Two months into the year and the drama in the book world is legion, beautiful people. I’m working on a mega-roundup of it all for next week’s LWIB, but this week, let’s focus on a few of the nicer things to read and one very weird Winnie the Pooh reboot.
I’m on BookTok. I don’t see why so many people have such a hate-on for it. Neither does LitHub. [LitHub]
I’ve written before of how Zane’s Addicted was a revolutionary force in the development of many a 90s Black girl’s developing sexuality. The real life Zane looks like a librarian(no shade), has a famous pastor father, and can be found podcasting these days.[The Root]
The balance between writing while Black for other Black people and writing while Black under the scrutiny of people who want to tell you how to be Black is very treacherous, I find. Laura Warrell, the author of Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm unpacks this well.[LitHub]
I’m late but WTF is this new Winnie the Pooh movie, y’all? Or should I say, oh bother? [New York Times]
There’s some very good titles in this booklist of works by Afro-Latinas, so please check it out. [Electric Literature]
And let’s round things out with another booklist because why not? I love generational epics of all sorts, and this list features family stories from Asian writers. I love that the titles on this list step away from a solely East Asian focus and include authors from the Philippines, Vietnam and India as well. [Book Riot]
And that’s this week’s round up, fellow readers. As always, I appreciate your visit. If you want to further support this blog, check out the Equal Opportunity Bookshop and the carefully curated lists of diverse books available there. If you buy anything there from a link you find here, we earn a commission and then we go buy more books so…what are you waiting for?
Greetings, fellow readers. I spent President’s Day weekend at Boskone 60, where I spent a significant amount of time cursing both my forgetfulness and my commitment to ebooks. This is because I met both Nalo Hopkinson and Andrea Hairston(if you don’t know who they are–I have a booklist or two for you). I forgot my copy of Brown Girl In The Ring and only have an ebook of Master of Poisons, and so I missed out. I wonder, though, if a signable Kindle cover is a thing? Perhaps I’ll start doing that?
At any rate, it was a great weekend, I learned a lot, and now I’m exhausted, but not so much that I can’t bring you a roundup of diverse bookish news for the week.
The Scottish Book Trust says pleasure reading can be part of the solution for poverty. I don’t doubt them ,but how isn’t entirely clear to me. I guess it sort of worked for Shuggie Bain. [Scottish Book Trust]
Moving slightly south, there’s a whole controversy afoot about Roald Dahl’s estate making the decision to go back and edit some of his works to be less offensive and contain more appropriate language. I have a lot of feelings about this, unsurprisingly. While the edits seem like a pandering money grab that potentially destroy the integrity of the works, this is something Dahl did himself to his books over the years. My first copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was my dad’s old copy from the 60s. In it, the Oompa-Loompas are racist caricatures of African pygmy peoples. I didn’t realize Dahl rewrote it so I was confused until I learned that he regularly went back and sanitized his own work in later editions to reflect changing norms. He didn’t necessarily change his beliefs, which have been discussed at length elsewhere, but he had no problem changing his books. Then again, there’s a difference between the writer changing his work himself and others changing it. What do you think? [The Guardian]
Okay, enough of that. Back to diverse books–this booklist of titles for young readers about the Great Migration is something I really could have used as a kid back in the 80s and 90s, when nobody taught it in schools and I just sort of wondered out loud why all of my grandparents’ generation said they were from the South but had spent most of their lives in New York and Baltimore but never got any answers. Definitely get your kids–or yourself!–into some of these titles. [School Library Journal]
Raven Leilani is best know for her award-winning novel Luster, but I stumbled across this pre-novel short story of hers randomly and it’s very good. Highly recommended reading if you have a few minutes.[The Cut]
The Sign In Sidney Brustein’s Window had a chokehold on me in undergrad. Something about it being Lorraine Hansberry’s last and tragically unfinished play appealed to me, although I’ve never been able to decide if I think the play itself, about self-righteous white liberals in New York, is very good. It is, however, timely, even though it was written 40 years ago. It’s running in revival on Broadway now, and I may just get myself into debt to go and see it.[NPR]
