As a writer, and a fictional writer at that, reading takes up a great deal of my time. I love perusing the shelves at the local bookstore, searching for new books to add to my library. In celebration of a fresh start as we welcome 2017, I set a fairly lofty goal for myself: to read at least one book per week, aside from the arsenal I already read in professional pursuits. I set this resolution in order to force myself to rethink how I utilize my downtime. Whether it’s a more thoughtful memoir by someone I admire, an educational anthology that’ll help inform my work, or an epic fantasy for pure leisure, I want to make sure that I’m actively enriching my mind with a good book.
For those of you who share my love of reading, and have set similar goals for yourselves, I’ve come with an author recommendation that is bound to keep your reading time well occupied.
Last summer I was introduced to the world of Sarah J. Maas. I was immediately enamored with her work, and read everything that she had published (at the time) in the span of one month. To date, Maas has written two stellar young adult series that are ongoing, currently totaling in eight novels, that are bound to interest readers young and old — she’s easily become one of my favorite modern authors. I even included her debut novel, Throne of Glass, as a part of our 2016 Holiday Gift Guide out of admiration.
A manifesto of sorts, I’m going to do my darndest to tell you why these books are absolutely fabulous, and worthy of a good read (all spoiler free!):
Both series take place within the same meta-universe, and are high fantasy “epics” about some pretty stellar girls doing some pretty stellar things. Throne of Glass, which currently sports six novels (one of which is a little collection of short stories that take place before the events of the first novel), and A Court of Thorns and Roses, which currently has two. Both series are scheduled to wrap up this year, with spin-off novels of the latter, ACOTAR, in the future works. That’s over 3,500 pages of material to blast through.
I’m not alone when I say I’ve had a hard few weeks. Things have felt slightly broken, shook askew, tilted into fantasy mayhem. I’m trying to take the long view, trying to steel myself for a fight, but sometimes some of the best uses of our time is taking a step back and looking through different eyes.
I’m a big reader, so in the days since the election I’ve been trying to understand things through fiction. So here’s a small list of inspiring and thought-provoking books I’ve been dwelling on.
October is our favorite month of the year! Why? Because that’s when GeekGirlCon is on, of course! But there are also plenty of other awesome geeky events on throughout the month; be sure to check them out here:
I first heard of the Guardian Princesses via Black Girl Nerds. With birthdays and gift-giving holidays coming up, and nieces and nephews of the targeted age range for these books, I knew these were books I needed to check out and share.
As is typical of much of the fantasy genre, one issue with Elvenbane is the lack of diversity in the humans presented. While Mercedes Lackey is known for books with homosexual and bisexual characters all the Elvenblood pairings appear to be heterosexual, and it continues through Elvenborn. Everyone also pairs up with people within their own identity: humans with humans, elves with elves, dragon with dragon, and Wizard with Wizard, with one notable exception. Everyone’s gender identity is that assigned to them at birth. And until Elvenblood, every Elf is fair (and stays that way) and every human is white.
In Elvenbane, we were introduced to a group of traders under the control of the elves that I thought were people of color, but in the end, I was left unsure. In Elvenblood, we are introduced to very dark skinned people. These are free folk, nomads who resisted the yolk of the elves and fled to the south when the Elves came. Elvenblood shows them moving back to the north to find grazing for their herds, searching for precious iron, and possible contact with long-ago allies. Unfortunately, the enigma of these people and their roots breaks me out of the story.
In Elvenbane, the location of Prince Dyran’s estate is given as being on the edge of the Mojave Desert. For those unfamiliar, the Mojave Desert is in the southwest U.S. – on the border between California and Nevada. We are led to believe that the elven estates are massive, taking up huge tracts of land and located very far part. But no mention of them reaching across the ocean is made. So it becomes a little confusing about how the elves have enslaved the human race, but not all the human race, and the elves do have borders to their land, but I also find it hard to believe that the humans on other continents would not intervene for hundreds of years to find out what is going on on another continent.
I struggled with the geography of this series through the entirety of it. I believe the forest on the edge of Lord Cheynar’s estate are those of the Pacific Northwest that qualify as temperate rainforests due to all the rain described in the books. The lack of description of bodies of water makes this a little hard to swallow, but is the best I can determine.
In Elvenbane, it is mentioned that the elves wiped out all remnants of human civilization so it is impossible to know when the elves came through from their world to this one. It could have been Biblical times, medieval times, or current times. However, the division of racial diversity implies a time when we believed races were more divided geographically. That time precedes white men settling North America, so having exclusively white slaves near the the Mojave Desert seems unlikely.
