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 […]
Hope is the thing with feathers
This Newberry Medal winning YA novel is a fantasy/fairy tale about hope’s triumph over sorrow. Kelly Barnhill writes about a world populated by witches, dragons, monsters, and humans. She writes of bogs, forests, and towns separated by fear and magic. In this world, one town in particular, the Protectorate, engages in a terrible human sacrifice every year, wherein the youngest child in town is left in the forest as a tribute to an evil witch. It is an age old practice, perpetuated by the town […]
Tackling Grief and Mental Health Issues in YA Lit
But how do we live with these secrets locked within us? National Book Award nominee I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter is a powerful young adult novel that deals with the very real trauma of grief and depression. Fifteen-year-old Julia Reyes, our narrator, lives in Chicago with her parents and older sister Olga, who has just died in a tragic accident. Julia is struggling with feelings of grief, guilt and anger, and her already fragile relationship with her parents is at the breaking point. […]
A Short History of White Women’s Complicity
Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
In Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae makes a strong argument for white women’s vital role in protecting and perpetuating white supremacy and thwarting integration in the US. One hundred years ago, woman began to organize in ways that we would recognize from today’s resistance movements. They developed grassroots campaigns reaching out to other women and encouraging them to organize, to write letters, to publish, to speak up and to vote. They did this, however, […]
An Epic About Resistance
Circe is a fascinating and creative imagining of the life of Circe, a character mentioned in The Odyssey as one of Odysseus’ lovers on his travels from the Trojan War back home. In The Odyssey, Circe is a witch who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs but is then herself bested and tamed by Odysseus (with help from Hermes). In Circe, when Circe hears how the bards sing of her, she thinks, Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can […]
Women & Espionage in the World Wars
The Alice Network by Kate Quinn is an ambitious work of historical fiction that straddles two world wars and their aftermath, and that shines a light on the heroic work of female spies. Quinn uses a solid base of historical fact and real people to create her fictional heroine Eve (aka Evelyn Gardiner, aka Marguerite Le Francois), a spy for England in WWI who made shattering sacrifices and has never healed from her tragic and brutal experiences. Eve is an alcoholic recluse when, in the […]
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