I don’t think enough Western journalists and reviewers realize that Asians who live in ASIA are not minorities to themselves and have no reason to see themselves as marginialized or otherwise demographically unusual by default when they talk about their work. You can almost smell the writer’s bewilderment coming off off this interview with Breasts and Eggs author Mieko Kawakami at times, but it’s a very good interview, nonetheless and I enjoyed her responses and she’s had an interesting life, like many novelists. [New York Times]
I’m tired of y’all sending me links to this article about Pedro Pascal having good taste in books because no he does not. (W. Somerset Maugham?!?) Okay, it’s not that bad, and there’s no hierarchy of books, but I couldn’t share a bookshelf with this dude. He’d get Salinger all over my comic books.[LitHub]
Last link, and it’s a serious one; I’ve been waiting for the survivors of Uyghur persecution in China to begin telling their stories in their own words, and it appears the wait is over. Gulchehra Hoja was a Chinese television star, but overnight her friends and family disappeared into reeducation camps and she fled the country. Hoja’s lived in the US and worked as a journalist here since 2001, so it’s perhaps safer for her to speak out than others, but it’s vitally important that she does. Find her book, A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs in my Bookshop. [The Guardian]
That’s it for this week, beautiful people. As always, don’t forget that any links you click that lead to purchasable products are to affiliate shops, which results in a commission being paid to this blog. Obligatory disclaimer over, go read something good. Peace!
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but my current day job is in an ESL school. Perhaps this is a bit too on-brand, but I’m always telling my students that if they want a good English vocabulary, they need to read. Our school even has a little library that I curate.
The other day I saw a Ukrainian student walking around with a book and I asked him what it was about.
“Oh,” he casually said, “Just Black people.”
“Um…excuse me!?”
“Yeah, so let me explain. There’s this girl and she has light skin so the other kids tease her and call her things like zebra and it’s not good. But this is a long time ago. Black and white people are separated, so this girl really wants to go to Boston to live with her mom who is a singer. She goes, but she learns her mother has a girlfriend and her father is white so she’s not happy and she comes back home to South Carolina. But it’s not good there either because there is this boy she and her cousins are friends with and the white people say he killed somebody but he didn’t but because they are racist, they kill him anyway. For nothing, really, he’s a good boy. It’s sad, but I think we need to read these things because they are true history and we should all know.
Anyway, I think you should read this book. You would like it.”
You’re absolutely right, Ivan. I did. Thank you very much.
The author of this book is, in fact, thatKaryn Parsons, aka Hilary Banks from The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. (Me: Is that Hilary from the Fresh Prince? Ivan: What? No, there is no prince, this is an American book.) She wrote this book partly to explore what happy childhoods looked like in the segregated, racist South–such things did exist, despite the dangers of socially sanctioned racial terrorism. She does really a good job — this is a middle-grade novel and the kids are refreshingly childish. Heavy things happen, but so does cute kid stuff like fishing, art contests, berry picking and first crushes. In this context, I really appreciate that. Childhood is precious, and in a world where Black children are often adultified, this unexpected portrayal of pure kid joy and discovery is both powerful and enjoyable.
Parts of this book are built around the real-life case of George Stinney Jr., who was unjustly executed at the age of 14 after being falsely convicted of murdering two little white girls in Jim Crow South Carolina. Seventy years later, in 2014, courts found that George was in fact wrongfully executed and vacated his judgment. A terrible chapter of US history–but like Ivan said, we all need to know, and remember.
(Beautiful people! This book was a nice surprise for me, and I might ask more students to recommend books to me. In the meantime, don’t forget that teachers don’t get paid well in America so any purchases you make from links on this site will result in a commission being paid to me. It’s called a side hustle. 🙂 If you’re interested in a curated selection of diverse books for diverse readers, check out the Equal Opportunity Bookshop landing pageand take a look around. Thanks for reading, and peace!)
