![]() ![]() The reader knows better, but young Jeanne wanders through training confused about why the church is so strict about “particular friendships” and what all the blushing and hand-holding is about between nuns she knows. Cordova as a postulant is hopelessly naive. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of that. This isn’t as scandalous as the subtitle “A Lesbian Nun Story” would have you believe. It also ended up being an interesting prologue to When We Were Outlaws: I wouldn’t have guessed that passionate lesbian activist spent her childhood yearning to be a nun. Cordova wrote a memoir about her activism titled When We Were Outlaws which I reviewed at the Lesbrary previously, so I knew that her writing style agree with me. Is it surprising that lesbians are over-represented in that number? In addition to this being a lesbian nun book, it’s also by an author I already enjoy. It actually makes total sense: historically, at least in the Western world, one of the few avenues that women had available to them if they didn’t want to get married to men and have children was to become a nun. ![]() I love that there are multiple books on the subject. I will admit, I find the idea of lesbian nuns fascinating. ![]()
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![]() ![]() This is definitely one of the better YA short story collections I have read. For fans of Neil Gaiman’s Unnatural Creatures and Ameriie’s New York Times –bestselling Because You Love to Hate Me. From fantasy to science fiction to contemporary, from romance to tales of revenge, these stories will beguile readers from start to finish. A young woman takes up her mother’s mantle and leads the dead to their final resting place. A young man learns the true meaning of sacrifice. Two sisters transform into birds to escape captivity. Myers, Cindy Pon, Aisha Saeed, Shveta Thakrar, and Alyssa Wong. Compiled by We Need Diverse Books’s Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman, the authors included in this exquisite collection are: Renée Ahdieh, Sona Charaipotra, Preeti Chhibber, Roshani Chokshi, Aliette de Bodard, Melissa de la Cruz, Julie Kagawa, Rahul Kanakia, Lori M. Fifteen bestselling and acclaimed authors reimagine the folklore and mythology of East and South Asia in short stories that are by turns enchanting, heartbreaking, romantic, and passionate. Star-crossed lovers, meddling immortals, feigned identities, battles of wits, and dire warnings: these are the stuff of fairy tale, myth, and folklore that have drawn us in for centuries. ![]() ![]() ![]() As it turns out, the mother of Samantha had been less than faithful to her lawfully wedded husband and the news has just been broken. However, things aren’t wont to stay as they are, but more often than not things take dramatic turns without any kind of warning. She had her own merry band of friends, she went out and had fun when night fell, and everything was just fine and dandy. She had a boyfriend with whom she had been together for a lengthy period so far and they were having a pretty great relationship. Samantha was living a rather normal life, with no larger worries on the horizon. Now, let’s meet Samantha and the Kade brothers. The novel has quite a few things to say about us as human beings and the decent thing for us to do is to just have a listen. No, it is a remarkable novel with a potent story, an interesting, attention-grabbing cast of characters, and it is not a volume that disappoints. It is not a typical fluffy romance that is there just to make the reader feel good for the length of the novel and have no intention of ever picking up. Fallen Crest High, the novel, is the first in the series and it was published in the year of 2012. The series is composed of a total of seven novels and a couple of tie-ins, too. It is a part of Tijan’s well-known and beloved series called Fallen Crest High. ![]() ![]() This is undoubtedly one of the best Tijan Meyer novels that readers have been blessed to read. ![]() ![]() Fatima, an elegant Persian captive, will transform her desire for revenge into an unbreakable loyalty. ![]() Their daughter, the fierce Alaqai, will ride and shoot an arrow as well as any man. Temujin will return and make Borte his queen, yet it will take many women to safeguard his fragile new kingdom. When she seeks comfort in the arms of aristocratic traveler Jamuka, she discovers he is the blood brother of Temujin, the man who agreed to marry her and then abandoned her long before they could wed. ![]() But it is the women who stand beside him who ensure his triumph.Īfter her mother foretells an ominous future for her, gifted Borte becomes an outsider within her clan. In the late twelfth century, across the sweeping Mongolian grasslands, brilliant, charismatic Temujin ascends to power, declaring himself the Great, or Genghis, Khan. ![]() ![]() ![]() Johnson's latest novel, "Tree of Smoke," is the same kind of beast. Many critics, apparently flummoxed by Johnson's abrupt shift from minimalism to maximalism, missed the underlying pattern and declared the book a big mess. ![]() His widely misunderstood and woefully underappreciated novel "Already Dead" is a symphony of malevolence and chaos harnessed to a baroque but exquisitely executed plot. ![]() Knowing and loving those stories has made it difficult for lazy readers to grasp what Johnson has accomplished since. "Jesus' Son" turned out to be unforgettable, which hasn't always worked to Johnson's advantage. Once upon a time, Denis Johnson published a collection of stories called "Jesus' Son," flinty shards of lowlife illuminated by the phosphorous glow of the author's despairing faith or faith in despair (it's often hard to tell which). ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats is Zink's faux-translation of Shats's 1998 novel Lashut El Hashkia ("Sailing Towards the Sunset"). ![]() Now, this tongue-in-cheek homage is available to Nell's growing readership for the first time, accompanied by a second dazzling and imaginative work that breathes-at Shats's request-the perfumed air of the Old Europe and stars a figure very much like Shats. Unable to read his Hebrew, she was forced to start from scratch. Years ago, Nell Zink resolved to write a book for her friend, the Israeli novelist Avner Shats, that would mirror his remarkable style. From the brilliant and incisive author of Mislaid-"a writer of extraordinary talent and range" (Jonathan Franzen) whose "capacity for inventions is immense" (BookForum)-comes a new collection of her earliest work: two wildly funny novellas ( Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats and European Story for Avner Shats) available in one compact volume. ![]() ![]() One-Handed Catch is an enjoyable read on the popular theme of overcoming adversity. While the rosy worldview may be slightly exaggerated, there's a small-town interconnectedness between the episodic chapters that will keep the pages turning. His mother's fierce attempts to keep her son independent and his father's silent guilt round out the family picture that feels immediate in many ways, even though the story is set in 1946. Norm's inner voice is generally calm, and his jocular exchanges with his friend Leon provide comic relief. The gruesome accident is the only jarring note in this otherwise light, humorous tale. The climax is, of course, the big game and Norm's chance to prove himself to his peers and community. He then faces the challenges of one-handed shoe tying, band practice, and his dream of being a baseball player. On the Fourth of July, while helping his dad in the store, he gets his hand caught in the meat grinder and loses it. ![]() ![]() ![]() Set just after World War II, Auch's novel tells of 11-year-old Norm, whose family owns a meat market. ![]() ![]() ![]() There’s a reason that the most abundant writer in the language was so abundant in puns: words, like Bottom’s dream, are bottomless. ![]() Being accidental, they are like free money-nature’s charity. Puns are part of the careless abundance of creation, the delicious surplus of life, and, therefore, fundamentally joyful. On the other hand, everyone secretly loves a pun, and, wonderfully, the worst are often as funny as the best, as the great punster Nabokov knew, because the genre is so democratically debased. They lurk, pallidly hibernating, inside fortune cookies and Christmas crackers the groan is the pun’s appropriate unit of appreciation. Puns are accidental echoes, random likenesses thrown out by our lexical cosmos. They are essentially found, not made discovered after the fact rather than intended before it. If you are tired of puns, are you tired of life? Puns are easy to disdain. Words aren’t stable in Smith’s fiction: as in Shakespeare, everything is mutable. ![]() ![]() This time he's up against something the likes of which he's never seen-on or off the battlefield. ![]() Nothing is as it seems, and time's running out.Ĭharlie Madison has encountered more than his share of unusual suspects in the past. In the process, he uncovers an isolated facility and an off-the-books operation with the potential to destabilize the United World government.ĭetermined to find the truth before Blackshirts eliminate every shred of evidence, Madison must fight to stay alive, facing trigger-happy robots and a genetic monstrosity intent on putting him out of commission. What begins as a search for a rebellious youth leads Madison out into the desert Wastes where he encounters a gang of marauders looking for an easy mark and secretive Federal agents tasked with detaining political activists. When an old friend from Little Tokyo asks for help locating his missing nephew, detective Charlie Madison takes the case. ![]() ![]() ![]() Better yet it is written by a 17-year-old girl Fuka-Eri who is beautiful. ![]() It is raw, needs a lot of work, but has captivated his heart. Into Tengo’s life comes a manuscript he is to judge for a literary competition called Air Chrysalis. Back then Aomame was living with Witness parents and living a strict religious life, Tengo himself was forced to go house to house with his subscription collecting father every Sunday, always missing the pleasures of childhood. It has affected both of them for the next twenty years. By chance Tengo and Aomame, although complete strangers in Tokyo as adults, were once connected when they were ten years old by one simple moment when he held her hand at school. Tengo wants to be a writer but is being strung along by an unscrupulous publisher and gets by teaching Math at a Crammer. ![]() She teaches women self-defence and in private dispatches abusers to an early grave. It was a natural progression for her in a world where men behave badly to women. His writing is spare and his characters are almost never heroic and indeed often tortured by self-doubt, but somehow they get under your skin and his two leads in this tale are no different.Īomame (Green Peas) is a fitness instructor and part-time assassin. ![]() |
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