essjay's Reviews (635)

From the ages of 10-17, I lived in a town so small it's listed as a "census designated place." We had a library, but it was literally two small rooms, staffed by volunteers (this was my first "job," actually) and only open for a few hours two days a week. This was not enough for young me, which led both to me getting cards from the closest towns with libraries (30 and 60 minutes away, my mom was glad when I got my license bc it meant I could drive myself to the library whenever I wanted) AND to me re-reading all of the books I owned endlessly. 

Enter The Elvenbane. 

I don't even know that I thought it was GOOD when I read it, but I bought it bc of that cheesy-ass Boris Vallejo cover (there is not a single fucking dragon in the whole book that looks like this, btw) and then read that MMPB copy to tatters. To TATTERS, I say!

I re-read it bc Mercedes Lackey has said she's finished writing the manuscript for the fourth and final book (following a fuckton of dramz with Andre Norton's estate) and a friend has a project going where she's reading ALL of Lackey's work, so we read together. 

I have so many fuckin questions that never would have occurred to me 30 years ago and there are so many little things that bothered me. 

AND YET it was somehow still super compelling? I had forgotten most of the back half of the book (which is understandable bc I think that's where it starts to fall apart) and had a hard time not just plowing through the whole thing in order to be able to discuss it coherently. 

Really looking forward to getting to the next book before this one drops entirely out of my head. 

(Added a ¼ star bc of nostalgia, tbh.)

As with most things I read aloud to my 14y/o, I let them take the lead with ratings. The following are the stories they rated 5/5 in this collection. 

I'm a little disappointed the last one wasn't the closer to this anthology as it would have been perfect there, but I wasn't the editor, so what're you gonna do?

Genuinely hilarious and so clever, I will never not love this series. Glad to have read it again and am greatly looking forward to re-reading the rest ahead of Dark Reading Matter.

When is the winter of our discontent?

Marcy Dermansky : Messy-ass GenX Women :: Anna Dorn : Messy-ass Queer Millennials

If you know this going in, or you have read any of her work in the past, you know what to expect.

Which is the following:

• Messy-ass women that are almost entirely unlikable, but make for compelling reading nonetheless.
• An inordinate amount of messy-ass women swimming.
• Terrible decisions made by messy-ass women; you will want to scream at them "the fuck is WRONG with you?!" but you will keep reading in order to hopefully find out the fuck, in fact, is wrong with them.

My oldest read this review as I was writing this. "Oh, so like if Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was a book? No wonder you loved it!" Yes, exactly. That kid gets me.

I've read the majority of Dermansky's oeuvre, and would slot this solidly in the upper middle. It doesn't top Bad Marie for me, but really...what could?

Lots of fun, will be forcing this on people as an excellent poolside read (heh) when it's released in time for warmer weather. 

Sometimes I read something without quotation marks and it works so well I don't even notice. Others I am painfully aware of every missing one. This is the latter. 

Might try again sometime, but am just not in the mood for a murder mystery rn. 

I cackled (“Idle Hands”), I cried (“Hasselblad: Triptych”), I panicked (“Tropicália”), I gagged (“Porcelain”). 

I really just enjoyed the hell out of my time with this collection. Bumping up a quarter star bc of how much I loved the framing device. 

This could have been an email a short story. 

This slots perfectly into an eternal favourite niche of mine, that of the "messy-ass queer women litfic" variety. Add in a perimenopausal midlife crisis, and I was never not going to love it. 

Yeah, no. 

I thought "woof, this prologue is fuckin ROUGH" and convinced myself to read a little further, but got to this bit and decided I didn't need to put myself through this anymore.