I love C.J. Cherryh, for her world-building, her characters, and her imagination. I picked up Cloud’s Rider before Rider At the Gate because of how difficult it is sometimes to get a complete list of a series in order, and probably because the nice lady stocking shelves at the library was chattering at me. I really enjoyed the world of Cloud’s Rider. Humans live on [...]
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Deborah Bell
Kevin J. Anderson is a familiar name in several fandoms, as an author of novels in the Star Wars, Dune and X-Files universes, as well as several movie novelizations. I got hooked, though by a universe of his own making, that of The Saga of the Seven Suns. Recently, the Saga concluded with The Ashes of Worlds (Saga of Seven Suns), a dire title if [...]
I attended my sister’s graduation from South Carolina School of Leadership this weekend and heard some pretty awful things that were really quite normal in context, but from the outside perspective I bring these days, I heard them with some measure of shock and dismay. A female graduate asked to speak about what her time at SCSL meant to her, said she had felt that she [...]
When I was about 13, I read a book called The Explorer by Francis Parkinson Keyes. It does not appear to be available on Amazon or the librarything (or anywhere else I looked), so unfortunately I can’t link to it, but it was definitely an adult romance, and not at all a romance I would expect to be available at a church library. The “explorer” [...]
The Thirteenth House (The Twelve Houses, Book 2) is the sequel to Mystic and Rider (The Twelve Houses, Book 1) by Sharon Shinn. Both books, along with the third, Dark Moon Defender, are fantasy-romances set in the mythical kingdom of Gillengaria, and are, unfortunately, fraught with the saccharine tendencies of romance novels of every other genre. Sharon Shinn, although a fascinating world-builder, is prone to [...]
Typically, I get three responses from men to whom I express my feminism. A) “Well, don’t worry, as far as I’m concerned you are equal with me.” My response to this is something along the lines of “Thanks, but no thanks.” The fact that you think it is necessary to tell me that I am equal with you shows that we have a problem; equality [...]
The picture shows a woman, seated, back arched and head thrown back as if laughing – although her head above the chin is cut off, as if to say that who she is doesn’t matter; her near leg is raised provocatively. It’s not a seated pose; it’s not a comfortable pose. It is, in fact, a pose, a seductive pose. Every time I drive past [...]
