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 …
Feminist philosophy translated from Italian. Since ancient Greece, philosophy in the West has been predominantly centred on thought and on the visual, the semantic, the disembodied, the Said, and the reified. Cavarero begins from the observation that, when we speak, prior to whatever content is conveyed by our words, the singular character of the speaker’s …
A mental health-related self-help book that I heard about because a friend posted this interview with the author connecting it to writing practice, and it was enough to intrigue me: http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/…/writing-brain-exercise-i…/. I have some significant misgivings, which I talk about below, but there are some core practices in this book that feel solid, useful to me, …
A book of essays – genre-bending ones – by someone who is “sometimes called a poet, sometimes an essayist, sometimes a lyric essayist, sometimes a prose poet” (101). Some are about writing, many are about life, and most feel like they follow closely the fluid movement of the author’s mind. Some cleverness and some lovely …