genericwhitegirl

A new spin on an old idea

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia

September 29, 2025 by genericwhitegirl Leave a Comment

Moreno Garcia does an amazing job setting the right mood in this newer gothic tale. Set in Mexico in the 1950’s, you forget that the world is more modern than what Noemi Taboada experiences. Having grown up in Mexico City to an affluent family, Noemi’s life is more about finding a worthy suitor and getting married than education or developing skills to join the workforce. Despite this, Noemi is a confident, charming, smart woman who would like to study at the University. While she enjoys […]

Ridiculous, as expected

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

September 14, 2025 by genericwhitegirl Leave a Comment

Grady Hendrix and I have an on-again off-again relationship. I didn’t like Horrorstor, but I appreciated the premise and the book itself in terms of the illustrations included. I enjoyed How to Sell a Haunted House enough that I decided to try The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and give him another chance. I will give him credit for being an author that I picked a random book from because of name recognition. So there’s that working in his favor. But we are […]

Together we can be worth more than the sum of our parts

Grown Women by Sarai Johnson

June 20, 2025 by genericwhitegirl Leave a Comment

Sarai Johnson teaches writing and literature courses at Howard and American Universities in the DC Area, and apparently wrote Grown Women, her first novel, in her free time. In my free time I do things like sleep, or sit around and do nothing, or make lists of things I should be doing. Okay okay, I also read the product of other people’s free time. Which bring us full circle to Grown Women, a novel about four generations of women, with the story beginning in 1974 […]

Like Lord of the Flies at Disneyland

FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven

March 22, 2025 by genericwhitegirl 1 Comment

If you strand a bunch of (mostly) 20 something year old adults who work in a theme park for 35 days during a natural disaster, what do you think would happen? If you’re hoping for Temptation Island level hijinks, you’ll be sorely disappointed. But if you’re leaning toward murder and heads on a stick level violence, then this is the book for you! Think Lord of the Flies, but with adults and multiple tribes. This book works for a lot of reasons. First, you have […]

One of My Year’s Best

Circe by Madeline Miller

March 22, 2025 by genericwhitegirl Leave a Comment

Whether or not you know anything about Greek Mythology is irrelevant when it comes to reading Circe. You could go in cold, like I did, or with a vast knowledge of the myths. If, like me, you thought of Greek myths as being about otherwordly beings who have little in common with mortals, you may be pleasantly surprised by this book. Miller makes the gods human, accessible, fallible, and vulnerable. And I guess anyone who knows anything about these stories might already know that, but […]

I’m not sure we’re better off in this universe either…

The Power by Naomi Alderman

March 15, 2025 by genericwhitegirl 2 Comments

This is a story that Alderman describes as feminist science fiction – a type of speculative fiction that I like to call a “what-if” story. The Power examines how power comes in various forms – whether physical, societal, something you are born into, something you can take from someone…and the list goes on. Alderman explores what happens when women develop an organ called a skein that enables them to deliver electrical shocks. Their inherent ability to physically overcome any man changes the balance of power […]

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