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Science Fiction Fairy Tale: A Wrinkle in Time
My August/September YA classics read was Madeline L’engle’s A Wrinkle in Time — but technically, it was a reread. When I was a kid, probably only eight or nine years old, my mother read Wrinkle to me out loud, which left only two lasting impressions for me: the line “There is such a thing as…
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The Free World of Francie Nelson’s Brooklyn
I knew even less about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when I started reading it than I had about Little Women. But it was, in a lot of a ways, a perfect answer to Little Women, right down to the moment, early on, where Francie mentions that she read and enjoyed Little Women. Liberty vs.…
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Little Women, Female Ambition, and Castles in the Air
Hey everyone, have you read your Pilgrim’s Progress lately? Because it’s time to talk about what I got out of reading Little Women, in this first real installment of the YA Classics Catch Up. But first, one housekeeping note — as I experimented with formats, I found I had a pretty fun time capturing some…
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Assault, Consent, and Romance in Bound by Blood and Sand
(Notes: This blog entry discusses rape culture, also, there are minor BBB&S spoilers.) It’s April, which is sexual assault awareness month. So I want to take a second to talk about sexual assault in Bound by Blood and Sand, because, well, it’s in there. Jae, the protagonist, is a survivor of rape before the book…
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Leia, Rey, and Me
I have always had this habit of mentally rewriting stories I love to be about the female lead. If you were to hear me describe the plot of Disney’s Aladdin, you’d be pretty sure it should have been titled Jasmine. When I started binge-reading fantasy novels in middle school, man, the Belgariad was tedious until…
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Sailor Moon, Ninja Turtles, and Learning to Save the World
So you may have heard about this, especially if you’re a woman between the ages of, let’s say, 25 and 35, but Sailor Moon has been re-subtitled and is now available on Hulu, with two episodes being released a week. And this will go all the way through the end of the series, which means…
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