Lady Midnight: The Dark Artifices

Lady Midnight is the first of the newThe Dark Artifices trilogy written by Cassandra Clare. The novel follows the lives of shadowhunters Emma Carstairs and Julian Blackthorn. Shadowhunters are nephelium, half-angel, half-humans, who kill demons. They’re on a mission to figure out why there have been a series of killings throughout Los Angeles that seem similar to murder of Emma’s parents five years before. 

The Dark Artificesis the third series in the Shadowhunter Chronicles universe – the first and second being The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices. 

Clare is one of my favorite authors and originally won my heart over in The Mortal Instruments. She continues to keep me enthralled with Lady Midnight.

The novel was a thrill ride from start to end and was definitely a treat for those who read the previous books. You get all the humor and action that you loved and there are even appearances from past characters such as Clary Fray, Jace “Insert Last Name Here” (he goes through quite a few of them), Tessa Gray,  Jem Carstairs, and a crowd favorite, Magnus Bane.

If you haven’t read the previous books, no worries! Lady Midnight has made its own mark with loveable characters, entertaining action, steamy scenes, and great adventure. There are so many interesting and complicated relationships, too. For instance, the forbidden love between Emma and Julian, desperation of lost love from our villain, and difficult relations between lost family members just to name a few. One thing I got from this read is, relationships are complicated no matter who they’re with. One thing I’d suggest is to always keep an eye on characters in this universe, minor characters included. You never know when they’ll show up again.

If you enjoy an addictive read full of action, some laughs, romance, and a whole lot of magic, I’d suggest picking up Lady Midnight.

Reading the first two series of books is definitely not needed but if you want to get all of the nice Easter eggs placed in the novel, it wouldn’t hurt. There is so much about this book and this universe that Clare has created; it’s hard to sum up the vastness of it all. This world of Shadowhunters, demons, and Downworlders is quite large and is still growing. Take a dive into it.

You can check out the next novel, Lord of Shadows, now! The last installment of The Dark Artifices, Queen of Air and Darkness, was released in autumn of 2018.

Reviewed by Courtney Gilmore

Published by Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published in 2016
ISBN: 1442468351 
698 Pages (Hardcover)

Witches Sluts Feminists

In Kristen J. Sollée’s book, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, she writes: “The witch is at once female divinity, female ferocity, and female transgression. She is all and she is one. The witch has as many moods and as many faces as the moon.

Most of all, she is misunderstood.

With a pretty straightforward title, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive leaves no questions as to what you should expect to find in its pages. From the “All-American Witch”, AKA what really went down in Salem, to the “Political Witch-hunt” of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, this book will leave you with the what, why, and how of the words witch, slut, and feminist in our history. Albeit, “our” means mostly “American” in this case, but Sollée states right off the bat in her introduction that the Christian, Anglo-European view is so prevalent in the media’s perception of the witch that she decided to pick apart the biggest offender.  

Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive is a history lesson with a contemporary feel. It will educate you without overwhelming you with dry facts. It will answer questions such as “when did ‘witch’ become a negative term?” or “how has the internet changed witchcraft and the feminist movement?” with a plethora of sources, 225 in the 200 pages to be exact, from historians to witch-identifying people to historians who are also witches. 

Sollée’s voice is snarky, and her comments are brief but amusing. She never makes herself the focal point. This is not a person on her soapbox, shouting her beliefs at you for 200 pages. She is merely the vessel for the dozens of voices woven into the passages, telling their stories, findings, research, their histories. It is a cumulative journey, each sentence building on the last, each chapter carrying you further through time, showing you a history of adversity and of perseverance, leading you to the present-day identities of witches, sluts, and feminists.   

