Well, that's been a busy month
Side note: last I checked, there were 666 pages of results for Sam/Dean on AO3.
I show up in this neat article on Judaism in fan fiction.
Mark Millar, Starlight, vol. 1: We start in an unusual place: Duke, a pilot from Earth, has just saved an entire Barsoom-like planet-we get brief flashes of thrilling adventures. Then he goes home, and no one believes his story. He grows old; when his wife dies, his two sons, who barely tolerate him, don’t want to hear from him. Then, as he’s at his lowest, a child from the planet he saved comes for him-they need his help again. I really wanted to like the concept, but it was too Indiana Jones-y in execution: he was immediately on top of his game again, instead of being a grandfather who’d spent decades being disbelieved.
Latifah Salom, The Cake House: After the sudden violent death of her father, fourteen-year-old Rosaura moves into her new stepfather’s home, haunted by her father’s ghost and tempted both by the stepfather’s generosity and his seductive seventeen-year-old son. The Hamlet vibe is strong, but a lot of this lushly written book is about Rosaura’s struggles with her mother and her desires for stability/nice things/sex with attractive boys. As her stepfather’s high life starts to unravel, Rosaura comes more into her own; I quibbled a bit at the end but it would be plausible for a fourteen-year-old to think she’d done more than she really had to fix things.
Claudia Gray, A Thousand Pieces of You: Meg is the artist daughter of two brilliant scientists. When one of them is killed through sabotage, Meg sets off on an alternate-reality-crossing journey to hunt down the man she believes is the killer. But nothing’s as it seems, as she quickly discovers. The Russian royalty AU was quite enjoyable, and the usual romantic triangle is further complicated because Meg falls in love with two versions of the same man; basically breezy YA.
Jacqueline Carey, Poison Fruit: Daisy, demon halfbreed and Hel’s liaison in her small Michigan town, is trying to juggle her apparently doomed attraction to her werewolf coworker and her new affair with the hottest ghoul in town. But when another halfbreed shows up with a lawsuit against the town, her problems worsen. I still feel like Carey’s heart isn’t entirely in this genre (essentially, urban supernatural romance without the urban) but Daisy’s story got a pretty good resolution and the legal maneuvers didn’t make me want to throw the book across the room, so there’s that.
Lev Grossman, The Magicians: Really well done deconstruction of the Narnia/white male savior trope done in a way that doesn’t interest me: by having the privileged white guy be quite obviously a nearly useless asshole, with bonus casual misogyny. Grossman clearly knows this about his protagonist! “Quentin took the subway and rode the elevator and ordered in lunch like the rest of humanity, or at any rate the most privileged 0.1 percent.” Yes, exactly. Magic school, and even the Narnia-like magic land Quentin wanted to be a part of as a child, don’t change Quentin’s fundamental dissatisfaction with himself and the world around him; his entitlement does not match his gifts; others are braver and less bored and more interesting … which is kind of the problem, though if Quentin had been less of a git then I could probably have enjoyed it more.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
I show up in this neat article on Judaism in fan fiction.
Mark Millar, Starlight, vol. 1: We start in an unusual place: Duke, a pilot from Earth, has just saved an entire Barsoom-like planet-we get brief flashes of thrilling adventures. Then he goes home, and no one believes his story. He grows old; when his wife dies, his two sons, who barely tolerate him, don’t want to hear from him. Then, as he’s at his lowest, a child from the planet he saved comes for him-they need his help again. I really wanted to like the concept, but it was too Indiana Jones-y in execution: he was immediately on top of his game again, instead of being a grandfather who’d spent decades being disbelieved.
Latifah Salom, The Cake House: After the sudden violent death of her father, fourteen-year-old Rosaura moves into her new stepfather’s home, haunted by her father’s ghost and tempted both by the stepfather’s generosity and his seductive seventeen-year-old son. The Hamlet vibe is strong, but a lot of this lushly written book is about Rosaura’s struggles with her mother and her desires for stability/nice things/sex with attractive boys. As her stepfather’s high life starts to unravel, Rosaura comes more into her own; I quibbled a bit at the end but it would be plausible for a fourteen-year-old to think she’d done more than she really had to fix things.
Claudia Gray, A Thousand Pieces of You: Meg is the artist daughter of two brilliant scientists. When one of them is killed through sabotage, Meg sets off on an alternate-reality-crossing journey to hunt down the man she believes is the killer. But nothing’s as it seems, as she quickly discovers. The Russian royalty AU was quite enjoyable, and the usual romantic triangle is further complicated because Meg falls in love with two versions of the same man; basically breezy YA.
Jacqueline Carey, Poison Fruit: Daisy, demon halfbreed and Hel’s liaison in her small Michigan town, is trying to juggle her apparently doomed attraction to her werewolf coworker and her new affair with the hottest ghoul in town. But when another halfbreed shows up with a lawsuit against the town, her problems worsen. I still feel like Carey’s heart isn’t entirely in this genre (essentially, urban supernatural romance without the urban) but Daisy’s story got a pretty good resolution and the legal maneuvers didn’t make me want to throw the book across the room, so there’s that.
Lev Grossman, The Magicians: Really well done deconstruction of the Narnia/white male savior trope done in a way that doesn’t interest me: by having the privileged white guy be quite obviously a nearly useless asshole, with bonus casual misogyny. Grossman clearly knows this about his protagonist! “Quentin took the subway and rode the elevator and ordered in lunch like the rest of humanity, or at any rate the most privileged 0.1 percent.” Yes, exactly. Magic school, and even the Narnia-like magic land Quentin wanted to be a part of as a child, don’t change Quentin’s fundamental dissatisfaction with himself and the world around him; his entitlement does not match his gifts; others are braver and less bored and more interesting … which is kind of the problem, though if Quentin had been less of a git then I could probably have enjoyed it more.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.