The Bees is a very weird and cool book that’s a third-person narrative of a literal bee, navigating the dystopian politics of her hive. There are a lot of tropes in here that are not exactly unique to this book among the glut of other dystopian fiction, but the framing of the insect colony is novel. While, naturally, some liberties are taken with facts, the structure and major events of the novel are based on known entomology of bees and how hives operate. All that […]
Ghost Boys through history
First, Ghost Boys does seem like a fairly balanced look how the shooting of Jerome, a 12-year-old boy, by a white police officer effects not only Jerome’s family, but the officer and his family as well. Perhaps, it is tilted a little more in Jerome’s favor, but that is to be expected. Second, this will bring up the feelings and thoughts we have on the subjects presented: Someone at the hearing yells, “Black Lives Matters.” And the father of Jerome is going to sue the […]
The perfect ending to a spellbinding series
For the first time in my life, it turns out that I know someone who knows someone, which is how I managed to get my eager little hands on a pre-release copy of The Winter of the Witch, the final instalment in Katherine Arden’s fantastic Winternight Trilogy. And what a treat it was. Taking everything I loved from The Bear and the Nightingale (and missed most in The Girl in the Tower, namely the chyerti of the forest and the homestead) and ramping it all […]
“There is the same unforgettable alchemy to being dislikeable as to being universally loved.”
I found myself in a really spectacular bookstore last spring, and all I wanted to do was buy ALL THE BOOKS, and then maybe take all the books to a nearby cafe and read them and drink coffee and watch people until it was too dark to read, and then do that every day. I could not, sadly, do all of those things, so I consoled myself by buying only two books, and then reading them in the waiting room in the hospital, which was […]