[publications] Review of Mansfield Park and Mummies

Earlier this year, I reviewed Mansfield Park and Mummies by Jane Austen and Vera Nazarian for Broad Universe’s The Broadsheet. You can find the review here.

I’m not really a Jane Austen fan (yeah, any response you have to that I’ve probably heard from my younger sister), but I did mostly enjoy Mansfield Park and Mummies. I’m also glad to see one of these mashups written by a woman; I have some problems with a guy rewriting these books written by a woman. So often women’s contributions to literary canon are ignored or overlooked or flat out denied, and I am really frustrated to see work by one of a high respected and recognized author appropriated by a guy.

But this isn’t that, and I really think people will enjoy Mansfield Park and Mummies.

[short stories] (Fat) Fiction Friday: The Mad Scientist’s Daughter by Theodora Gross

First, an update! You may remember that for my first (Fat) Fiction Friday (here), I reviewed Karen Healey’s Guardian of the Dead and talked a little (and somewhat incoherently, sadly) about my responses to the main character who describes herself as fat.

Well, at The Rotund, Marianne Kirby talked about “When Fat Characters Describe Themselves: A Response to a Book I Just Finished Reading” and I wanted to link here because they are very interesting.

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Second, an actual (Fat) Fiction Friday mini review!

The Mad Scientist’s Daughter by Theodora Gross Part One | Part Two at Strange Horizons.

Two excerpts really capture this for me:

Beatrice: “Why do we always die in the stories?”

Catherine: “Because we’re not the ones who write them.”

and

XI. Why I Wrote This Sketch

Someday, I would like to write a book that isn’t about Rick Chambers or Astarte. It would be the sort of book that George Eliot could have written, about life in a country town and the people who live there, their jealousies, their ambitions, the minutiae of their lives. How they fall in love with the wrong people, or the right people at the wrong time, or lose the mercantile business on which their fortune is built. Or misplace wills. You know, literature.

But I’ve never experienced any of those things myself. All I know is monsters.

Mini Review: I really enjoyed this story, because I do love stories about monsters and stories about monsters doing mundane things and because I do love stories which talk about why women die in so many stories and why women need to be able to tell their own stories.