Becky: I don’t think I’d want to be known as the Colon Lady. Unless you’re talking about punctuation. In which case, I’d rather be the Semi-Colon Lady.
Rachel: No, I get semi-colons. You’re the Em-Dash Lady.
Me: Fair enough.
Perhaps our deep emotional attachments to punctuation is part of we both find this so freaking funny. And useful!
I chopped a good five or six inches off my hair yesterday. It’s the shortest it’s ever been now, I’m pretty sure. This is what it looked like when the stylist blowdried it. It, uh, doesn’t look like that when I blowdry it. But whatchagonnado?
Anyhoo.
Two very different books this week: historical romance and contemporary YA.
Mr. Impossible by Loretta Chase
I was really looking forward to this one — I’d already read two of the Carsington Brothers series (Lord Perfect and Miss Wonderful) and found them charming, but both of the people who’d recommended them told me I’d like Mr. Impossible best, because a) it’s basically The Mummy in prose form (without an actual mummy) and b) Rupert is a charming scoundrel.
Basically, the book is about a scholar named Daphne, who has to pretend it’s her brother who’s the genius because no one will accept a woman who’s smarter than they are. But her brother gets kidnapped as they’re studying ancient Egypt, and the only one around who can help is Rupert. She and Rupert set off together and through a series of adventures, they fall in love. He thinks her smarts are hot, she thinks his hotness is hot (and it is!), and they have lots of good sex. Hooray!
My one complaint is that it’s set up very clearly at the beginning of the book that Daphne is the brains, where Rupert is the muscle; Daphne is logical where Rupert is rash. But Daphne spends a lot of the book bursting into tears and missing the obvious, while Rupert picks up on clues and does the actual mystery-solving. While Daphne’s smarts showed through in her scholar-ing (that’s a word now), when it came to the plot itself, it was very much an applied attribute. That said, I loved her character growth as she came to terms with being smart and not being ashamed of it, and began to embrace who she is. And I loved the romance (which is, obviously, kinda key to enjoying the book). She and Rupert are delightful, and I would read a million more books about their adventures.
Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers
I’m honestly not quite sure what to say about this one. It’s really not my genre; while I read lots and lots of YA, very little of it is contemporary and of that, basically none of it is stories about mean girls and social hierarchies, because those are not things I particularly want to read about. But I adore Courtney — her twitter is super fun to follow if you love Lady Gaga or hate werewolves (or both!) — and despite it not being my genre, I enjoyed her debut novel, Cracked Up to Be, quite a bit.
And I can’t say I didn’t enjoy SGA. I read it in one sitting, and stayed up quite a bit past my bedtime to do so. It’s compelling. But it’s definitely a story about mean girls being mean. And not in the Lindsay Lohan-movie way. The book is brutal: it kicks off with an attempted rape, and the antagonists laugh about it and use it as a way to torment the protagonist throughout.
Speaking of the protagonist, Regina: she’s not nice either. She’s not a good person who’s dealing with bad things happening to her; she’s not sympathetic. She was one of the mean girls until she got frozen out, and Summers doesn’t shy away from the fact that Regina is basically exactly the same as the people tormenting her, she’s just on the receiving end for a change. It was definitely interesting; one of the main themes of the book was that everyone revels in being a bitch sometimes.1 It would have been dishonest if Regina hadn’t been, too. But that made it hard to root for her. It felt almost arbitrary that she was the protagonist and the girl she hated most was the antagonist; without changing much of the story before the very end, only flipping the point of view, it could have been about Kara getting back at Regina for a variety of horrible things Regina had done.
So ultimately, I’m not sure what to say. A few months ago, Courtney2 posted a very interesting blog entry about mean girls and writing SGA; looking through the comments, what I wrote in response was:
I really wonder if my own completely weirdo high school existences are why I don’t read much contemporary stuff and am much more drawn to sf/f. Hmmm. There wasn’t really a lot of bullying or cliqueishness in my school (that I was aware of); I never felt bullied or that I had to find a way to belong with my equally-weird friends. So I rarely see myself reflected in contemporary stuff and I rarely identify with the characters on either side.
Aside from the fact that I evidently wrote “existences” instead of “experiences,” I think that’s the best I can do to sum up my feelings on SGA. It was a good book; it just wasn’t a book for me. But Summers’ writing3 is compelling — I read both of her books cover-to-cover without stopping. So I would absolutely recommend to people who are into mean girls-style stories.
