Books As Gifts

Here’s a list of what us wenches are reading right now!

Under a Painted Sky by Stacey Lee & The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubraker Bradley

Whatcha reading, Brett?

Wing & Claw by Linda Sue Park 

By Break of Day by M L Buchman

Indeh by Ethan Hawke and Greg Ruth

Whatcha reading, Jo Ann?

Burn Math Class by Jason Wilkes

Passenger by Alexandra Bracken & Ninth Key by Meg Cabot

Whatcha reading, Tori?

Hi all. I’m JoAnn and, at the tender age of 30, hold the position of Crone in The Book Wenches. I split my work life between managing the operations of the bookstore and being a massage therapist. I split my personal life with reading, gaming, various crafting, and pounding back movies/shows/anime.

I have fairly eclectic reading tastes, but my go-to comfort zone is genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, horror, and romance). I also read a bunch of YA and graphic novels.

I’m a giant nerd so that is my wheelhouse and probably going to be really evident in the bulk of my posts.

This is just to say that there’s a number of ways Rowling could’ve made her Magical North America work without causing real harm to a lot of real people. That would be for her to have treated American peoples — all of us — with the same respect that she did European. Pretty sure she would never have dreamt of reducing all of Europe’s cultures to “European wizarding tradition”; instead she created Durmstrang and Beauxbatons and so on to capture the unique flavor of each of those cultures. It would’ve taken some work for her to research Navajo stories and pick (or request) some elements from that tradition that weren’t stereotypical or sacred — and then for her to do it again with the Paiutes and again with the Iroquois and so on. But that is work she should’ve done — for the sake of her readers who live those traditions, if not for her own edification as a writer. And how much more delightful could Magic in North America have been if she’d put an ancient, still-thriving Macchu Picchu magic school alongside a brash, newer New York school? How much richer could her history have been if she’d mentioned the ruins of a “lost” school at Cahokia, full of dangerous magical artifacts and the signs of mysterious, hasty abandonment? Or a New Orleanian school founded by Marie Laveau, that practiced real vodoun and was open/known to the locals as a temple — and in the old days as a safe place to plan slave rebellions, a la Congo Square? Or what if she’d mentioned that ancient Death Eater-ish wizards deliberately destroyed the magical school of Hawai’i — but native Hawai’ians are rebuilding it now as Liliuokalani Institute, better than before and open to all?

N. K. Jemisin

http://nkjemisin.com/2016/03/it-couldve-been-great/#sthash.YYqbnjzj.dpuf

(via absintheabsence)

We’ll get back to Mary Anning later. 

Is Kelis’ milkshake song a gift to humanity, or what?

A Feminist Reading List for the Holidays: Books by strong, spirited, whip-smart, flawed, fantastic, human, devastatingly talented women for anyone - female, male, or otherwise - on your list.

My Life On The Road by Gloria Steinem

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Hissing Cousins by Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer

Isabella: The Warrior Queen by Kirstin Downey

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

A House Of My Own by Sandra Cisneros

Fates & Furies by Lauren Groff

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar

The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan

Missoula by Jon Krakauer

Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

You Don’t Have to Like Me by Alida Nugent (@thefrenemy​)

Peruse all of our holiday lists here!

A Diverse Reading List For The Holidays: Because representation matters. We’ve gathered some of our favorite authors and characters from 2015 who speak from just a few of the myriad perspectives humanity has to offer. (Don’t see what you’re looking for here? Send us a chat!)

Taking Flight by Michaela DePrince

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates

Negroland by Margo Jefferson

City of Clowns by Daniel Alarcón & Sheila Alvarado

Half-Resurrection Blues by Daniel José Older (@danieljose)

The Book of Phoenix by @nnedi Okorafor

Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial by Kenji Yoshino

Everything, Everything by @nicolayoon

The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh (@rahdieh)

The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak

The Girl at the Center of the World by Austin Aslan

Becoming Nicole by Amy Ellis Nutt

Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin

A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk

All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami

Peruse all of our holiday lists here!

Made a note on my manuscript while slightly drunk last night, looked at it this morning and all it says is “#foreshadowing”

Image credit: Harper Collins Publishers, Matt Murphy, Joel Tippie

Marita here. I’m apparently incapable of writing brief reviews, so buckle in.

World War II seems to be having a moment in YA, between Code Name Verity and Salt to the Sea and Wolf by Wolf (Hi, Melissa!), and it seems like I have been sucked in, too.

