William never intended to be the chair of the English Department, but was chosen for that position because he’s crazy and no in the divided department ever completely agrees with his decisions. It was really fun to watch him juggle his responsibilities as instructor (attempting to tell a student that his writing stinks), friend (his best friend is a little in love with his wife) and administrator (he threatens to kill a goose a day until he gets his budget).

Underlying this humor is the security and insecurity of academia and the realization that all of the hard work has brought most, if not all, of William and his colleagues have reached the highest positions that they will ever attain.  They are stuck in one place and most are trying to cope with that. William trying to figure out if his definition of himself as a joker and anarchist is the best definition of who he is and who he wants to be.

As a college student, I enjoyed the humor, especially because it gave me a different perspective on the lives that my professors lead. While I certainly don’t see my professors threatening to kill animals for budgets, it is a look at academic politics and the affect tenure and publishing can have on their careers. This romp brought laughter to my life and made me think about how I evaluate my life. It’s definitely a book I’ll remember for a long time to come.

–Sarah Morris

Sarah is a senior journalism major at the University of Missouri. She can be found on Twitter at @smorris198888.

Photo: Portroids Poloroid Portraits

Should someone judge the cover of this book, they would probably pass it off as a smutty historical romance – but this novel is so much more!  Not only does Gemma find out about the existence of realms and a secret society of women who guard over them, she also has to figure out how she fits into society.  She feels completely out of place in conventional 19^th century society.  She is not the “perfect girl” that Spence Academy tries to produce – she doesn’t dance well, she doesn’t always keep her mouth shut, she is not looking for a husband, and she doesn’t want to just blindly do what people tell her.  She constantly feels like she doesn’t fit in among the girls of Spence Academy.

I love when Gemma makes tentative friendships, and she and the three other girls decide to rebel and make their own “secret society.”  They drink, stay up late, and talk about all of the dirty things that they are supposed to avoid as ladies.  They share with each other their secret desires, things that their parents and teachers could never find out if they wish to keep a place in society.

Gemma is such a wonderful character – she is not the strongest girl, and she makes a lot of mistakes because of her conflicting desires to both fit in and be free from the oppressive society around her.  She wants friends, but she doesn’t want to become some trophy wife who is supposed to “lie back and think of England” when the time comes.  She’s a teenager, so she is still trying to figure out what she wants in life, and she’s dealing with all of the trials and tribulations that come along with this age – including new feelings about the Indian boy, Kartik, who follows her to England to warn her about the realms.  This creates tension, especially later in the trilogy, because of their different ethnicities and classes.

Author Libba Bray creates this wonderful story of a girl trying to find her place in the world.  Gemma wants to fit in, but can’t, because she feels so oppressed by the very society she lives in.  Gemma is so easy to relate to because she is so imperfect.  But the realms, and the issues surrounding them, create this extra layer of problems, and they also create a temporary escape for the four girls in this story.  It makes the story even more involving, and gives Gemma a way to grow and become her own person.  I also love how realistic this novel is, outside of the realms.  Libba Bray shows how there is goodness and happiness in the world, but we also have to accept and acknowledge the bad in order to move on.  As Gemma says, “There’s an awful lot of gray to work with.  No one can live in the light all the time.”  But we are also left with hope: “Dans chaque fin, il y a un début…In every end, there is also a beginning.”  I love the realism combined with optimism and hope.  This trilogy explores so many social issues as well as the issues of coming of age.  A Great and Terrible Beauty also helped restart the trend of mixing fantasy with history.

–Alyssa Krueger

Photo: Writerswrite

Waking Up in the Land of Glitter

A few pages into the book, I could have sworn it was written by the same author as Houston, We Have a Problema. I quickly detected the same seemingly recycled character types: the young fiery Latina with no sense of direction and her suave Latino love interest, always so cunning and elusive. Admittedly, I’ve grown sick of these caricatures, but I’m happy to report that Waking Up in the Land of Glitter scores much higher marks than its doppelganger.

Murillo’s first novel tells the story of Estrella (Star) Esteban, the wacky, spoiled daughter of two of Phoenix’s most prominent proponents of the local art scene. Star’s parents own La Pachanga, a restaurant/community center/art space that also happens to be where Star works, doing what can only be described as a half-assed public relations job.

