Are you non-compliant? Do you fit in your box? Are you too fat, too thin, too loud, too shy, too religious, too secular, too prudish, too sexual, too queer, too black, too brown, too whatever-it-is-they’ll-judge-you-for-today? You may just belong on Bitch Planet When you get a load of Kelly Sue DeConnick’s dystopian world — earth as run by a patriarchy called “the Fathers”– you might prefer to be on the Auxilliary Compliance Outpost, also known as “Bitch Planet.” In a not-too-distant future, for reasons that […]
Whacks and Whacks and Whacks
…only a fool would reject the comfort of routine for weeks of murder and monsters. Kindle location 2065 This sequel to Maplewood meets and, in some ways, exceeds its predecessor.
An Unexpected View of WWII Berlin
Underground in Berlin is an unusual memoir of a Jewish woman in WWII Germany. Marie Jalowicz Simon avoided the concentration camps by going into hiding in Berlin. With the help of both Jews and Germans, Communists and even Nazis she managed to find shelter and meager food from 1941, when she became “illegal”, until the end of the war. Given that many memoirs by Jews from this period deal with the Resistance and/or survival of the camps, Jalowicz Simon’s memoir is quite remarkable — a […]
Beware the Sea Anemone
Pretty Baby is a dark, suspenseful drama featuring a do-gooder, her career-obsessed spouse and a runaway teen with a baby. Kubica keeps the reader guessing not only about her characters’ motives, but also about the crime that seems to have been committed, and whether or not any of our three narrators are telling the whole truth. The novel starts from Heidi’s point of view. It’s a rainy, dreary early spring day in Chicago and Heidi is on her way to work where she runs a […]