A few weeks ago, my very smart friend Jen mentioned on Twitter that she was reading Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. My reactions, in order, were, “Awesome!” and, “Really?” Because (aside from superhero stories) Jen is not much for my beloved scifi/fantasy genres. So while I’d classify The Hunger Games as “book that you should read regardless of genre,” it wasn’t something I’d have recommended to her.
We had the following exchange:
Me: Ooooh. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts, though I probably wouldn’t have recced it to you.
Jen: I love dystopias! And I loved the movie of Battle Royale. So I think I will like this.
Me: How did I not know that about you??? (I guess I think dystopia = scifi = not so much your interest?)
Jen: I don’t see dystopia as sci-fi; if anything, it’s the reverse of historical fiction, which I also love.
Me: That is really interesting! I tend to think of it as just a sf subgenre, but I can see why you don’t.
Interesting thought, filed away for “things to think about later,” though I never really did. Until I ran across this post on io9 in Google Reader. I clicked over because that was the first time I’d seen a cover or title for the final book in Wasserman’s Skinned series — which I will definitely buy in hardcover as soon as it comes out — and the actual post turned out to be a question of whether or not YA has moved on from scifi.
My initial reaction is, um, no, especially not given the fantastic success of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, as well as Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy, and a handful of others. But the post posits that the argument for YA not being big on scifi right now is based on not counting dystopias like the ones I just mentioned as science fiction. Interesting, especially because almost all of the YA scifi I can think of — at least published recently — is very near-future, is dystopian, or both.
Innnnnnteresting. So if you have thoughts, please throw them out in the comments! Do you consider dystopian novels part of a larger science fiction genre, or are they their own beast? Does it depend on the story? (Any recs? Because I need a longer reading list…)
So, speaking of what is big in YA, an interesting link: Girls Just Wanna Have Fangs:
Twilight is more than a teen dream. It’s a massive cultural force. Yet the very girliness that has made it such a success has resulted in its being marginalized and mocked. Of course, you won’t find many critics lining up to defend Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, either; mass-market success rarely coincides with literary acclaim. But male escapist fantasies — which, as anyone who has seen Die Hard or read those Tom Clancy novels can confirm, are not unilaterally sophisticated, complex, or forward-thinking — tend to be greeted with shrugs, not sneers. The Twilight backlash is vehement, and it is just as much about the fans as it is about the books. Specifically, it’s about the fact that those fans are young women.
I’m no fan of Twilight, but that’s not really what the article is about. It isn’t a question of whether Twilight is good or bad, it’s about why Twilight fans are greeted with sneers and disdain. Hint: because girls like it. And quality and content of the novels aside, that’s not an okay reason to dismiss them.
And continuing in that vein, tween stars. Jen (the same Jen as above) passed on a link she realized would be relevant to my interests: Smells Like an Ethnically Divided Teen Star System
The editor who chose to display the photos in this manner might argue it was simply artful to play up contrasts. And it’s not to argue that the “ethnic” stars have particularly dark skin (this is Hollywood, after all), just that they are racialized as not exactly white, and the positioning next to “whiter” stars makes this assertion stronger. Moreover, the juxtaposition eerily echoes the way in which leaked gossip in 2008 characterized Selena Gomez and Hannah Montana actress and singer Miley Cyrus (the arguably All-American daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus) as unfriendly rivals and ultimately positioned Gomez and purported BFF Demi Lovato, another Disney actress and singer also of half-Mexican heritage, in a separate camp from their more EuroAmerican counterparts at Disney. Is the conglomerate thinking of teen celebrity promotion in relation to ethnic blocs?
Interesting stuff. There’s also a good point in the comments; most of the ethnically ambiguous actors you see on Nick and Disney and even the CW are female; with the exception of Taylor Lautner and his Amazing Abs, the young, male heartthrob ideal remains pretty freaking white. I can think of a few other Disney kids who are ethnically ambiguous, and a few who are non-ambiguously African-American — but they aren’t kids who are being set up to follow the Zac Efron mold, either, which makes me think Lautner is an exception that proves the rule.
And now, because it is a lazy Sunday, I think I will take a nap. (Translation: I have no idea how to conclude this blog post.)
