Category: Book Talk

The Great Big Anita Blake ReRead: Blue Moon

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Content Warning: This installment talks in detail about sexual violence, abuse in relationships, and false rape accusations on top of racism, rednecks, and my usual rage over the series.

blue moon - us 1998 cover
Blue Moon‘s 1998 US Cover

First published in 1998, Blue Moon is the ninth Anita Blake novel and the second in the series to take Anita outside of her normal territory in St. Louis.

While I previously said positive things about how the series takes Anita out of her comfort zone by removing her from her base of operations and her main allies (back in Bloody Bones), sending Anita to Myerton, Tennessee was not the greatest idea because it wasn’t necessarily executed well and relied on stock portrayals of prejudiced southerners to provide a lot of the background characters and minor villains.

After werewolf alpha (and Anita’s ex-boyfriend) Richard Zeeman is falsely accused of and arrested for rape in Tennessee while on a research vacation, Anita takes the initiative to travel down south to keep Richard’s werewolf-y secrets from coming out. The only problem, is that Richard’s pack and family aren’t very fond of Anita and neither is the master of Myerton, a vampire with more power than common sense.

Throw in pack politics, the ghost of the rapist Raina, a bunch of rednecks, and a mystical conspiracy to find the mythical Spear of Destiny and you’ve got one big ole book.

Strap in folks, we’re about to talk about what Blue Moon does decently, what the book gets wrong, and what parts of the book should’ve been killed by magical fire in the woods of Tennessee.Read More »

The Great Big Anita Blake ReRead: Burnt Offerings

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Content warnings: this installment of The Great Big Anita Blake Reread talks about rape and racism in mild detail (and they’re connected in my analysis of Hamilton’s writing in this book) that include repeated references to what winds up being the corrective rape of a Black lesbian

Burnt Offerings - 2000 UK Cover
Burnt Offerings – 2000 UK Cover

Once upon a time, the Anita Blake series used to be genuinely interesting. Hamilton would open the newest novel by introducing a new and weird element of her worldbuilding and Anita, our audience proxy and authorial self-insert would immediately start stumbling all over herself trying to figure it out before saving the day thanks to her inexplicable good luck and all the illegal weaponry and magical powers she winds up with.

Burnt Offerings, the seventh novel in the long-running Anita Blake series, was one of those interesting books back when I first read it a decade ago.

After being approached by a local firefighter to take down a pyrokinetic arsonist before they escalate in the book’s first chapter, Anita finds herself dropped hip deep in a mess of vampire politics and drama as the arsonist begins to turn to vampire victims. This is also the first novel after Anita and Jean-Claude started to sleep together (and I’m pretty sure that means she and Richard are broken up for the time being) and since it’s also set after Raina and Gabriel’s deaths, this means that leopard shifter problems are becoming Anita’s problems for the first time in the series.

This novel introduces several long-running characters who will become an integral part of Anita’s life as the series progresses and I’m going to be honest: like with refreshing myself with Richard, it’s nice to read these characters as they were before Hamilton ruined them. (Even though, this early on, you can see the problems that would later balloon out of control in characters like Asher and Nathaniel as the series progresses.)

So, let’s talk about what Burnt Offerings did decently, what it did poorly, and what I wish Hamilton had left on the editing room floor back when first working on it.Read More »

The Great Big Anita Blake Reread: The Killing Dance

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Content Warnings: This installment of my reread series contains relatively detailed references to snuff films, sexual assault and harassment (including brief references to these things happening to children), particularly in the “Just Plain Borked” section so please skip that if these are things that may trigger you or otherwise cause discomfort.

 

The Killing Dance - UK Cover from 2010
The 2010 UK cover for The Killing Dance. Chosen because it doesn’t represent a single theme in the novel.

First published in 1997, The Killing Dance is the sixth book in Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake series.

Like the majority of the novels in this long running series, this book is primarily set in and around St. Louis, Missouri. In The Killing Dance, Anita is faced with complications in her triumvirate relationship with Richard and Jean Claude), a visiting vampire master in a similar situation to the trio, and some seriously gross shapeshifter pack dynamics that are coming back to bite Anita in the ass from previous books in the series.

It should be just another beyond busy Anita Blake book, but this is one of the most memorable and disturbing novels in this early run of the series in part because Gabriel and Raina, two of the series’ most infamous abusers and rapists, are in their element here.

There are interesting aspects to The Killing Dance, but as usual, they’re nearly lost thanks to all the weird and upsetting shit that happens and all of the absolutely pointless relationship drama.Read More »

Stitch Reads Stuff: October TBR List

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Stitch Reads Stuff - My October TBR List

This October, I’m focusing on young adult books and supernatural fiction!

I’m doing some necessary re-reads for reviewing purposes, diving into some books I haven’t had the time to read, and reading one of my most anticipated reads for Fall 2018. I’m looking forward to getting into these books and talking to y’all about them!

So, what’s on my reading list for October 2018?

