Monthly Archives: January 2021

Book Review: Save Yourself

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Title: Save Yourself
Author: Cameron Esposito
Release date: March 2020
Source: bought audiobook copy
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Save Yourself is a memoir by stand-up comedian Cameron Esposito that I bought on audiobook last March, and then never got around to reading/listening to. The minute I saw the description I knew it would be up my alley though. Cameron Esposito is a “masculine of center” lesbian comedian who was raised in a very devout Italian Catholic family and wanted to be a priest when she was younger. The memoir deals with her childhood not understanding her own sexuality because of the stigma around homosexuality and gender conformity in her family and church, and with her life through college and early in her career as she finally comes to terms with her sexuality and (mostly?) loses her religion.

As a bisexual woman from a devout Cajun Catholic family who didn’t even consider the fact that I might be anything other than straight until I was 20 years old, and didn’t come out until I was 30, I identified VERY strongly with the subject matter. Add to that, the fact that (as I mentioned in a previous book review) I was pretty damn sure I was to become a nun until I was 15 or 16 years old, and then proceeded to become more and more disillusioned and disconnected from the catholic church at just about the same time (and for many of the same reasons) as Cameron Esposito, and well… this book was pretty much written for me.

This is not a long book. I think the audiobook was about 7 hrs long, so if you were reading it in print at a medium pace, you could probably finish it around 4 or 5 hours. I finished it in about a day and half, listening while I was at work. I laughed through pretty much the whole thing. Cameron Esposito’s writing is absolutely hilarious, and the fact that she narrates the audiobook herself helps immensely with the delivery of certain lines and jokes. She is honest and blunt about herself, her family, and her relationships. She talks about place of upper-middle-class white christian privilege she came from as a child, the terrifying experience of discovering your own sexuality and coming out while attending the extremely-NON-gay-friendly Boston College, the rejection of her father who took years to accept her as a gay woman, her very problematic relationships (including being a victim of date rape, and admitting to cheating on several girlfriends), and yet she makes all of these very serious subjects human, relatable, and funny as hell.

(Side note: the cheating stories were particularly difficult for me to sit through because I absolutely cannot abide cheating. I know it happens, I know plenty of otherwise very good people have done it, I know we’re all human and flawed and all that… but I am very sensitive to stories about cheating, so I squirmed through those bits pretty uncomfortably.)

Thankfully, not all the stories she writes about are serious topics. Some of them are downright delightful: like making her from wanting to be a priest, to studying social work, to getting hired to several improv groups with shocking ease, and finally ending up in stand-up comedy; or (my favorite) joining a small alt-indie circus for a summer!

All in all, this was a delightful, funny memoir from a person I could identify with quite a lot (I’m not particularly butch or “masculine of center” as she describes herself, but that was one of a very small number of major differences). The writing is sharp and witty and deeply human. Her narration is perfect (not surprisingly, since that’s kind of what stand-up comedy is anyway). And it was a really fun way to spend a couple afternoons at work.

Book Review: The Councillor

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Title: The Councillor
Author: E.J. Beaton
Release Date: 2 March 2021
Source: ARC provided by publisher
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I had meant to get this review written and posted nearly a week ago, but alas, life… But anyway, here we go, and OH BOY, folks! I am so excited about this new release novel! It is already a strong contender for my favorite book of the year! (Yes, I know, it’s only January and I have a lot of books to read this year, but it’ll definitely be making the shortlist at least!) The Councillor is from debut author E.J. Beaton. It’s being marketed by the publisher as “machiavellian fantasy” which is a very good description actually. It is political intrigue fantasy at its best; it gives Game of Thrones a run for its money. This debut author is arriving on the science fiction/fantasy with a bang, and we love to see it! They pack more world-building and suspense into this book than you could possibly hope for, and it’s fantastic!

So here’s the basic premise: the story takes place in a country that seems somewhat vaguely inspired by medieval Italy called Elira, where Queen Sarelin Bray rules over a country that is separated into five city-states (Axium, Rhime, Valderos, Pyrrha, and Lyria), each with its own city-ruler. The country is in a state of uneasy peace, some twenty years after an enormous war against the White Queen, leader of a group of people with magical abilities called Elementals. Having defeated the White Queen, Sarelin made Elementals illegal and routinely executes them; people are not even allowed to speak of them. Our main character is Lysande, an orphan, a scholar, and the handpicked protege of the warrior-queen Sarelin. When Sarelin is assassinated leaving no heirs, an ancient tradition dictates that the queen’s appointed Councillor choose a new king or queen from among the city-rulers.  When Lysande, a commoner rather than nobility, is shockingly assigned the role of Councillor, and given the task of choosing a new ruler from among the nobility of the surrounding city-states, she is thrust into a world of political machinations, alliances, betrayals, and death she feels woefully unprepared for. Add in the fact that the White Queen, long-thought dead, may be returning to conquer the realm, and Lysande’s secret drug addiction, and it seems things could not get more complicated. Until they do. 

