Fair warning: this is the fourth and final book in this series. Spoilers for the series are a hazard.
This love story does not have a happy ending
They’re like great trees, these violins. Like those from which they’re made. They live through epochs. Min Kym fell in love for the first time as a young child with a violin. Parental expedience demanded that she play either trumpet or violin as those were the only instructors available in the same time slot as Kym’s older sister’s piano lesson. She was immediately taken with the instrument. In the week between settling on the violin and receiving her first, she cut out a paper violin […]
Can we talk about California as the Hellmouth?
The Epic Crush of Genie Lo is the story of a high school girl who learns that it’s not enough that she has to work her butt off to get into an Ivy and please her traditional Chinese mother. Now it turns out she has to prevent some of the worst demons of Chinese mythology from eating the people of the Bay Area. Can a girl get a break? I can’t remember where I stumbled over the synopsis for Genie Lo, but it has been […]
Sing loud, sing proud
Journalist Tim Falconer loves music. He glories in concerts and plays albums on repeat until the neighbors complain. Unfortunately, like most of us, he’s pretty sure he’s a bad singer. Falconer decides to do something about that by signing up for singing lessons, and then learns the truth: he’s not just a bad singer, he’s diagnosed as tone deaf. As Falconer explains in the book, “tone deafness” is not really a thing, but there’s a real diagnosis behind it: “amusia”. Only about 2% of folks […]