I didn't read the book. I'm just here to encourage people considering it to research the author and his own history with accountability processes and frivolous lawsuits.

A first-person narrative from an android secure in its non-personhood was a new one for me. I found it strikingly original, but maybe not entirely compelling. I'm curious enough that I'll try the second one. The self-named "Murderbot" is a curious mix of introverted, judgmental, wiseass, and practical, making observations like "There were eleven messily dead humans in the hub..." messily dead!

Murderbot has been rented from some megacorp as a security officer, complete with drones, feeds, and a faulty governance system. The team its assisting are planetary explorers or anthropologists. Things go awry, but because the crew has seen Murderbot without its mask, they see it as close to human, and they want to keep it around.

Laura Stearns from a suburb of Las Vegas yearns for a World-Historical life, in the manner of Sebastian Oliver Webster who authored Laura's favorite book, All Before Them. Webster attended St. Dunstan's, a New England boarding school, and now Laura is headed there as well, for her junior year of high school. She's an emotional person, but passive, rather than passionate. She finds St. Dunstan's church choir, especially its leader Virginia Strauss, transcendent, and eventually takes a place among them. Virginia and the choir are Laura's whole world.

If you think that sounds like a recipe for disaster, you're right. The World Cannot Give is a Literary read, with a lot of messed up white people (including a hot priest). I embraced the artistry of Burton's writing most of the way through, but found the ending a little too too. It's not bad, I just didn't quite get there. I feel like there's something I didn't connect to that more sophisticated readers would pick up.

Thanks, NetGalley for the digital ARC!

These connected stories follow Fiona and Jane semi-linearly from childhood to early middle age. They're both Taiwanese American growing up in LA, but Fiona was born in Taiwan and Jane in the US. They are close through high school, but lose touch for a bit when Fiona moves to NYC with a boyfriend after college, and Jane stays on the west coast, doesn't finish college, and mostly dates women.

I'm not much of a short story reader, but these stories being connected helped. Still, I feel like this kind of storytelling is lazy, rather than creative. I'm a bum, and I don't want to bounce around the world the author created; I want to be led through it and told what to look at when.

"True Biz" is an ASL idiom meaning "for real." The truth in Novic's novel may be open to interpretation (see what I did there?) or, more accurately, positionality. There are multiple narrators, but the primary two are Charlie and February. Their turns are signaled by the ASL character for the first letter in their names--same for the other occasional narrators. Sometimes I don't like philosophical or instructional asides in books, but in this case, the ASL and deaf history lessons/lesson plans are contextual and enriching.

"DID YOU KNOW?
"Deaf scholars have proven that Deafness meets the requirements to be considered an ethnicity."

"Black American Sign Language (BASL) is a dialect of ASL used by Black Americans in the United States, often more heavily in Southern states. ASL and BASL diverged as a result of race-based school segregation. Because student populations were isolated from one another, the language strands evolved separately, to include linguistic variations in phonology, syntax, and vocabulary."

February, a CODA (child of deaf adults) is the headmaster at a school for the deaf, and Charlie, who has hearing parents and cochlear implants is failing to thrive, is February's newest pupil. Charlie arrives without much sign language and a lot of frustration with her shitty implants and inability to speak and be heard--especially by her mother. She's been mainstreamed her whole life, which concerns February. Language acquisition is much harder after a certain age--and acting out when you can't communicate is common.

"It was hard to imagine what the world might be life if deaf people had as short a fuse about hearing people's inability to sign, their neglect or refusal to caption TV, or, hell, the announcements on this bus. Of course, that was their privilege--to conflate majority with superiority."

Charlie actually does pretty well, though. Despite keeping up with a Bad Boy from her old high school, she's also got a flirtation going with the Deafest boy in the school--Austin, whose family's deafness goes back four generations. Austin's dad, though, is hearing, and an interpreter, which gives the family access to the hearing world, as well as the Deaf one.

I liked living in Charlie and February's world. They're both complex characters--Charlie with her grubby musician lover and February with her hearing wife and passion for Deaf education--and both with a tiny penchant for self-destruction.

The grubby musician is part of a revolutionary punk band/anarchist cell who says at one point, "I mean, this shit's all over the internet. The trick is being able to look it up without getting tracked. We used to have an in for burner library cards..." lol--love "burner" library cards!

Thanks, NetGalley, for the digital review copy!

The premise--queer union organizing witches--may be too good for any story to live up to. The Factory Witches of Lowell reads like a novel from the time it takes place--mid-19th century. It's weirdly (or intentionally?) stilted and dry. Or just not my taste!

One element that interested me was the ascribing of belief in money and other evils (enslavement) as a kind of witchcraft.

The Boston gentleman whom he addressed had built the industrial city of Lowell, not with their hands, but with more mystical faculties like "ingenuity" and "entrepreneurship." And money, of course. Most mystical of all.

and

Capitalists have their paper-craft.

I mean, that's accurate and extends to legislation, I think.

Melania and Me is an absorbing read, even if its subject is deeply unsympathetic and its author hopelessly codependent on her for most of the book. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff is a devoted friend and adviser to Melanie Trump, and their texts are full of heart emojis and declarations of love. Wolkoff, who was in her 40s at the time, had never voted in a presidential election until her bestie's husband ran in 2016.

Wolkoff has a sense that Donald is a blusterer and thinks "grab 'em by the pussy" isn't great--for Melania. It's wild how Wolkoff's devotion to Melania obliterates any good sense she might have about Trump as president. She is drafted to work on the inauguration, which she explains week by week because "the family," as Ivanka, or "Princess" as Wolkoff and MT refer to her, attempts to make Wolkoff a scapegoat for the out of control costs and malfeasance of the event. Wolkoff's account makes vivid what a shitshow the inauguration was behind the scenes, but she also discloses that she made nearly half a million dollars for her role in producing the events.

Once the Trumps are in the White House, Melania dragging her stilettos to move in full time, Wolkoff's role is perpetually undefined--and unpaid. She volunteers her services because all of the staff lines have been gobbled up by the family. Whether her telling is accurate or not, and I believe it semi-is, it seems like many of Melania's early blunders were engineered or allowed to happen by others in the family who left Melania out of important conversations. Regardless of what is true vs. Wolkoff's perception, this is some high tea.

As a contributor to this book, and as someone who is friends with 2/3rds of the chapter authors, I feel awkward reviewing it. Many of the chapters are available for download from here https://www.zinelibraries.info/zines-in-libraries-selecting-purchasing-and-processing. Let us know what you think!

Outlawed is a tale of 19th century barren women doing hot girl shit (crimes). The MC adds administering medicine and field surgery to her hot girl shit portfolio, along with shooting and fighting, when she joins the Hole in the Wall gang, led by the Kid (no pronouns).

Imagine yourself 16 and visiting the old country (Pakistan) for the summer and learning that [spoiler]. I won't say what it is, but for Zeba, raised in the UK, it's not what she would have chosen for herself, and she is shocked into paralysis. Thank blob for her grandmother Nannyma and another teen she meets who is in the same position as Zeba, but the layers of betrayal feel impossible to navigate.

Nannyma also gives an excellent (dire) presentation of how capitalism works in tandem with men's fragile egos.