starlady: A can of gravity from the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. (in emergency break seal)
Healey, Karen. The Shattering. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2011.

I liked Karen Healey's first novel Guardian of the Dead quite a lot despite some flaws, and Healey herself is one of those people I know mostly from the Internet and would like, in a perfect world, to know better. *waves* So when I was offered a signed ARC of her second novel, The Shattering, I was quite excited. I think in a lot of ways this is a tighter book, and maybe even a better one, than Guardian of the Dead, and I enjoyed it a lot - though, rereading my review of the first book, it's clear that I liked the first one better, or at least, that one got me in the emotions in a way that this one didn't quite manage.

Mild spoilers also contain discussion of suicide )

All in all, I'm looking forward to Healey's next book, When We Wake.
starlady: the cover from Shaun Tan's The Arrival, showing an aquanaut in suburbia (i'm a stranger here myself)
I'm almost out of canned reviews to post. Clearly this means it's time to binge on media.

Also, yesterday I took my bird to Starbucks because I had taken him to get clipped and I wanted iced coffee, damn it (though Starbucks iced coffee is execrable, which tells you something about my level of desperation). Starbucks has no service animals only signs, so it was totally legit! And the only person who noticed was the cashier. I feel that this is an important step towards becoming a strange bird woman™ in my middle age.


Healey, Karen. Guardian of the Dead. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2010.

I read this book while I was delayed on my way to WisCon. By the end of my first flight I was doubly glad to be going to WisCon so I could tell the author just how much I liked her book at the party she was hosting for it on Friday night. And I did! Because it really is awesome (and the author herself is pretty awesome too; I hear she makes a mean midori sour).

Anyway. Guardian of the Dead tells the story of Elle (Eleanor) Spencer, a seventeen year old Paakehaa (non-Maori and/or white person) going to boarding school in Christchurch, New Zealand while her parents tour the world to celebrate her mother's cancer going in to remission. Elle is tall and emphatically anything but thin; she doesn't have many friends besides Kevin Waldrup, who is her best friend. But when she allows Kevin to volunteer her to be the fight coordinator for his friend Iris Tsang's university production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, both Elle and Kevin quickly become mixed up in an inhuman struggle out of Maori mythology, with their mysterious classmate Mark Nolan proving central to the mystery, and the fight it holds.

Awesome sauce. )

In conclusion, I teared up a few times. New Zealand! Chromaticism! Feminism! Comic books! Magic! What more can you want, I ask you?

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