Crafty Chloe, the villain for the first two-thirds of the book, first comes into Star’s life when she interviews her after someone defaces a popular mural at La Pachanga, which happened to be created by local artist and Star’s sort-of-boyfriend, Theo Duarte. What Chloe doesn’t know is that Star did the defacing herself after one too many tequila shots.

What ensues is not original, groundbreaking, or thought provoking—it’s simply cute. After Theo and Star’s parents find out she’s the one that ruined the mural, Theo breaks up with her (though they were never really together; “it’s complicated”), and her parents fire her, making her sign a contract saying that if she doesn’t get her life together she’ll have to move out of their home and stop working at their restaurant.

It is during this time we get into the cheesy coming-of-age tale, in which Star bands together with her best friend Ofie, an obsessive crafter with no crafting talent, Chloe, and a young gay teenager named Benecio to create centerpieces for what’s called the Crafting Olympics. It is also around this time that Star becomes an artist after talking about it for years, despite never picking up so much as a pen.

Despite clichés, bad dialogue, and not-so-intriguing characters, I was pretty hooked on this book and read it in just a few days. I suppose I’m a sucker for stories revolving around charmed lives—you know the type: it always works out for them in the end. And for Star, it all works out: She has an art show at her parent’s restaurant and sells every piece within hours, Theo proposes in a ridiculously elaborate way on her birthday, and she has enough money to buy a property on the same lot as La Pachanga so she can open her own crafting studio.

As I get older, I realize that not every book I spend time reading has to be an earth shattering, groundbreaking, eye-opening event. What you get with Waking Up in the Land of Glitter is a cute though trite little tale that will leave you wishing real life worked out as seamlessly as it does in books.

–Tina Vasquez

Originally published at Feminist Review.

Read More: Hispanista Interview with Anjanette Delgado

Though the book is billed as a book about sisters (and it is, in a way), the central theme seems to be identity. Even the four markers that divide the book, “Success,” “Home,” “Jump,” and “Trading Places,” suggest a stage in Lindsey’s changing identity, which the heroine is comfortable with at the beginning as the successful, smart, and serious twin to Alexandra, who’s beautiful, breathtaking, even, charming and popular. The two have orbited around each other since birth, but never seemed to connect until an unexpected and catastrophic chain of events bring Lindsey back home to Bethesda, a Washington, D.C. suburb. Here, with her two hilarious and long-bickering parents, Alex and a childhood friend who’s always had a not-so-secret crush on her, Lindsey begins to discover and embrace her true self.

Lindsey’s characterization of her twin was disturbing to me at first. Smart = ugly and pretty = dumb stereotypes for women are played out and, generally, unrealistic. Because readers meet Alex first through Lindsey’s jealous eyes, I found the prettier twin to be just that: unreal. As the story unfolds and Alex is allowed to speak and feel and express herself on her own terms, readers see that there’s a lot more to her than meets Lindsey’s eye, including a devastating diagnosis that throws the entire trajectory of the novel a-plop.

But, I also identified with the sisters. As grown women, we’d like to believe that we were born with our original personalities, that all of our little quirks were pre-destined by nature. But for anyone with a sibling, particularly one of the same sex, we know that our identity is sometimes equally formed by a desire to compete, to be different from or to be better than our childhood companions just as much as it is formed by our DNA. In this regard, Lindsey’s extreme type-A personality juxtapositioned against Alex’s seemingly carefree and lovable nature seemed a lot more believable and relevant., as if years of rubbing against the other had molded the polar opposite personalities.

The meat of the story involves many of the issues that engross 20-somethings: career, family, and relationships. Both women begin the book as perfect fodder for bragging parents, but as each begins to discover hidden talents, they commit to the rough-and-tumble work of living lives of passion.

Pekkanen successfully left many of the genre’s cliches in the trash, but that didn’t stop the writer from indulging in a few tried-and-true chick plot points, including The Makeover. Being a huge fan of both chick lit and chick flicks, I was particularly delighted to read Lindsey’s six page shopping spree jump from Georgetown  to the shops of D.C.’s M Street, with stops at Victoria’s Secret and MAC cosmetics. After sexifying her image, our heroine makes one last stop for new shoes.

