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Legends of Royalty

June 6, 2011 at 5:00 pm in Books

What do you think of when you hear the word “history”? Memorizing lists of Roman emperors, trying to keep Henry VIII’s wives straight, or just the sheer number of North American battles named after otherwise inconspicuous geographic landmarks? You’re not alone, but you’re also missing out.

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Feeding the Hunger

June 1, 2011 at 2:00 pm in Books

Or, “How Katniss Everdeen Climbed Out of Her Book and Ignited a Real-Life Conflict.”
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College Days

May 23, 2011 at 9:00 pm in Books

I sometimes find there’s a lack of fiction written by and about my age range. The YA fiction genre is explosive, but while I enjoy a lot of it, I’m just beyond the age where I actually relate in a personal way to the characters and their stories.

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Three Little Words

May 23, 2011 at 3:30 pm in Writing

I’m about to write a post that will probably make my copyeditor cringe. After all, she is a copyeditor, and it’s her job to be picky about words. As readers and writers, I’m sure many of you reading this piece will do a little cringing yourselves.

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“Blowing through the Blueness”: Vincent and the Doctor, Depression, and Invisible Monsters

May 19, 2011 at 6:00 pm in Mental Illness

I’m a Whovian. I’m pretty obvious about my love of Doctor Who most of the time, and if you’ve known me long, you also know that the Series 5 episode “Vincent and the Doctor” is among my absolute favorite episodes. It’s just so rich; full of details and layers that make it both a critical piece of the season and a fantastic stand-alone story. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, get on it! Because below you may find spoilers. Read the rest of this entry →

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How to Stage an International Move So You Don’t Pull Your Hair Out: a Ladyguide

May 18, 2011 at 9:30 pm in Ladyguides

In a disastrous week of calamity (I’m exaggerating because I’m exhausted), my husband and I have just moved from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois to Toronto, Ontario. Really, we should have known when the 14-hour overnight drive with a U-Haul was extremely easy that the rest of the move was going to go painfully awry. Please, please learn from our mistakes (and the lucky things we managed to do right).

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Hate List

May 16, 2011 at 9:00 pm in Books

I tried for ages to think of a better title for this post than just the title of the book. Sometimes they come to me, and sometimes they don’t. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised about this one though because Jennifer Brown’s Hate List hit really close to home. I knew it would, of course, and it’s spent months in my to-read pile waiting for me to be ready to read it.

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Delusions of Gender

May 9, 2011 at 9:00 pm in Books

We’ve all been buffeted in the past few years with claims that women and men grow out of boys and girls who are “hard-wired” at birth to be boys and girls and men and women that fill stereotypical roles. Based on what I know about the people reading Persephone Magazine, I expect many if not most of you have spent a lifetime fighting that prescriptivism and the expectations that come along with it, so I hope you’ll take heart!

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The Good News Out of the Canadian Election

May 5, 2011 at 6:00 pm in Politics

The Carey house slept fitfully on Monday night, our last night in our Midwestern U.S. home under the same media blackout that kept Canadians in later time zones from knowing the results of polls in the Atlantic and eastern Canadian provinces. We woke, of course, to several surprises (though they’re currently pending recount in a number of ridings, and some of this may change). Read the rest of this entry →

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On Going Home, and Discovering New Truths There

May 2, 2011 at 9:00 pm in Books

“The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.”

-Madeleine L’Engle, in The New York Times, 1985

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A Discovery of Witches

April 25, 2011 at 9:00 pm in Books

A Discovery of Witches is one of those books that’s been making the rounds of recommendations, and shows up in airport book shops. Read the rest of this entry →
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Authors, Readers, and Review Philosophies

April 18, 2011 at 9:00 pm in Books

As I sat down at the beginning of this week to decide what my review was going to be, I found myself floundering. I didn’t have anything in my to-read pile that seemed to fit, and nothing I’d read recently but hadn’t reviewed seemed adequate, either. As Friday approached and with it my self-imposed draft deadline, I realized I simply wasn’t going to have one. Read the rest of this entry →

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Favorite LGBT Teen Fiction (and Yes, I Meant All Four of Those Letters)

April 11, 2011 at 9:00 pm in Books

The world of LGBT-friendly fiction for teens and young adults is slowly growing, and certainly we expect most newly-published teen fiction to avoid homophobia, though heteronormativity and transphobia are both alarmingly common in the genre. Unfortunately for LGBT teens, though, most of these books, even the “friendly” ones, are written about LGBT teens but for straight readers, with an emphasis on promoting tolerance, or displaying the struggles against bullying, or otherwise trying to illuminate the minds of straight kids to the lives of gay kids. Tropes abound, and I’ve only found a few LGBT YA novels that I really think do a great deal in promoting not just tolerance, but show acceptance of LGBT teens not just as factors in the straight kids’ lives, but as complex, complete characters in their own right. Because April is LGBT Awareness Month, I decided to share some of my favorites.

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Fictional Non-Fiction: “The Social Animal” by David Brooks

April 4, 2011 at 9:00 pm in Books

“The happiest story you’ll ever read,” claims the book jacket, and while I don’t know if I’d go that far, David Brooks’ The Social Animal is definitely an engaging read, particularly when you consider the depth of what Brooks attempts to do. Read the rest of this entry →

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Oh, Canada! An Election Primer for the Otherwise Clueless

March 31, 2011 at 8:00 pm in Politics

I’m a U.S. American living in Illinois but (as of last Wednesday) married to a Canadian and making plans to move to Toronto in less than two months. The past couple of weeks have been really tumultuous in Canadian politics, and as comfortable as I am with the intricacies of the U.S. political system and the generalities of many others, the process of an election in a new country has been surprisingly hard to wrap my head around. My poor American brain with its overloaded political-awareness lobe couldn’t quite deal.

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