“You don’t need flickering lights or doors slamming shut, the parlor tricks of a poltergeist, to be haunted. The true ghosts are made of deed and word and live deep inside the marrow and bone.”
If you need an eerie book to curl up with on a cold winter night, filled with unreliable narrators and lots of flashbacks, check out The Dead Girls Club.
I’m super excited to say that today is my stop on The Grey Sisters blog tour! Thank you so much Penguin Random House for including me, it was lovely being able to partner with you to talk about this wonderful book. My full review is below, and later today I’ll also be sharing a Q&A with the author, Jo Treggiari.
“No guilt. No moment of awakening. No tearful repentance. My eyes slid over the signs and my heart remained unaffected. I’d made my decision long before we arrived. Those signs were just words.”
Reading a book about a 17-year old on a road trip across state lines to get an abortion may not sound like the greatest story, but in Unpregnant, Jenni Hendricks and Ted Caplan take this topic and spin it into a fast-paced, funny-at-times novel that also deals with the topic at hand.
“Throughout history, angry women have been called harpies, bitches, witches, and whores. They’ve been labeled hysterical, crazy, dangerous, delusional, bitter, jealous, irrational, emotional, dramatic, vindictive, petty, hormonal; they’ve been shunned, ignored, drugged, locked up, and killed; kept in line with laws and threats and violence, and with insidious, far-reaching lies about the very nature of what it means to be a woman—that a woman should aspire to be a lady, and that ladies don’t get angry. Millennia of conditioning is hard to unlearn.”
If you’ve ever been called any of the above, or been told that you’re “not acting like a lady,” welcome to the club. It’s fun here, because we’re ANGRY!
It was the book itself and it was trying to put into words how to flourish. Not “how to” exactly but that the act of flourishing might be possible.
If you’re looking for a beautifully written collection of poetry, add Flourish by Jacqueline Turner to your list.
This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending another Frenzy Presents event at the Harper Collins Canada office. For the Fall/Winter preview, the wonderful staff at HCC Frenzy were discussing 24 new middle-grade and young adult books that are hitting shelves over the next few months.
“Some people think I made JerkAlert as part of a malicious, premeditated scheme to humiliate men at large. But in truth, it was just a gut reaction to the futility of the status quo. I’d had a few really bad days, featuring a few really bad dudes. So I did what any disgruntled coder would do: I created an anonymous website where women could rate their dating experiences with the guys they met on Fluttr. Kind of like Yelp, but instead of reviewing restaurants or nail salons, you reviewed your dates.”