So last week I posted a review of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare and it’s attracted a whole new spate of fellow readers. Welcome! It’s also attracted a lot of people with nothing better to do than post nasty comments about people so famous they’ll never meet either of us, and to those folks I say; get gone. Please!
Anyway, there’s some interesting diverse books news out this week, so without further ado…
A 13-year old Afrolatina from Hamilton, Ontario has created one of the brightest spots on Bookstagram. Ainara’s Bookshelf talks all about books that relate to the diverse experiences and cultures of her and her classmates.[Hamilton Spectator]
Valentine’s day is coming up, and one of my favorite passages about loving yourself, from one of my favorite books — Toni Morrison’s Beloved— is highlighted in this short piece, just in time to get ready for the season. [The Marginalian]
The internet is spawning takes on this at an epic rate, but I cannot bring myself to be mad about the cancellation of the television adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I can’t even bring myself to finish the furious blog post I started a month ago on why I hate the series so much. Instead, I’ll just direct you all here to get a copy of the OG book for yourself and read that instead. [Hollywood Reporter]
Xiaolu Guo’s account of how she published her first novel is worthy of being a book itself, and now it is! Once Upon A Time In The East: A Story of Growing Up, came out last week and this excerpt made me add it to my #tbr stat. Equal parts sad, funny, and frustrating, it echoes the experience of many travelers, not only those from China to the West. [The Guardian]
Two of the people I’ve been fortunate enough to meet in my own journey as a writer–Sheree Renee Thomasand Alex Jennings — gave a talk on worldbuilding at Under The Volcano in Mexico. The whole thing is available here via Facebook Video, and includes a brief reading from Jenning’s work The Ballad of Perilous Graves [Facebook]
When you consider that Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer is one of the most hotly contested banned books in American schools lately(sigh), the significant of queer comics and graphic novels is definitely worth a closer look. A documentary has been released, and this interview with featured players Alison Bechdel(of the infamous test) and director Vivian Kleiman gives a lot of context.[The Washington Post]
As always, if you’re looking for something to read that is by and for diverse readers, click around this blog or check out the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. Don’t forget, we have an affiliate relationship with the blog and any purchases you make at that link will result in a commission being paid to this blog. Peace, and go read something good!
I’m not much of a royal watcher, despite having lived in Britain for some years in my late twenties and early thirties. The only members of the family I’ve ever paid any attention to are the late Princess Diana and her youngest son, and I really only started paying attention to the latter when he married Meghan Markle. I found their relationship fascinating, made all the more so by their departure from the royal family and the interviews they gave later airing out all of the palace’s dirty and allegedly racist laundry.
Harry gets into all of that, but first, he gives us a startlingly vulnerable look at his life before becoming a family man. The way he found out about his mother’s death and the long delay in processing it emotionally, his difficulties in school, and his spiky relationship with his older brother are all laid out. He talks about finding himself as a young man through travels in Australia, Lesotho, and Botswana. He recounts his time in the military and how he rose to the challenge of becoming a helicopter pilot. (I was genuinely surprised to find that he really served in combat.)
Through it all, Harry seems like…well, not a regular guy, but a normal one, if that makes sense. Ultimately there’s no amount of power and privilege that can shield a person from the pain of being the odd one out, of being rejected, or of having to find your own way in a world that doesn’t want to see you succeed in a way they haven’t already decided for you. In some ways, power and privilege can make all of those things harder. They certainly make it harder for other people to sympathize. But for some reason, I really felt for Harry for most of this book. Sure, he’s a prince, but he’s also a guy who’s dealt with loneliness, anxiety, grief, and shame. He’s made big mistakes and great choices, and despite the whole prince thing, he’s very relatable through it all, even the really egregious bits that there really should be no excuse for. (I did not need to know all that about his genitalia.) There are things in this book that really shouldn’t read as smoothly as they do–for instance, Harry’s explanation of his infamous N*zi uniform gaffe is a little too blithe and pleads a little too much ignorance for me to be entirely comfortable with it. But there’s a sense that Harry is growing and has grown so much as a person that I could accept it as part of the overall narrative of what he’s learned from life and where his younger years brought him.
