“Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” It all began three years ago. Futzing around on Tumblr (as one does), I happened across a teaser/conceptual trailer from the Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon. Familiar as I was with their work from their very enjoyable first film The Secret of Kells, I gave it a … Continue reading Guest Squee: Song of the Sea →
When Sarah mentioned k-dramas and the guest squee on Healer, my heart seized up for a brief moment. Ya’ll, there was a period of time where I lived for k-dramas, and just Asian dramas in general. This was pre-Netflix boom, so binge watching them was hard, though there were a few helpful sites for those wanting to watch and who didn’t speak the language. Some series I loved so much that I actually bought them. … Continue reading So You Wanna Watch Some K-Dramas? →
What Matters in Jane Austen is a fantastic piece of literary criticism that reveals a lot of new angles on Jane Austen. It’s entertaining, it’s approachable, and it’s incredibly helpful if you want to understand the nuances of Austen that are either very subtle or which would have been obvious to her contemporaries but not so much to modern readers. Critic John Mullan divides his book into twenty short chapters. They don’t need to be … Continue reading What Matters in Jane Austen by John Mullan →
Orphan Black is the kind of show that makes me want to go door-to-door preaching the Gospel of Tatiana Maslany. It makes me feel frantic with anxiety, gleeful, weepy, excited, and triumphant. It makes me laugh so hard I fall off the couch and it makes my heart grow three sizes. It’s given rise to a nurturing online community (The Clone Club) which uses one of the character’s lines as its motto, “We make a … Continue reading Ravings of an Orphan Black Fan →
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy is a riveting non-fiction book about four women who conducted espionage (and, in one case, fought undercover as a soldier) in the Civil War. Two women worked for the North and two for the South. The book is interesting and exciting and paints incredible pictures of very different women who, love them or hate them, lived unusual lives of great political and personal passion and daring. Here’s a look at the … Continue reading Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott →
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is being marketed as “The first Iranian Vampire Western.” It has elements of film noir, Western, horror, and romance. It’s finally available on iTunes and will be available on DVD April 21. I adored this movie – it’s a quirky romance as well as a subversive feminist horror movie with minimal gore but lots of suspense and an amazing amount of dry humor. The plot is pretty simple. A … Continue reading A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night →
Elyse wasn’t fond of Scribd when she tried it out, but Angela James and Jane have discussed it very favorably in recent podcasts. Last November, I decided to give myself the three months to try it out using the Harlequin coupon, and, y’all, I flippin’ love this thing. As Angie pointed out in the podcast, HarperCollins and Harlequin both participate – which means that older Dorchester fantasy and science fiction romance titles are also in … Continue reading Six Ways to Get the Most Out of a Scribd Subscription →
RHG and I (CarrieS) saw Jupiter Ascending and we are here to tell you that it is just terrible and we loved every batshit minute of it. Is the movie “good”? No, in the sense that it was relentlessly derivative, totally soapy, had some god-awful lines, a plot that frankly never did make much sense, and characters that had very little development and when they did develop it was in peculiar ways. Yes, in the … Continue reading Jupiter Ascending →
I have ranted many times in these pages and on my podcast and on Twitter and on Tumblr about the dearth of women-led stories that can be found in movies these days. However, there is a bright spot, and that bright spot can be found on television. The sad reality is that movies have become increasingly risk averse, and risk averse means we have franchises, remakes, reboots, and sometimes someone throws the Wachowski siblings money … Continue reading Ladies on our TVs →
The Secret History of Wonder Woman is an absolutely fascinating non-fiction book about the man who created Wonder Woman and the many women who inspired him and who, in many cases, directly contributed to Wonder Woman in concept, story, and design. It’s also a history of feminism from the suffragette movement into the 1950’s (it touches briefly on the 1960’s and 70’s but is primarily devoted to early feminism). I dragged my feet a bit … Continue reading The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore →
Yes, it’s here, my precious, we likes it! Unbound, by Jim C. Hines, the third book in the Magic Ex Libris series is finally out, to my great rejoicing. Yes, you will have to read the previous two books to appreciate this one (Libriomancer and Codex Born). Yes, you will love them. Libriomancer introduced the characters, led by Isaac Vainio, magician and librarian. Isaac is a libriomancer, meaning he can use magic to pull objects … Continue reading Unbound, by Jim C. Hines →
