Month: July 2012

Danika reviews Macho Sluts by Patrick Califia

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Macho Sluts is a book that apparently needs a lot of introduction: 75 pages of it out of the 400 page book. It makes sense, though, because a lot of the appeal and importance of Macho Sluts comes from the reaction to it. It was originally published in the 80s, during the feminist sex wars. BDSM was seen as a patriarchal power display, and something lesbians just didn’t do. Macho Sluts inspired a lot of outrage, but it also just kept selling.

Its role making lesbian BDSM visible is important enough, but it became even more pivotal when the book was imported into Canada. Little Sister’s Bookstore, a gay and lesbian bookstore still in business today, kept ordering the book and kept having it stopped at the border for being obscene. This meant that any shipment with Macho Sluts in it was delayed or even destroyed. But the thing that makes it interesting is that Little Sister’s kept defending Macho Sluts by saying it had literary value. And after long arguments with Customs, they had to agree and release the shipment–if it hadn’t been destroyed. Except that every time Little Sister’s tried to get the book again, it was stopped at the border again, and they had to go through the same argument. They couldn’t just refer to their last decision; they had to start all over. Meanwhile, non-queer bookstores that ordered Macho Sluts would be able to get the book just fine. Other books were given the same treatment. (If you’ve ever seen the movie Better Than Chocolate, Ten Percent Books is based on Little Sister’s.) Little Sister’s took Customs to court for discrimination, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. Little Sister’s won. It was a landmark decision and has a big place in queer history, especially Canadian queer history. Macho Sluts played a big role because it showed that porn could be literary, and that complicated things. It’s not a big surprise that Little Sister’s decided to republish it as a Little Sister’s classic with that background.

As well as explaining the historical relevance (and the author’s transition from initially publishing Macho Sluts as Pat Califia, now Patrick Califia), the introductions also stress two major points about the book: 1) it is well-written and 2) it is probably too intense for you and it’s okay if you need to put it down and not read any further. After 75 pages of this, it gives the actual stories a lot to live up to. On the first point, I can definitely see that the stories are well-written, especially by porn standards. Characters have personalities and outside lives. Sentences flow well. Califia says in his introduction how important good writing and editing is to him, and because this was stressed so much in the introductions, I was a little disappointed to find a few typos. That’s a pretty minor quibble, though.

[trigger warning for rape and incest, this paragraph only] As for the intensity, however, Macho Sluts does not disappoint. Califia states in his introduction that he did not bother to try to make BDSM seem safe or approachable. One story features an incestuous possibly pedophilic family (I thought it was pretty clearly pedophilia, but the transcript of Califia in court says that he intended it to be between people after the age of consent). Another features what appears to be (male) police rape of a lesbian. Another story, “The Calyx of Isis”, is described in the On Our Backs review as leaving the reader exhausted, not turned on. I’m used to erotica, including BDSM erotica, starting strong but then ending when, in my opinion, it had only just gotten started. I can’t imagine anyone finishing “Calyx of Isis” thinking there should have been more. I felt worn out when I thought the story was wrapping up, and then realized there were only taking a break. Personally, I disagree with On Our Backs in that I don’t think it’s a failing, but it is definitely an epic of a erotica story.

Macho Sluts is from the 80s, and there are a few descriptions that date it, but it ages well. If you’re looking for lesbian BDSM, or a little more background in queer literary history, or even just a book to expand your mind by making you a bit uncomfortable–because no matter who you are, there is likely at least one part of Macho Sluts to make you uncomfortable–I definitely recommend picking up Macho Sluts.

Danika reviews The Abandoned by Ross Campbell

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I learned about The Abandoned from Good Lesbian Books’s Lesbian Fiction list. A lesbian zombie graphic novel?! Sounds too good to be true! I tried to brace myself before reading it. Maybe there would just be gay undertones. Nope! It’s established from the first couple of pages that Rylie is into girls, though romance isn’t really a big plot line in the book. And when I actually got The Abandoned in my hands, it looked even better. A fat lesbian PoC protagonist?! And the art is amazing. Rylie is just as awesome as she looks. She and the other characters in The Abandoned have their own interesting personalities and interactions with each other. Rylie is the only person of colour character, but there are other queer characters. Honestly, the only complaint I have is that there isn’t more! I read The Abandoned in one sitting. Apparently, there were supposed to be two additional volumes, but they got cancelled. I wouldn’t say, as some reviews do, that this volume ended on a cliffhanger, exactly, but it is open-ended. The Abandoned also has some hardcore zombie gore. You do see people torn apart. So if you like zombie gore and lesbians, I highly recommend this!

Guest Lesbrarian Lindy Pratch reviews Carry the One by Carol Anshaw

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Five adults left a wedding reception in rural Wisconsin very late one night in 1983. Stoned, drunk or sleepy, none of them were in any shape for driving. Their car struck and killed a child and her death stayed with them for years. In Carry the One, Carol Anshaw explores the connections between human beings: siblings, parents, married couples, lovers and offspring, as well as fellow participants in a tragic event.

Alice, sister of the bride (Carmen), and Maude, sister of the groom (Matt), discovered a passion for each other on the night of the wedding. “All through the night Alice had tried to break down the elements of Maude, then add her up, but she kept getting lost in the higher math, the exponential blur.”

Later, arithmetic comes up again when Alice speaks of the connection between all of them who were in the car that night: “Because of the accident, we’re not just separate numbers. When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.”

“In a deep recess, an inchoate space where thoughts tumble around, smoky and unformed, Alice’s biggest fear was that she and Maude and the accident were tied in an elaborate knot — that her true punishment for what happened that night would be God, or the gods, or the cosmos giving her Maude, then taking her away.”