This novel delights in thwarting reader expectations, seeming to be one kind of story before transforming into another about a third of the way through. You go in thinking the whole plot will be about Lysande trying to decide who is the best ruler from among the city-rulers, but then it flips on its head and becomes another thing entirely. There is a large cast of characters, each with distinct developed and fascinating personalities and motives. The various city-rulers are all amazing in different ways, and the various people who support Lysande throughout the story are complex and fantastic! 

Lysander herself is wonderfully complex and flawed. She worships the memory of Sarelin and must struggle with the fact that her glorious queen’s treatment of Elementals was oppressive, cruel, and unjust. She has developed a growing addiction to an illegal drug made from chimera scales, a drug that keeps her calm and numb and helps her deal with the stress (and downright terror) of being the Councillor, but is having increasingly painful side-effects. She, like the readers, cannot determine who is to be trusted in the labyrinthine machinations of court politics and continuously trips up as she tries to navigate the diplomacy necessary. She also begins to grow a taste for the power that comes with her new position. At the same time, however, she is brilliant and studious and brave, and desperately wants to do the right thing both for herself and for the entire population of the country she loves. In addition to all of this, Lysande is like the DEFINITION of “disaster bi,” and she harbors long suppressed BDSM leanings that slowly emerge in various relationships throughout the novel. She has several different possible love-interests over the course of the novel, and there are a handful of sex scenes, though they are not explicit (in case you’re the kind of person who is concerned about that kind of thing).

 It is so full of well-plotted, but shocking plot twists that you will not be able to catch your breath from beginning to end. I was routinely completely shocked by various developments and revelations, in the best way possible. I am trying to talk around several absolutely STUNNING revelations because I really don’t want to ruin them for potential readers. The whole last third of the novel, in particular, had me breathlessly sitting on the edge of my seat, trying to figure out who was betraying who and how the hell it was going to end! While the ending was satisfying, it absolutely left plenty of room for a sequel, and I really need everyone to go buy this book (pre-order it even!) so that the author and publishers feel compelled to give me a sequel as quickly as humanly possible, please and thanks!

So, get thee hence! Go order a copy! You can find it at all the usual places: indiebound.org, bookshop.org, barnesandnoble.com, and your local indie bookstore!

Book Review: Sisters of the Vast Black

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Title: Sisters of the Vast Black
Author: Lina Rather
Release Date: 29 Oct 2019
Source: bought 
Rating: 5 stars

I bought this book not long after it was released, sometime in late 2019, and then never got around to reading it, even though the premise was very exciting to me. Just one of those things, of course. But now I have finally taken the time to sit down and read it (it’s a novella, it only took about three hours once I finally just SAT DOWN), and wow was it great! (This also happens to be the first book of the year to fulfill a spot on my 2021 Reading Challenge!)

Sisters of the Vast Black is a novella by Lina Rather that manages to pack all the punch of a vast epic space opera into a very small 155-page package. It follows the space-faring convent of Sisters from the Order of Saint Rita, on board their living-ship called the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations. The sisters are out in the far reaches of space, in the “third system” of planets away from Earth, several decades after a disastrous and bloody war between Earth and its rebelling colonies. Most of the sisters have never even SEEN Earth, having been born and raised on space stations or other planets and moons. They administer to the sick and spread the word of God, though they feel that proselytizing is the least important of their duties. At the beginning of the story, they are going to a small moon to bless a brand new colony and perform marriage and baptisms for several colonists. But aboard the ship, many of the sisters harbor deep secrets.

The Mother Superior of their convent took a vow of silence forty years ago, and speaks using sign language, but is the REASON for her vow of silence that she has kept a closely-guarded secret for decades. Another sister is hiding the fact that she joined the convent under false pretenses. And a third sister has been keeping up a secret correspondence that could have a huge impact on her faith and her choices.

All of these things come to head in the climax of the story, when a distress signal calls them back to the colony they had just blessed weeks before. When they arrive, they must face many things: the consequences of their actions, the hypocrisies of the Catholic Church, and the renewed strength of the Earth Central Government.