Reviewed by: Ash Dietrich 

Publisher: ThreeL Media

Publication Date: May 22, 2017

ISBN: 9780996485272

Length: 200 pages

House of Names

Relatability – it’s the one thing that makes a good book great and meaningful to an individual. So, have I ever sacrificed my daughter, kidnapped children en masse, or murdered my husband or mother? Well, no. No, I have not. But, I’ll forgive Colm Tóibín in this instance. His latest novel, House of Names, retells the classic story of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon in the aftermath of the Trojan War. I found that this novel was a very fast read – I probably could have read it in one sitting if I had a few hours available consecutively. Although the plot occurred over several years, Tóibín moves quickly through the major events leading up to and following Agamemnon’s assassination by carefully balancing the political events with the personal perspectives of his three main protagonists: Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Electra. I only know the basic premise of the story, so I can’t speak to how true Tóibín held to the original tale. Having familiarity with other classic epics, though, I can appreciate his adaptation of language, relationships, and mannerisms of the time to be more accessible to the modern reader while still maintaining a degree of authenticity. Overall, I enjoyed House of Names. It was an easy way to pass the time, and entertaining for what it was. However, it was largely unmemorable, and, I think, underwhelming in the light of its source material. 

Reviewed by: Kristin Rawlings

Scribner (Simon & Schuster imprint)

ISBN: 1501140213

278 pages

Marlena

Marlena is Julie Buntin’s debut novel about two teenage girls growing up on the edges of a forest in rural Michigan. It’s the raw coming-of-age story of Cat, a girl from the suburbs of Detroit and her growth as a character when she’s unwillingly thrown into a little nothing of a town where she meets Marlena, her “manic, beautiful, pill-popping” neighbor. Throughout the novel Cat conforms herself to Marlena, no longer wanting to be “Catherine,” the private school girl who coughs at the smell of cigarette smoke, but Cat. Marlena’s friend. Marlena is entertaining, Cat is interesting, this is very much a character driven story, and I really enjoyed every moment of it.

The novel is told through a distanced and mature retelling of Cat’s young teen years with chapters flipping from her life in Silver Lake and her current adult life in New York. Buntin artfully uses anchoring points throughout the “younger” chapters of the novel that keeps reminding the reader that this is a memory. I’ll admit that the first couple times that happened I was a bit thrown off. A voice would suddenly break into the telling that didn’t match the already established voice of fifteen-year-old Cat but once I realized who that voice was and what it was doing for the story, it really strengthened the moment.

This is Cat’s story, from the first time she sets foot in Silver Lake to her being an adult with a career in New York, but she’s oftentimes overshadowed by Marlena. Marlena is a wild child from the very first time the reader sees her in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s pickup. Her personality is bright and eccentric yet tainted with a darkness that Cat couldn’t really grasp until she was older. Cat was just along for the ride, moulded by Marlena’s unique allure. It would have been easy for Cat to become a background character; she’s quiet and often times unsure of herself, but Buntin kept her at the forefront of the story. The voice of the character kept her interesting even if, seemingly at first, the character herself wasn’t. The first person narrator was a perfect choice and Buntin did a great job with it.

This is a story of more than just sex, drugs, and lost childhood. It’s about friendship, family, and self-discovery. It’s about loss and growth and everything in between. I think this is a story worth listening to and the artful and unique telling kept me reading even when I knew that I should go to bed.

Reviewed by Cali Luisa Lemus

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Publication Year: 2017

ISBN-10: 1627797645

Number of Pages: 274

October 02, 2018

Guidebook to Relative Strangers

Guidebook to Relative Strangers is the blueprint of breaking down communication barriers and changing the view of our troubled world.

Award-winning writer Camille T Dungy is acutely aware of what it means to live on the crossroads: she is a writer, a mother, and an African American woman. In Guidebook to Relative Stangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, she poetically intertwines history with her present. This weaving of events helps readers understand not only why history is of great significance, but how to “interpret—and not disdain” people.

The opening of her book begins with a conversation she was pulled into among her peers. This experience sheds light on a catastrophic detail that comes from privilege: the obliteration of communities of people. She connects this to why history is an all-consuming experience to many, including herself.

“There is something about privilege that can place one in a position to erase the realities of others. . . my life and flesh and family and history demand that I recognize [others] where and how I can.”

