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.
Or, “How Katniss Everdeen Climbed Out of Her Book and Ignited a Real-Life Conflict.”
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.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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
A Discovery of Witches is one of those books that’s been making the rounds of recommendations, and shows up in airport book shops.
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 […]
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 […]
“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.
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 […]