Book #2! The short version is: I enjoyed it. It’s YA fantasy, and conveniently, I have a whole blog to review those, so the long version, which also consists of “I enjoyed it,” with a pesky “but…” is over here.
Incidentally, I have finally given in and set up a GoodReads account. So… friend me and say hi?
Last year, I tried (elsewhere) to keep track of the books I read. I gave up in February when I could no longer type: banishment from the computer meant I was able to read more, but not record titles or my impressions. (Handwriting is not good for sore wrists either, for the record.) Basically I gave up three months into the year.
This year I’m trying again, though I’m weirdly nervous about it. What if I lose track and slack off and this tag only ever has this one entry? What if the internet judges me based on what I read? Or, for that matter, what I haven’t read yet? I was a serious bookworm growing up — less so of late, though I hope keeping track of what I read will encourage me a bit — but I never read much that could count as The Classics. The classics I did read were mostly for English class, and that sort of damaged the joy of reading them for me.
Case in point: Pride and Prejudice. Now, basically all of my friends swear by this book. Several swoon over Mr. Darcy. But I read it for A.P. English and detested it. Which, looking back, was unfair; it had nothing to do with the book itself, and everything to do with the teacher. This was a teacher whose favorite Shakespeare was The Taming of the Shrew — LOL spousal abuse, I guess? — and when we read it in class, who declared, “Becky, you read Kate, because you’re a shrew.” Not so much my favorite teacher.1 So I have been studiously avoiding Austen and all things associated with her ever since.
Like, in this case, Sense and Sensibility. Which I have now read! My sister put the movie on a couple of months ago, and I looooooooooved it. We actually ended up watching it twice in 24 hours. So I decided perhaps I should get over my admittedly irrational avoidance, so I picked up the book, put off reading it for awhile, and finally started it on vacation a couple weeks ago.
And okay, yes. I loved it. Jane Austen: A++, would read again. It was a bit more challenging than most of what I read, because I am very accustomed to modern pacing and structure, but once I fell into the rhythm of the book I quite enjoyed it. I loved both Elinor and Marianne, and I really enjoyed Edward and Colonel Brandon. I didn’t get all of the satire because I don’t know much about what was being satirized — I know just enough to know what I don’t know, basically — but once I shrugged and accepted that the various friends and relations running around and being ridiculous were, in fact, meant to be ridiculous, and stopped worrying about keeping track of who they were related to and how all the supporting characters related to one another, it was delightful. It took me a couple of weeks to read the first section, but once I got sucked in, I sped through volumes two and three in a few days.
So in the end, I feel thoroughly enriched and glad I read it. And now I’m going to watch the movie again, because that sounds perfect for a lazy Sunday, lying-on-the-couch viewing.
First things first: I wrote an article for work about the increasing funding issues that AIDS Drug Assistance Programs are facing, and specifically about a woman who, after years of drug addiction, getting her HIV diagnosis in jail, and then doing a 180 and turning her life around, was kicked out of her drug assistance program. Though the story is pretty depressing, she was a lovely, fascinating person, willing to share all that with me despite not being out about her HIV status and needing to remain anonymous to avoid stigma. So if you have a moment, please do read.
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Over at AV, I recently reviewed The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor. Two cupcakes. Not great.
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Somewhere in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books — I suspect one of the later ones, which I haven’t read as often1 — there’s a character it always rains on. He actually turns out to be descended from a rain god, but doesn’t know that, so instead he just copes with the fact that everywhere he goes, it rains.
I’m starting to think I’m something like that. But with leaks.
Growing up, my bedroom leaked. We had the roof rebuilt and reshingled, but couldn’t find the source of the problem. This was upstate New York, with all of its ridiculous blizzards; after every one, we’d shovel the driveway, and then my dad and I would climb up on to the roof and shovel that off, too, hoping that it would keep snow from melting directly into my bedroom.
It didn’t.
When I got to college, the source was eventually found. It was one of the joys of living in a very old house: the thing had been built out over a hundred years or so, the front rooms being the original section — then the next two rooms built on, the upstairs, and finally the back section of the house, which included my room. The house was built on a hill. And whoever added on that last section did not, as it turned out, build a foundation under it.
My bedroom was slowly falling off the house and down the hill, and whatever stretch and strain that put on the house opened it up to leaks.
