Black Dogs by Ursula Vernon
ISBNs: 9781936689026 & 9781936689033 Book One: The House of Diamond – Book Two: The Mountain of Iron The world was green and grey, balanced on a serrated knife of pine and...
17 March 2011
Touching earth lightly by Margo Lanagan
ISBN: 1864488239 Growing up is hard. Even when you have encouraging responsibly parents, like Chloe. When you don’t, when your parents are like Janey’s, consistently putting you in harms way and...
28 December 2010
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
Tally Youngblood is an Ugly. All her friends have gone off and become Pretties, but she is the youngest, and eagerly awaiting her 16th birthday so that she can join them. But before she reaches that magical age she meets a new friend, Shay, who tells her about a mysterious boy called David, and the notion that some people don’t want to be made Pretty. To Tally this is insane. Science and evolution prove that people like beauty. And back in the “Rusties” day, when they weren’t able to make people pretty there was so much discrimination just over the way people lived. She’ll never go off looking for the Smoke. She’ll stay in the city, and become Pretty, just like all her friends.
Of course, if she did then this book wouldn’t have much of a plot now would it?
11 November 2010
Fun home : a family tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Like many father, mine could occasionally be prevailed on for a spot of ‘airplane’.
This is the memoir of Alison Bechdel, her recollections of growing up in an emotionally-distant family, the role of literature in her, and her father’s, life, her identifying as a lesbian at college and coming out, by letter, to her parents. It is the story of growing up in a house that can seem more like a museum than a home. Of living in a funeral home. Of trying to connect with her father. All told in graphic form.
26 June 2010
Changeling dir. by Clint Eastwood
It is 1920’s Los Angeles and single mother Christine Collins is trying to raise her boy. One Sat she is called in to work and when she returns home little Walter Collins is nowhere to be found. The police set about looking and eventually, after 5 months they bring him back. Only the boy they return to Christine is different; she is, however, informed that those changes are the result of her shock and the boys trauma. Why it is quite the done thing for a boy to shrink 4 inches as a result of such a horrifying encounter. And circumcised now you say? Well it is healthy, and who knows what that drifter may have been thinking. Ms. Collins is not about to rest however. She wants her boy back.
4 December 2008
One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus
23 March 1875
Today is my birthday, and I have received the greatest gift of all – freedom! I make these first poor scribblings aboard the westbound Union Pacific train with departed Union Station Chicago at 6.35 a.m. this morning, bound for Nebraska Territory.
In 1854 a Cheyenne chief asked the United States government for one thousand white brides to marry into the people. Cheyenne society was a matrilineal society the resulting children, to their minds, would belong to white society. Yet they would also have an understanding of Cheyenne ways, and so it seemed a good way of joining white man’s society. Of course this didn’t go down to well in the white man’s world, and the offer was refused.
In this novel Fergus imagines what would have happened had the US govt decided to go along with this Cheyenne idea. In secret, of course.
17 November 2006
Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett
ISBN: 0552149411By my count this is the 28th Discworld novel, although if you include the “Younger Readers’” discworld books then you get 30. So take your pick, I don’t think it...
20 July 2004
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