The people of color also fall into the typical fantasy treatment of being tribesmen. I looked for a critique of the treatment of people of color in the Halfblood chronicles, but I found none. If someone knows of one, please comment. Or, if someone would like to write one, I’ll send you the three books in exchange for your guest post (following our guidelines) here on GeekGirlCon. (Email adrienne at geekgirlcon dot com.)
Book 2, Elvenblood, was a little slower to get through and took nearly a month. Actually, it took me several weeks to read the first 100 pages and then I raced through the remaining 250. The book is shorter than Elvenbane at about 350 pages compared to 566. Elvenblood is also challenging because it starts out with a new set of characters. By the end of Elvenbane, we have a reasonably sized cast of characters, and one dives into Elvenblood to read more about them. However, we re-meet Sheyrena, her mother, and Myre, and are introduced to Sheyrena’s brother Lorryn. It takes 61 pages in the mass market paperback pass before we even get back to Lashana. I have a 60-page rule: if a book is not sufficiently engaging in the first 60 pages, I don’t force myself to finish it. Sadly, Elevenblood barely makes it through my rule. The story presented in those first 60 pages does not fully engage me, but your mileage may vary. In Elvenbane, the plight of Wizards and humans is sufficiently focused that starting out book 2 with the story of a fullblood Elf, her mother and father, and her halfblood brother, along with the distasteful Myre, is rather off-putting. And I didn’t find the story being presented as attention-grabbing as the beginning of Elvenbane. I persisted because I had enjoyed Elvenbane so much and Elvenblood was beginning to show its potential.
Like Elvenblood, Elvenborn deviates from our main cast of characters at the beginning, introducing us to another elven family – one that has human servants and not slaves (but I’m really not sure how much different this is because it isn’t well described.) We stay with this family for 145 pages of the 382-page hardcover edition of the third book in the series..
While Elvenblood had a brother and sister who shared the limelight, Elvenborn disappoints because it has a male main character. Why did Elvenborn have a male main character after effectively using female main characters previously in the series? These authors both had often written female main characters in other series, so this switch feels wrong to me.
In Elvenbane, the characters get fairly well developed. The characters introduced in Elvenblood are not as well developed and those who continue on from Elvenbane do not get much more development. In Elvenborn, the main character, Kyrtian, gets a lot of character development. However, Lorryn, one of the main characters from Elvenbane, almost gets typical female treatment, seemingly having been introduced only to become the romantic interest for Shana, the original lead. I don’t actually have a problem with this, although I prefer to have good character development for as many characters as possible in books I read.
Like Elvenbane, in Elvenblood the quest and character development are the majority of the story. The conflict comes late in the novel and is short; the denouement basically leaving you hanging and ready for the next novel. Elvenborn differs only in that the main conflict is resolved with little conflict, but rather with political maneuvering fairly early in the book. This smoothly transitions the book to what appears to be the focus for the next books in the chronicles.
I like all the mystery and potential theories this could go to. This is why a fourth book was so eagerly awaited and fans of the series were hoping for it. We have the inevitable human slave rebellion on earth, the enigma of the magic-sucking constructs that kill, the fleeing Elves that didn’t make it (I have a theory about the Elves and those contraptions that is not the conclusion drawn by the story’s occupants), Triana’s potential storyline, and the thing that came through the Portal from Evelon and took her. Is that thing what the Elvenlords of Evelon became after all this time? Is it something new? And, of course, the opening of the Portal from either side means there could be a war between Earth and Evelon later on in the chronicles.
Despite the issues I’ve described in these two reviews, I am again excited for any follow-up chronicles in this series.
Written by Adrienne M. Roehrich, Manager of Editorial Services
Vision: “A Book in Every Child’s Hand” by Pratham Books
Today, April 2, 2014 is International Children’s Book Day. Established in 1967, the holiday falls on or near Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday, the 2nd of April. Ostensibly, it is meant to encourage a love of reading and highlight children’s books. It is also an opportunity to turn a critical eye towards children’s book and their representation of people.
