroccan woman to win, though it wasn’t her first award.

Slimani is also a journalist, which perhaps explains her eye for detail and her fluid prose.

In short, the novel explores several modern-world tensions. What happens when a woman doesn’t want to just stay home with her children? How do you choose “the perfect nanny”? If the nanny is too perfect, how do you keep yourself from depending on her too much or from exploiting her generosity? Who should decide what the children eat? The person who buys the food or the person who cooks it? Do you really want someone to feel like family or do you secretly want deference and respect? How do you navigate intimate employees in a world where race and class and power conspire to confound us?

It’s been a difficult week here in pre-Gilead.

And it’s only Thursday morning.

I’m tempted to stop watching and reading the news. And I understand why many friends have.

But I’m an Atwoodian.

So when it occurred to me that I should take a “break” from reality for my mental health, a little voice said, “careful, June.”

June/Offred, in The Handmaid’s Tale, was passive, like so many of us are. She was lulled into accepting roadblocks as necessary after a terrorist attack–they became normal. And when the government started attacking women’s rights, she didn’t go to the marches–she tried to distract herself with baking, with her daughter’s lunches. And then they started opening fire on the protestors.

She tried to act too late.

“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it” (74).

Jimmy/Snowman, in Oryx and Crake, is the same, except as a male, he is more protected. He is privileged enough to be obtuse, to not ask, when his friend says sterilizing people without their knowledge is “step one”: “Wait, what’s step 2? And where do these steps lead?”

And then it’s too late.

“How could I have missed it? Snowman thinks. What he was telling me. How could I have been so stupid? No, not stupid. He can’t describe himself, the way he’d been. Not unmarked–events had marked him, he’d had his own scars, his dark emotions. Ignorant, perhaps. Unformed, inchoate. There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out” (184).

I can’t choose what these narrators do.

I can’t turn off the news and start a loaf of bread. I can’t be lulled by pizza and sex.

My eyes have to stay open, even with the tears.

My voice has to stay loud, even though I’m hoarse.

My heart has to keep beating to fuel this fight, even though I’m weary.

Atwood has written the warning.

I must heed the call.