The Girl Who Would Be King

The Girl Who Would be King uses alternating first-person narration to tell the stories of two young women who discover that they have unusual abilities, their struggles to understand and adapt to them, and the conflict those struggles eventually draw them into. Along the way Bonnie and Lola become, more or less, a superhero and

S. S. Taylor: The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon

I wanted to love this book, and perhaps I didn’t because my expectations were too high. It’s published by an arm of McSweeney’s, and it features steampunk trappings, secret societies, cloak and dagger intrigue, a wide subversive streak, strong female characters, and subtle, but deliberate, I think, allusions to Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Becky, and

Jonathan Tropper: This Is Where I Leave You

Warning: This is going to be one of those godawful reviews that may tell you nearly as much about the reviewer as about the book. At the outset of This Is Where I Leave You, narrator Judd Foxman’s life has fallen into a shambles after he discovered his wife was having an affair with his

Jennifer Traig: Devil in the Details – Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood

Traig’s memoir of growing up beset by scrupulosity, a form of OCD manifesting as extremes of religious observance, was often very funny. This was a multiple-guffaw read for me. And beyond its entertainment value, it’s informative and sometimes insightful. I found its structure a little perplexing; it’s somewhere between a linear coming-of-age memoir and a

Lynn Thomas, Deborah Stanish (ed): Whedonistas! A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them

This collection of essays about Joss Whedon’s creations (through Dollhouse; it’s pre Cabin in the Woods/Avengers) includes contributions from writers whose work I already know (Jane Espenson, Emma Bull, Catherynne Valente…) some I didn’t, and some who aren’t writing professionals. It’s kind of all over the map: there’s some really insightful critical analysis, and there’s

Beard, Donihe, Duza, et al: The Bizarro Starter Kit (Orange)

I hoped The Bizarro Starter Kit would help me figure out if I’d like bizarro fiction, a genre self-defined by a loose collective of writers with a shared love of cult/trash cinema. It didn’t. The Bizarro Starter Kit makes the case that there’s too much going on for me to dismiss it, and too much

Wells Tower: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

The nine stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned are full of vivid, acute descriptions, like: I had a studio apartment in the West Village, which people were impressed by until they came up for a look. The place was the architectural equivalent of a biscuit dough remnant, a two-hundred-square-foot waste shape of crannies and recesses

Jennifer Trynin: Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be

If I were dictator of the world, everybody who wanted to form a band to play in front of people would be legally required to watch Standing in the Shadows of Motown first, and everyone who wanted to sign a record deal would be required to read Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be. In my