To understand why I loved this little book so much, you’ll need a tiny bit of personal background info. I was raised in a very devout Catholic family until the age of thirteen, when my mother had an enormous crisis of faith and left the church. She became agnostic, and finally atheist, while I lingered in the faith for a very long time. Up until about the age of sixteen, I was pretty sure I was going to become a nun later in life. Even in college, by which point I had started to learn doubt and become angry with the hypocrisies of the Church, I still minored in theology. Nowadays, I don’t know what I would classify myself as, religiously-speaking: spiritual but not religious, uncertain and ambivalent and more than a little angry? But I still hold a deep fascination with and love for the saints, and my Patron Saint is, in fact, Saint Rita. 

Because of all this, Sisters of the Vast Black speaks to me on quite a few levels. First of all: I love a good space opera, and this is definitely a good space opera despite its small size. The science fiction elements are precise and well-written, and the ending was satisfying. But more importantly, the way the story deals with faith and doubt, with the contradictions of believing in God and messages of the Catholic faith while acknowledging and despising the evils of the Catholic Church, and with the inevitable blending between the Church and imperialist governments… all of this punched my right in the gut. All of the sisters were deeply sympathetic and complex characters that I could recognize and identify with myself or family and friends.

I do believe that anyone who enjoys a good space opera, or the compactness of a well-executed novella will like this book. But I think it will be ESPECIALLY potent for people who come from religious backgrounds in general, and the Catholic Church specifically. It will likely speak to you on a deep, perhaps even existential level. And if so, I hope you will share your thoughts with me sometime!

Movie Review: Godmothered

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Last week I said I had a couple holiday movies I wanted to review, and I posted the first one (for Happiest Season), and then completely forgot to write the second one! So, here I present to you my movie review for the other new holiday movie I watched over Christmas break: Godmothered.

Godmothered is a Disney movie that was released directly to Disney+ on Dec 4th, starring Isla Fisher and Jillian Bell. It is clearly in the tradition of Disney holiday movies meant for whole families, and I frankly: I thought it was really REALLY cute!

The basic premise is this: Jillian Bell plays Eleanor, a fairy in training in “The Motherland” to become a Fairy Godmother, only she discovers that no new fairy has been made an official Godmother in YEARS because there are no more missions. And there are no more missions because people on Earth have stopped believing in magic and happily-ever-afters. The head-Godmother Moira, played by Jane Curtin (which was both strange and amusing), announces that the Motherland is officially going to be closed, and all fairies will be made into Tooth Fairies. Eleanor decides she won’t accept this: she finds a single mission, a wish from a little girl named Mackenzie, and goes to Earth to give Mackenzie a happy ending and prove that Godmothers are still needed.

Lo! And behold, however: the wish is old, and Mackenzie is now an adult woman with two children, working at a failing trash-news station. She is widowed, miserable, and has mostly checked out of her childrens’ lives. When Eleanor arrives, Mackenzie is understandably skeptical and then HORRIFIED when she discovers that Eleanor really IS magical. Mayhem and hijinks ensure, during which Eleanor decides that Mackenzie’s happily-ever-after must mean that she should fall in love with her attractive, charmingly-geeky coworker at the news station, aptly named Hugh PRINCE, who must SURELY be her TRUE LOVE. Eleanor causes several disasters and highly embarrassing situations (I am very sensitive to secondhand embarrassment and squirmed through a couple scenes). And the movie ends, of course, happily, but perhaps not in the way one might expect.

I really enjoyed this movie. It was sweet and charming and funny. Clearly, it must be safe for children, but I found for the most part that it played as much to adults who would understand and empathize with Mackenzie’s disillusionment with romance, happy endings, and life in general. Isla Fisher and Gillian Bell are wonderful in the movie. They’re funny and played off each other very well. Santiago Cabrera, who plays Hugh Prince, was (as I said) charmingly-geeky and adorably idealistic. Even the two children were pretty good (and I usually find child actors in these kinds of movies either FAR too twee, or just plain-old BAD). Quite a few scenes made me laugh out loud, and even the more cheesy scenes weren’t TOO cheesy. But what I really appreciated about this movie was the ENDING.

AND HERE WE GET INTO A SPOILER FOR THE ENDING OF THE MOVIE! CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

At the end of the movie, following all of Eleanor’s failed attempts to get Mackenzie and Hugh together in the belief that this is the ONLY TRUE Happily-Ever-After, Mackenzie comes to a realization. Eleanor has succeeded in giving her a Happily-Ever-After (despite Moira’s claims that she has failed and therefore the Motherland will close as planned), NOT because she’s in love with Hugh, but because she has reminded Mackenzie how to enjoy the small things in life, and helped her reconnect with her children. She announces (to a rather large audience) that her True Love is her CHILDREN, that they give her life meaning and happiness. She says that there is no single kind of True Love, and no single kind of Happily-Ever-After. And then the  camera pans to a father looking at his son, a grandson looking at his grandmother, etc etc etc. And folks it was FANTASTIC. It was such a great message! 