Dungy ties this awareness of erasure with the way she raises her daughter. Her young daughter experiences moments completely disconnected to history but that does not devalue the importance of it.

“I notice, now more than ever, what I don’t know, and what I want to know, and what I want to share with you, Callie Violet. I want to name the world correctly.”

Dungy shares how and why a traffic stop is something feared by African American men. She shows readers the realness of this fear when she intertwines her traffic stop while with her family with those that happened before and after her. 

“Our routine traffic stop happened just a week after Texas police shot and killed thirty-eight-year-old Jason Harrison, a black man. And one month earlier, Eric Garner, a black forty-three-year-old father of six, was choked to death by New York Police Department officers. It was six weeks before Ferguson police shot Michael Brown, and five months before Cleveland police shot and killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. . . .”

           Despite all this trauma, Dungy still gives the benefit of the doubt to all those she encounters.

“I am, for one thing, more prepared to interpret—and not disdain—other people’s potentially flawed communications. . . I am, I believe now, more prepared to be accepting of the humanity in all of us.”

            History is alive all around us. Take some time and become aware of how it connects to you.

Reviewed by Maria Mendoza Cervantes

Published by W. W. Norton Company on June 13th 2017

ISBN: 978-0-393-25375-7

240 pages

September 04, 2018

Sourdough

Sourdough by Robin Sloan is a high-stakes story about baking sourdough bread. While definitely strange-sounding, it actually isn’t too far from the truth. Within a short novel, Sloan managed to create a fast-paced story that skillfully kneads magical realism, actual science, and a heart-warming story into a filling meal.

The story follows Lois Clary, a software engineer, who gets into the habit of baking sourdough bread after the owners of her favorite restaurant are deported.  The restaurant’s owners, Beoreg and Chaiman, left Lois with a sourdough starter that has been in their family for generations. For those of you who aren’t bread connoisseurs (I know I’m not), a sourdough starter is a mix of wild yeast, flour, and water that won’t die as long as you continue to feed it; essentially it’s what makes sourdough sour. But unlike normal starters, Lois’ starter is rather moody and otherworldly. It needs to listen to unidentifiable foreign music, can’t be treated roughly, and emits glowing lights when in a good mood. Strange.

That’s about as far as the magical realism in the story goes, and honestly, it didn’t need to go any farther. The rest of the magic comes from the science that appears throughout the novel. Like I said earlier, Lois is a software engineer at a robotics company in San Francisco. When her bread becomes a huge hit at work and she’s recommended to try out for one of the city’s many farmers markets, she ends up at the Marrow Fair. There, science and food collide with LED grown produce, laser-roasted coffee beans, honey made from radioactive bees, and bacteria-produced Lembas bread (yes, like the kind from The Lord of the Rings).

Sloan has the ability to combine science with fiction in a way that seems totally plausible. You could tell me that all the science and history in both of his novels are completely fiction and a part of me would honestly be sad. His ability to make the reader believe in his words that is perhaps the most incredible part of his work. As readers, there’s a certain level of suspended disbelief that we will always carry. But with Sourdough, no matter how impossible the science might seem, there never seems to be a reason to suspend it in the first place.

While the main story of this novel focuses on Lois and the Marrow Fair, one of my favorite aspects are the little emails sent to Lois by Beoreg, the restaurant owner. In those emails, we learn more about the mysterious Mazg people he and his brother hail from and his own family history, the tone of which remind me of bedtime stories told to me as a child. And with just one side of the conversation, Sloan managed to create a naturally progressing relationship between Beoreg and Lois that doesn’t feel forced or rushed.

Sourdough is a beautifully written book that appeals to the child-like wonder we all still hold as adults. If you’re a fan of tech, food, and strong female characters, this is the book for you. If you’re a fan of books that leave you quietly smiling as you turn the last page, then it’s definitely the book for you. But just a warning, this book will definitely leave you a bit hungry!