The last third of the book is where he introduces us to Meghan Markle through his eyes, and wow. May we all be adored the way that Harry adores this woman. May we all adore someone the way she clearly adores him. Their love story is surprisingly simple (albeit assisted with lots of rich people opportunity), and even when surrounded by press and family drama there’s a fated sweetness in the way he talks about her that is wonderful.
I expected to like this a little, but I’m surprised that I relate to it so strongly. A round of drinks at the pub on me for Spare.
(Fellow readers, I’m a little surprised I enjoyed this as much as I did, but it’s probably worth the audiobook credits! If you want to read a memoir but aren’t sure if Prince Harry is quite your cup of tea check out this booklist on my shop. Don’t forget, we have an affiliate relationship with Bookshop and if you buy any books from an Equal Opportunity link, we’ll be paid a commission. Thanks for visiting, peace, and go read something good!)
Finally, I’m getting around to making a post about my last year in reading, and what I hope to read in 2023.
2022 was a bear of a year for me, fellow readers. It was also a banner year, in many ways. I’ve alluded to my personal struggles on Instagram and also in this reading challenge post, but I’ve said nearly nothing about the good things. This time last year, I was at Under The Volcano Guided Writer’s Residency, where I met legendary writer and editor Sheree Renee Thomas and workshopped alongside Alex Jennings and Tracy Cross, both of whom released their debut novels last year. Thanks to a generous grant from Con or Bust, I attended World Fantasy Con for the first time in New Orleans and met lots of cool new people, including Nisi Shawl who is like…whoa. Imagine Yoda sidling up to a Storm Trooper at the bar with a compliment, a drink, and a friendly laugh. That’s about how it felt to meet them(they are Yoda, obviously.)
I am not at all cool enough to be in this photo, yet there I am, fellow readers, on the far left. Everyone else, from left to right; comic book and story writer Alex Smith, speculative novelist and genuinely kind person Alex Jennings, speculative and culture writer Danian Darell Jerry, and Sheree Renee Thomasherself. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? WHAT AM I DOING THERE?!
In between and around the process for that, I wrote, edited, and revised a LOT of stuff that will be released across various platforms this year. Some of it’s already out: my sci-fi short Mothership Connection is out in khoreo magazine, and my essay A Repat’s Guide to Boston was published in The Statesider. There are at least three more things in the offing between now and September, and while I am really trying hard not to make this into a writer blog as I slowly move more and more into that world, I will be updating you all here as things come out.
What I think I’m trying to say is that 2022 was the second year in which I spent most of my time working hard at becoming a writer(albeit, not very successfully yet). While I did some cool things and met some clearly awesome people, this year my reading weirdly suffered for it.
In 2020, I read 122 books. In 2021, I read 96.
In 2022, I read 46, and about 20 of them were children’s books I read when I was having a Very Bad Time last March and that was the only thing my brain could hold for a couple of weeks.
I’m not saying trying to write is making me a worse reader. I’m just saying that while trying to reach the great and stressful goals I’ve set for myself, I also read fewer books, far less pleasurably than I think I have in any other year of my life since I learned how to read. Believe it or not, I’m not a reader who uses books as a coping mechanism (anymore), and one of the things I learned last year was that if I’m not in a good frame of mind, books have lost their ability to soothe me.
Last year was my first full year back in America after 15 years elsewhere, and…yeah. It wasn’t a great time, mostly. Bright spots included the aforementioned WFC, meeting lots of new writer friends and acquaintances, trips to Mexico(for Under The Volcano) and Colorado(to see family), but not a lot else, and nowhere near as much reading as I usually do.
