[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.

[short stories] (Fat) Fiction Friday: Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire

This week I bring you an ongoing series of short stories by Seanan McGuire, published monthly at The Edge of Propinquity.

Sparrow Hill Road is the story of Rose Marshall, a hitchhiking ghost, and the story of her death — and a bit of her life — on Sparrow Hill Road and what comes after. It’s creepy and delightful, sweet and heartbreaking, and every story is filled with adventure and ghostly intrigue. McGuire has created an excellent world of ghosts and the living and the roads they share and the roads they don’t.

I grew up a truck driver’s daughter and have been in love with the road and with driving for as long as I can remember. The first place I go when I need a break is the highway, and no matter whether I’m in my car or on my motorcycle, watching that blacktop stretch before me feels like coming home.

McGuire deftly, expertly captures that feeling in Sparrow Hill Road. I wait impatiently each month for the next issue of the Edge of Propinquity to be released so I can slip back into a story of shadows and souls, of wandering ghosts and monsters in the darkness, and of the rhythm and pulse of the open road.

Rose Marshall’s tale is incredible and McGuire’s writing will still your breath.

Excerpt from the synopsis:

Welcome to the midnight America, the one that exists parallel to the “real” world. It’s a dark country, one where men with hooks haunt Lover’s Lane and scarecrows walk on moonlit nights. It’s the place where people go when they slip into the cracks between light and darkness, a world of routewitches and oracles, demons and ambulomancers. It’s the place where a man named Bobby Cross sold his soul to live forever…and where one pretty little dead girl is racing to save her soul and stop the killings that began on Sparrow Hill Road. The rules are different here, and everyone’s playing for keeps. Be careful. Be cautious. And listen to the urban legends, because they may be the only things that can save you from the man who waits at the crossroads, hunting souls to keep himself alive.

Welcome to the ghostside.

My favorites so far are the first story, “Good Girls Go to Heaven” which absolutely broke my heart and showed me how much I would love this collection, and the fourth story, “Building a Mystery,” but each story is excellent and they just keep getting better.

Welcome to the ghostside, McGuire says, but it sounds more like welcome home.

[books] (Fat) Fiction Friday: Karen Healey’s Guardian of the Dead

(Fat) Fiction Friday

For awhile now, I’ve been meaning to spend more time talking about the books I read. Specifically, I wanted to talk about books which include fat characters, though that won’t be my exclusive focus. Such is born (Fat) Fiction Friday, because the fat will come and go, but Fridays are forever. Or something like that. I like alliteration.

(You may be interested in an old blog post of mine talking about fat and feminism, Fat, Ugly, and Pissed, and Tammy Pierce’s response to it, So WHAT if we’re FAT? Which, for the record, that she read and responded to it brought me great joy. Tammy Pierce has been my favorite author almost my entire life and is one of my biggest feminist influences. I have a touch of hero worship for her.)

So on Fridays (though not necessarily all Fridays, as I head into the end of the semester, finals, graduation, and the bar exam) I will discuss fiction.

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(I wrote most of this the other day and intended to come back and add more before I posted today, but my allergies hit really hard and I’m almost out of Friday. Since this is (Fat) Fiction Friday, I want to get it posted before Friday ends, but if it’s scattered or confusing in places, I’m sorry.)

(Fat) Fiction Friday: Guardian of the Dead

It’s really kind of fitting that Guardian of the Dead is my first (Fat) Fiction Friday book. For one thing, it is Karen Healey’s first published novel and it was officially published on 1 April and it is the first novel by one of my close friends published by a major commercial publisher. For another, I first read this in first draft form, so rereading the official published version was a different experience. (A good experience, but different.) I reread books quite frequently (this is why I have both a large book collection and a teetering, towering To Read pile; the books I reread most make it into the collection, but there are quite a few of them, and so the To Read pile sometimes goes unread), but generally those are books which stay the same from one read to the next. Guardian of the Dead isn’t. (Or rather, wasn’t. From now on, it will stay the same. Which is perfectly fine with me, because I loved it and devoured it in just a few hours.)

( Blurb )
( Brief review )
( Fat Content Review )