Delightful. Theodora Goss takes Victorian era science fiction and writes a novel that answers the question: what if we told these stories and centered them around women? She brings together the daughters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson), Rappacini's Daughter (Nathaniel Hawthorne), Catherine Moreau (The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells) and of course, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the form of a female Frankenstein, into a narrative of women who meet and form an alliance with each other because they have been made so different from the world around them by their fathers (or father figures). Mary, Diana, Beatrice, Catherine and Justine each have a unique voice and personality that comes through the text (and their interjections into the narrative). I loved the structure of this that pulls back the curtain somewhat, giving us the impression that we are privy to the thoughts of the writer, who is (ostensibly) Catherine, with contributions from each young woman telling her own story.

This was unexpectedly amazing! (Unexpected because I knew nothing of the book before I started listening to it.) I was looking for a great audio book for a road trip, and this was so good that I did the thing where you sit in your car after you get home because you can't stop listening (after driving for almost ten hours!). Humans find evidence that there are other species in the universe, who have a much more advanced society than theirs. In this first book of the series, we follow the ragtag team of people involved in understanding the alien technology and how the discovery changes all of their lives.

I'm not sure what I expected, but this far exceeded my expectations. This is an autobiographical collection of essays where Gabrielle Union discusses a myriad of topics and issues. It's so live!

Hardboiled detective meets historical fiction? Yes please.

Omigosh this series is amazing! I can't post much detail about the story because spoilers (for this one and the first one) but it does not disappoint. I love the epistolary-ish format of the book and the narration (I listened to the audio book version) is great! [My only qualm is that one of the characters is a child, and the narration doesn't sound like a child, so I kept having to remind myself that a child was speaking.] But the story develops in an interesting way in this second book, and I can't wait to see what happens next!

Fascinating. On a scale of dryly academic to wildly political, I'd rate this probably politically academic. McWhorter takes and a linguist's view this highly politicized topic and makes an academic argument for the validity of Black English as its own language form.

So weird. So creepy. So good.