I still managed to get in some good ones, though, so here’s a quick recap of my 2022 reading;
The Ones I Didn’t Review…
I read a lot of books that I didn’t review last year, fellow readers, especially at the tail end of 2022. Some of them were great, like Helen Hoang’s romance novel The Kiss Quotient and Tayannah Lee McQuillar’s manual of Black American ancestral spiritual practices, appropriately titled Rootwork: Using the Folk Magick of Black America for Love, Money and Success. Some were okay, like the quirky graphic novel Catboy or I’m Not Dying With You Tonight, a tale of two girls–one white, one black–trying to get home on foot through a city burning up in race riots. The latter was written by two YA authors, Gilly Segal and Kimberly Jones, who switch off chapters, each one writing from a different girl’s perspective. That was one of the more interestingly constructed books I read last year, and I’d recommend it to young readers for sure.
A few of the books I read last year I avoided reviewing because they just didn’t speak to me and I wasn’t sure how to talk about that constructively. The Pacific Northwest thriller The Wives and Jeff VanderMeer’s Amazon short Wildlife fall into that category.
Out of all the books I read but didn’t review, the only one I regret not giving some page time to is Stephen Graham Jones’ Amazon exclusive The Backbone of the World. In it, a Blackfoot woman in Montana is facing the loneliness and social ostracization that comes with being a prison widow (her husband is in jail) when strange goings-on in the field behind her trailer begin to distract her. The story is funny, otherworldly, and extremely creepy. It manages to work with the tropes established by horror writers past in an entirely new context. The ending made me cheer but also made my skin crawl, which is quite a feat. I wish I’d reviewed it more fully, but I did get around to a full review of the author’s biggest hit The Only Good Indians, which is also worth a read if you like horror.
The Ones I Loved…
I didn’t read a lot of books that I outright, unreservedly loved last year, if I’m being honest. The only three books that I read that gave me that meditational book hangover after I turned the last page were The Only Good Indians, Lola Akinmade Akerstrom’s Black woman migrant novel In Every Mirror She’s Black and actress Constance Wu’s memoir Making a Scene. I think I loved both of these for the same reason; they feature women of color being whole, flawed, normal creatures who don’t have to proclaim that things like racism and sexism suck out loud for that to be obviously so. Instead, they live their lives fully in pursuit of happiness and love, and I am entirely here for that kind of narrative. Come to think of it, I also loved the Brown Sisters series of romance novels for exactly the same reason.
There were other books that I really, really enjoyed, mostly because they surprised me. The Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky’s collection Deaf Republic shocked me in a good way and opened up an empathy void that I needed to examine. I was convinced that Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn would be really, really stupid but instead, it knocked my socks off. And while I didn’t need any extra help to remain a TJ Young and the Orishas fangirl, the ending of the second installment of the African wizard school series really stunned me in a good way and upped my anticipation for the rest of the series greatly.
The Ones I Appreciated…
There were plenty of books that I read and liked, even if they didn’t flood me with serotonin and literary brilliance the entire time. David Morrell’s 1972 novel First Blood, which formed the basis of the Sylvester Stallone franchise Rambo, surprised me with its deeply sensory descriptions of nature and genuine empathy for PTSD-stricken veterans. Rebecca Roanhorse’s hotly anticipated Fevered Star, the sequel to her pre-Columbian fantasy started Black Sun, had some exciting moments and set us up perfectly for the inevitable third installment of the trilogy. The Argentinian cannibal dystopia story Tender is the Flesh was…well, really gross, but I got what the author was trying to tell us and while I’ll never read that again and did not like it one bit, I definitely appreciated it.
The “no thank you, but I respect what you did” club was pretty crowded for me last year, come to think of it. Child star Jenette McCurdy’s abuse memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jasmine Mans’ poetry collection Black Girl, Call Home, and CM Nascosta’s orc romance novel Girl’s Weekend also fall into that category.
My 2023 Reading Plans…
2023 is already shaping up to be a better year than 2022 in many ways. I feel hope and excitement for what’s to come, and while we’ll see if my optimism is truly warranted, I’m enjoying the feeling that my hard work is getting me somewhere, and therefore have time and emotional energy to read again.
