Midnight Never Come

Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this on the plane home for Christmas, and I found it completely engrossing despite a packed airplane and an uncomfortable seat.

The history is a little glossed, as other reviewers have alluded to, but had she offered the details of the lives discussed in the book, she could have easily doubled her number of pages. It reads as a fun supplement to the life of Queen Elizabeth I, but no one should expect that this novel will get you the full workings of Gloriana's court. Dissertations have been written about less. I suggest Alison Weir's excellent biography, if you want to know more.

This book is an excellent merging of the history with the fae, and the author's initial inspiration was the World of Darkness's Changeling role playing book. It was a fascinating example of a great story idea working in two venues (the game and the novel), and for fans of both story-telling vehicles, this is an interesting read.

View all my reviews >>

Cast in Silence

Cast in Silence by Michelle Sagara West

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Though this is my least favorite series that Michelle Sagara West has written, it's still very good, and I continue to enjoy it. It's shockingly light on the romance for a title published by a division of Harlequin, and though there are a couple of places I thought we were headed that direction, it never quite got there.

I feel like I am in the minority in preferring Severn to Nightshade, though I thought Nightshade was better in this book. Kaylin has struck me as painfully childish in previous books, and every novel seems to move her farther from those behaviors that annoyed me at the start of the series.

This book was very good, and I am ready to read the next book in the series. Should be out sometime this coming year!

View all my reviews >>

The Innkeeper's Song

The Innkeeper's Song by Peter S. Beagle

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Peter Beagle is an author I should read more of. His "The Last Unicorn" is one of my favorite books, as well as having been made into a cartoon that was in nigh constant rotation during my childhood. In fact, I still own it today.

This book had moments of startlingly beautiful prose. Whole chapters as finely wrought as any in genre fiction. But sometimes it was inscrutable, holding me at arms distance, a mean feat for a book comprised of short, overlapping first person perspectives. I wonder if this isn't a book too delicate and subtle for my law school brain at the moment, and so I am promising to reread it soon.

You know, this summer, or after the JD.

View all my reviews >>

Green by Jay Lake

Green by Jay Lake

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I enjoyed this book very much, despite some initial trepidation about its origins. I picked it up from the library after seeing it reviewed at John Scalzi's blog, Whatever, as well as at The Hathor Legacy, where it was reviewed most favorably. Books that pass the Bechdel Test can be pretty rare, even in genre fiction, but this book passed with flying colors. I had to try it.

The book was written by Jay Lake as a gift for his daughter. That gave me pause. I was worried it would be a little paen to Mary Sue Lake, and the twee would overwhelm the potential for a good story. I was wrong. This story, full of adventure, is also a story with plot advancing casual sex, torture, and a heroine who makes devastating mistakes that she has to live with. It wasn't EVER saccharine or sentimental, and I found myself thinking Jay Lake's daughter is a pretty lucky girl, to have been given such a gift.

The world is marvelous, particularly the theology, and I found myself hoping that Lake plans to return to this world again. I would certainly read anything he wrote that further explores this world or its gods, and I plan to pick up his other series as soon as I clear out my library queue a bit.

ETA: Left purposefully vague, because I think I would hate to spoil any of the plot twists.

View all my reviews >>

Happy Birthday, Victoria Woodhull!

Today is the 171st birthday of one of my favorite 19th century feminists, Victoria Woodhull. This biography sums her up beautifully.

Woodhull was a woman ahead of her time in nearly every way. She was the first woman to open a brokerage firm on Wall Street. She ran her own weekly newspaper. She ran for the U.S. Presidency in 1872. She advocated a woman's sexual autonomy and free love 100 years before the Summer of Love. She was by far one of the most interesting women who campaigned for suffrage in her time.

If self-government be the rule, every self must be its subject. If a person govern, not only himself but others, that is despotic government, and it matters not if that control be over one or over a thousand individuals, or over a nation; in each case it, would be the same principle of power exerted outside of self and over others, and this is despotism, whether it is exercised by one person over his subjects, or by twenty persons over a nation, or by one-half the people of a nation over the other half thereof. There is no escaping the fact that the principle by which the male citizens of these United States assume to rule the female citizens is not that of self-government, but that of despotism; and so the fact is that poets have sung songs of freedom, and anthems of liberty have resounded for an empty shadow.

The Woodhull Center for Ethical Leadership has this to say about their namesake:

The woman who inspired and served as namesake to this organization is Victoria Woodhull, a nineteenth-century feminist who was the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street; the first woman to produce her own newspaper; and the first woman to run for President of the United States when women did not even have the right to vote. Victoria Woodhull was a fearless lobbyist, businesswoman, writer and investor who advocated for a woman's equal status in the workplace, political arena, church and family.

