A Jungle of Tales

              I very much enjoyed this book, even though it turned out not to be a story about witches, in the classic sense of “women who do magic”. The Silver women are in no way in control of the magical goings-on connected to their spooky, sentient house in Dover. Well, except perhaps the last Ms. Silver…but I’m getting ahead of myself! No, this is more in the vein of a family-secrets-heavy haunted house gothic novel. If there is anyone doing witchy stuff it is mostly 29 Barton road, the house that is a POV character in itself. If you enjoyed Netflix’s ‘The Haunting of Bly Manor’ for its spooky vibes, explorations of grief and guilt, and Sapphic subplot, you would probably like this book! If you need the magic to be explained, on the other hand…best look elsewhere, because like Mary Poppins Ms. Oyeyemi never explains anything.             The modern-day Silvers consist of 17-year-old Miranda, her twin brother Eliot, and her father Luc. The mother, Lily, died i

              I got this book as a present from my mom alongside ‘Blanca & Roja’ , and I must admit I was nervous to pick it up since I ended up being a tad disappointed in that book relative to ‘Wild Beauty’ (which I loved). That was primarily due to an overly-complicated plot and themes – and this one’s blurb seemed more convoluted yet. Happily, though, that was not the case, and I enjoyed ‘Dark and Deepest Red’ very much. ‘Wild Beauty’ still wins the prize so far, though, because while the 16 th century plotline of this book is amazing, the modern day one is – especially in comparison – merely OK. Let me explain:   In this book, we follow two pairs of young people: A Romani girl named Lala and her aunt’s apprentice Alifair in 16 th century Strasbourg, and Emil Woodlock (Lala’s great-to-the-whatever grandnephew) and Mexican-American Rosella Oliva in 2018…somewhere USA. Well, it is a small town called Briar Meadow that undergoes a yearly magical phenomenon of

              This 1991 book was the first ever to feature a black lesbian vampire, and a sympathetic one at that. It takes place over eight time-periods from 1850s Louisiana to the former New Mexico (probably?) in 2050. This structure – not to mention the diverse and interesting cast of characters – would make it well-suited to a TV series or movie franchise setup where each season or film could focus on one or two of the time periods. My only real complaint with the book is that I wanted MORE of each story, so I think there is potential to expand on the character dynamics and history in that way.             When we first meet our main character, she is a runaway teenage slave known only as the Girl. Within the first five pages she has stabbed a white man who planned to rape her before turning her in and has been found hiding in a basement by a woman who can speak to her telepathically. This white lady, named Gilda, runs a local brothel in what appears to be a pre

  'Borne' was already a very weird book, in which a woman living in an apocalyptic future picks up an anemone-thing that grows into something like a Lovecraftian toddler. But it was still a book told from a human perspective. In THIS book only two of the characters are (mostly) human - though not entirely sane - and Vandermeer uses a surreal, poetic, artsy style of writing to try to show us the world not only through their eyes but through the eyes of a blue fox, a woman made of sort-of-moss, a “manufactured” man, a monstrous fish, a "duck with the broken wing" that is a kind of murderous bio-weapon, and more. Even more than ‘Borne’, it feels like a blend between sci-fi and magical realism.   "The sentimental tale. The tale you always need to care. Which shows you don't care. Why we don't care if you care."- The Blue Fox This book is brutal when it comes to pointing out humanity's brokenness, destructiveness, and hypocrisy

  I struggled to get a handle on this book in part because the blurb and my experience with previous books by the same author had set me up to expect a love story or a family drama set against the backdrop of history. But it turns out that’s probably the wrong way to approach this! Getting frustrated at the lack of a clear protagonist, or at the perfunctory way the relationship between the main pair is handled misses the point: HISTORY is the main character, everyone else is in supporting roles. Once I started thinking that I appreciated 1 the book much more, because it seems like it actually answers a question I tried and failed to ask Ms. Allende directly. (Although then it kind of swings back around to being about the characters? – more on that later).   1. I was going to say “enjoyed”, but given the heart-breaking history in question that feels like entirely the wrong word!   You see, not long after I’d joined Goodreads, someone associated with the BBC-r