I’ve been sitting on this review for several days, trying to let the experience of rereading The Half-Blood Prince settle in my mind so I could look at it from a larger angle. The plot of the story is crucial; it shows how the war could so easily fall to the side of Voldemort, and sets up the game plan for defeating him. But it isn’t the only crucial aspect of the narrative, this is also a story of being on the cusp of adulthood, […]
Like an early draft of your favorite suffragettes in romance, with letters
This week in the Romance readers back channel one of the many tropes that drives us nuts came up: “this whole manufactured conflict of a couple hundred pages could have been solved by a SINGLE DAMN CONVERSATION.” (h/t kdm). In some ways, that describes the entirety of My Dearest Enemy by Connie Brockway. At the very core of Romance novels, there is often a single fundamental misunderstanding, and in this one it’s the placing of the two main characters as antagonists to each other by […]
I’d Eat at Chrissy Teigen’s House Any Day
I have been in a bit of a cooking slump. I am tired of my food and desperately missing having a roommate to share that responsibility with or even just tell me what she wants to eat on days I have no inspiration. In addition, leftovers hang around a lot longer, as a recipe that serves four will now last me four days as opposed to two or three. When I saw a review of Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings, billed as “food you’ll actually want to […]
We Are All Too Much Something
We are entering the period of time where the cultural upheaval that Hillary Clinton losing the White House will have on our literary intake. Out early is Anne Helen Petersen formerly of The Hairpin and currently of Buzzfeed, who is known for her incisive long reads on culture, celebrity, and feminism. This book literally grows out of her election night response article “This is How Much America Hates Women” where she began grappling with what last year’s election reaffirmed about American society. Too Fat, Too […]