Victoria Woodhull was in some ways like the Susan B. Anthonys and Elizabeth Cady Stantons of her time. Like them, she advocated for the full education of daughters, foregoing the 19th century belief that daughters, mothers and wives should be silent 'angels of the house' submissively catering to men's needs. Like them, she called for a vote and a voice. But there the resemblance ends - for she was in many ways a quintessentially modern woman, and far ahead of her time.

She spoke frankly of the need for women to take control of their reproductive life and health- so frankly that she was not received in the most respectable drawing rooms, even those belonging to the feminists of her day. Even her language differs sharply from that of her well-meaning sisters in the suffrage movement: where they were often circuitous and genteel, Woodhull had no patience for mincing words; every speech was ablaze with bold honesty as she savagely criticized Victorian hypocrisies and political inequities.

The other organization I found that bears her name is the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. Their list of current projects is pretty amazing. Right at the top is this:

21st Century Census
The current Census exemplifies the government’s outdated view of America’s residents and their relationships. The Census suggests that marriage is the only type of relationship that really matters, it suggests that households all consist of a group of people related to a head of the household, it suggests that male and female are the only two options for gender, etc. If government is going to serve Americans optimally, then it needs to have an updated, accurate understanding of the rich range of personal characteristics and interpersonal relationships that exist in America.

Woodhull is working to restructure the discourse in America about sex and sexuality and about the personal characteristics and interpersonal relationships that stem from that. As part of this work, Woodhull has formed working groups to address these issues around the Census and to present the group’s recommendations to the government.

As a legacy, I don't think either of these things would displease her. Happy birthday!

Life As We Knew It

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I went back and added a star to my review, based on the Ebert rule. This book was okay, on a relative scale of what I generally like to read. But if I were to review it for how well it met the conventions of its genre and expectations of its target audience, it deserved another star at least, out of fairness.

The book is written as a journal of a sixteen-year old girl named Miranda, and it begins before the apocalyptic event occurs, giving us a baseline of what Miranda's life is like before the asteroid hits the moon, pushing it into a closer orbit and causing tidal waves and volcanic eruptions as the moon's gravitational force pulls harder on the Earth.

My main gripe with the book was that many of the more event-packed entries strained to be written in the format Susan Beth Pfeffer chose. Too much word for word dialogue and objective viewpoint made it feel less like a real journal and more like a journal interspersed with short stories.

It was a zippy read, broken into easily digestible pieces, though, which made it perfect for reading while in law school. I'm not sure yet if I ultimately care enough about these characters to seek out the sequel, but maybe eventually. Next book, I think I want something a little more demanding.

View all my reviews >>

Because I Am a Girl

So, today, a report came out on the effect of the global financial crisis on women and girls. I have previously linked one of my most favorite charities--The Girl Effect--who deal with economic aid and development issues as they impact women and girls.

The report is excellent. (Though I could quibble a teeeeeeny bit about the design of a report about girls and women that makes every pulled quote PINK, but whatever. That's a losing fight. I get that.) It starts with a grim call to action:

The global financial crisis is taking a heavy toll on families and communities everywhere, and when money is short it is girls and young women who are most affected.

As a result of the current crisis, in 2009 alone an estimated additional 50,000 African babies will die before their first birthday. Most of these will be girls.

The numbers, if you stack them up, are grim. The falling economy results in girls being pulled out of school to take a job to help support the family. Sweatshops and child labor are often the BEST things that these girls can hope for. The economy being what it is just about everywhere, the sex trade is often where those girls end up working.

The report ends with a ten point plan for how to prevent the economic crisis from destroying the inroads made in helping women and girls.

1. No compromise on global gender equality goals and international commitments.
2. Promote the full integration of gender equality principles into national and regional economic policies.
3. Prioritize girls' education from their earliest years through to adolescence and beyond.
4. Maintain national social protection programs and safeguard social services.
5. Scale up investment in young women's work opportunity.
6. Support young women workers and ensure they get decent pay and conditions.
7. Invest in young women's leadership.
8. Ensure equality for girls and young women in land and property ownership.
9. Count and value young girls and young women's work through national and international data disaggregation.
10. Develop and promote a set of practical global guiding principles on girls and young women at work.

The conclusion, and the reason for redirecting our focus, is simply put: "Educated girls mean the chance of a better life for themselves and their children, a more prosperous community, a better workforce, and a wealthier nation."

Graceling by Kristin Cashore

Graceling by Kristin Cashore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Generally, the broad criticisms of this book are accurate. It is fairly superficial, zipping along at times when a slightly slower pacing would be a good idea. The characters are interesting, but mostly I was left wanting to know more about all of them, and sometimes their motives were completely inscrutable.