Reviewed by Celeste Paed

MCD Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published on September 5th 2017

ISBN: 978-0374203108

272 pages

August 07, 2018

The Doll Funeral

A quote from Shakespeare’s Richard II begins this supernatural coming-of-age novel: “…even through the hollow eyes of death I spy life peering”. On her thirteenth birthday, Ruby discovers that cruel Mick and passive Barbara are not her real parents. Instead of letting the information devastate her, Ruby is elated. Surely her real parents must be out there, somewhere, searching for her? Blowing out her candles, Ruby wishes only for one thing: for her parents to come and find her. What follows this fateful wish is a journey deep into the woods, where Ruby meets three siblings just as lost and lonely as she is, and the answers to questions she never thought to ask.

The novel’s narration is divided between thirteen-year-old Ruby in 1983, living in the Forest of Dean with her adoptive parents; her birth mother Anna, pregnant, terrified, and seventeen-years-old in 1970; and the imaginary Shadow boy, Ruby’s one constant companion. It becomes clear very early on that there is something different about Ruby: she can see and talk with the dead. Ghosts and spirits seek her out, some helpful, some less so, some as overlooked as Ruby feels.

A gripping exploration of how the past can haunt us, even when we do not know the whole truth of where we come from, The Doll Funeralexists on a cusp for its majority. We meet Ruby at the threshold of her teenage years. She is looking for family, for home, for everything she has never had. The quest for these essentials takes her deep into the woods, to a long-forgotten mansion and the three children trying to survive in its cluttered, death-cold interior. It is with these three siblings that she begins to understand what home really is.

In 1970, Ruby’s young birth mother faces her own struggles, chief among them whether or not to put her baby up for adoption. Anna is convinced that the baby’s father, Lewis, would never accept either of them. In the end, she decides to keep the baby, and Lewis tries to do the right thing, proposing to Anna and whisking her and Ruby off to London for a fresh start.

The fairytale nature of the narrative creates intrigue, setting up mysteries it is in no hurry to solve. As the narrative progresses, the timelines condense. The truth about what became of Ruby’s young parents is revealed: a tragic tale of a loveless marriage and post-partem psychosis that ends with a car accident on the roads within the forest. The origins of Shadow and his connection to Ruby are similarly exposed, and every gap filled in. While the pace suffers slightly in the middle, when each of the three narrations reach their tipping point, the end is worth every minute. “I was a scavenger for family,” Ruby tells us. “And what I found was love and souls.”

As haunting as it is captivating, The Doll Funeral is an unexpectedly moving tale of finding yourself and what it means to come home. An excellent read for anyone who has ever searched, longed for, and lost.

Reviewed by Grace Smithwick

Faber and Faber Ltd, Melville House

Published On: August 15th 2017

ISBN: 057131385X 

336 Pages

July 10, 2018

Poison and Antidote

By Cody Lee, Reviews Editor

This foggy, angst-riddled delve into the underbelly of ’80s San Francisco acts as a sedative for those arty-farty solipsists who think that they’re the only ones to feel heartbreak, and the ongoing excruciation of life: you’re not alone . . . well, you are, but so is everyone else, really.

Poison and Antidote: Bohemian Stories by Lee Foust intertwines nine stories, all of which resemble the lives of your local waitresses, meth-mouthed pseudo-rockers, and performance artists who drink blood from crystal chalices.

Foust jumps between first and third person, and even switches the characters that speak in first person, which can come off as confusing at times (I’m still trying to figure out who’s speaking in the last chapter . . . I have my bets on a fellow named Lee (Ding! Ding! The author’s name!) but I’m still not 100% certain; my book’s marked up with two too many arrows pointing to names, and strikethroughs), but that’s the excitement in the adventure: by reading, and peeking into the thoughts of these unsure young adults, I became a part of the story, too, wandering around the hookered, and unencumbered streets of California for a moment, only to put the book down and return to reality: the world of classwork, work-work, and sleep/repeat.