The movie hints to possible future development between Mackenzie and Hugh, but the happy ending does not HINGE on that fact AT ALL. And it was WONDERFUL.

So yeah… I really enjoyed this movie. I think it’s a great movie for families, and possibly also a great movie for adults who are perhaps lonely or disillusioned with life in general. At the very least, I bet it’ll make you smile for a little while! 

Movie Review: Happiest Season

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I haven’t been watching a ton of movies lately. Mostly, I’ve been re-watching the same dozen or so movies (mostly Disney movies) or tv shows over and over again for months, because it brings me comfort. I read something once about how people with severe anxiety tend to rewatch the same handful of things over and over again because you already know what’s going to happen and you don’t have to deal with the tension or fear of uncertainty, or cliffhangers, or whatever. I’d say this is pretty accurate. I also don’t really watch anything too dark or heavy lately, even if I have seen it before and know that it’ll end up ok. I’ve been sticking to gentler, happier things (don’t ask me how many times I have watched Hilda or Phineas & Ferb lately; the number has got to be in the dozens by now).

But I did watch two new holiday movies over Christmas, so I figured I might as well offer a couple movie reviews over the next few days.

The first is for Happiest Season, streaming on Hulu, and starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis. You probably saw commercials for this at some point, and possibly a bunch of people talking about it online right after it came out. (Ha! Came out! How apropos!). Happiest Season is a Christmas movie, first and foremost, and it is also one of a very small number of LGBT/queer holiday films. Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis play lesbian couple Abby and Harper. Abby doesn’t like Christmas, because it reminds her of her parents who died when she was 19. Harper wants to get her girlfriend into the holiday spirit and so invites her home for Christmas — only to reveal at the last possible second that she is not actually OUT to her family, and that Abby will have to pretend to just be a roommate Harper is bringing home because she had nowhere else to go for the holidays. All this deflates Abby’s plan to propose to Harper on Christmas eve.

As it turns out, Harper’s family are a) stinking filthy rich, b) politically-motivated (her father is running for mayor), and c) absolutely TERRIFYINGLY HORRIBLE PEOPLE. The parents, played by Mary Steenburgen and Victor Garber and completely obsessed with giving the appearance of a perfect family (perfect, here, of course defined by very conservative values), and Harper and her three sisters are all back-biting bullies who are constantly fighting for supremacy and their father’s apparently-limited attention and love.

Meanwhile, poor Abby has been thrown to the wolves of this family with little warning or support from her girlfriend, who has turned into a completely different person before her eyes. Add in Harper’s ex-boyfriend, who clearly wants to rekindle their relationship (spurred on by Harper’s oblivious parents), and everything is sure to go to shit very quickly. In the middle of all this, Abby meets Harper’s ex-girlfriend Riley, played to perfection by Aubrey Plaza (can I just have a movie about HER character?), who knows well how Abby feels: she was likewise hidden away by Harper throughout their entire relationship, until Harper eventually outed Riley in a panic at the prospect of being caught.

So, let’s get down to brass tacks: I was so excited about the prospect of a qeer-women holiday movie when this first released, and  there are certainly parts of this movie I really liked. Kristen Stewart was wonderful in the role and she did a great job of coming across as sweet and earnest and more than a little heartbroken. Aubrey Plaza, as I said, was a delight. Probably the highlight of the whole film (unsurprisingly) was Dan Levy, playing Abby’s best friend. He’s saved from being the stereotypical token “sassy gay friend” by the fact that, of course, half the characters are gay. And, of course, because Dan Levy is just that FUNNY.

But it is flawed. The secondhand embarrassment of several scenes, when Abby is put in awkward situations, was so bad I literally couldn’t watch them. I had to fast-forward (thank god I hadn’t been able to watch this in theatres!). Harper’s parents are HORRENDOUS. And Harper spends most of the movie abandoning, gaslight, and emotionally-torturing Abby. Because this is a Christmas movie, we all know going on that there’s going to be a magical reconciliation at the end. Every Christmas movie has one, some more forced and unbelievable than others. This one takes the cake for unbelievability. Harper at NO POINT does any real thing to earn Abby’s trust or forgiveness. Nor does anything in the plot make us believe for a SECOND than Harper’s parents would just magically flip a switch and be okay with Harper’s sexuality at the end. And yet, that’s what we’re left with at the end.