“‘Your boyfriend’s going to love them,’” a salesperson tells Lindsey.

“‘Boyfriend?’ I said, winking, ‘Don’t you mean boyfriends?’

‘You go girl!’ she said.”

What’s not to love about that? The Opposite of Me is available via Amazon.

–Whitney Teal

Photo: The Debutante Ball

Rafael Trujillo began his rule as a democratically elected president in 1930, but like far too many Latin American politicians, he did all in his power to remain in office as long as he could. He was assassinated in 1961 by a group composed of both all-time opposers of the regime and dissenters of his own administration. Vargas Llosa intertwines the stories of the killers with the day of the assassination, providing the necessary background to understand Trujillo, his regime and the great risks these men took to get rid of “the goat”.

Amongst this male-dominated account, Varga Llosa presents a woman’s perspective of the regime and its dark secrets. The book opens with Urania, a Domincan woman who returns to her country after residing in the United States for decades. As a successful lawyer from New York City, Urania tries to face her past by digging herself up in work and obsessing over the history of the Trujillo Era. Seeking to finally put an end to her life-long trauma, Urania returns to confront her dying father Agustín Cabral. Urania’s widowed father was once one of Trujillo’s top officials, but his fall from grace and his thirst for political recognition transcend the moral sense and responsibility one expects from a father, leading to life-changing and traumatizing consequences for Urania.

During her visit, Urania’s aunt and cousins reprimand her for distancing herself from her family and especially her father; Urania takes this opportunity to tell the women the real reason why she left for the United States at age 14. Throughout the book, the reader is trapped in the same suspense these women go through as Urania’s story unveils.

It’s hard not to cringe at several parts of this novel, where for example, Vargas Llosa vividly describes the torture Trujillo’s assassins endured when captured. But in spite of these gruesome details, as a female reader, Urania’s story is what most effectively illustrates the terrible consequences of these regimes capable of blinding men to an extreme where all sense of morality, dignity and respect for human life vanishes amidst an endless search for power.

–Silvia Viñas

Photo: wikimedia.org

And so the novel starts out. The most beautiful opening paragraph I’ve ever read in my life. And unless you are heartless or have never been in love, I don’t know how this wouldn’t at least rank somewhere on your list of most beautiful passages.

By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept was written by Paulo Coelho. He is best known for writing The Alchemist which just so happens to be my least favorite of the three books I’ve read by him. My introduction to Coehlo was The Zahir which was, like the other two I read, a beautiful story of love. Neither of those however prepared me for the beauty I would find in that very first paragraph of the novel.

It then continues:

“By the River Piedra I sat down and wept. The winter air chills the tears on my cheeks, and my tears fall into the cold waters that course past me. Somewhere this river joins another, then another, until – far from my heart and sight – all of them merge with the sea.”

A couple pages later the protagonist, Pilar, takes us back to the beginning to tell the story of how she ended up weeping for this young man. They seemed to have always loved each other, even as childhood friends. However, they grew up and took separate paths in life. He chose to leave their small town to learn about the world (a theme present in both The Alchemist and The Zahir) while she chose to take the prescribed path of enrolling in a nearby university. They kept in touch throughout his travels, and one day he invited Pilar to hear him give a lecture in Madrid.

The story is a whirlwind from here. Pilar struggles to accept and embrace her feelings for him. He struggles to reconcile his love for the seminary, the gifts he has been given and the love he has held onto for so many years. While the beauty of their love story as it unfolds kept me wanting more, I found myself disappointed, especially toward the end when I didn’t feel the same intensity of emotions as I did with the opening paragraphs.

Like the other Coelho books I’ve read, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept carries a spiritual theme, as he touches quite a bit on the mystical nature of God. In this particular piece, he focuses on the young man’s belief in a feminine God that grants him the power to heal. For some this may be an appealing aspect of Coehlo’s writings, but it tends to throw me off. It gives me some of the same vibes that the Celestine Prophecy gave me, which is more eerie than anything else.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book. I have two more books by Coelho that I want to read, one of them comes with high praise from Melissa. And if you know me, you’ll know that there are very few authors from whom I’ve read more than one book. I must really like this guy. 