It’s evident that this novel’s a byproduct of Foust sitting down in front of his computer, opening up Microsoft Word and spilling out the beautiful (and sometimes oddball) workings of his hyper-inventive mind. This comes across in Poison and Antidote’s anarchic content, and structure, too; Foust chooses to incorporate a movie script; he chops up select chapters into italicized, page-long preludes—typically composed of surreal dreamscapes (e.g. “In this crowd I grow two more faces—I’m surrounded) and old-bearded-man-glued-to-a-rocking-chair wisdom (e.g. “Remember, everything has the potential to be the most painful thing that you’ve ever felt, but the numbness you force on yourself in its place will rob you of even that”).

Poison and Antidote is filled with quotables, and I can go on for pages, but rather, I highly recommend that you, personally, read this über-observant, and visceral look at Foust’s San Fran: the land of the free, and the home of Dead Kennedys.

September 11, 2017

The Kingdom of Speech

By Will Horner, Contributing Editor

Aha! seems to be Tom Wolfe’s archetypical cry in understanding the basis of the world, how and where we fit in it. Following many of the tropes seen in The Painted Word, Wolfe turns from art theory to evolution in The Kingdom of Speech, focusing again on the fabled, no-way-around-it word, or in this case speech, a most-esteemed factor in how humans developed separate from the world of plants and animals. While it may not be as trendy a topic as gallivanting hippies or adrenaline-happy rocket jockeys, the reader is slung around in space-time for Wolfe to come upon the reason, the real reason we talk and how it shapes us from on the branches to below the street lamps.

The essential thing that drives the book is the understanding of everything, the encompassing theory of all theories, the origin of the species. Like in his book on art criticism, The Painted Word, Wolfe includes himself very much into the story, which he evades in his more notable works like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or The Right Stuff. Starting with the discovery of nothing by Noam Chomsky and a few other MIT professors, “. . . the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever,” to which he replies from the largely used “Aha!” to the more archaic, “Ahura!” Wolfe begins to construct an argument, beginning in the 1800s, with Charles Darwin, cozy in his stuffy hypochondria in London, and his relationship with Alfred Wallace (who’s that?), a then-contemporary naturalist, in the mud, living amongst nature, competing for the pedestal for their scientific findings. Wolfe notes Wallace’s attempts and snubs from the Linnean Society, an academic biological society, to present what essentially becomes Darwin’s argument. The reader follows Darwin in his attempts at Everything, largely resting on the realm of language, how speech reflects the world and us in it.

Fast-forward to the 1950s: Noam Chomsky, the prodigy thinker, the law of the land of linguistics. Chomsky presents his law of recurrence, which explains the brain’s mythical language center for “universal grammar,” only to come across another rival, marking about in the Amazon. Daniel Everett (come again?), a contemporary to Chomsky, then unhinges Chomsky’s theory by simply saying, “This group of people over here, the Pirahã, they don’t follow this universal theory, Chomsters. They don’t even have a grasp of the future or the past, only the now, the now!”

Only by Wolfe’s perseverance in looking at these two bloodless conflicts does he come to his own conclusion that speech is “a mnemonic system,” a way for us to pattern our speech pattern, to remember, to organize, to pull from nature the invisible to make artifacts out of. “Speech,” Wolfe states, “and only speech, gives the human beast the ability to make plans . . . not just long-term plans, but any plans, even for something to do in five minutes.” Speech also gives us the ability to tell time, to measure, to build, to investigate, to express, to create. What Wolfe gives us is the keys to understanding, or at least a lock pick for our eyes to see what line divides the microcosms of biology and even the general macrocosm of Earth. It’s the problem we’ve been largely expediting to religion, whether we are made or we just are, whether we have free will or not, dualist versus dialectic thought. This heavily-researched yet short book is a blanket-explanation of what academics have been turning in bed for, why speech is so fundamental in our lives.

It’s definitely a book to pass along to friends, but moreso for the topic and its presentation. Wolfe has a great intuition in research and stringing along occurrences in history, and showing us something that we didn’t know, delving into a world that we as a general public probably thought was settled. The reader is left with not an open-ended question but a way of thinking of their own collected cell-cess pool that we call the body, that we call human.