What is interesting about this book that I didn't expect from a straight up YA genre work was the independence of the heroine. In this type of book, where the female protagonist is a tomboy, she is almost always tamed and persuaded to be feminine to catch the eye of the male love interest. No so, Katsa. If anything, she becomes more butch and independent after she loses her virginity to Po. In fact, instead of the inculcation of marriage and sex only inside marriage that you find in most YA fiction (Harry Potter, anyone?) Katsa doesn't want to get married: she just wants Po to be her lover and her friend.

All in all, I'd recommend this to young girls who like genre fiction and who aren't quite ready to graduate to the adult books yet. It was feminist and fun. In totally unrelated and irrelevant news, the cover is completely gorgeous.

View all my reviews >>

I'm All In

When your interests and education background are what mine are, things like this come across your radar, often because people want to prove you wrong. They want to take two of your beliefs and smash them against one another to see if they give sparks. In this case, my feminism and my respect for Islam were put to a test by the article about the 12-year old Yemeni girl who died in childbirth. It popped up several places today where I saw it, but it was also sent to me be a friend who disagrees with my assessment of Islam as a peaceful religion.

Let me be clear. This is not Islam. This is patriarchy dressed up with religion, which happens everywhere that men have decided they are the sole voice of God. In this case, the flavor is Islamic, but everything that happened to this girl would be contrary to the teachings of Muhammad and Qur'an.

Stories like this tear the heart out of me. They leave me wondering if there's any hope that the world can be made better for women and girls. When stories like that of Fawziya Ammodi, who labored for three days to have her baby before she died, threaten to overwhelm me, there are two places I go. One, is the Shakesville blog, where I remember I have a teaspoon, and that I have promised to be all-in. (That's one of my favorite blog posts of all time, right there...) The other is the Girl Effect website. And so a healthy dose of the informational video of one of my favorite charities:



"There is no neutral in this. You're in or you're fucking out." --Melissa McEwan.

I'm in, too. Still. For good.

The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1: Sex, the Future, and Chocolate Chip Cookies

The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1: Sex, the Future, & Chocolate Chip Cookies by Karen Joy Fowler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I wrote my senior thesis for the KU Women's Studies department on James Tiptree, and I had been wanting the anthologies ever since. I mean, the titles alone would have sold me. :)

In this anthology, you'll find short stories, critical essays, even letters from Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree) herself. If you don't know who James Tiptree is, go now and Wiki it. I'll wait.

Fascinating stuff. So much in the Tiptree stories turns gender on its head. They're exciting, bright, well-crafted stories, and well-worthy of having an award named after them. I won't say every Tiptree nominee has knocked my socks off, but they certainly have all TRIED.

I recommend this, and any Tiptree short stories you can get your hands on, to any fans of the genre.


View all my reviews >>

Palimpsest

Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Long ago, I was at a writers' meet-up during NaNoWriMo where I met an older woman of the Probing Question Asking sort. She wanted to know what everyone was writing, and if each story had "a sense of longing" to it. To her, a story that instilled a deep sense of longing in the reader was a GOOD story. Her earnestness in this opinion made me uncomfortable, and I squirmed as I answered her questions about my post-apocalyptic vampire story with killer pagan nuns. Stories that hollow us out and make us hungry, I thought, are not the only stories worth reading...

And here I find a story that would completely satisfy PQA lady. It hollowed me out. It made me sad for the characters. It filled me with a deep sense of longing that they would prevail in their quest. It had as much or more sex than most books I read (and I read Jacqueline Carey!) but none of it felt prurient. Little of it was hot. It just filled me with a desire for the connection that these characters were reaching for, as well.

I'll try this author again, though first I might do a little time with escapist fiction, until I need to be hollowed out again.

View all my reviews >>

Formative Fiction and Cool Bits

So, anyone who has ever been pinned down at a bar and forced to talk speculative fiction with me has probably been subjected to a discussion of reading/writing/gaming by Cool Bit. A cool bit can be just about anything that draws you consistently to a story, and I believe understanding what moves you that way makes you a better reader/writer/gamer. The comments are particularly great at that link, where you can see lots of people thinking about the common elements that get them fired up about the stories that touch them.

Take my friend, J., who I shared books with and occasionally gamed with over the years. A few of his cool bits would be assassins, demons, violins (though he might say fiddles), stories about dads, redheads, and weaponsmiths. So I know that if I encounter a book with more than a couple of these elements, I might want to pass it on to him. Or if I run a game for him, he'll have more fun if I toss a few of these things in for his gratification.

Yesterday, I was working on homework and got a hankering to watch a movie. (Note: watching a movie while doing homework generally means that it's on as background noise, and I look up for the really good scenes. It's not really watching a movie, but I like a certain amount of friendly, predictable, white noise.) So I popped in an old favorite that I hadn't seen in a while--Dragonslayer--and got to work.