Several reviewers (such as this article from Screenrant, and this blog post, just to list a couple) and many comments on Twitter have said the same thing I’m going to say: the chemistry between Abby and Riley was MUCH more believable by the end, and I think a more emotionally-honest and satisfying ending would have been if Abby broke up with Harper and got together with Riley, and Harper had to learn to accept her own sexuality on more honest and mature terms. All of this is frustrating because I am torn: on one hand, I have been dying for (and am very grateful for) a movie about lesbians that didn’t end with tragedy. SO MANY lesbian romance movies end with the couple breaking up in the face of societal pressure, or one or both of them dying, and I am SICK TO DEATH OF IT. But on the other hand, THIS particular happy ending just didn’t feel EARNED by the story in any real way. So… I’m stuck somewhere in the middle.

All in all, I’d give Happiest Season maybe a 3 stars out of 5?

One thing I can say for this movie: I have been playing around with the idea of writing my own queer-women-rom-com for awhile now, and this movie pushed me over the edge to actually trying to DO it. I’ve been sketching out notes and outlines for about a month now, so we’ll see how that goes…

Goals for 2021

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Hello all, and welcome to my first blog post of the new year! We are now nearly a week into 2021 and, unsurprisingly, it mostly just feels like more of the same. I don’t really DO New Year’s resolutions, per se, but I do have a few goals in mind, most of them book-related, of course!

I first wanted to share my overall reading progress for 2020! I had a goal to read 50 books in the year. I didn’t quite make it, but I read 46 which is still very good (for me at least! I have a friend who routinely reads between 175-200 every single year, but we won’t go there…) I keep a log of my total reading hours in my bullet journal, color-coded for format (print, audiobook, ebook, comic/graphic novel, and fanfiction). My total reading hours was 458 hrs, which is approximately 19 days! My highest total hours per format was, unsurprisingly, audiobook at 294 hours. Most of my reading is done by audiobook these days — and for the record, I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with this, or that it is substantively different from print reading in any way! Still, I am hoping to work a bit more print-reading into my schedule this year. I think I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but I USED to read voraciously, and severe depression killed my ability to read for nearly a decade. Audiobooks saved my life, but I am hoping to work my way back up to something at least resembling my old reading habit. It’s slow progress, but it is progress…

For 2021, my goal is once again to read 50 books. And 30 of those will, of course, be for the reading challenge I set up for myself: Amanda’s Very Idiosyncratic 2021 Reading Challenge.

I am also going to continue on with the “Finish the Series” Reading Challenge I joined last year. For last year I finished three series that I had previously started: the Artemis Fowl series, the Old Kingdom Series, and the Wayward Children series (at least until the new one comes out later this month!)

For this year, I am going to try to finish the Percy Jackson series, which I started last year (so this year it counts as “previously-started”!), and possibly the Redwall series. I want to do a massive Redwall re-read, and I own and read MOST of the series — having read them all during the HEIGHT of my reading days in high school and the first couple years of college — but as I got more and more busy with college and part-time jobs, I lost track and never finished the last five books in the series: High Rhulain, Eulalia!, Doomwyte, The Sable Quean, The Rogue Crew. I could, of course, just read those five and have done with it. But I think it would be fun, if a tad ambitious, to try to do a re-read of the whole series from the beginning (and yes, I prefer to read in publication order, don’t @ me).

I also intend to continue trucking along on my way through the Dresden Files books, though I have little illusion of finishing the whole series this year… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I also have several writing goals, of course. Last year I continued work on one novel, and started a second, while also tinkering with planning/outlining for a novella and (possibly) a screenplay. I participated in both Camp Nanos in April and July, and actual Nano in November, though I didn’t “win” them. All told, between all projects (and the blog) I wrote 123,132 words! I would like to have a similar total word count for 2021, and better if possible. I am hoping to finish the one novel (Holes in Your Coffin) and make significant progress on the second (Onyx Seal), and I would REALLY like to have one short story or novella done. I am INFAMOUSLY bad at writing SHORT and CONCISE, but I think it would be good practice for me, and might also give me a (albeit very small) chance to maybe get something published while I continue to try to finish a whole novel. But who knows…

I have other goals as well, of course: saving money, continuing to improve my exercise routine, that sort of stuff, but that’s boring so we won’t get into that here.

I’d love to hear about your goals for 2021! Books to read, things to write or make or do! Please share in the comments!