YA contemporary queer rom-commish hate-to-love story. Originated, or so the rumour goes, as a Rory/Paris *Gilmore Girls* fanfic, and you can see those roots, but it has been turned into quite good YA. I thought one of the central characters (Rachel) felt a bit over-the-top and a bit caricatured early on, though less so as …
Literary paranormal thriller set in 1990 in a small southern Ontario border town that once had a famous amusement park. At the start, the haunted main character reminded me in attitude and sensibility of a more sombre version of the titular character from TV’s Wynonna Earp, with her mouthy ways, her personal and sexual recklessness, …
A book by a life-long activist and retired scholar thinking through the many varieties of a kind of moment familiar to anyone invested in questions of justice and liberation: When we know we could speak, we should speak, perhaps at least part of us wants to speak, and yet we remain silent. This might be …
Middle-grade contemporary. A 12 year-old girl – Ivy, younger sister of one, older sister of baby twins, gifted but shy and closed-off artist – whose family loses their home to a tornado at the beginning of the book navigating post-disaster stress, topsy-turvy family dynamics, and figuring out who she is. And, of course, trying to …
A collection of essays by Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott. I’ve encountered her writing online from time to time in the last few years and thought highly of it every time, so I was very excited to hear she had a debut collection coming out. I was not disappointed. These essays are strongly grounded in memoir, …
Book two of four in Okorafor’s series featuring a young human woman who decides to follow her prodigious mathematical abilities and become the first of her insular people to travel to a distant solar system and attend the galaxy’s greatest university. The first book was about her decision to go and the unexpected sequence of …
A really great little book combining movement history and radical analysis. The goal seems to be to clarify some current debates by creating a resource to allow a more robust understanding of the Combahee River Collective, whose famous statement from the 1970s is both a crucial document in the Black feminist tradition and also foundational …
The latest from Mariko Tamaki, a writer of prose and comics whose work I have enjoyed for a long time. This one is a graphic novel – teen heartbreak in slow motion, and a young woman’s move from bad decisions and the drama of her dysfunctional on-again-off-again first queer love to a friend- and community-rich …
The excellent second book in an excellent sff trilogy. It had been a while since I read the first one, so it took a few chapters for me to get my head back into it, but once I did…great stuff. The world building continues to be sophisticated and gripping. I particularly appreciate that it is …
Essays by a Canadian now living in New York. Makes heavy use of sequential illustrative specifics to create feel, meaning, narrative beyond the linear flow of the words themselves, a technique I like and gravitate towards myself (though am not nearly as good at as she is). Particularly liked the earlier, longer, and more stylistically …