I moved to the city four years ago this month, and within three months there created a leak from our bathroom into the next apartment down. (I still feel guilt over this, accident though it was.) I flushed the toilet, got in the shower, and when I stepped out, discovered ankle-deep water on the bathroom floor, and rising. Luckily, that building had the greatest super of all time, who not only fixed the suddenly-broken pipe and helped get the water under control, he also calmed down the downstairs neighbor. Phew!
Greatest super ever exhibit number two: a year later, when a leak opened in our ceiling — barely a drip, but definitely there — within 48 hours, the super had the ceiling open, the pipe replaced, and the ceiling closed back up, repainted, and all the dust and debris swept up and dealt with. For those of you who’ve never seen something like that in action, that was remarkably efficient. My sister and I left that building really reluctantly because seriously, that guy was awesome.
All of which is a leadup to this series of pictures of my kitchen wall over the last week:
The hole.
The large hole in relation to relatively small me.
“The hole will be fixed today!” …It wasn’t.
We didn’t even know about this leak; the pipe was between our wall and the neighbor’s, and dripping into the basement while affecting us not at all. But it had to be fixed, and our wall had to come down to do it.
The worst part wasn’t even the return of my leak-inducing superpower, or whatever this is. There were two real issues: #1, with the kitchen totally disassembled, we had the sink sitting on the floor, and the cabinets in front of the fridge, and everything that had been in them piled on the stove. Meaning there was no way we could, you know… cook. For the four days it took to get this settled. Yeesh.
But worse yet was what happened to poor Lily Flufferson, the terrible mouser. She couldn’t be allowed to roam free with construction stuff sitting around and a giant hole in the wall for her to get lost in. She’s not smart enough to avoid such things. So for three days, she had to stay in small rooms if we weren’t home or awake to keep an eye on her — meaning the whole work day, and overnight. On day #3, I worked from home because we just couldn’t do that to her anymore. Poor kitty.
She’s fine now. The wall is fixed. Ish. The kitchen is still a wreck, but what are you going to do?
In conclusion, have a picture of my cat being adorable. (You’d think with that much fur, she wouldn’t want to sit directly in front of the radiator.)
A couple of weeks ago, a friend pointed me towards this post by Mad Marvel Girl. The post basically asks, what are your three stories — the stories of your heart? The stories that grip you and don’t let go, which you could read or watch over and over, and why? It’s not about how good the text is, it’s about the actual story, the part that makes your heart happy.
As one very smart friend of mine paraphrased, what are the stories which, if every other story was a riff off them, you’d still be pretty happy with?
I’ve been thinking about this on and off since. I’ve managed to come up with two.
Star Wars. (If I must be more specific, The Empire Strikes Back.) There are a lot of general things I love about the trilogy: the space opera backdrop, the rag-tag band of rebels taking out a much more powerful enemy,1 the epic scope of world-building, the fact that the movies are fun before all else. But let’s face it: for me, the big, big thing is Leia and Han. I love Leia and Han. Or rather, I love Leia, and am in love with Han.
About my love of Princess Leia: I love that she’s making serious contributions to the rebellion even before the movies start. She’s a leader, and she’s good at it. Once captured, she remains defiant (“I should have recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board.”). Even when she’s the one being rescued, she’s still perfectly able to grab a weapon and kick down an exit where one doesn’t exist. She can run around and do the action hero thing, as well as the pretty, dress-wearing, traditional fantasy princess thing. She’s smart, she’s angry, and she kicks ass. I adore her.
Han… well, he’s my fictional type. Smug. A rogue with a heart of gold. Not necessarily nice, but certainly nice to look at. He can do bad things, but generally does the right thing in the end. And smug. Did I mention that? My first fictional crush, when I was about five, was Peter Venkman in the Real Ghostbusters cartoon; I have no idea how I was wired to find smug jack-ass-ery particularly attractive, but it is absolutely typified by Han Solo.
Beyond anything else, the story of the two of them falling in love while snarking at each other and having adventures speaks to my soul. The Empire Strikes Back is my idea of a perfect romance.
To sum up: a kick-ass woman and the smug guy she loves (and often rescues). 2 If they starred in every story, I would be a happy camper indeed.
My other story is Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey. I’m amazed it took me this long to realize that, actually, as I’ve read that book at least fifteen times. I first read it when I was in fifth grade, and even though, as an adult, I can spot plenty of flaws in it, it’s still among my all-time favorites and I reread it every couple of years.
