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The other consequence of wacky traveling adventures involving lots of time on planes and buses and so on: I am way behind on booklogging. Here goes some of the way towards catching up!

L.A. Meyer' In the Belly of the Bloodhound: I meant to do a big write-up-and-rec post of this whole series, but once again time foils me, so I'll save it for when I get my hands on the next book, which will hopefully be ASAP. In any case, this is the book I was talking about (yes, I am that behind!) and it is so far tied with the second book for my favorite in the series to date! I love when Jacky gets to hang out and bond with other girls, and this book especially takes a trope I love and see all too rarely (rarely enough that I don't even know if it counts as a trope), which is Group Of Apparently Helpless Young Girls Gets Out Of Trouble By Being Ridiculously Awesome. As one might guess from my previous reference post, I especially loved the dynamic between Jacky, Our Heroine, and Clarissa Worthington-Howe, who in the second book was That Bitchy Girl From High School and in this book - well, is still That Bitchy Girl From High School, and demonstrates exactly how much you want That Bitchy Girl on your side when bad things start going down. I adore that Clarissa never softens or un-bitchifies or loses her bad traits (of which she has several) and that Jacky and Clarissa learn to respect each other without necessarily liking each other; I also love the lesbian subtext!

Which is not to say the book does not have issues - of which the main one is the plot itself. Since it's on all the book covers, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that there's Kidnapping And White Slavery, which is always awkward to focus on when, um, slavery in the other direction was a much bigger problem. The book does point this out more than once, but there are still aspects of the plot that make me pretty uncomfortable - but the characters!

- and now I have to go, so I guess this is not going to be as much of an Epic Catch-Up Post as I planned. Uh. MORE TO COME LATER.

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So I read Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring recently and it did not work for me all that well. All the same, it was interesting enough that I tried another of her books, Midnight Robber, and liked it quite a bit more! Midnight Robber is the story of Tan-Tan, a girl who grows up to embody the legendary figure (kind of like a Caribbean Robin Hood) on a world of exiles. What I really liked about this book: the emphasis on language as power, the transformation of truth into myth, and also the hints of really interesting worldbuilding in the two parallel worlds that the story spans. What frustrated me: once again, the pacing. Somehow Nalo Hopkinson always seems to be dancing around the edges of the stories I really want to see; in this book, she spends far too much time setting up Tan-Tan's angsty childhood and even angstier teenaged years, and then skips over a lot of her activities as the Midnight Robber, which were the bits I really wanted to read! There are also a lot of subplots and characters in the beginning who are never really picked up, which made the book seem slightly disjointed to me. It kind of feels like she's setting up for a sequel, but there is none in the works to the best of my knowledge; if there was, though, I would read it.

Following Midnight Robber, I dove back into some comfort reading with a reread of Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind and Johnny and the Dead, which . . . turned out to be not so much comfort reading. (For those who have not read: the Johnny books are a trilogy entirely independent of any of Terry Pratchett's other work, surrounding a boy who is apparently so ordinary as to be invisible, to whom Strange Things Just Happen. In the first one, the aliens in Johnny's videogame surrender and ask for safe-conduct home; in the second, Johnny starts chatting with the dead in the local graveyard; the third apparently involves a bomb, but I don't remember it at all and need to reread.) Not that I did not still love them on the reread, because I do, but - I actually think the Johnny books, for all they're labeled Children's, are in a lot of ways much darker than the Discworld books. Discworld tackles serious issues and is definitely not entirely upbeat, but there's still a level of escapism in the use of the brightly-colored fantasy world in a way there isn't in Johnny's dead-end town. The plots of these books are not the kind of fantastic events that save you from your humdrum existence; they're more likely to add on an extra burden of responsibility. Only You Can Save Mankind, especially, presents a pretty grim view on humanity.