Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers - A...

Merry Christmas Eve! As the Icelandic tradition of Jólabókaflóð dictates, I shall be reading all of Christmas Eve as a way to celebrate! This is my first year participating and so far, it has been wonderful.

The first story I've read today is called Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by the talented Alyssa Wong, who has won many awards for this particular short story and, in my opinion, it is well deserved. This is a short story about survival. About what it's like to live in a world that is much different than one would expect. Wong does an amazing job in showcasing how a person must do certain actions in order to survive in a world that is not made for everyone. She then makes commentary about families and how they are not always as loving and kind as they are made out to be. Her writing ability is rich and engrossing. I was captured from the very beginning by her character of Jen and what she must do in order to live.

I don't want to talk too much about the actual story since it's a short one. But I will say if you love beautiful writing, horror, stories about survival, and a different way of life then I highly suggest you read this short story. It's incredible. Also, there are some LGBTQIAP+ elements that I simply adored. Warnings for graphic violence and swear words. But if that does not bother you, give this a read. Wong did a fantastic job in creating a horror story with love interwoven throughout. It's amazing!

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories - ...

I probably should have warned my book group about Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, a short story collection by Bonnie Jo Campbell, when we picked it last month. It’s been very well reviewed and the content of the book rings a lot of our bells: women’s issues, family relationships, profound psychology, etc. But when we picked it, I remembered hearing Rebecca Schinsky of Book Riot describing it in her mostly positive review as “every bad thing that can happen to women” (as best I can recall)...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Stand for Something or Stand for Nothing

Ebony Jones-Kuye

Thanks to Whiskey in the Jar Likes to Read.  Way back in July she posted about the movie Suffragette which comes out this month.  I'm posting this to remind myself to search for the movie house which has it for viewing.

When Sharon Maas first made it known to her then-agent and then-editor that she was thinking about writing a book set in her native Guyana, she met with blank incomprehension and utter rejection: "Guyana? Whyever would anyone write about that little backwater country; a place nobody knows anything about and which probably at least half her projected readership wouldn't even be able to correctly point out on a map? No no no," she was told, "stick with what is safe and what people know. And if you want to write a book set in an exotic location, write something set in India. You know India, right? You've lived there – so you can just as credibly write about that. And there are plenty of people out there who do want to read books set in India. It's even a sort of literary trend these days. You'll fit right in."

Sharon's response, after actually having published three books in which Indian settings played a crucial role, was to refuse to work with anybody who was not open to her own ideas about the construction and settings of her books; even if that meant not having any literary agent at all, nor a publisher, for the foreseeable future. The one thing she did not do, however, was stop writing. And looking for a new publisher, who would accept her without any preconceived notions about which niche to fit her in. Over a decade after the publication of her third novel, The Speech of Angels, she finally struck gold – so now here it is, the book (or first of several books, hopefully) that might never have gone to print if its author had not finally found a publisher willing to take her on solely on the strength of her writing, and accept the chosen setting as an asset rather than a burden.

Read the full review on my own website (ThemisAthena.info) or on Leafmarks.