A lovely collection of loosely entwined tales, with a touch of the kind of modern fairy tale spirit of Charles de Lint: the magic seeps around the edges of the mundane.
From robots of the future to visitations from a goddess of storytelling herself (and three different takes on the classic tale of the minotaur and the labyrinth), the great joy of this collection include the recursive visitations of place and character from angles askew.

In My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World That is Sick, Lyndsey Medford takes the reader on a journey through her own lifelong chronic illness and its intersections with our chronically sick world. Medford skillfully weaves a narrative of body in place that brings the reader into the realities of navigating complex illness in the American medical system with a gentleness that doesn't shy away from how lonely and painful that experience of illness can be. She acknowledges her own perspective, and its shaping by her social location. Rather than prescribe a solution, she continually returns to the space of complexity and accountability she has found for herself in her own healing journey.
Throughout this, she comes back to the complexity of her own faith journey. The God-talk is grounded and does not interfere with the reading as a non-Christian reader, rather, it is a call to remind herself and her faith communities to live in the kind of clearness and compassion that Jesus' narratives of healing modeled: ones where healing is not just about removing illness, but returning people to their communities and relationships with each other: a universal message that comes through and is timely for modern gathered communities to hear.

I do my best to avoid one star reviews, and I find that it is usually a mismatch between author's description and my expectation. Which is perhaps the kindest thing I can say about this collection: it's description, much like it's content, is pure fantasy. Fantasy that I'm sure appeals to someone, but certainly excludes many others. However, the best fantasy tends to look at the world that is and imagine something different. The fantasies in this series sadly uphold much of the world as it is, which a gimmicky foil of the idea that the protaganist is in dialogue with a femme friend.
One major limit in my own reading is that the formatting of the ebook is not finalized, so vignettes that perhaps should have followed essays did not link in my reader and I was left without the ability to read the connecting narratives directly. However, I'm not sure there is much that can contextualize opening a fantasy series with a sotry of a woman embracing her "true love" for a cop who pulled her over and declined to ticket her in exchange for a cheap date, or the very "nice guy" undertones of the self-inserted protagonist who avows he isn't just a "nice guy" while embellishing a fantasy night with "the one who got away."
I have real concerns for guys who might read this: it upholds some really problematic and false believes about sexuality, gender, and pursuit. It tries too hard at the pretense of being intellectual and artsy, while landing in territory that seems more suited for certain show more subreddits.
This book would benefit from much stronger editing and more critical reader feedback before circulating to a wider audience. show less

https://www.patreon.com/posts/i-spoke-to-you-77519687?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&...

Well, hells. Or perhaps, heavens??

When I picked up this book, I approached it from the stance of queer elder and sometimes scholar, advocate and academic. I've worked in the world of queer identity and advocacy long before I claimed the identity for myself. As a collection published by an academic press and on a population so different from my own lived experience, I expected my curiosity and desire to understand all that exists at the intersections to lead me into these narratives of queer Mormom experiences.

I must admit to how unprepared I was for what I found, both in the text and in myself.

This book came to me at the same time I found myself stepping away from a life on the road and stepping into queer communal living. It came to me as I was starting replacement hormone therapy and all the weird self-shifts that come to it. Which is to say, it has arrived just as I'm in a place to really reflect on my own gender and queer journey.

One of the really stunning threads throughout this book is the way the editors and the authors hold the tensions that come when acknowledging one core part of your indentity is likely to result in the loss of community, family, geography, and core narrative. To be Mormon and queer is to be divided in yourself, and the high costs of navigating that resonate throughout the collection. In an age where queer authenticity and "outness" are celebrated and show more encouraged, where despite setbacks we are in one of the most open and safer times in modern history to be queer, this collection invites reflection on *not* speaking out, or speaking, and on the decades long journey for some of reconciling hope and salvation with your human peers deciding you are wrong.

It is a hard read at times, with stories that do not shy away from the worst of the costs, including suicide and loss of community. It is also incredibly hopeful, in the small acts of living and loving that these courageous authors tell.

Let them speak to you. We all have something we can learn. show less

*The participation of people with good intentions doesn't change a system that exists to cause harm."
Both an advance and beginner primer on understanding and repairing the harms of colonialism. This book complements, deepens, and is in the lineage of such books as Red Earth, White Lies; A People's History of the United States, and Lies My Teacher Told Me.
At a time when it is so easy to Other each other, Krawec invites and challenges a different response: to bring each other into connection and understanding, while retaining that which is culturally our own. To do that she reaches deep into her own kinship narratives and broadly across webs of knowledge to share how we got to the place of such division, and what we might do about it.
Krawec connects through language, history, and her own heritage and superbly links them together in an understanding of colonialism that is harrowing, yet also ultimately hopeful. We may not yet be doomed to despair and a world inflamed. To get there we must understand how we got here, and that journey, as she challenges us, is not one to take alone, nor is the reading of, and response to this book.

This collection is timely and important, yet I found it struggled with cohesion and pacing. Some of the individual author's stories shone brightly, others seemed misplaced or missequenced. As a migrant myself, I had trouble finding any sense of connection with the stories. Perhaps I was not the intended audience.

