poisonenvy's reviews
849 reviews

Well. 

That was lovely. 



I wish I could have taken my time with this novel; could have doled it out piece by piece to really savour it. 

But alas, I was on a deadline. I'll reread it someday though, and likely soon, and I'll read it at the pace I want. 

A Two-Spirit Journey by Ma-Nee Chacaby is an emotional retelling of a life of a Ojibwe-Cree Elder, who speaks to her many difficulties growing up and into her adulthood.  Throughout it she pulls herself out from addiction, and recounts both the abusive and familial relationships she has. 

What she speaks surprisingly little of, given the title of the book, is her journey through her two-spirited identity.  While her biography is sprinkled throughout with references, it is not a focus of the book; given the title of the biography, I thought it would feature more prominently.  

Despite that, however, this is a heartbreaking, but ultimately hopeful, biography of Ma-Nee, and very readable and engaging.  I listened to it largely through audio, and Marsha Knight did an extraordinarily good job of making this story listenable; her cadence and speech were beautiful and lulled me right in. 

The title Queer Indigenous Studies is not a misnomer. This book's main focus is about decolonizing academia, and trying to find new ways to study indinginity and queerness through a academic lens that isn't so steeped in colonial methodologies. It is made up by a number of essays that explore this topic, though the last third of the book is made up of critiques of queer, indigenous literature.  

It was a very good read, but highly academic -- not necessarily in the language, which is relatively accessible, but in terms of topic.  

Arthur Ponsonby's book, Falsehoods in Wartime, is a book that discusses British wartime propaganda and lies during World War II. It discusses specific falsehoods that were spread during the war, with some attempt to discern where they may have come from.  

There's very little analysis, if that was something you were looking for.  It is exactly what it is stated.  "This is something that was said during the war.  It is false.  These are the people who spread it. These are the people who did not refute it."  Pretty simple. Some common tactics of propaganda discussed explicitly. Decent if you're writing a paper about propaganda and need a citable source for common tactics.  

 

 Will Naomi Novik ever write something that I don't love? Probably not. I've not rated each individual story since I loved pretty much all of them. This is an absolutely solid anthology of short fiction from one of my top two favourite authors.

Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake A lot of fun. I can read Naomi Novik's Regency AUs all day and never get bored. I loved this a lot; would absolutely read more with these characters.

After Hours This is the Scholomance short story, and man, what a great story. It takes place after the events of the Scholomance, so we can see how things are going after all of that, and it's everything I'd hoped it would be. Ngl, I totally teared up at one point.

Vici I didn't read that in this collection, just because I've very recently read this story in another collection. This is a short story set in the Temeraire universe, and tells the story of the first dragon to ever be "tamed". By Marc Anthony. It really is a great story and I loved it a lot.

Buried Deep This retells the Greek Myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur, and it is also very, very excellent. Look, this is going to be a lot of my reviews, okay? Partly because I didn't review them each after reading them so they're not fresh, but also because they were.

Spinning Silver How the novel Spinning Silver might have been. This is a fun little AU of her own novel, told in like, 50 pages.

Commonplaces A short little Sherlock Holmes fic that was a lot of fun.

Seven I loved this. A story about what to sacrifice for your art, and what art is worth without life.

Blessings lmao, this was pretty silly. What if a baby is given just too many blessings from her fairy godparents? Very cute.

Lord Dunsany's Teapot Yet another story that kind of made me tear up a little. Wow. What a story.

Seven Years from Home Not going to lie, this one lost me a bit and it was a struggle to get through to the end.

Dragons & Decorum I read this story in Golden Age and Other Stories, but it's been a while and I have just recently finally read Pride and Prejudice for the first time and so I decided to read it again. Let me tell you, with the P&P under my belt, this was so much more enjoyable than the first time around. Elizabeth Bennett gets a dragon during the Napoleonic Wars, so what happens when she catches the eye of Mr. Darcy?

Castle Coeurlieu Another fun one that I enjoyed. Much tension. A great ending.