First, let’s address the elephant in the room; reading challenges. Last year I did a monthly reading challenge and while they were fun to do and a lot of you had positive things to say about them, I am actually not great at planning and implementing things that are even remotely related to book clubs.
Which is why I’m going to do it again this year. *sigh* If anyone tells you reading makes you smart, point them to this paragraph and laugh, okay? I’m still thinking through all the logistics to ensure that it will sustainable and interesting, but reading challenges will be back in February, this time connected to the book club app Fable. At least, that’s the plan. Watch this space.
As far as my own reading, there are two things I really want to do this year. One is to read more deeply in the backlist. The bookish internet clamors very loudly over new releases and that’s great. However, I’ve found so many gems from the backlist–not just from this decade, but literary eras past–that I want to start reading older books a little more conscientiously. I’ll still read new releases too, but I’ll be highlighting a few forgotten backlist classics–or should-be classics–in reviews this year.
I also want to read more African writers. I say this every year, and I read one or two. Africa is in a bookish boom right now and I want to see what it’s all about. So, more African authors from across the continent will be on my shelves and on my Kindle this year, and you should expect to see some reviews.
All that said, there are some things that won’t change. For example–I have no intention of reducing my romance novel consumption. The spicier, the better, although I’m still not sure how much I’m into the monster trend. (No kink-shaming intended if tentacles and fangs are your thing, of course.) I also have no intentions of straying from the initial purpose of this blog, which is to read, review, and discuss books by most of us–meaning Black, Brown, Asian, Latinx, Indigenous, Arab, Pacific Islander, LGBTQIA+, disabled, neurodivergent, gender-diverse, poor and otherwise normal but under-recognized writers. This is still a space that centers us and y’all and me, and that won’t change.
Beautiful people–I just realized that this May we’ll celebrate this blog’s third year of existence. There are over 200 posts on this site, and countless more on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. (Don’t even get me started on Pinterest…yes, I’m over there too.) We’ve been interviewed on NPR, shouted out by Stephen Graham Jones, Blerd.comand in countless lovely supportive posts by other bloggers and bookstagrammers. I think my little pandemic project has far exceeded my initial goals, and I’m glad you’re all still here reading along with me.
Onward and upward into 2023, fellow readers. I’m excited.
(I hate when I have a great inspirational ending line and have to ruin it with the obligatory legal disclaimer saying that this blog has an affiliate relationship with Bookshopand any links you click here that result in you purchasing something over there will result in a commission being earned by this blog, which we(meaning I, this is a one-woman nerd show) will use to buy more books and gratefully read weekends away in a big comfy chair. There. Disclaimer done. Thank you for reading, and go read something good. Peace!)
“In Arabic folktales, Shubeik Lubeik is the first part of the rhyme a genie speaks once released from a lamp. It means “Your wish is my command.“
It’s been a very long time since I read something so captivating. This graphic novel, recently translated from Arabic into English, drew me out of a cold, rainy Boston weekend into a very detailed alternative Egypt where wishes are real and an inevitable source of much politicking and policymaking. It’s a fascinating world, but even though it’s clear that wishes have a massive impact on the sociopolitical aspects of the Shubeik Lubeik world, that’s not entirely what the story is about.
Instead, we get three intertwined tales of three very different people with very different lives and very different reasons for wanting to have their deepest wish come true. In beautifully rendered panels we follow each story through to an unexpected conclusion. I won’t spoil them for you because they’re worth reading cold. I will say that they all examine desire, agency, and regret in very poignant ways, and the inevitable, seemingly small connections between each story strengthen their impacts. In between, there are a few amusing pages of brochures explaining the history and policy of wishmaking in this world which tips into interesting political commentary at times.
