Contemporary fiction. A young widow in the city of Suryam in India witnesses a beautiful woman having a seizure in a park, and ends up drawn into a relationship with the woman and her husband. I picked up the book because of the unconventional relationship at its core, but it also has some things to …
Month: December 2020
Middle-grade fantasy. Book three of the Nevermoor series. Features Morrigan Crow, a serious and sensible girl growing up in an absurd and fantastical realm, along with lots of strange creatures and magic and terrible villains and hijinks. As I’ve observed before, it is enough like that famous series by She Who Must Not Be Named …
[The following is a rebroadcast of an episode of Talking Radical Radio that originally aired in June 2020.] Souheil Benslimane describes himself as a father, a partner, and an illegalized and criminalized migrant who lives on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin territory (also known as Ottawa). Since his release from prison in 2018, he has been …
YA contemporary. Queer Black girl in a mostly white, mostly well-off town in the midwestern US doesn’t get the big scholarship she’ll need to attend the university program of her dreams, so she decides to go after an alternative source of scholarship dollars by entering the superintense prom king/queen competition for which her school is …
A lot of Serious People who do Serious Things when it comes to knowledge tend to treat stories and other kinds of experience-based narratives as inherently suspect and not terribly useful. Some do this from a sort of empiricist place, an unreconstructed Enlightment approach to knowledge in which our best approximation of accuracy and reliability, …
Sci-fi. A novella by the author of *The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet* (which I loved) and its sequels, though set in a different universe. The story of a small group of 22nd century astronauts on one of the early crewed voyages beyond the solar system. They travel in suspended animation over years …
[EDIT: Later in the day this episode was released, it was announced that this campaign had in fact won a major victory! Check out this media release for more details.] Taylor Maton is the conservation outreach coordinator with CPAWS Northern Alberta, a regional chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. In recent months, the …
YA fantasy, nominally, but it overflows both parts of that label. A teenage girl who grows roses from her wrist and who spilled mysteriously out of a water tower when she was five, a teenage boy who paints moons and hangs them from every tree, the bond between them, the family of four red-headed sisters …
Annnnd that’s a wrap. Posting and promo labour still have to happen when they have to happen, of course, but the one remaining original episode of Talking Radical Radio for 2020 and the first for 2021 are in the can, and the last interview of the year happened on Friday. So I’m off until January …
Just finished my final Talking Radical Radio interview of 2020. I spoke with Kota and Maya of Japanese Canadians for Social Justice. Listen for it in January!