–Mademoiselle Mitchell

I finally read it because it just kept coming up – in classes, in pop culture, and when I joined Goodreads.com a few weeks ago it was one of the frequently read books they wanted me to rate. Besides, I’d read Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran a few years ago and her discussion of the book made me curious about it. I mentally moved the book from a category I’ll call “Yikes,” to the “I’ll get around to it eventually” category. Last week I finally got around to it.

I had no idea of the creepiness that was in store for me. Unlike the movie, in which Sue Lyons could conceivably pass for 16 or 17, when the book begins Lolita is 12. Humbert, the narrator, repeatedly points out that she’s a child – he takes pleasure in noting Lolita’s half-price admission to parks and museums. Humbert also enjoys pretending that Lolita is his daughter (rather than his stepchild); meaning, the idea of incest sweetens the deal for him. His actions also, for a time, make Lolita into a whore. The two establish a monetary system for sexual favors: a hand-job (while she’s at school!) costs him 65 cents plus permission to act in the school play (p. 198); a “fancy embrace” (we can only imagine what that means) costs him $4 (p. 184). Perhaps the most singularly disturbing passage in the novel is Humbert’s daydream of impregnating Lolita, her giving birth to a daughter, then waiting twelve years to rape and impregnate “Lolita the Second,” and maybe – if he’s lucky – do the same to a third generation (p. 174). This is one of the vilest ideas I’ve ever considered in a story.

Yet, even though I wanted to hate it, I can’t deny that Lolita is a great work of art. I love the way Nabokov plays with language (Quilty lives on “Grimm Road,” Humbert stays at “Insomnia Lodge”), the book’s layers, the theme of artifice and masks, and the book’s symmetry (the novel’s first and last words are “Lolita;” Mrs. Haze, Lolita’s mom / Humbert’s landlady turned wife is mirrored by “Mrs. Hays” the hotel owner, also a widow, later in the book). At the same time, I can’t say that I wholly enjoyed reading the book.

Since I found the events of the story to be so disturbing, I tried reading from Lolita’s perspective – as if she were the story’s heroine. However, doing so is not easy. Although you can cheer on her small acts of defiance (in one scene Humbert describes her “Swearing at me in language that I never dreamed little girls could know, let alone use,” haha), you can’t really know Lolita. As narrator, Humbert has such tight control of the story that it’s impossible to get a sense of her distinct from him. In the same way that Humbert can’t fully grasp or understand Lolita, neither can the reader.

Nabokov’s ability to make the reader sympathize/identify with Humbert is supposedly one of the things that make this novel great. Although the book is brilliantly written, I keep wondering, is Humbert’s perspective really all that unusual? Is it possible that it wasn’t all that difficult to get the reader on Humbert’s side because our culture already encourages us to view girls from the perspective of lecherous old men? There are too many examples (both fictional and real life) from popular culture to count: 12 year old Jodie Foster plays a hooker in Taxi Driver, Elvis dates 14 year old Priscilla, Britney Spears wears her sexy school girl outfit… the list goes on. Even my beloved Beatles sing, “She was just 17 / you know what I mean,” (yes, we know what you mean and it’s creepy). Perhaps this is why it’s so easy for us to identify / sympathize with Humbert – the watching and desiring of teenage girls is already tolerated in our culture with a wink and a smile. In some ways the book is just another depiction of a powerless young girl through the eyes of a desiring older man; it wasn’t the first and it certainly wasn’t the last.

Despite my concerns, I wasn’t entirely immune to Humbert’s charm. In the first third of the book – before he acts on his desire for Lolita – his eloquence has more currency with me. Although awkward and pretentious, Humbert is also charming: he’s well read, he’s sensitive and apparently he’s very handsome. Yet, for me, when Humbert breaks out the roofies (in order to drug and rape Lolita), his charm disappears. Unlike most critics, I just couldn’t forget how horrible Humbert’s actions were. Slate critic Stephen Metcalf writes, “With Lolita, you must work past its beauty to recognize how shocking it is. And for all its beauty, for all its immense ingenuity and humor, one easily forgets how shocking Lolita is.” Somehow, I wasn’t able to forget how shocking the book was. Perhaps the key to enjoying Lolita is allowing yourself to be swept away by Humbert’s prose and forgetting the actual events of the story. Maybe this is why I didn’t fully enjoy it – I just couldn’t forget how horrifying it was.