In it, our hero, Talia, runs away from the home where she’s always been unloved and unappreciated, gets Chosen, is swept off to Valdemar’s capital city and thrust into circumstances she doesn’t fully understand. But once she’s there, by way of tenacity and hard work (plus being super-duper-special) she overcomes the odds and makes it, proving to both herself and the world in general that she’s truly deserving of her new-found status.
Or, in other words, a girl who feels awkward and out of place — particularly because she’s bookish and none too feminine — is just sure she can do and be more than anyone realizes, if only she gets the chance! And when the chance comes, even though it’s hard, she’s plucky and determined! And in the end, she succeeds! Hooray! 3
It isn’t a complex story, but look, there’s a reason I not-so-secretly love Mary Sues. The story, simply as a story, speaks directly to my id. But it gets me in Arrows of the Queen in particular, I think because when I was 11, I identified so strongly with Talia. Ultimately, I don’t need the story to be about someone bookish, or even about a girl,4 because it’s the I’m-something-more leading to plucky determination leading to success! that gets me. I could happily read that over and over again. I have read that over and over again.
I think, if it came down to it and I absolutely had to pick one character archetype over the other, it would be Leia over Talia. But maybe that isn’t a surprise, either. I identify with Talia in ways that reflect who I am: someone who often feels awkward and out of place, who wants to do and accomplish more, even though I don’t know how or even, really, what I want to do. I want to be part of something important, something that matters, even though I haven’t figured out what yet. But that’s where Leia already is, where she starts her story. Maybe it’s just that ultimately, I’d rather read stories about what I aspire to than what I am now.
Especially if I get Han Solo in the end. Just sayin’.
(Unrelated ETA: upgraded Wordpress, fiddled with plugins. Threaded commenting should now exist. And possibly automatically posting to Facebook. So if this shows up there… Hi!)
I feel like I should say something because it’s the end of the year, and decade1. And also because I haven’t updated in awhile. So.
I was thinking about why I never update, and it’s because I feel like every post needs to be long and have a central thesis and be well thought out.2 That’s what the original point of this blog was, sort of, several years ago. But I don’t actually have a lot of deep, thinky posts in me, and it seems silly to feel like I can’t post on my own personal blog unless it’s something big and deep, when I am a small and rarely deep person. So: either I’ll post more in the upcoming year, but it will be less thoughtful, or I will continue to not post much. Either way. Shrug.
Regarding goals I had for this year: I didn’t accomplish any of them. Whoops? This was the first year in ages I’d bothered making any sort of resolutions, and now I remember why I don’t usually. But actually, it’s pretty indicative of my year in general. It wasn’t a bad year, but I didn’t have a lot of forward motion in it. So I’ve got some sort of mental goals for the upcoming year, but I don’t feel like putting them out on the internet, so I won’t. So there.
Let’s see. Other things I can talk about…
We got a Wii fit! If my year was stagnant, well, so was I; aside from the three months of physical therapy for my wrists, I don’t think I did anything involving working out or moving or not sitting on my ass. My sister thought the Wii Fit would be fun, and so it is. I’ve worked out more in the last week than in the few months leading up to it, which is good.
Good, fun things: I was skeptical of how much actual working out would happen with a video game, and I still have no idea how accurate it really is in terms of calories burnt and such. But I certainly feel like I’ve worked out after I’m done for the day. If nothing else, it’s moving and stretching, and I’ve recently rediscovered the muscles in my thighs and abs. So there’s that!
I also like working out with it because it is super fun. Little Mii characters are constantly applauding and encouraging you, even for things like jogging, which I absolutely hate doing, you know, in real life. (Also: it’s cold outside, but warm in my apartment.) And, dorky confession that should surprise absolutely no one who knows me at all, when we first got the Wii we made a whole bunch of silly Miis based on TV and movie characters. I… may have made the entire cast of High School Musical.3 But jogging is way more fun with, say, Chad Danforth!4
On the other hand, it’s pretty problematic in that if it measures your BMI as above “normal,” or you gain weight between days, it berates you. That’s neither healthy nor helpful; at best, it’s obnoxious, and at worst, potentially triggering for people with disordered eating.