Though not my first encounter with Sim Kern’s work, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this collection, in the best ways. What I found was a diverse garden of narratives. Many of them deal with intense and traumatic themes, yet the thread for me as a reader engaged how we heal through community and relationship with ourselves, our chosen families, and the landscapes we call home. These stories planted hope for making sense of a nonsensical world, and guideposts to imagining realistically hopeful futures. Like a tapas menu in a foreign tongue, each story dished up a surprising flavor or texture leaving me satiated in unexpected ways. At times the raw honesty left me bereft of useful words for my feelings, as catastrophes of all size encountered the truth of each character’s choices. The best sci-fi helps us imagine the best futures. Each of these stories-even the most fanciful-left me hopeful for us as a singular species in the universal webs of life, death, and all that exists between.

Cross Posted on Patreon at:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/review-cunning-66553768

Review: Cunning Linguists (the New Smut Project)

CW: this is a review of a collection of erotic short stories..in case the title didn’t give it away!

The brain is sometimes referred to as the largest sex organ we have, and this collection certainly explores that concept, and tumbles through a playground of themes. There’s a breadth -a girth even- of literary themes to delight passionate nerds of all types. Wordplay as foreplay, silly and sublime, from subversive and suggestive innuendo to playful puns. If there is a common theme it is curiosity: about context, about desire, about what the heart and the mind can create when bodies collide.

As in many anthologies, the sheer variety alone offers a menu where there is likely something for everyone, even if not everything is for one reader. Unless, perhaps like me, you are the type of reader as enthusiastic about reaching for a dictionary as your favorite toy.

This anthology leans toward queer, in the verb form: interpreting and playing with erotica in a way that upends traditional categories of gender and sexuality. It invites reading through several lenses: as the good smut it sets out to be, as playful exploration of story forms, of a buffet of ideas and interactions to explore: alone, or perhaps to a friend or loved one.

As a somatic educator, I particularly appreciate that the stories accept and explore that which many still consider taboo: show more sex and shame are often linked in unhealthy ways, yet many of these stories help craft realistic narratives around consent, physical and mental ability, and body shame, offering alongside well-written smut the opportunity to see how bodies and brains connect across both the differences we manufacturer from the outside and the secret thoughts we hold about our own perceived differences. Educational at times, amusing at others, and sometimes just plain weird in the best ways, I hope to see more writing from these authors, because we don’t just need better smut out there, we need stories that help us imagine healthier ways to connect to pleasure in ourselves and with each other. show less

Cry of the Firebird is urban fantasy through and through, in both it's strengths and its weaknesses. Like much urban fantasy it involves a troubled main character with many resources magical and mundane, fun doses of romance, mythical half breeds and frequent battle scenes.

The main character Anya can be hard to connect with at times, however, this tracks well as the character portrays the effects of trauma in mostly realistic ways, including alcohol misuse, nightmares, and interruptions in how she can use magic.

The writing is engaging and weaves together fast-paced action with really well detailed nuances of spiritual traditions from several cultures presented as living culture rather than simplistic tropes (with one single and really unnecessary notable exception of describing a roving band of travelers as gypsies).

There's a romantic plot device that sets up a childhood friendship with the main character and an older immortal as the primary love interest: reader beware.

Otherwise I found the world building and character development engaging and the book a pleasure to read.

A collection of short stories that are delightfully weird, just as promised in the title, this engaging and often eerie anthology of strangeness is worth a second read. While the landscapes in question largely seem to center on the British countryside, the variety from urban to rural, shadowy to magical are most uncanny for how they all seem to fit together in their individual oddness.
If you like stories in which the landscape is a character in it's own right, this is definitely for you. One of the most engaging short story collections I've had the pleasure of reading in years.

This is a comprehensive and thoughtful review of climate advocacy policy at the beginning of 2021, that addresses political, policy, industry, and individual actions that can be taken toward climate change (with a focus on reducing carbon, which is explained in the text). It takes a complicated set of intersecting topics and provides a layman's understanding without 'dumbing down' the material too much.
Reading this has left me more confident about my role - and the role of corporations (and how I can influence that) in creating a sustainable global climate future.

The title and description of this book offer an interesting hook, the idea of what our brain can create in isolation.

The themes of horror in this book, however, barely address the theme. There is horror, and suspense, but rather than a unique take on a little known neurological phenomenon, the story relies on a number of inaccurate and harmful stereotypes about child abuse, military PTSD, and indigenous legends to move along a plot that at times is compelling in it's level of detail but mostly just cringey and perpetuates easy and unnuanced tropes.

Rather than explore these, and the effects of the 'prisoners cinema', the plot rushes to a sudden, incomplete, and unsatisfying conclusion, in which the complex inner feelings of the protagonist are suddenly dropped in favor of an unbelievable act of violence seemingly inconsistent with the build up.

This is a novel that seems to attempt to bridge the space between queer erotica and YA fiction. The content is heavy on common tropes about sports and gay romance. It mostly manages to still be an enjoyable read if looking for a light distraction, but the plot line about closeted gay attraction feels overdone and asynchronous to the heavy leaning on details of here and now setting. The romantic/erotic components felt stronger than the plot itself. Despite this it was a fun enough read.