In case you haven’t encountered her on the internet, Lindy West is a writer and comedian who battles trolls–the kind that dwell on Twitter instead of beneath bridges. She’s also an audaciously loud, unapologetically fat woman in a world that prefers its women to be quiet and thin. I identified with a lot of what West wrote about in Shrill. Her lifelong struggle with body image issues, her journey to find her voice as a writer, and–most recently–her incredible screw-up of a freelance project. Today, […]
Historical Fantasy Takes a Weird Turn
I finally got around to re-reading Betraying Season, the sequel to Bewitching Season, and now I remember why I was so reluctant to tackle this one again. Not only is it not particularly good, but it’s also weird. If the first book is a pleasant afternoon tea in a sunlit parlor, then the sequel is more like gnawing on stale fried chicken by the light of the full moon–odd, unsatisfying, and more than a little off-putting to witness. After her twin sister marries at the […]
Actual Improvement or Stockholm Syndrome? Books 4-6 of Juliet Blackwell’s Witchcraft Mystery Series
After reading (and not particularly enjoying) the first three books in Juliet Blackwell’s ongoing Witchcraft Mystery series, I had decided to give them up. By the third one, I was mostly hate-reading anyway, curious to see how crummy these stories would get. But…well, I’d already put the fourth volume, In a Witch’s Wardrobe, on hold at the library, and when it was automatically delivered to my Kindle, I read it anyway. And then something surprising happened–it was actually pretty good. Some of the more annoying […]
Old-School Horror for Kids
When I was a kid, my dad and I read books together. It’s a bittersweet memory, since we’ve been estranged for most of my adult life. My favorite author then was John Bellairs, who wrote Gothic horror set during the era of his own childhood in the 1950s. The early editions had covers and sometimes illustrations by Edward Gorey, and between Bellairs and Gorey, I grew up with a lifelong love of the macabre. This weekend, I had to do an assignment for my editing […]