William Horner is a continuing senior at Columbia College Chicago. He has no job, no wife/husband/pet or a shitty jay nay say quay. He eats too much and hasn’t been published. What a maroon.

August 14, 2017

When Mystical Creatures Attack!

By T. Daniel Frost, Editor-in-Chief

Kathleen Founds’ debut novel, and winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, When Mystical Creatures Attack! is an impactful collection of stories with a cast of honest and relatable characters.

Laura Freedman is a high school teacher on the verge of what everyone fears: losing it. But, that’s not what this story is about. Laura snaps and is committed to the Bridges Psychiatric Wellness Solutions program pretty early on. This story is less about her time in, and her frustration with, the program, and more about how each character deals with and responds to their fight with mental health and the stress that comes with it.

The characters are what drive the themes of this book. In the past twenty-five years or so a lot of attention has been given to mental illness, especially depression. The stereotypical depressed individual is usually depicted as self-pitying and awkward. And that’s fine, and sometimes even effective, but it’s only one version of how depression can affect someone. Laura Freedman, Janice Gibbs, and Cody Splunk are three of several characters that are portrayed in the novel; each of them suffer from mental illness, but none of them are constantly suffering.  Above all their sense of humor comes through in fantastic ways.  Whether it’s Cody’s dramatic tale of how he and Janice busted Ms. Freedman out of Bridges or the sass that Janice gives her father’s fiancé, the characters are more than their sickness; they are still functioning human beings.

Found’s humor comes through strongest in the section “Uncommon Happiness” where she intertwines heartbreaking insight to the character.  Laura Freedman starts a Dear-Abby-like blog where she hears out people’s problems and offers her advice for the situation.  While many of the people who ask Laura for advice have comically exaggerated situations (e.g. Beached Whale in Trenton), the real heart-wrenching realizations come from Laura’s response to her readers.  She slowly goes from fighting (and helping others fight) emptiness and loneliness, to beginning to accept her depression and potentially nihilistic points of view. By her last post (excerpted below) she has relapsed and it seems that she doesn’t even realize it fully.

Sartre was an asshole.

We all know loving one another is the whole goddam point of this human condition. So spend these last moments with your children. Let them stroke your cheek, wash your hair, kiss you goodbye. After all, maybe you’re the lucky one. Being human is rough stuff. You get to be done.

Signing off, for now and always,

Laura Freedman

The thing that makes this book brilliant in the literary sense is how Founds plays with form.  Journal Entries, email chains, and establishment guidelines (to name a few) all help to get the reader needed exposition that would otherwise have been taxing if written out in traditional prose.  These forms also show the attributes of the characters that we couldn’t have gotten from the normal first person point of view.

Glenda Gayle’s recipe for Sweet and Sour Party Meatballs goes beyond just the ingredients. “Directions: This dish can mark an occasion that is both sour and sweet, such as when my fiancé’s daughter came up for our wedding.” Little tricks like this, which are also very fun, help us get to know how some of the side characters think and feel toward other characters within their circle.

Whether you’re new to writing or on your sixth novel, there is a lot to learn from When Mystical Creatures Attack!, from experimentation with forms to character development.  And to those who have a great love for reading, this novel will break your heart and cheer you up at the same time in the same way that It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini and Kneller’s Happy Campers by Etgar Keret could. There’s a reason why this is an award-winning novel and recommended by the New York Times. It’s incredibly well-crafted.

When Mystical Creatures Attack! by Kathleen Founds

University of Iowa Press

ISBN-13:978-1-60938-283-4

163 pages

T. Daniel Frost is a senior Fiction Writing major at Columbia College Chicago and was the co-chair of the professional development seminar “So You Want To Be An Author.” But like most people his age, he’s just happy to be holding it together, even if only a little bit.  He’s particularly proud of this magazine and the awesome team that works on it.

July 17, 2017