Listen. I sat down with this on Saturday morning and didn’t come back up for air until the sun had gone down. The only reason I stopped reading then was because I was enjoying it so much that I wasn’t ready for it to be over yet and wanted to prolong the experience. When I returned to it the next day, the last story took me to that transcendent place that only a good story told well can. I laughed, I cried, I gasped, I cheered, and when I got to the last page, I sat with the book closed on my lap for a minute, wistfully thinking of what I’d just read.
This is thoroughly magical, deeply Egyptian, funny, moving, beautifully illustrated, and VERY worth reading.
All of the stars and the deepest heart’s desire toShubeik Lubeik. Go read this book, everyone.
(Beautiful people! This was an absolutely wonderful read, and my first five-star read of the new year. Go grab it from your local library, indie bookstore, or the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. Keep in mind that if you buy from that link, we will earn a commission. Thanks for reading, and peace! Now go and enjoy a good book! )
The blurbs call this a Black version of Stephen King’s Carrie, and they’re mostly right. The author set out to write this as an homage, only shifting the tone of the main character’s terror, not the source. Instead of sheltered, abused, religiously traumatized Carrie White, this book focuses on biracial (Black and white) teen Madison Washington. Maddy has all the same problems as Carrie, but she’s also been forced to pass as white for her entire life by her racist white father, who ritualistically straightens her hair every week with an old school stovetop straightening comb, complete with deliberate ear and neck burns.
One day Maddy’s hair gets wet during P.E. class and the resulting afro reveals her secret to her classmates and the rest of her tiny Georgia town. Cue trauma-induced psychic powers, a brief redemption in the form of the cute (Black) boy next door, and total embarrassment at the hands of (white) mean girl bullies leading to chaos, destruction and lots of very heavy blood.
It’s a good story and a very clever take on the novel that made Stephen King a household name. But it’s not all that scary.
This is partly because it’s set in 2014, not 1974. Something about the time period never really settled for me. Some parts of the book feel much older, others feel very recent, but I think the whole thing would have fit better in the 80s or earlier. (2014 is an oddly specific time to set this, and I never really figured out why that was the year of choice here. If it’s a nod to Ferguson and the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, it’s poorly placed.)
There’s also the fact that a lot of the horror of the book is caused by racism–Maddy’s racist father, racist cops, racist classmates, benevolent racists who think they’re crusading for justice. Jackson does a good job of putting a face to all of them and weirdly enough, it backfires. Even though racism is carried out by individuals, racism isn’t scary because it’s personal. It’s scary because it’s impersonal, systematic, and dehumanizing. Just like Carrie, you feel sorry for Maddy. But unlike Carrie, who got terrible revenge, Maddy lashes out violently and destructively but still can’t touch the system, which is frustrating and sad. Even in her vindication, Maddy is still a victim.
(Fellow readers! This was an interesting read but not my favorite of the year, so far. If you’re interested in reading it, click the links above or head over to the Equal Opportunity Bookshop for more booklists featuring diverse books for diverse readers. Don’t forget we have an affiliate relationship with Bookshop and any purchases you make here from links you find here result in a commission being paid. Peace, and go read something good! )
What I expected from the hotly anticipated sequel toLegendborn: Our heroine Bree, having discovered she’s the bearer of a magical legacy from her slave-owning white ancestors that supercharge the gifts inherited from her mother’s ancestral line, raises up a network of fierce Black women rootcrafters, takes on the Round Table, and brings it all crashing down, speaking magical truth to magical power.
What I got: Bree, accompanied by far too many angry white dudes both dead and alive, gets captured, escapes, runs between safe houses, and somehow manages to find time for an annoying YA love triangle before tripping into a vortex of dumb decisions that ends on an unexpected cliffhanger.
Look. I get it. The premise of these books has always been a magical reckoning with what it’s like to be Black and exceptional in hostile white spaces and that’s very much what this is. I don’t love it, but I appreciate it. I’m always begging for Black women with not only enormous power but emotional range and relationships of reciprocal care in fantasy and Bree is all of that. There’s a lot of emotional and social truth strewn through the dumb decisions and moments of abject villainry that hits hard and spoke to my current America-wounded spiritual state of mind.
