I liked this well enough, but I’m beginning to wonder if Talley isn’t a one-hit wonder for me. I LOVED her first book, but the ones I’ve read after have just been meh. I’m especially sad because as soon as I heard the premise for this book I immediately wanted it in my hands (a young girl from our time who is a lesbian begins researching lesbian pulp fiction from the 1950s for a school project, and fixates on a particular author, and the narrative is split between […]
YA Historical Fiction with a Lot to Dissect
“For eighteen years I’ve believed what other people told me about what was right and what was wrong. From now. I’m deciding.” I have seen a few very favorable reviews of this YA novel already, and I must say that I too really liked it for both the clear writing style, but also the handling of the serious subject matter therein, though I do think that perhaps one side of the story was much stronger than the other. Lies We Tell Ourselves shifts between the […]
First love, gender, and other complicated things
Sometimes, a random internet search leads you to some awesome places. One night two weeks ago, I was in the library. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to read, so I did a search for Southern Lesbian fiction. There were no new Rita Mae Brown books (that weren’t fox or cat related) and most of titles the query returned, the library didn’t have. (I know, shocking that a fairly conservation, Northern NJ, small-town library wasn’t overflowing with Southern Lesbian lit, right?) However, they did […]
And so, lesbian Macbeth.
K, so first if you haven’t read Macbeth, um, why? Go do that. Second, this book is a pretty good adaptation of it, though not perfect. Talley translates the Scottish kings, lords, and various witches into the haunted setting of a boarding school that used to be a plantation in the antebellum south. Kings become teenage girls, witches become spirits, and what was straightforward murder in the original play becomes something more complicated here. Ultimately, this book was enjoyable, but I thought the first half […]