First up are the physical books! I tend to read on my kindle more than anything else – partly because I have a bunch of kindles from years of buying them and so I’ve always got one charged – but some books you just have to have in your hand. You know?Read More »

Too White Bread for This Shit: Race and Racism in Laurell K Hamilton’s Urban Fantasy Series

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Too White Bread for This Shit_ Race and Racism in Laurell K Hamilton’s Urban Fantasy Series (1).png

“I’m so white-bread, if you cut me I’d bleed bleached flour! I have no ethnicity to me, and I’ve always wanted some.”

– Laurell K. Hamilton in an interview excerpted from Locus Magazine.

I’ve been reading Laurell K. Hamilton’s urban fantasy series – the necromancer-focused Anita Blake series and her sidhe political drama Merry Gentry series – since I was in high school and I picked up a copy of Incubus Dreams (Anita Blake #12) back in 2004.

In the fourteen years since I began reading the two series, I’ve noticed one constant in both of her series. Hamilton constantly attempts to talk about race in her work through a focus on (predominantly white) supernatural characters while characters of color in the series are reduced to stereotypes and tropes that have long-since went out of style. Simply put, Laurell K. Hamilton is awful at writing about race and racism.Read More »

A to Z Bookish Tag

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I was in the mood to do something fun and this book tag seemed like just the thing! You can find the original over at The Perpetual Page-Turner!

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Author you’ve read the most books from:

Nalini Singh, hands down. I’ve read and reread the entirety of both her Psy-Changeling series and her Guild Hunter series. So that’s about… Twenty-eight books if I include the anthologies? (If I’m wrong, don’t correct me. Let me be bad at counting.)

Seriously, she could probably write a grocery list and I’d lunge to read it.
Best Sequel Ever: 

Matt Wallace’s second Sin du Jour book, Lustlocked. I’m still in mad love with how he just… turned goblins on their heads and managed a tribute to David Bowie (who’d passed away right before the book came out). Also, there were giant horny lizards everywhere.

Currently Reading:

For some reason, despite the fact that I have other stuff I’m literally obligated to be reading and reviewing, I just restarted Anne Bishop’s Lake Silence.Read More »

The Great Big Anita Blake Reread: Bloody Bones

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For this installment of my reread series, I’ll be changing up the format in order to look at “The Good”, “The Bad”, and “The Just Plain Borked” parts of the novel. If this all goes well, this will be what these reread recaps look like for the rest of the series!

Content Warnings: brief descriptions of sexual assault and harassment, descriptions of violence, non-specific mention of child sexual assault and turning (both done by a vampire pedophile) in the plot, as well as a reference to the snuff film described in the previous book

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This is one of the UK covers for Bloody Bones That Hamilton has up on her website.

Bloody Bones, the fifth book in Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series is another busy book in the series where a ton of stuff happens but also… nothing happens. It’s not one of the worst books in the series thus far, but it’s not a novel I enjoyed rereading.

As one of the earlier books in the series, the novel focuses more on the supernatural detective aspects that were significant in the first ten or eleven books in the series. It also introduces interesting new aspects to the worldbuilding by being the first (and so far, only) novel in the series to have fairies onscreen – a disservice I think because they’re some of the most interesting non-human characters that she’s created and their portrayal in Bloody Bones is nothing like the way they’re treated in her Merry Gentry series.

That being said, let’s talk about what Bloody Bones did well, what it did that could’ve used work, and all the things that made me want to chuck my kindle halfway across the room while I was rereading.Read More »

[Stitch Goes Places] Elizabeth Acevedo & Tomi Adeyemi in Conversation @BooksandBooks

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I love book events. Talks, signings, readings… You name it and I’ll probably enjoy watching an author I admire and adore do it because I just think they’re cool.

So when news first dropped about Tomi Adeyemi going on a book tour to celebrate the release of her debut novel Children of Blood and Bone AND that she’d have a tour-stop in my lovely neck of the woods at local bookstore Books and Books AND that she’d be in conversation with the ridiculously talented Elizabeth Acevedo (whose debut novel The Poet X is also amazing), I got obnoxiously excited. Read More »

#NowWeRise – Children of Blood and Bone Blog Tour (Moodboard + Blogging Bits)

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COBB Blog Tour Banner.png

You know, I think this might be the first time I’ve ever done a blog tour?

When I got the email about possibly doing something for the release of Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone in its release week, I kind of like got all giddy. What a great opportunity to do something fantastic in order to celebrate one of my favorite books of 2018!

In Tomi Adeymi’s Children of Blood and Bone, the Ìwòsàn Clan is the clan of the Maji of Health and Disease. As a result of this totally awesome “Discover Your Magic” graphic, that clan is… my clan, but my majj power isn’t that of healing, it’s of inflicting disease.

My maji power (Cancer) is the magical equivalent of Typhoid Mary.

Which I find fitting because of my relationship with illness.

I’m honestly always sick.

Or suffering from something.

Right now, I’m actually pretty sure that I might even have the chicken pox. (Though… probably not as I was vaccinated as a child and I think that’s supposed to stop that from happening.)