I picked up this book because I thought the cover was amazing, and something about the author’s name tugged on my memory.

So then I opened it up and read the first line of the prologue: “I’m not going to tell you my name, not right away.”

And WHA-BAM! It hit me. Michael Grant, the author, is married to K.A. Applegate, the author of Animorphs. For those not in the know, every Animorphs book begins something like, “My name is ____. I can’t tell you my real name. It’s too dangerous.” It’s a bit of an open secret that although his name’s not on the books, he collaborated with her on the series that pretty much defined my childhood. Some people know Harry Potter forwards and backwards, and some people know Lord of the Rings and some people know Star Wars, but I am a scholar of Animorphs.

So, yes, this made me very happy. 

The real strength of Animorphs is that it used fantastic settings and characters and circumstances to explore very real and important issues. It’s about a war between two alien species that humans got caught in the middle of, but the fact that it is a war is never forgotten. There are casualties and sacrifices, and it hurts.

Over the course of the series, each character is slowly broken in their own unique way. It is, at heart, the story of six children (OK, four children, a hawk, and an alien) who are thrown into a war they simply aren’t prepared for. Their only choices are to become soldiers or die.

It is a science fiction series through and through, but the brutality and the horror and the cost of war feels very, very real.

After reading Front Lines, I have to believe that that gritty, realistic tone was in large part Michael Grant’s contribution.

Front Lines, the first book in the new Soldier Girl series, is not science fiction or fantasy. It is a meticulously researched historical epic. There is exactly one fact that is not historically accurate, one court case detailed in the opening pages:

FLASH: “In a surprise ruling with major ramifications, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Becker v. Minneapolis Draft Board for Josiah Becker, who had sued claiming the recently passed Selective Service and Training Act unfairly singles out males. The decision extends the draft to all US citizens age 18 or older regardless of gender.”

--United Press International--Washington, D.C., January 13, 1940

Women became draft-eligible just in time for World War II. This is the single cog that Grant fits in to the machinery of history, and the whole thing spins out naturally from there. And my God, is it incredible.

Told in a roving third-person point of view, this is the story of three teenage girls heading to war. Rio Richlin is a sweet, innocent California farm girl who is thrown off balance by the death of her older sister in the Pacific theater. Almost on a whim, she lies about her age and enlists with her friend Jenou. Frangie Marr is small and unassuming, but dreams of being a doctor. However, because she happens to be black and female in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1940′s, this is little more than a pipe dream. She enlists because her family desperately needs the money, and because being an army medic might pave her way to the MD she’s hungry for. And Jewish New Yorker Rainy Schulterman just wants to give Hitler a taste of his own medicine. She’s icy and intelligent, and even though the men around her are quick to write her off, she’s determined to put her skill with languages and numbers to good use.

Our heroines make it through boot camp just in time to join the fray in North Africa and become embroiled in the Battle of Kasserine Pass.

Why is this book important? For a couple of reasons.

The one at the top of my list is that it makes war immediate and real. I’m a girl. I’ve never had to think seriously about going to war, and I don’t have any immediate family in the armed forces, either. War is a distant concept to me. I can have sympathy for the experiences of soldiers, but empathy simply isn’t possible because there’s nothing I’ve experienced that can compare. Sure, I can appreciate Saving Private Ryan, but once again, I can’t really empathize. I’m watching men I don’t strongly identify with going through things I can’t comprehend.

This book of teenage girls on the front lines made the battlefields of World War II feel personal. These are girls I could have been in another life, reacting like I would have reacted. They’re as confused and determined and angry as I could see myself being in the same situation. I may not know what it’s like to fire an M1 Garand and take a life, but I do know what it’s like to walk into a room full of boys and have them size you up and dismiss you in the same glance. And I do know what it’s like to want to show the boys you’re competing with that they’ve dismissed you at their own peril. I can definitely put myself in the shoes of these soldier girls.

(Side note: I’m almost resentful that this book was written by a grown man, but captures the feeling of being a teenage girl so incredibly well. He writes with such sensitivity about things like schoolgirl crushes and nail polish and hairstyles without being belittling or dismissive. It’s just not fair.)

There’s so many perfect scenes, so perfectly experienced by our heroines. This book is filled with countless moments that bring the war to life. Not a word is wasted. Every little instance of disenchantment and demoralization and rage and fear hits hard. You’re there on the transport ship on your way to the front for the first time, realizing that you’re still just a civilian in an army uniform. You’re there in the foxhole, aiming an M1 at another human being and hoping you miss. You’re there in the medic tent, making the impossible triage decisions. That experience alone makes this read so worthwhile.

