You know that a book is good when you highlight/mark something in the acknowledgements of the author. Depression & Other Magic Tricks by Sabrina Benaim is a collection of poems dealing with depression: thoughts, what she wishes others knew, conversations she had, the struggle and finally, the hope they have that they will be well someday. While the poem “Explaining My Depression to My Mother” has become the poem associated with Benaim it was her poem “On Releasing Light” that I got the “feelz” from. […]
“We Can Handle Monsters. We Can’t Handle Our Neighbors Doing These Things”
I saw MrsLangdonAlger’s review of this novel and was basically sold on the description of this one as an angry The Lovely Bones. It is but there are also distinct differences – the rapist/killer isn’t a creepy older neighbor but a peer of Ellie’s. The Lovely Bones was sad and beautifully written but by making I Stop Somewhere involve a peer, it is also very much a condemnation of rape culture, a testimony to how early girls learn their lack of importance and how early […]
Nothing to do with turtles, really
I don’t profess to be the picture of mental health, but overall I’d say I don’t have a lot of experience with depression, anxiety, or any other mental disorders. Maybe it’s my WASPy suppressive tendencies? In our YA book club, the woman who suggested John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down described it as “the best depiction of anxiety” she’d ever seen, so I was intrigued. Turtles tells the story of Aza, a young woman dealing (poorly, but trying) with serious anxiety and OCD. Aza’s […]
You Can Never Leave the Island
Since I drove up to visit my parents’ new house last weekend (and to catch up with my cat), I actually had a long enough drive for once to make progress in an audiobook (“thanks” to traffic, it ended up being much more progress than I expected). I think I bought this when it was an Audible deal of the day, and I am so glad I did. It was an enjoyable story, easy to listen to, though I do feel that the narrator’s voice […]
A surface read, but an enjoyable one
I read Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone series last year and didn’t think all that much of it. It read like bad fanfic, despite being more or less original. So I didn’t have the highest of expectations going into Strange the Dreamer, and got to be pleasantly surprised. I’ve even got a future hold on book 2 at the library set up. If you couldn’t tell by the title and cover, this is another young adult fantasy about a young person discovering their place in […]
Don’t Expect Logical Actions from Racists
Thank you so much to caitycat! I doubt I would have stumbled across this novel without her review, and I thoroughly enjoyed it despite some minor complaints about potential red herrings or loose threads. The novel is set near Baltimore in 1880. The North never won the Civil War because of the zombie outbreak that followed the Battle of Gettysburg, leading to a quick reconciliation between the two sides to face the common threat to the survival of humanity. Slaves were declared free, but, for […]
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