Because I will think about just about anything rather than outline, it occurred to me that it's likely that a comprehensive accounting of my personal cool bits could probably be connected directly back to most of the books and movies I loved as a child. In this case, in particular, Dragonslayer was the first place I saw a woman dressing and passing as a man for any reason. It's marvelous in Shakespeare, it's great in Dragonslayer, and it's a sure way to draw me into a story. Even before I was a women's studies major!

Since yesterday, I've been pondering what other cool bits of mine might be tied directly to the movies and stories I loved as a kid. My favorite fairy tale was always Beauty and the Beast, with Snow White and Rose Red running a close second. So many stories draw on the elements of fairy tales to shape the narrative--they're our shared mythos, so it only makes sense. Michelle Sagara West's Books of the Sundered come to mind as a story that draws heavily on the Beauty and the Beast story, without being a direct retelling of the fairy tale.

I might need to compile a list of my cool bits at some point, but for now, I'm going to pop in Beauty and the Beast and hit the books.

How to be a Douchebag

1. Go to Blizz Con 2009.
2. Take a video camera.
3. At a Q&A panel with a successful acting group responsible for a popular online series, remind the show's creator that though she's accomplished and smart, you can still make her a punchline and a piece of ass just like that.

4.  Bonus points for posting it to You Tube and raking in the nerdboy kudos.

Fanboys, doncha know, have a right to know anything and everything about the objects of their interest. Certainly, those rights outweigh the personhood of Felicia Day.

Bah.

Coming back...

So, I fled back to LJ for a while, but it didn't stick either. I think I am happiest blogging here, so I will be back here in the next few days with some substantive (i hope!) content.

Law school, it is hard. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

As Nature Made Him

As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read John Colapinto's Rolling Stone interview back in 1997, and was absolutely riveted. I don't know why, given that, and my undergraduate degree in Women's Studies, it took me so long to get around to reading this book.


I would strongly recommend this book to anyone with a taste for journalistic non-fiction or an interest in whether our gender is a product of nature or nurture.


Once you've read it, look online for the follow-up. It's a part of the story you would not want to miss.


View all my reviews.

Dollhouse, episode one

Opening scene: Echo and the Older British Lady
Nice line here: "Ya ever try to clean an actual slate? You always see what was on it before."

:02--Oh, yawn. Motorcycle racing. And weirdly stilted banter between Echo and the Birthday Boy.
:03--Echo and BB hit the dance floor. Eliza Dushku is a great dancer, and knows it: they had her dance quite a bit on Buffy, too. And WHOA that's a short dress.
:05--Banter here is better.
:08--Geek Boy is Creepy.
:11--Opening credits are typically Fox-sexy, but the music is nice if un-catchy.
:18--we meet the FBI agent who thinks the Dollhouse is real. Not-Mulder is a BSG-refugee, the character formerly known as Helo.
:26--Creepy Geek Boy is oddly likable, in spite of it all.
:33--I liked Faith. I think Echo might be slightly beyond Eliza Dushku's acting chops. Or maybe I can't get over that she's FAITH.
:45--Okay, the tension in the episode is pretty compelling.

All in all, nice set up for the next episode, and while this show isn't Firefly, it's highly watchable.

Ow.

I'm not sure how I did it, but I may have sprained my wrist this weekend. It's tender, and typing may make it worse.

If it feels better soon, I have some things to say about Dollhouse that I'll try to post.

Book Update, again!

Cast in Fury by Michelle Sagara West

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I love Michelle Sagara West.


I love her writing, her blog, and her personal philosophy as evidenced by the books she writes. The Chronicles of Elantra series is as good as any genre fiction being published today...and it's not even the best series she's currently writing.


Such talent, in a person less lovely and deserving, would be a source of envy.


As it is, I'm just happy I can buy her books.




View all my reviews.

Book Update!

Glory & Greed by August Hahn

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Full disclosure: the author is a friend of mine.


That said, this book was incredibly fun to read. I worried, given that it was a novel set in a gaming world, that I would be lost because of a lack of familiarity with the source material, or I would get irritated with the info dumps that this genre can be guilty of.


I should have had more faith.


I can't wait for August to write the next installment. Or, even better, write something in an original world where he wouldn't be constrained by world history written by someone else.




View all my reviews.

Hey There, Delilah--Random YouTubery

Missed this song when it was out....but god, I love it.

First Day Back

Today was my first day of second term, and I am back at the law school after the least restful Winter Break ever.

That said, if I am not fully rejuvenated, I am recovered enough to appreciate the fresh start of a second term. I have two new classes, Property and Constitutional Law, as well as last semester's carry-overs, Legal Reseach and Writing, Torts, and Contracts.

Tonight, if I have time before we raid, I'm running for school supplies!