(And on a personal level, it makes fun of me. Much of the Fit’s whole shebang is based around balance and posture; and while my posture is pretty great, thanks to the physical therapy, my balance… uh… Look, some of us failed out of ballet class when we were four because we fell over too much, even for toddlers. Why yes, Wii Fit, I do often fall down in my daily life, thanks so much for asking sarcastically.)
Other than that, not much going on. I’m on vacation for a week and I enjoy sitting around doing nothing quite a bit.5 For at least the third (probably fourth) year in a row, I’m going to do New Years karaoke tonight. Should be good times.
Here, have something adorable to end your year with:
If I was the sort of blogger who wrote things on a timely basis, this post would have been up during the ALCS when I first thought about it, or at least during the World Series, when it was topical, or shortly thereafter, when people were still buzzing. But I’ve been busy with work, that novel I’m perpetually working on, and meeting some of my favorite authors. And I’m not that sort of blogger. Alas.
So. Baseball. And feminism!
The school where my sister teaches had a Yankees-themed dress-down day when the Yankees won the World series.1 She stopped at a Modell’s store to pick up a jersey to wear, and found only men’s larges and extra larges — and a very few women’s shirts, all in pastel pink.
I don’t actually know any women who want pink Yankees gear. The blue pinstripes? Pretty iconic, is all I’m saying. Rachel asked a salesman if there was anything else for women, and he said no. They never bother to order jerseys for women. Imagine that.2
I went to see a game with my friend B this summer. B is a much harder-core fan than I am, actually, and when we were talking about how we got into watching, she said I was one of the only women she knows who watches baseball like she does — or, in other words, who watches baseball like a dude.
But, she said, it was nice to see a game with another woman because she didn’t have to avoid talking about how Derek Jeter is wicked hot.
Yup. That’s my experience, too. Because that’s the thing about talking baseball with dudes. There’s an awesome feeling of being in-group, and what’s more fun than talking about something you love with people who are similarly passionate? But for me and B both — and, I suspect, a lot of other female sports fans — there’s an unspoken knowledge that commenting on a player’s attractiveness means you will be out-grouped instantly. Your opinions will be taken less seriously, and instead of a real fan, you’ll be seen as one of those women, who only watches the game for eye candy or because your boyfriend makes you.3
The thing is, this is not something that happens in reverse. For some reason, a sports-centric magazine with a primarily male audience puts out a yearly edition that’s devoted to women in swimsuits, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a magazine about sports. 4 Movie reviews nearly always comment on the female lead’s attractiveness, but even when written by men, the reviews aren’t discounted out of hand, on the grounds that people assume men only watch movies to stare at the women. And often, female athletes are uber-sexualized, and their looks are considered at least as important as their skills.5
So maybe I do watch baseball like a dude, because apparently even sitting on my couch watching the YES Network is a gendered activity. (Sigh.) But I also watch baseball like a chick. Because, whether you believe in Derek Jeter’s intangibles or Derek Jeter’s actual defensive statistics?
Dude is wicked hot.
↩So I took the day off to go to the Yankees tickertape parade1. Now I’m home, I’ve napped, cuddled my cat, and I’m watching Roseanne on lifetime because I love this show.2 And a commercial just aired for some kind of pre-made pancake batter.
It looks like every other pancake commercial ever. Happy family, messy kids, smiling mom, and end with a close up of the final product: a stack of delicious pancakes with a small square pad of butter on top, and plenty of syrup coating the whole shebang. It’s kind of the iconic image of pancakes.
But my question is: whaaaa?
Who eats them like that? With the pad of butter on top and then syrup. I mean, yes, butter on pancakes is delicious, and as far as I’m concerned, the more syrup, the better.3 But you don’t just want a mouthful of butter. You want it spread across the pancake, right? And if you’ve put the syrup on before you spread that butter pad out, you won’t really be able to.
Basically, that iconic pancake stack looks lovely, but it is not an accurate depiction of real pancake-eating life. I object!
Anyway.
Fire, Kristin Cashore’s second novel, is a sort of prequel/companion to Graceling, her debut. I loved Graceling so much that I gave a copy to my Dad, since we have similar tastes and all. But, while not a bad read, Fire doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor. Though it was good enough for me to assume it’s a sophomore slump, and thus I shall look forward to more from Cashore anyway. Review over at Active Voice.