But I’m iffy about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, even when they’re cleverly rebooted into good ol’ Southern boys and girls. Something about the inclusion of Arthurian legend makes this book move incredibly slowly. It doesn’t burst into life until the last third when Bree finally starts hanging around other magical Black folk. Their safe haven is one of the most beautifully woven concepts reckoning with ancestral magic and Black American history that I’ve seen in a book, and while I won’t spoil it for you, I really loved it.
But then the dumb decision parade begins and while it makes sense in the story and is true to the characters, ARGH. Briana, girl! What are you DOING?!?
I’ll definitely read the next installment but this one didn’t wow me like the first and I need FAR more Black people and their magics next go-round, even if the end of this one seems to be moving us away from that realm.
A week’s punishment with no phone calls from magical boys for Bloodmarked.
(Happy New Year, fellow readers! Welcome to another year of diverse books for diverse readers! If you want to read more books about Blackgirls and women in magical fantasy worlds inspired by legend and folklore, I highly recommend the works of Nalo Hopkinson. If you’re looking for something to get you started on your bookish journey through 2023, take a look at the whole Equal Opportunity Bookshop and have a peruse. For legal reasons, I have to tell you that we have an affiliate relationship with Bookshop and any purchases you make there from a link you find here will result in a commission being paid. Go read something good!)
I feel like the best thing I can say about this book is that the title is a lie.
While child star Jennette McCurdy describes the emotional, physical, sexual and financial abuse her overbearing stage mother perpetrated in painstakingly gory detail here, you never really get a sense that she’s glad that her mother is dead of the cancer she blamed for her behavior. But I also never really got the sense that any of the trauma in this book had been healed at all, only examined and trotted out for public display. All of the disturbing situations discussed — how adult Jennette weighed 89 pounds and rode in a booster seat at 14, how she was anorexic and bulimic at her mother’s urging, how she was in a terrible relationship with a man twice her age in her late teens, how her mother insisted on bathing her well into adulthood–these are all disturbing, but they also carry a distinct tinge of “what for?!”.
I don’t want to sound as though I’m criticizing her experiences–I’m not. I feel absolutely terrible about everything McCurdy says she goes through, and as a Child of the Secret myself, I know that healing is a journey, and the trauma of abuse isn’t something that can be wrapped up and explained neatly in a three-act plot with a tidy denouement.
But I’d also never heard of McCurdy before this book. I was an adult when iCarly and Sam and Cat were big on Nickelodeon. I don’t have the same parasocial empathy for her that fans have. In a way, that makes all of the suffering on display here even sadder. Not only was McCurdy abused, but she developed lifelong eating disorders and substance abuse issues that she still struggles with as a result. Her relationships are trainwrecks, her acting career discarded (it turns out, she never really wanted one), and at the end of her memoir, it’s pretty clear her money is beginning to dry up. At the end of a memoir like this, you want to walk away with a sense that something has changed in the life of the victim. The end of this just left me feeling empty–McCurdy is persevering through the pain, but her mother died and left mostly bitterness and nasty secrets behind.
That’s very real, but this was tiring to read and shockingly mean at times. It’s supposed to be funny and I didn’t laugh once. I was just horrified, disgusted, and disturbed. I like dark humor, but this ain’t that. While I’m sure McCurdy will continue to heal, I finished the book feeling bad for her. The one bright spot is that she’s a good writer and this book is put together well, despite her mother’s mean discouragement of her writing aspirations.
All these words and I still have no idea what to say or how to feel about this. Many years of therapy and a source of unconditional love to I’m Glad My Mom Died. Yikes.
(This wasn’t my favorite read of 2022, beautiful people. Fans feel differently, so if you liked iCarly, go ahead and check this one out in the Equal Opportunity Bookshop.Don’t forget, we have an affiliate relationshipwith Bookshop and any purchases you make through links on this site will result in us earning a commission which we will use to purchase more books! Thanks, and go read something good.)
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