Kindred is a first-person narrative of a woman, Dana, and her husband, Kevin, being pulled back in time to save the life of her ancestor, Rufus, who seems perpetually prone to disaster. The catch is that she’s African American and Rufus is white, and lives in Antebellum Maryland. I loved this book so hard. The germ of this book occurred to Octavia Butler after she heard the anger of a young black consciousness activist targeting the subservience in older generations towards oppressive white culture. Paired […]
We’re all so much alike, and yet so utterly different.
For the first 100 pages or so, this book was a literary Krispy Kreme doughnut: utterly devoid of nutritional value, but glazed in pure happiness. And then, like the best junk food, my joy immediately turned into regret, and my proverbial teeth felt like they were rotting out of my skull. Act Like It is about a man (Richard) and woman (Lainie) who star in stage production in London. He’s a celebrated actor (emphasis on the last syllable), she’s a budding young star. He’s a […]
Like a truth revealed to the self-assured, I wasn’t ready for this.
I am a white male in my 30s. Written as a letter to his 15 year old son, this is a memoir of being black in America by a 39 year old man with a life wholly different from mine. I point this out not to argue that this book has nothing to offer me, but to acknowledge that I am coming to this book with a different set of tools – a different language, even. The context I use to make sense of the […]
October monthly stat round-up!
I’m not going to lie, I slacked off a lot on this towards the end of the month, and was having a hell of a time playing catch-up pre-election. I used the shock and dismay after last night to power through the last few days of reviews. Anyway. I’m going to start doing something different, going forward. It can be pretty time consuming organizing all this information, so I think I’m going to stop updating the yearly information every month, and instead make one culminating […]
You know what I, as Rowell’s newest and biggest fan, am going to say.
This is actually a short story, published in the book My True Love Gave to Me. It tells the story of Mags and Noel. They are best friends, transitioning between adolescence and adulthood. The story is told over four New Years Eve midnights, where they party in a friend’s basement. Their meetings are chaotic, and the two circle one another, holding tight to their friendship. They aren’t involved with one another, but they are drawn indelibly to a shared connection. This is the kind of love […]
John Scalzi is reliably fascinating
This was my second attempt to read this book, and I’m glad I gave it another go. I haven’t been let down by Scalzi before, and Lock In was no different. This is a fairly typical Scalzi novel, in that the world is well developed and multi-layered. From what I’ve read of him (Redshirts, the Old Man’s War series, and The Dispatchers), he’s very adept at centering his stories around a big idea, and this is no different. Set in the future, a disease has […]
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