Category: Women Writers
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A Gift of Magic by Lois Duncan
Rating: 4/5, good Have you ever had a book mirror your life so much it’s spooky? A Gift of Magic is a children’s paranormal book. It was first published in 1971 and I read it in 2000 when I was about ten years old. It got re-released in 2012 and after looking up the synopsis…
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Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis
Rating: 5/5, excellent This book should be required reading—especially for white feminists! Angela Y. Davis’s Women, Race & Class is a classic feminist text. It came out in 1981 but it’s just as relevant today, and I think it will be evergreen because of its well-referenced discussion of black history. Women, Race & Class is…
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The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman
Rating: 3/5, average CW: rape, pedophilia The Real Lolita posits that Vladimir Nabokov’s (in)famous masterpiece Lolita (which I reviewed in 2014) is based on the true story of Sally Horner. Sally Horner was kidnapped by a man named Frank La Salle from Camden, NJ, in 1948. He caught her stealing a notebook from a five-and-dime…
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Free Women, Free Men by Camille Paglia
Rating: 3/5, average Trigger Warning: pedophilia, transphobia, sexual assault I must have been in a rebellious mood or something when I bought this. I’d been following Reason magazine online for a little while because my dad was a libertarian and I thought I’d come to understand his politics more by reading it. He never mentioned…
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I Rise: The Transformation of Toni Newman
Rating: 4/5, good I picked up this book because I saw Toni Newman on a Zoom call with Charlie Jane Anders and a lot of other trans and nonbinary authors. There were so many cool authors and good books to pick from it was a little overwhelming (the call included Alok Vaid-Menon, Meredith Talusan, Vivek…
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The Light in Front of Me by Aria Howell
Rating: 4/5, good Full disclosure: This is my partner’s book and I edited it. The Light in Front of Me by Aria Howell is an LGBT high fantasy book. It’s about Valerie, the princess of a kingdom called Rayleth, who is engaged to marry Eliot, the prince of Va’cerio. Valerie and Eliot have been good…
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The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Rating: 4/5, good Diverse Reading Challenge #4 This book was originally published in 1984 and it’s been a standard in classrooms. I’ve definitely seen it around, though I was never assigned it. We did read Sandra Cisneros’s story “Eleven” in class in 7th grade, and I loved that story. I think The House on Mango…
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The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Rating: 5/5, excellent Diverse Reading Challenge #3 I don’t know why I slept on this book so long. It came out February 8th, 2017 and it was a huge hit, with a movie adaptation that came out in 2018. I’ve heard so many great things about it, and it 100% lives up to the hype!…
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The Murderbot Diaries vol. 1: All Systems Red
All Systems Red by Martha Wells Rating: 3/5, average I really loved the concept of this, but I wasn’t crazy about the execution. All Systems Red is about a nonbinary asexual robot who went berserk in their last job and killed a bunch of their employers, so in their head they call themselves “murderbot”…