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Megan
Megan is from Chicago, where she grew up eating ice cream straight out of the carton, crying over movies, rearranging her bookshelves every three months, and writing best at two in the morning. She still does all of these things. She graduated with a BA in English Literature, which has led her to a brilliant career of collecting Shakespeare plays, enforcing the Oxford comma, and pretending she's a writer. Professionally, she sells books and drinks tea. Unprofessionally, she flails about Star Wars, writes, plays video games, and stargazes in her driveway. She is far too invested in chocolate-covered pretzels, Greco-Roman mythology, and hoping fictional people will kiss.
Megan runs the store's social media, so if you've seen a Facebook or blog post with a typo recently, it's her fault (though she tries really hard to fix the typos). Mostly, she reads fantasy and sci-fi (and teen fantasy/sci-fi), but she peppers in enough biographies, contemporary fiction, and graphic novels to consider herself at least semi-well-rounded. She finds writing about herself in the third person to be very odd, and is going to stop now.
If I could give this book a star for everything it has in it that's My Favorite, it would have, like...thirty stars.
At least.
I can't thank EK Johnston enough for this book. I can't thank her enough for the feminist, queer retelling of my childhood faves. For the heartwarming, heartwrenching, achingly lovely story that she poured into the Afterward, seemingly so that I, personally, would melt into a puddle of emotions and reread this book over and over and over. Because it's my favorite of all time? Or close at least.
A 200-page prose poem, an epistolary masterpiece, a masterclass in allusion, a deep dive into character, a perfect manipulation of form and syntax and tone, a bending of the genre to create something that is intrinsically SFF and yet absolutely, gorgeously unique. It's a Shakespearean sonnet, a John Keats love-letter, a Seamus Heaney translation. It's ancient and new, twisted and twined, harsh and jagged and soft all at once, romantic and Romantic. It's art.
This book is FULL in a way that few others are--it's dense but not unreadable, it's jam-packed but not hurried or frantic, it's twisty but not confusing. I love everything about the worldbuilding, the language, the poetry, the history of the Empire and the legacy of the Station--and how each place conserves and preserves in a galaxy that is always moving, always changing. The conversation about civilization that is born in this book is FASCINATING. It's the sort of book that makes me wish I loved book clubs, because I want to discuss this in every book club on the planet. The characters are just as full as the plot, each with their own story to brush up against Mahit's, and Mahit...Mahit might be my favorite character of all time. The cleverness, the brilliance, the way her mind works is amazing to read. And the SELF--the Question of the Self--is so central and so INTERESTING. And I love it. Simply saying, I love this book, more than words can express.
This is not a nice book. That’s okay, though, because it’s funny. And disgusting. Absolutely gruesome at times, if I’m being honest. But it’s got this big heart…Gideon has this big heart, and you love her, you love her so much despite everything—because of everything—and she’s such a big damn hero. And the book is about being a hero, and it’s about the hard parts and the gross parts and the awful parts about being a hero, but it’s about the heroic parts, too.
And it's about skeletons and swords and, yeah all right, it's about lesbian necromancers solving puzzles in space.
It's about tender, angry, soft, strong women who take their future by the throat and make it their own, writing themselves into the songs of history because no one else will. It's about magic and stories and the magic of stories. It has just enough Beowulf to make it...ancient--and yet new, gilded and atmospheric, like a fog-enshrouded sunrise. It's a new beginning and a beautiful ending. It's...my favorite book of 2018.
There was really nothing about this book that I didn't like. It was the freshest take on a beloved, if worn-out, story that I've ever seen, and was a truly engaging and energetic read from cover to cover.
I've been reading the Ranger's Apprentice series since I was 12, and it's a testament to Flanagan's unwavering style and delightful characters that I'm STILL reading these books now, new as they come out, and rereading over and over whenever I feel the need for the comfort only these brilliant, snarky archers can bring me.
No one told me that this book is an absolutely stunning fantasy rendition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Epic, many-layered, incredible, and elegant were the buzzwords in the blurbs for this book, and it is absolutely all of those things. It’s just also fantasy Hamlet. And it doesn’t say that anywhere in any of the marketing, despite that being, in my opinion, one of it’s biggest selling points. It’s amazing. And I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Not-quite steampunk, sort-of fantasy, a little bit French Revolution, the setting of Torn is a delightful mash-up of all my favorite genres. The political intrigue in this book is masterfully handled, and the characters are all beyond amazing. It started slow and steady and then picked up so intensely that I could not stop reading.
Estranged is an absolutely gorgeous story about family--about losing family and adopting a new one, creating it from nothing and everything. It's about growing up different and growing up at all. It's about love, about losing it and shaping it from nothing and finding it in unexpected places. It's about knowing when to ask for help and when to offer it. It's also about a dragon. It's an important story, detailed and deep, done up in art that literally took my breath away. It was heartfelt and haunting, and felt exactly like it should have, considering it's about the Fae.
And there's a dragon. So what else could you ask for, really?
Emily Wilson is the first woman to translate one of the epics, and she’s shown more understanding of what The Odyssey truly is and truly means then any of the men who have come before her. She’s made it an adventure novel, an analytical exploration, an emotional journey for both Odysseus and the reader. It’s readable and updated and intricate and fascinating. It is, simply put, the best translation you could possibly find of The Odyssey. And it should be the standard to which all other translations are held.
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08/17/2019 - 9:00am
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Old Firehouse Books
232 Walnut Street Old Town Fort Collins, CO 80524
(970)484-7898, info@oldfirehousebooks.com
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