Rosemary’s Baby

Read Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

I felt like reading a classic, and very recently listened to You’re Wrong About’s Stepford Wives and The Exorcist episodes, which motivated me to read Rosemary’s Baby. And I’m very glad I did. This felt like an easier read than it should have been, because every single twist and turn of the book had been…

Proud pink sky

Read Proud Pink Sky by Redfern Jon Barrett

Berlin: a megacity of 24 million people, is the world’s first gay state. Its distant radio broadcasts are a lifeline for teenager William, so when his love affair with Gareth is discovered the two flee toward sanctuary. But is there a place for them in a city divided into districts for young twinks, trendy bears, and rich alpha gays?

Meanwhile, young mother Cissie loves Berlin’s towering highrises and chaotic multiculturalism, yet she’s never left her heterosexual district – not until she and her family are trapped in a queer riot. With her husband Howard plunging into religious paranoia, she discovers a walled-off slum of perpetual twilight, home to the city’s forbidden trans residents.

As William and Cissie dive deeper into a bustling world of pride parades, polyamorous trysts, and even an official gay language, they discover that all is not well in the gay state – each playing their part in a looming civil war…

The main negative review I see about Proud Pink Sky is that nothing happens. I don’t agree. Some things happen, maybe too much, actually. And outside of what happens, there’s the world-building − after all, that’s what we’re coming for. And the world-building has its issues. The idea is nice, and who among us hasn’t…

Lebensborn

Read Lebensborn by Isabelle Maroger ( )

Un matin qu’elle se promène avec son fils, bébé, Isabelle Maroger se fait interpeller par une femme qui la complimente pour ce bel enfant blond aux yeux bleus et ajoute « ça devient rare comme race »… Un choc pour Isabelle, qui réalise qu’il est temps pour elle de raconter son histoire. Car si elle est, elle aussi, grande, blonde et aux yeux bleus, c’est parce qu’elle est à moitié norvégienne. Sa mère est née, pendant la guerre, dans un Lebensborn, ces maternités mises en place par les nazis pour produire à la chaîne de bons petits aryens.

Une bande dessinée offerte par mes grands-parents pour Noël sur le thème des Lebensborn, ces maternités qui servaient à accueillir les jeunes Aryennes enceintes dans les pays envahis par les Nazis. J’ai beaucoup aimé suivre cette histoire, racontée non du point de vue de la jeune femme enceinte en question mais de sa petite-fille. C’est…

Time’s mouth

Read Time’s Mouth by Edan Lepucki ( )

Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950’s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. Yet Ursa’s powers come with a cost. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting her son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry, to flee their home for Los Angeles and reinvent themselves far from Ursa’s insidious influence. But escaping their past won’t be so easy. A series of mysterious events forces Cherry to abandon their baby, leaving Ray to raise Opal alone.

Now a teenager and still heartbroken over the abandonment of the mother she never knew, Opal must journey into her own past to reveal the generations of secrets that gave rise to the shimmering source of her family’s painful legacy.

I’m not really a time travel enthusiast, as I said in my review of This is how you lose the time war. Maybe that’s why I loved this novel so much while many others who love time travel hated everything about it. Maybe it’s also because I love stories with women and stories with communes…

Private Citizens

Read Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte

Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel’s four whip-smart narrators–idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda–are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again.

Private Citizens is a darkly funny book that sometimes is just dark. It follow four supremely unlikeable 20-somethings in 2007 San Francisco in their daily lives for some kind of awful Breakfast Club of modern times. It took me a really long time to start accepting that I hated everyone, that it was intended, that…

This is how you lose the time war

Read This Is How You Lose the Time War

Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right?

This recommendation from Sara and viral sensation really hit the mark for me, with a couple of caveats: I still strongly dislike novellas. They never leave me fully satisfied. Unlike some other reviewers, I’m really glad the vignettes were short and diverse, without an explanation of everything going on. This story follows Red and Blue,…