(Page numbers are from Alfred Appel Jr.’s annotated edition).

– Melanie

Review courtesy mmmetropolis.

Photo: indelible inc

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SheReads: mmmetropolis’ Melanie

It starts with a telling and often gruesome discussion on the female slave, detailing the laborious expectations on the field coupled with her complex role in the home (slave quarters). She even goes into the brutal punishments regularly inflicted – from the abuse experienced by pregnant women to the brutal rapes at the hands of White men. This, for me, was the hardest part of the book to read because of the raw brutality illustrated.

The subsequent essays delve into the history of the women’s movement and the influence of African-Americans, most notably the likes of Fredrick Douglas, Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells. As the book progresses, Davis articulates the various issues that were used to ostracize Black women from the overall women’s rights movement since the late nineteenth century. Whether it was excluding Black women to gain support from the South for women’s suffrage or ignoring issues of forced sterilizations when it came to reproductive rights, there has always been an unfortunate division in the movement that ultimately and consistently left the needs of Black women unaddressed.

With Women, Race & Class, Davis brings these issues – and more – to light with the message of unity for the benefit of everyone in the fight for equality. It’s definitely a must read, especially for young Black women like myself.

A favorite quote:

“Evidence of the accumulated strengths Black women have forged through work, work and more work can be discovered in the contributions of the many outstanding female leaders who have emerged within the Black community. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells and Rosa Parks are not exceptional Black women as much as they are epitomes of Black womanhood.”

–Mademoiselle Mitchell

Review courtesy C’est La Vie.

“‘Never chase men or buses,’ my mother told me. ‘Another one will always come along,’” writes Sarah, whose struggles meeting expectations are what make this book by first-time novelist Katie Crouch so relatable and interesting.

With a slow start that follows Sarah and the three other Camellias her age, Bitsy, Charlotte and Annie, through middle-school Cotillion training, it’s clear as the story develops why Crouch spent so much time fleshing out the traditional South Carolina enclave of Sarah’s youth.

Sarah as a heroine is a little bland and things happen to her, not with her or at her behest. She observes the increasingly bizarre sequence of experiences that happen when her domineering older sister goes to Yale, when she and wild-child Charlotte meet country boys who lure them away from high-society duties and even when she goes away to a no-name Northern college.

The novel moves into familiar coming-of-age territory when Sarah moves to New York to work in journalism, joined by Charlotte, now in the fashion industry, and Bitsy. This is where she searches for love and where Crouch explores the frighteningly submissive personalities of her heroines. Sarah dates a man who changes her life and accepts, if not encourages, his violent sexual behavior. Bitsy marries a wealthy older man, who is later revealed to be selfish, uncaring and unfeeling. Annie dates men who don’t love her. Charlotte, the most sensible, falls in love with mind-altering substances.

I wonder if these women are supposed to represent some aspect of femininity that exists in every woman because something, the fear of being alone or the fear of not being enough or the fear of being unloved, keeps all of them from searching for or choosing healthy relationships.

At one point Sarah remembers what her mother taught her about men, “that no mater what, there’s always something. Fall in love and you’ll find it. He will steal, or dink, or dress up in your clothes, or die on you at dinner. That’s love, she says. That’s what you sign up for.”

Sarah is at her best when she is honest and feeling about the emotions that most of us only occasionally stumble upon. After almost screwing up her sister’s wedding she tells her. “‘There’s a lot wrong with me,’” before continuing with, “I tell her I’m sorry again, which she waves off. I am sort of always sorry. I am sorry for being drunk on her wedding day and for not being good enough for Max and for not being smart enough for her friends and for breaking her toe with a hockey stick when I was twelve. God, I am sorry. I am sorry for so many things that I should go outside and swim to Cuba.”

Emotionally numb, our heroine stumbles through the rest of the novel looking for electrifying love to shock her out of her  funk. She finds it, in an unexpected place, and ends up right where she started: among the mama, baby and grandbaby Camellias of Charleston.

– Whitney Teal