The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf

Summerlong Peter S. Beagle, 2016 New Release! I received a copy of this book from NetGalley for the purpose of review. Premise: Abe and Joanna like their life. He’s retired, she’s finishing out her career. She has her place in Seattle, but they spend plenty of time at his place on Gardner Island. It’s a quiet, normal life until they meet Lioness. This is not the first book I’ve read set in Seattle since moving here, but it is the most evocative. The city and Puget Sound are beautifully and accurately described. The descriptions are the best part of this book, and they are truly lovely. The picture of the places, the feelings, the people, are all gorgeously nuanced. Lioness is a mysterious young woman who appears working at a restaurant on the island. People are drawn to her, trust her without thinking. Mysterious things happen around her, flowers bloom, animals and children react to her. Joanna’s grown daughter Lily is immediately in love. It’s a melancholy, thought...

Feed (Newsflesh Book 1) Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire), 2010 Challenge Book! Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2016 - Read a horror book Premise: Georgia, Shaun, and Buffy are too young to remember a world without zombies. Their job: to go out and report on it. This has been the summer of Seanan McGuire for me, as I try a little bit of everything. Here writing as Mira Grant, she’s presenting a sci-fi horror story in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak. Society changed forever, but there are still politics and conspiracies and news. And there are bloggers. The three main characters: Georgia, the narrator, her brother Shaun, and their friend Buffy are a blogging team that goes into dangerous territory and reports on what they find. They are part of a community providing both news and entertainment to a population mostly hiding in fortified homes and enclaves. The story follows them as they get a huge opportunity: follow a presidential hopeful around. They jump at the chan...

Last Night, A Superhero Saved My Life Edited by Liesa Mignogna, 2016 Challenge Book! Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2016 - Read a collection of essays Premise: 22 authors write about their relationships with comics and superheroes. Happily or unhappily, the worst piece in this collection is the first. I was so dismayed to read a pale, pathetic piece about how Batman inspired some well-off guy I’m not familiar with to be a writer. There’s a better piece later in the book with the same thrust - superheroes inspired me to be creative. And that’s fine. But boring. The second piece is a raw, passionate, beautifully written essay from a woman whose rage causes her to connect viscerally with the Hulk, and how she eventually walks away from an abusive, toxic family life. The essays are overall interesting and often funny, but there is a bright line between the ones that are about the creative process, or even one I quite liked about a love for Spider-Man and a love for Ma...

Rosemary and Rue (October Daye, Book 1) Seanan McGuire, 2009 Premise: Half-faerie Toby Daye has been trapped by a spell for 14 years while the world went on without her. When an acquaintance calls her for help, her first response is “no,” but Countess Winterrose is not taking no for an answer, and Toby needs help whether she wants it or not. I have been interested in reading more by McGuire since I saw her speak at Emerald City Comic Con, so I’m diving into her urban fantasy series with the first book. This was a really solid read. I really liked the world a lot: the various courts and aspects of faerie society. There’s no info-dumping, you just glimpse the edges of much larger subjects as they arise. There is one scene that deals with a formal presentation to a ruler, and the writing for that is incredibly beautiful. I liked Toby (October); she isn’t unique among paranormal/urban fantasy heroines, but she’s snarky and tough and fun to follow around. My favorite aspect...

No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished (Heartstrikers, Book 3) Rachel Aaron, 2016 Premise: Julius is on top for the moment, but political turmoil in a dragon clan brings out a lot of opportunists. Sequel to Nice Dragons Finish Last and One Good Dragon Deserves Another . Oof. I was so looking forward to this book, that I think it really suffered from my heightened expectations. It’s not bad, per se, it’s just not what I wanted. It’s still well written, in an interesting world. I liked the new characters and the new things we learned about established characters. But I also got two things I wasn’t expecting from this author: realism over story and book six syndrome. In the first case, the book is bogged down by a lot of machinations and conversations and plot points that don’t really progress the bigger plot enough. I felt like a number of the twists and happenings weren’t essential, even though they were things that would have happened in ‘reality,’ given the set-up as it was. ...

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity Julia Serano, 2007, 2016 (new edition) Challenge Book! Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2016 - Read a book by or about a person that identifies as transgender Premise: Scholarship and personal perspective on the interrelationship between attitudes around femininity and discrimination against trans women. I borrowed this book from the library and got only a few chapters in before I decided that I had to buy my own copy so I could highlight all the best passages. I’ve been looking for a book like this, one that articulates so clearly the need to empower femininity. In feminist and liberal spaces, we already question the idea that women can be equal to men only if they act like men (but not too much like men). Yet somehow many of us tend to miss that so much of this attitude can be connected to dismissing girls, along with denigrating traditionally feminine attitudes, interests, and practices. ...

Every Heart a Doorway Seanan McGuire, 2016 Premise: Nancy found the place she belonged. The place she loved more than anything. But she isn’t there anymore, and her parents have sent her to this school, because they don’t believe her when she tells them where she’s been. This fantasy-horror novella is lovely, both heartbreaking and uplifting. The story is about outsiders and belonging, about ideas of good and bad, about compassion and fanaticism. All in under 200 pages. Eleanor West runs a school for children who have returned from journeying in other realms. These latter-day kin to Alice and Dorothy don’t want to adjust to “real” life, they want to go back to the fairylands and underworlds. Each character is intriguing; they each have a reason they went traveling and were changed by their experiences. The ideas and abilities that followed them back to Earth are only part of what makes them different. Nancy can go still as a statue and subsist on little food due to her tra...