Also important is the fact that Grant doesn’t pull any punches--not when it comes to the reality of war, and not when it comes to the prevailing attitudes at the time. This book is not for the faint of heart. There are scenes of extreme gruesomeness, and there is explicit and offensive language. It’s a hard book to read, but it has so many important things to say that you’re not doing yourself a favor by avoiding that pain.

A lot of war movies focus on the glory of battle and the unbreakable brotherhood between soldiers, how noble and brave they all are. But that’s whitewashing history. The soldiers who defeated Hitler were a bunch of scared kids. They were also, by and large, sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic. Many WWII works avoid acknowledging that the US army was still segregated at that point (probably because it would detract from our hero worship of those soldiers), but this fact is never sidestepped or excused or swept under the rug in Front Lines. In one scene, a soldier comments on the irony of sending a segregated army to fight a white supremacist and is immediately booed by the rest of his barracks, and that’s probably one of the least upsetting things that happens in the book. The fact that our three heroines are the continual targets of this bigotry drives that point home perfectly, if painfully. They don’t have to be as good as the white male soldiers they’re constantly measured against, they have to be better to earn any grudging respect.

World War II was that rare war that truly needed to be fought. Unfortunately, we’re a generation that has pretty much forgotten the lessons learned there. We’ve forgotten that Hitler was democratically elected. We’ve forgotten that the disenfranchisement of the Jews happened by inches and feet, not all at once. We’ve forgotten that the Holocaust happened because too many people saw evil happening but refused to speak up out of apathy and convenience. We’ve forgotten what it’s like for our country to go all-in on a war with rations and drafts. We’ve forgotten how it feels to live under a constant umbrella of fear. We’ve forgotten that lofty ideals don’t win wars, ruthlessness and violence do. And we’ve forgotten that the soldiers of that war weren’t glorious heroes. They were fallible, imperfect humans like the rest of us. He (or she) who forgets history is doomed to repeat it, though. By revising history, Grant manages to undo a lot of historical revisionism.

This is, all in all, an incredible tale that sucks you in, gets under your skin, breaks your heart, and shows you a whole new side to the story you thought you knew.

Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin

Man oh man oh man oh man OH MAN OH MAN.  This book was ammmmaaazzzziinnnngggggg. So good. Wow. Five stars. Fiver.

Let me break it down for you.  So let’s pretend that Hitler and the Axis powers never actually lost WWII.  IN FACT, they won and slowly began taking over the world, filling it with death camps and just lots more death.  Enter Yael. She and her mother were taken to a camp, and Yael became the subject of some extremely nasty German experiments. Unfortunately for the Germans, the experiments that were just supposed to change the pigment of Yael’s skin to that trademark Aryan White actually gave her the ability to skinshift, i.e. the ability to change all aspects of her appearance.

Fast forward ten years, and Yael has found the perfect opportunity for revenge. Every year the Third Reich hosts a cross-continental motorcycle race to commemorate their great victory, and the prize is an audience with Mr. Adolf Hitler himself.  Yael only has to enter the race as Adele Wolf, the only racer and person Hitler has ever let close to him, win it, and then kill Hitler.  Easy Peasy!

Unfortunately killing Hitler is not as easy as that, especially when Adele’s older, overly-protective brother Felix enters the race, along with past love interest Luka–two people who know Adele PRETTY well.  WOWWWW.

Let me further break this down for you:

Alternate history!

Sci-fi skinshifting!

Super attractive love interest with murky past!

Hunger Games-like competition that pits teens against one another at the expense of their safety and lives!

Knife fights, and fist fights, and gun fights, oh my!

Death

Basically everything you could ever want from a YA.

ALSO let me just say that Yael is the most badass girl I have ever encountered.  She puts Katniss Everdeen TO SHAME.  She’s super complex, cares a lot about people, and has trained to KILL HITLER. idk what else you could really want.

I am also going to add that I have an extremely awful habit of reading the ends of books before actually finishing them (I am fully aware that this is shameful bye). I did that while reading this book. I WAS STILL COMPLETELY BLINDSIDED BY THE ENDING.  Don’t ask me how that happens, idk.  And predicting endings is kind of my job (editor over here y’all). Surprise endings don’t really happen for me anymore.  But this IS an alternate history with skinshifting and motorcycle races, so what really could I have predicted lol

Read this book. It’s amazing.

~Melissa, Book Wench