So for me, there’s something absolutely captivating about the idea of maji whose power centers around causing illness instead of healing it.Read More »

The Great Big Anita Blake ReRead – The Lunatic Cafe

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Content/Trigger Warning: References to sexual violence, sex work/er shaming, and well… a snuff film in the text that I describe in medium detail. I still can’t believe it was in the book. I cover the ableist language in the title in the bonus section alongside a bunch of other stuff that I found frustrating about the novel, but that wasn’t related to my angle.

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Lycanthropes are nothing if not practical.

— Anita, woefully understating the circumstances behind a snuff film released into the US Underworld. Lycanthropes aren’t practical. If anything, in the Anitaverse, they’re largely actual monsters.

While the previous Anita Blake novel introduced lycanthropes on the large scale, The Lunatic Cafe is the novel that really introduced some of the messed up facts of life as a shapeshifter in Anita’s world.

The one main question that The Lunatic Cafe appears to ask throughout the narrative is whether or not shapeshifters are truly human (like “we” are). It’s a question asked in almost all of the shapeshifter focused books in the series and one that tends to glean different answers depending on the novel and the characters essentially posing the question.

In this book, the answer is… kinda, sorta, not really.

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Stitch’s Stuff: December 5th and 6th – Books 

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I’m smushing the 5th and 6th together so I don’t mess up my blogging goals for December too badly.

 

2017 was a really good year for me book wise.

As in I bought a lot of books.

I’m really good at sales.  I mean, if there’s a book I want on sale, chances are that I’ll find it. Couple that with our on-campus Barnes and Noble and the fact that I’ve made bargain bin diving a hobby and well… I’ve bought a bunch of books.

2017 was also the year that I started seriously preordering books in order to support my favorite writers.  I have minor memory issues so if you don’t remind me repeatedly to do something, I straight up won’t do it. I’ll think about it every once in a while, very fondly even, but my brain needs active reminders or… in the case of book pre-orders, it needs choice taken out of my hands.Read More »

Stitch’s Queerwolf Rec List

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Queerwolf Cover

Here’s a list of some awesome media that focuses on queer werewolves, my favorite supernatural being. All of these pieces of media have at least one queer werewolf on screen/on the page as main or secondary characters. Many of these pieces of media also contain graphic violence so it’s the one thing I won’t be warning for.

Glass PredatorTitle: Harmony Black series

Creator: Craig Schaefer

Content Notes: non-consensual kissing (in book 3 specifically), body-horror

Queerwolf Focus: Technically, Jessie Temple isn’t a typical werewolf, but courtesy of her serial-killing father’s dealings with the King of Wolves, there’s something wolfish in her that takes control every so often despite her attempts at holding her own.

Jessie, a black lesbian and absolute badass, is a secondary character in Schaefer’s dark urban fantasy series. She’s present in all of the books so far, but “her” book, Glass Predator, is an incredible read that gives us a great look at one of the coolest queerwolves in the genre.

LINK

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The Great Big Anita Blake Reread – Circus of the Damned

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Circus of the Damned

“He’s dead, Richard, a walking corpse. It doesn’t matter how pretty he is, or how compelling, he’s still dead. I don’t date corpses. A girl’s got to have some standards.”

— Anita on why she won’t give in to Jean-Claude

Circus of the Damned, the third novel in Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, has some serious shapeshifter issues.

Published in 1995, the book introduces Anita and the readers following along on her adventures to several of the powerful (and problematic) lycanthropes that populate St. Louis. After a series of murders committed by an unknown group of vampires sees Anita called in to work with the police force once again, the character is forced to deal with several different, stressful things.

To start, Anita has master vampire Jean-Claude panting after her and trying to do everything in his power to make her a proper human servant. Then, everyone who’s anyone is out trying to find out who the master of the city is. With two of Jean-Claude’s marks on her and a reputation for working in the master’s employ, Anita is basically the woman of the hour. Which leads to shenanigans and even more attempted murder.

Circus of the Damned isn’t terrible (and in fact was one of the better Anita Blake books), but it has some problems that keep it from being close to perfect.Read More »

[Series Squee] Angel Sanctuary

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With “Series Squee” I’m trying to do something new (that can be regular content) by sharing the love for some of my favorite series so that y’all could get a better look at what I like and why I like it.

Note: in this first installment, I cover horror-fantasy manga Angel Sanctuary and I talk about the series’ weird fascination with incest and a character that is frequently portrayed as a transmisogynistic joke in the series.

angel sanctuary cover

Who wrote this series?

The mistress of horror manga herself: Kaori Yuki

What’s this series about?

I’m bad at describing series, but I’ll copy and paste the description from Wikipedia:

It focuses on Setsuna Mudo, a teenager who learns that he is the reincarnation of an angel who rebelled against Heaven. After the death of his sister, he travels through Hell and Heaven to reunite with her.

And Comixology:

With just seven days to find his beloved sister Sara in the afterlife, Setsuna goes to hell, only to find himself sitting in judgment of the very angel who condemned his soul to life after life of suffering. But the only way out of the pit is through it, and how much time can Setsuna waste on revenge? Meanwhile Heaven is falling apart as assassins move in to murder God’s highest ranking angels! Will there be a universe left when-and if-Setsuna gets out?

You can find the series for sale at Viz.com.Read More »