Some of which are pretty bad, because Kidston's book collection, she is not so premium.
Brown Girl In The Ring, by Nalo HopkinsVoodoo! Gods! Monsters! Zombies! A dystopian Toronto! Although I found the dialogue a little confusing, this book has pretty much everything a good urban fantasy should have. Plus zombies. Did I mention the zombies? And the mean old ladies with magical powers?* And the graphic death? And the feminism? And the cases of mistaken identity? AND THE ZOMBIES?
Kindred, by Octavia ButlerThis is a book about racism disguised as a book about time travel. It is utterly amazing on both levels. Read it.
Adverbs, by Daniel HandlerDaniel Handler's taken a while to really hit his stride in adult literature, I think-
Watch Your Mouth was disappointing, and I can't even remember
The Basic Eight- but he finally has with
Adverbs. Focusing on the intertwined love lives of a few dozens people- some of whom may or may not be one another- the novel moves back and forth in time, space, and tone. Handler's style is both snappily ironic and totally earnest, and
Adverbs itself is equally divided: it is about how love fails everyone and about how it's the only really important thing in the world. (Also, I think
uncommon_crow would really like it. Just throwin' that out there.)
The Onion Girl, by Charles de LintAn artist named Jilly is seriously injured in a car accident, which throws her into Mabon, a kind of fairyland she's been trying to break into for years. Trying to lose herself in dreams, she learns to come to terms with her abusive past, her guilt over abandoning her sister, and the possibility of paralysis leaving her unable to paint again. I'm still not sure how I felt about this book. On the one hand, Charles de Lint is a really lovely writer and incorporates the fantastic into the everyday in a seamless, understated way that makes me really jealous; on the other hand, I couldn't get into Jilly as a character. Or, rather, I couldn't get into how all the other characters
reacted to Jilly. A protagonist being well-liked is something I can deal with- not everyone can be a twisted anti-hero, because that would be boring as fuck- but half the city (literally) showing up to visit her in the hospital? It got to the point where I groaned every time the point of view switched to anyone who wasn't Jilly or her sister, because it meant I was in for another digression on how Jilly is such an awesome person, like, really, she's so nice, want to hear about all these selfless things she did for the poor and the homeless and the orphans and the kittens and stuff? De Lint's treatment of sexual abuse kind of bothered me as well- although it was easy to tell he empathized with Jilly and wanted his readers to identify with her and her pain, there was an undercurrent of voyeurism there that made it a very discomforting read. It was a good read in spite of that, and I certainly wouldn't encourage anyone
not to read it- de Lint writes some good, meaty fantasy and has the guts to tackle subjects a lot of genre writers don't really address, or use as a cheap plot device.
Affinity, by Sarah WatersWhat I got out of this book: Don't be a lesbian in Victorian England, you will go crazy/become a criminal/go crazy and then become a criminal and then kill yourself because the woman you helped to bust out of jail was using you the whole time and you'll never love again, woe, woe, etc. Okay! Thanks for that, Ms. Waters!
Soul Kitchen, by Poppy Z. BriteRicky and G-man, the cooks who took the world by storm in
Liquor, are back and planning to open a new franchise called Soul Kitchen, which serves comfort food from around the world. After hiring on a man wrongly accused of rape and murder twelve years before things get a little tense; that tension only heightens when you add in Rickey's burgeoning addiction to prescription drugs, G-man's struggle with infidelity, and roughly a thousand other narrative threads that Brite seems eager to drop as soon as she picks them up. Remember how I loved
Liquor? That was because it had a clear, concise plot, well-defined characters, and a sense of humour about itself.
Soul Kitchen has none of those; on top of that, it cannot decide what kind of book it wants to be. A murder mystery? A meditation on race relations in New Orleans? A moral lesson on Why Drugs Are Bad, Use Acupuncture? A straight-up restaurant book? It tries to be all of them at the same time, and ends up being nothing much at all. Also, Brite's history of failing at characters of colour continues: not only does the only prominent black character in the book die at the end, but a good portion of the book is spent criticizing this Crazy Angry Black Guy being mean to all the Nice White Folks Just Trying To Help Him Out. I mean, what's a dozen years of wrongful imprisonment when someone offers you a
job in a kitchen, man?
The Holy, by Daniel QuinnOh, Daniel Quinn. Please stop trying to write books with plots and characters and dialogue (and, uh, Satanic rituals) and go back to your telepathic gorillas, please.
Stardust: The David Bowie Story, by Henry Edwards and Tony ZanettaThis book taught me that David Bowie was a cockhead. And slept with a lot of drag queens. V. informative! (Hilariously, since it was written in 1986 it ends by noting that hey, David Bowie is gonna be in this movie with muppets and stuff sometime soon, he'll be wearing tight pants, it'll be awesome! TRUER WORDS, MY FRIENDS, TRUER WORDS.)
Glass, by Ellen HopkinsOh, God.
Okay. Remember
Go Ask Alice and how it was a straight-up hoax book that was written to scare youngsters onto the straight and narrow? Imagine if someone wrote that in the aughts, in the form of a frillion calligrams, and pretended it was their daughter's experiences instead of their own, and you've got
Glass. DON'T DO DRUGS, NOT EVEN ONCE, BECAUSE YOU'LL BECOME HOPELESSLY ADDICTED AND SPEND ALL YOUR BIRTHDAY MONEY ON CRYSTAL METH. ALSO DO NOT HAVE SEX, BECAUSE THEN YOU WILL HAVE A BABY AND GET FAT AND THAT WILL SUCK PRETTY HARD, RIGHT? ALSO MEXICANS ARE DANGEROUS. ALSO WHAT DO LESBIANS DO IN BED, I MEAN SERIOUSLY? ALSO REALLY GUYS, DON'T DO DRUGS, YOU'LL GO TO JAIL FOREVER. OKAY? OKAY.
Tigana, by Guy Gavriel KayDear Mr. Kay:
If you call a vagina a "portal," I am going to laugh at you.
Love and kisses,
Ish
The Five People You Meet In Heaven, by Mitch AlbomReading this book was like watching a movie- I enjoyed it, but I was still waiting for the credits to roll.
* Mean old ladies with magical powers make me happy. Just ask Granny Weatherwax.