When I look back at the books I loved most as a little kid, they included:
The Poky Little Puppy A Big Golden Book – representation male, animal
Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, and Falling Up by Shel Silverstein – I’m not going to go through the poems, but there were poems about boys and girls and animals, all the depictions in the illustrations seem to be white people
McElligot’s Pool by Dr. Suess – ‘young man’ main character, drawn as white
Giants Come in Different Sizes by Jolly Roger Bradfield – all main characters are male and apparently German, based upon umlaut usage, or British, based upon names. There are a few images of female characters.
Richard Scarry’s Peasant Pig and the Terrible Dragon – all the characters are animals, the cast seems fairly evenly split as male and female, but the major players are male.
Dr. Suess’s Sleep Book by Dr. Suess – a variety of genders in made-up species
According to my favorites, there was a slight advantage to the boys, and other groups of people were not so well represented. A study in 2011 looking at the representation of gender in books found that in children’s books written from 1900 to 2000, male characters had a central role in 57 percent of books published per year while female characters were at 31 percent. This value did not get better over the century, and in fact, it was worse mid-century. Another more recent study has found that in the literature children read in their school textbooks, male characters outnumber female characters in both text and visual representation. As I pointed out in the books I listed of my own interest, even when characters are female, they are doing stereotypically female things.
I didn’t go into my favorite books where the text outweighed the illustrations, such as Bunnicula by James and Deborah Howe or The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White or A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. But these books are characterized in the above studies as well, and also show the same gender disparities.
What about race or disabilities? What about sexual orientation? To address the latter, I found one study directly exploring the representation of sexualities other than heterosexual in children’s literature. Considering so many children’s stories actually have a romance or an arranged marriage between a male and a female character, I would expect that heteronormative experiences are the huge majority of any sexuality presented.
There have been studies of the representation of disabilities – and a wide range of disabilities in children’s books. You guessed it, they are hugely under-represented. And the disabilities shown do not reflect those that most children see in their peers in elementary schools. Sadly, children’s books are where the tropes of characters with disabilities start. These tropes include being support characters, inspirational, “pitiful or pathetic, or a burden and incapable of fully participating in the events of everyday life.” For those who are disabled reading this, this is not the reflection that is healthy. And for those who are able, seeing only these stories is also unhealthy for learning about others.
Studies of the representation of both disability and race have been done. In general, when you find children’s stories with disability represented, the percentage of those with non-white races depicted is very low. In fact, the percent of children’s books depicting any race that is not white is low.
As every single study or article linked above says, it is important for children to see representations of themselves, and positive representations of themselves in the literature they read.
Stellaluna by Janell Cannon was not a book of my childhood, but it is a book I read to my kids and have kept because I liked it so. The main bat character is female, but it does not live up to a fully diverse cast. Do you have some examples of inclusive children’s books?
Bookworms beware! GeekGirlCon ‘13 will spotlight so many absorbing books to pick up, you may not emerge from your favorite reading spot until next year’s convention. From feminist anthologies to young adult novels, we’ve got geeks of all kinds covered.
Want to collect some awesome autographs? Be sure to bring copies of your favorite authors’ works—or support them by purchasing a few at the big event!
Fantasy fans, take note: several authors will be discussing strong female characters—both in general and ones they’ve created—at the panel “The New Female Fantasy Hero.” Sit in to soak up examples from Cat Rambo’s Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, Dia Calhoun’s After the River, the Sun, and Danika Dinsmore’s Brigitta of the White Forest. Sci-fi enthusiasts will also be treated at “Toward A Universe of Equals: The Past, Present and Future of Gender Equality in Science Fiction.” Danielle Myers, author of The Last Burning of New London, and Michael Shean, writer of The Wonderland Cycle series, will speak on these imperative issues in sci-fi worlds and our own.
We can’t forget children when analyzing and crafting well-rounded personalities! “Strong Female Characters in Young Adult Lit” is a not-to-be-missed panel for kids, parents, and YA novel fans of all ages. Writer of Prophecy Girl, Faith McKay will examine how to build and exemplify positive role models for young (and not-so-young) readers.
For mature-only audiences comes “Romance Is A Feminist Genre,” where writer Corrina Lawson will explore the concept that romance novels contain more substantial women than just damsels in distress. Lawson certainly knows her stuff, having been recognized multiple times by the association Romance Writers of America.
For book fans of the comic variety, we’ve even got panels on books about comic books. How meta! The panel “All The Real Girls—Creating Real Girls in Comics” will also explore this topic with multiple authors who have crafted fully-formed personalities in their books’ female characters. Sit in to soak up examples from Hope Larson’s Who Is AC?, Mariah Huehner’s Womanthology: Space, Kel McDonald’s As We Were/Strange Someone, and Rachel Edidin’s Adventure Time scripts.
