The Surface Breaks: A Reimagining of The Little Mermaid is a wonderful feminist take on the popular fairy tale. Louise O’Neill stays very close to Hans Christian Anderson’s original classic story (as opposed to the Disney version), but gives her little mermaid (Gaia/Muirgen) a much darker back story and provides a fuller description of the world that exists under the sea. Little mermaid Gaia has grown up under a misogynistic patriarchal system, where women are valued for their beauty alone. Gaia and her five sisters […]
Phoebe and Marigold Heavenly Nostrils are the new Calvin and Hobbes
Phoebe and her Unicorn is at times charming and touching, but mostly it is funny, and overall an entertaining read. What began in 2012 as a daily webcomic (originally titled Heavenly Nostrils) has now been gathered into seven graphic novels, and is still being posted daily by author and artist Dana Simpson. On the strong recommendation of a friend I picked up the first graphic novel, Phoebe and her Unicorn, for my six year old. She loves it, her ten year old sister loves it, and I quite […]
To have strings, like everyone else.
I thought that this book was going to be steeped in ’80’s music and culture which is totally in my wheelhouse. Some of the reviews that I had read indicated this. They were not accurate. I hate to use words like “okay” and “nice” but that sort of sums this one up. It really wasn’t what I was expecting, which is okay, but it circles around some pretty heavy themes in a way that is a bit too nice. CDs are trumping vinyl in the […]
You can’t go home again
I still remember watching E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in the theater as a kid. The nearest movie theater was an hour’s drive from our little town in the Deep Midwest, so we didn’t get to go more than a few times a year. I’d been begging my parents to take us to see E.T. for weeks when they finally surprised me for my 8th birthday. I was enchanted from the start, so wrapped up in the story by the time Eliot said goodbye to E.T. that […]
The things we take for granted
I first learned about Octavia Butler a few years ago when searching online for innovative novels and Kindred showed up on just about every list I came across. When I went to the bookstore, I had become so enthusiastic about her that I decided to buy not only this book but also Fledgling, and then I read the latter first after a coin toss. That was probably a mistake, because I disliked it so much that I put off reading Kindred indefinitely. I’d finally put […]
We all have biases, or “Why grandma might suddenly sound like a racist”
Twelve years ago, my grandmother passed away at the age of 94. Born in 1912, she was the product of a different time, but other than maybe telling a slightly off-color joke or wondering out loud why there were so many more homosexuals around these days than when she was young, I don’t recall her being prejudiced against any particular group (except maybe Italians, but that’s a story for another day). Apparently in her final days in the nursing home, however, she started loudly proclaiming […]
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