Well, we’ve done it! We’ve made it past the halfway point of 2017. To say it’s been a crazy year so far would be a bit of an understatement. In times like these, we need the option to escape into a fantasy world for a little while before heading back out and fighting the good…
Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution
Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution Julia Alekseyeva Microcosm Publishing January 10th, 2017 A review copy was provided from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Soviet Daughter is a graphic biography of a women named Lola, born in 1910 to a poor Jewish family outside of Kiev. She lived through the Bolshevik revolution, the civil war, the Stalinist…
Dogears: A Separation from a Discovery of Witches
A Discovery of Witches Deborah Harkness Narrated by Jennifer Ikeda Penguin Books February 2011 As a teenager, I had wanted to like the Twilight series. Everyone around me seemed to be riding that train, and I always wanted to like fun; I never have. I read Stephenie Meyer’s series with increasing disdain and eventually eviscerating…
Canada Reads 2017: The Defence
It’s that time of year again! Canada Reads is back with five new books and the Canadian celebrities who plan to defend them. Every year, Canada tunes into CBC to watch four days of painstaking debate on the book that Canadians should be reading right now. We’ve assembled three of our Canadian book lovers to…
Does “Star Wars: The Editor Strikes Back” Hold Up?
Back in 2012, Topher Grace edited the three Star Wars prequels, The Phantom Menace, The Clone Wars, and Revenge of the Sith, into one 85 minute movie and called it Star Wars: The Editor Strikes Back. After Rogue One, we wanted to see if held up. (Or, honestly, if it was ever good.) So Kat,…
Born Both: Books about the Intersex Experience
Hida Viloria was raised a girl, but always felt different. It wasn’t just that they were attracted to girls, but unlike many other people in the first world who are born intersex–meaning they have genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, and/or chromosomal patterns that do not fit standard definitions of male or female–Viloria’s parents did not have their…
Snowy Days With Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber: Part One
Welcome to The Bloody Chamber roundtable; a collection of short stories by speculative author Angela Carter. We’ll be discussing the short stories — their themes, the craft and the feelings they’ve elicited — in a four-parted series for every season starting with cold, frosty winter. We broke up the collection and have started with wolves:…
The Summer of Self Discovery or The Education of Margot Sanchez
The Education of Margot Sanchez Lilliam Rivera Simon & Schuster February 21, 2017 Margot Sanchez is a girl torn between two worlds. The first is her home in the South Bronx where she was raised and where her family owns a pair of grocery stores, Sanchez & Sons. The other is the mostly-white, private school…
Dogears: My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Diabolic Angels
My Best Friend’s Exorcism Grady Hendrix Quirk Books May 16, 2016 The power of Diet Coke compels you! My Best Friend’s Exorcism is a nostalgic, sweet, and disgusting story about friendship, high school, and demons. There are a few tiny gaps in the narrative and plot, but I enjoyed this book more than I expected….
WWAC’s Reading Resolutions for 2017
Want to read more sci-fi? What does it mean to “read diversely” and do you need to do more of it? Are you notorious for not finishing your to-read pile? It’s a new year which means a new year because that’s how it works, right? Some of the WWAC contributors have shared their reading resolutions…
Books that Moved Us in 2016
2016 was kind of an odd year for books. There was a new Harry Potter (of sorts), more celebrity memoirs than we will ever need, and some Star Wars novelizations. A number of books were published to great acclaim—The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien and The Sellout by Paul Beatty, to name…
Merry Scary Christmas: The Last Winter (Or How I Should Have Just Watched The Thing)
I am not a horror movie person. I’m a “hide behind a pillow until the monster is gone” kind of person. But when Merry Scary Christmas time rolled around again at WWAC, I decided to challenge myself a little and take part. Now, the one exception to my no-horror-movies rule is John Carpenter’s The Thing…