For an informative, fun, and frank look at how geekery is changing the world, be sure to take in GeekGirlCon co-founder Jennifer K. Stuller’s panel, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Fan Phenomena”. Author of Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology, and editor of Fan Phenomena and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she will participate in talks tackling such scholarly work being done on fan communities, and how these studies’ findings affect both geek and mainstream culture.
Oodles of books and authors will be bouncing around at GeekGirlCon ‘13! Pick up your passes in advance so you can nab the best seat at each panel, and be first in line for each author signing session. See you this weekend!
Here at GeekGirlCon, we love to feature guest blogs from you — the people who come to our events, attend our convention, and volunteer or donate to our cause. You are the geeks who keep us motivated, even on the craziest of days.
Today, we are featuring a blog from Eliza Hirsch, a local writer and, of course, proud geek girl. Below, Eilza shares a story about one of her favorite books and why it spoke to her when she was a teenager.
I only made it to my sophomore year before dropping out of my Colorado country high school. I left behind trailer classrooms (the debate club was relegated to a stuffy box hidden behind the school proper), an extra creative mascot (the mighty fighting Falcons from Falcon High School, in the city of Falcon), and a few real, honest-to-Betsy cowboys.
During my illustrious public school career, I developed a couple coping mechanisms. Books were my primary line of defense. I fell in love with stories, and the ability of those stories to transport me into different, more interesting places. Places that made sense.
The paperback cover for Into the Wild Nerd Yonder
Places like the world in Julie Halpern’s Into the Wild Nerd Yonder. The book follows Jessie in her sophomore year of high school. Her best friends are changing in ways she’s not sure she likes, and she’s trying to figure out who she is, how she fits into the world. Sound familiar? Sound like everyone’s second year of high school? Yeah.
I liked this book, and Jessie in particular, for a few reasons. The most important is that Jessie is the kind of girl I might have been in high school—if I was approximately twice as innocent and half as angry. She wears crazy clothes (most of those skirts I mentioned came from the quilting fabric section) and hangs out with people on the fringe of the social strata; she’s funny, and fun.
Jessie’s also unapologetically intelligent and—with a goal of sewing enough skirts to wear a different one every day of school—she’s uniquely creative. She doesn’t mind standing out, yet at the same time she’s pretty insecure, relying on her increasingly difficult-to-relate-to friends. What’s a girl to do?
Hi everyone! In honor of National Library Week, I asked our faithful staff at GeekGirlCon what they love most about their local library. Here’s what a few of them had to say:
“When I returned to Seattle after a near-decade away, I could not believe all the changes that had been made to the Seattle library system! They’d become all sleek and modern, with a website for me to check out things, pay fines, and renew holds. Best of all, in my absence they had built a gorgeous branch in my neighborhood that is perfectly located next to a grocery store and other handy things. What a joy it is to load up on books (I never leave with just one), get other errands done at the same time, grab coffee, and go home to curl up and read. Not going to lie, I’ve had a lot less overdue books than in the past because of this system; everyone should have a neighborhood library!” – Nova Barlow, Web Content Producer
“What I like most about my local library system is my library card. In addition to checking out materials, my library card allows me to access a huge array of fantastic online resources: such as dictionaries or encyclopedia like the Oxford English Dictionary, when I need to get some hardcore etymology, usage, or history for words; or full text magazine and publication databases like ProQuest, General OneFile, or eLibrary when I wanted to pull up that article on the Lake District from 1998; or a fantastic pulled pork recipe from an old cooking magazine accidentally ruined by a sweet-and-tangy (but sadly opaque) sauce. I’m amazed at how much stuff is not on the free internet, and I am really happy that my library gives me access to it wherever I am.
And yes, I do have my library card number memorized.” – Amanda Powter, Copywriter
“My favorite thing about my library is the fact that they’ve gone digital. Now I can check out an audio-book on my phone or an eBook on my kindle from anywhere instead of having to make that extra effort to stop into the library. I read a lot of books and use the library for most of them. I would much rather check out 10 books on my kindle than have to carry around a giant hardback. Thank you, Seattle libraries, for providing digital content, and here’s to hoping the selection keeps expanding!” – Jex Ballard, Volunteer Coordinator
What do you love about your local library? Leave your comment below and show some love for your favorite book nook!