The Long Way Round This is the short story that introduces us all to Naomi Novik's upcoming series, Folly, and boy let me tell you I'm so freaking excited. 

Oh how I wish I was better at reviewing books I listened to entirely on audio, especially when said books are a billion hours long. But this was fun. The action was tight, the worldbuilding was Greta, the weird sexism was extra weird sexism (nothing takes me out quite as fast as Rand talking about how ten women got him drunk, then got him undressed and... Tickled him? Until he went to bed? You're fetishes are showing, Jordan).   

Anyway, I'm still enjoying the series, though am officially bummed out that there's no more Rosamund Pike audiobooks. 🥲 She truly is an excellent narrator. 

Is it wrong if I spent this entire play going "Wow, Prince Hal is giving me so many Nikolai-from-Grishaverse vibes? 

Given the way my professor spoke of Falstaff, he had not at all what I expected.  All the same, I had a lot of fun with this play. 

This book was wonderful, and absolutely beautifully written (I tabbed so many quotes).  It's suspenseful and a little creepy, but it's about hope and family and healing and grief.

There was one scene in particular that felt a little heavy handed, but it didn't diminish how much I truly enjoyed reading this book with my book club. 

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Second Read-through a couple months later for class. Just as enjoyable as the first time around.  

<u>Becoming Two-Spirit</u> is not a text without a wealth of issues, but it is also an enlightening look into Two Spirit life, particularly in Denver and Oklahoma, in the early 2000s (the book was published in 2006). I'm going to start off with the ways in which this text was weak: 

Brian Joseph Gilley opens the book, in the Preface and in the first few pages of the first chapter, letting us know that he is not Two-Spirit himself. While some people apparently seem to think this will make the book more academic or something because he'll somehow lack bias or whatever (no one lacks bias, fyi), Gilley straight up admits that he was excluded from a number of events and likely opinions because of the fact that he wasn't Two Spirit, and I am sure there were a number of men who wouldn't speak to him. I also wonder just how much he actually understood some aspects. For instance, one of the Two-Spirit individuals he spoke to lost often was someone named Shiela, a Two-Spirit person who was perceived to be a male at her birth, but lives life as a woman and uses feminine pronouns. Yet Gilley continuously referred to her as a Two-Spirit man, and referenced her as a man a number of times, and I spent nearly every time she came up wondering if she truly identified as a man or if that was only how Gilley understood things. 

Gilley also did not have access to any Two-Spirit women, as apparently the men and women kept quite a lot of space between them, and so it lacks entirely the perspective of more than half the community. 

Finally, and this is no fault of Gilley's at all, but the book is nearly twenty years old and so it's quite dated. This is only my first book in my research into Two-Spirit identities, but I am very positive that the acceptance levels in Indigenous communities has shifted radically in the last two decades, and I am excited to see how that shift has happened. 


Those criticisms aside, this was a very insightful book into the Two Spirit movement. It discusses the history of Two Spirit community members pre-colonization -- at least as much is known -- and how and why the identity started to form following the AIDS crisis. It speaks a lot about what it means to be Two Spirit -- how it's just as much about being Indigenous as it is about being queer, and you can be a "gay Indian" (as the book calls it), but if you do not embrace the culture of your Nativeness, you cannot be considered Two-Spirit. It talks a great deal of their role in communities, and their roles in ceremony, and I learned quite a bit in this very short book about identity and social acceptance.  

This is the second book in both the Emelan series and the Circle of Magic series, and takes place immediately following the events of Sandry's book. 

While that book seemed to lack in any real plot and seemed more like an intro to the characters and settings than anything, this one is plotted much tighter. It's still very much a children's novel, but it was very enjoyable even reading it for the the first time as an adult. The characters are strong, as is the world building, and I'm very excited to see where this goes. 

Also, I don't know when I'll be able to pick up Daja's book because life, but I'm hoping that it'll be in the next couple of weeks 🤞