Doctor Elizabeth Ford is a psychiatrist who has worked on and overseen the prison hospital psychiatric wards at Bellevue Hospital in New York since 2000. In this memoir, Dr. Ford describes the conditions, staff and patients in these wards as well as her own personal journey in working with them. Much of what she describes is frustrating and tragic: the lack of space and consistent treatment for those in need, seeing the same prisoners cycle back into her wards over and over, stories of individual […]
When you dedicate a book to Han Solo, odds are I’m going to like it.
The CBR hivemind has been quite divided over Sleeping Giants, the first book in Sylvain Neuvel’s proposed trilogy (The Themis Files) about gigantic alien robots discovered on earth after being buried for thousands of years. I really enjoyed the interview/journal aspect of the storytelling and found the plot to be intriguing and fast-paced. I liked the confusion that the scientists were facing, and that there were people in Washington who had information, but weren’t all that willing to share it…unless Kung Pao chicken was involved. […]
We are not all heroes
I was inspired to write this review by this tweet. YA is an interesting genre. Nix’s previous books (which I adore) have given us a very typical YA heroines. They are morally clear, they have self doubt which they work through, and they are generally good. In Clariel – which a lot of Nix fans didn’t like – we don’t get that. Clariel is a prequel to Sabriel – Nix’s first “Old Kingdom” book. It’s set a couple of hundred years in the past. Clariel […]
“Believing the strangest things. Loving the Alien”
Octavia Butler is a name that pops up frequently in searches for sci fi writers who aren’t white and male. Naturally when the first book in the Xenogenesis Trilogy popped up on Kindle for sale, I grabbed it up. While Dawn contains many of the same ingredients as a lot of sci fi classics (alien races, the destruction of humanity) the finished product is very different. Lilith Iyapo has lost everything. Shortly after her husband and son are killed in a car accident, humanity destroys […]