So last week we talked a little bit about what makes a review helpful. After all, people differ wildly in their opinions, and just because the reviewer liked a book doesn't mean you will. But there are lots of different ways for a reader to use a review when it comes to deciding whether or not a book appeals to them, or even just bringing new ( Read more... )

In my travels around the interwebs, I came across a fantastic blog, Charlie the Unicorn, Ace Detective. You're probably looking at that title and wondering "uhh, what?" It's a blog about asexuality, and his post on asexual representation in particular got me thinking. Charlie laments the lack of asexual characters presented in fiction, and talks ( Read more... )

Since the life if internet drama is cyclical, there's usually some discourse going on about authors and reviews and author reactions to reviews and what constitutes a "real" review anyway? This topic has been pretty prevalent lately, so I'm not going to get into what others have already said ( Read more... )

And here it is! The very long and image-heavy post nobody asked for, but that's what you get today. But look, it took me forever to put together and hurt my back and I did it all for you, so you should at least humour me and glance over it, right? Right.

As mentioned yesterday, I took some inspiration from Jim C Hines's Striking A Pose blog ( Read more... )

YA author JD Bauer has written an environmentally conscious novel entitled The Trinity of Superkidds: Quest for Water. The proceeds from the novel goes to the World Food Programme, and Bauer has a facebook page with nearly 4000 fans. On the surface, it's a bit surprising to hear there's quite a bit of controversy surrounding Bauer and her book ( Read more... )

So... why zombies? Those critters are all over the place, and there are many different variations on them, but they're common enough even a small child can recognize one. Even before they became "solidified" into the standard zombie we think of, nearly every culture had something zombie-like in their mythologies, something that crawled back from ( Read more... )

Occasionally I ponder over what makes the ending of a story "right." As I believe most people do, I tend to prefer a happy ending, but that doesn't mean I want all the pretty ribbons tied up tightly in a basket of sunshine. If it's too neat, I can't believe in it, no matter how awesome the rest of the story was ( Read more... )

Most of the time, in contemporary books, we expect a certain level of human equality. There aren't many novels out there in which the characters you're meant to sympathize with have blatant shows of racism or sexism. The world we live in isn't perfect, so you do get "casual" displays of -isms on occasion, which hopefully get called out by as many ( Read more... )

Over at We Got Class, Lindsay Ellis has some interesting ramblings about female characters in popular fiction and the impossible standards we hold them to. For one thing, because female characters (and in particular female protagonists) are comparatively rare in popular fiction, we want them to not only be well-rounded and complex characters, but ( Read more... )

Publishers Weekly recently reviewed Courtney Milan's upcoming release, Unveiled, in which the reviewer enjoyed the writing but said the premise of the historical romance rang false. The implausibility ruined the book for the reviewer.

Courtney Milan wrote a detailed blog post discussing her research and how the premise of her novel was uncommon ( Read more... )