The strong bond between Alice and her sister, Carmen is wonderfully portrayed, as is the way they cope with Nick, their junkie of a brother.

“Their alliance was deep, formed in the trenches of childhood where they were each other’s landsmen, comrades in strategy and survival, in warding off the contempt of their parents, and in protecting their brother. These positions had been set up early and were not subject to realignment. So Alice and Carmen always approached each other carefully, with respect — minor diplomats, one from an arctic, the other from an equatorial nation, attempting to understand each other’s customs, participate in each other’s holidays.”

Twenty-five years pass over the course of the story. It’s like a trip down memory lane. For example, Nick wore a thrift shop wedding dress to Carmen’s wedding. (His sisters called him “the backup bride.”) I used to share a house in the early 80s with three other dykes and two gay men, one of whom (David) liked to wear a wedding dress that he found at a charity shop. Our friend k.d. lang later wore that very same dress to collect a Juno award for Most Promising Female Vocalist. But I digress.

I also love that Carmen and Alice are both big readers. At one point, Carmen drops in to find Alice reading stacks of cheesy dyke novels from the forties and fifties:

“The covers had a sinister tone, usually represented by a woman in a black or red slip. ‘They’re all great,’ she told Carmen. ‘They’re like Greek tragedies. Everyone gets horribly punished in the end. Or they hang themselves with a belt over the steam pipe.’
‘But weren’t these somebody’s real, tortured life once?’ Carmen said.
‘Well, sure, but now they’re more like folktales. Hardships of our ancestors. Like Lincoln walking ten miles to school every day through the snow. That sort of thing, only in bars.'”

Nick’s girlfriend, Olivia, was the one driving when they left the wedding. She was negligent in many things, including her job as a letter carrier. On the night of the accident, her trunk was full of undelivered mail. I was a postal worker from 1983 to 1989, so that is another reason that Anshaw hooked me from the start.

Beautiful language, great characters and a moving plot; it all adds up to a superb book.

————-

Lesbrary Link Round Up: July 18-26

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Autostraddle posted

Bold Strokes Books posted Get The Picture and The 3rd Annual Bold Strokes Book Festival, Nottingham!

C-Spot Reviews posted MEC’s Hot and Sticky Week with Radclyffe.

Card-Carrying Lesbian posted Latest Lesbian Book On My Nightstand.

     

Elisa posted Literary Heritage: Sarah Waters and Rainbow Awards: Current Submissions (111-120).

Good Lesbian Books posted Lesbian YA Fiction By Country & USA State and Amish Lesbian Fiction.

I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the Hell Do I Read? posted Gay Characters at ComicCon!

Lambda Literary posted

      

The Rainbow Project posted 2013 Nominations: Silhouette of a Sparrow, Radiant Days & Way to Go.

Readings in Lesbian and Bisexual Women’s Fiction posted Readings welcomes Tarra Thomas.

Readings LAB posted LAB links July 21, including Author Interviews & Blogs, Book Releases, Book Reviews, and other LGBTQ news.

Windy City Media Group posted LGBT Summer Book Treats.

Women and Words posted Interview with Renée Bess! Plus GIVEAWAY! and Identity Crisis.

     

Alison Bechdel posted highsmithery.

Ivan E. Coyote is the new Writer-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario’s Department of English (PDF).

Sarah Diemer posted ANNOUNCING Project Unicorn: A Queer-Girl, YA Extravaganza!

Kristyn Dunnion is leading a free writing workshop for teens at the Toronto Reference Library on Aug 15.

Karin Kallmaker posted “No One Cares Who’s Gay”.

Malinda Lo posted 10 LGBTQ Young Adult Novels to Make It Better.

     

Catherine Lundoff posted State of the Catherine midweek and New review and musing.

Janet Mason will be at Poetry Aloud and Alive July 27 in Philadelphia.

Rachel Spangler posted Deep in the Heart of Texas.

Sarah Waters is “among authors threatening action over ‘Big Society’ lending libraries”.

Rebekah Weatherspoon posted Day 758.

     

Cornered: 15 Stories of Bullying and Defiance edited by Rhoda Belleza was reviewed at Lambda Literary. (This book isn’t exclusively lesbian, but still relevant.)

Here Come the Brides: Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage edited by Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort was reviewed by the feminist librarian.

One in Every Crowd by Ivan E. Coyote was reviewed at Vancouver Weekly.

Silver Moon by Catherine Lundoff was reviewed at Lambda Literary.

     

Ana Historic by Daphne Marlatt was reviewed by Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian.

The Light that Puts an End to Dreams: New and Selected Poems by Susan Sherman was reviewed at Lambda Literary.

Spelling Mississippi by Marnie Woodrow was reviewed by Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian.

After a suggestion from a commenter, the covers in this post are now linked to the page you can buy them on IndieBound. If they were not available at IndieBound, I linked the author or publisher’s page. (If you buy a book through this link, theoretically I may get a small referral fee.)

Kristi reviews A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace and Other Stories is a collection of short works from Catherine Lundoff

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A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace and Other Stories is a collection of short works from Catherine Lundoff. These ten stories run the range of speculative fiction, from an intriguing “highwayman” in “Regency Masquerade” to the Fae choice of love in “A Scent of Roses” to fighting for an Egyptian artifact — and love — in “The Egyptian Cat.”

While each story has a unique plot, there are some themes that appear throughout the collection. Of course we have the requisite female protagonists, in most cases shaping a role that would not normally have been theirs in a heterosexual narrative. There are pirates, swashbucklers, detectives, and fighters, each holding their own in the world. It is not always love for another woman that drives the main character. In “Great Reckonings, Little Rooms,” William Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, searches for her brother and her muse in the dark streets. In the title story “A Day at the Inn, A Night at the Palace”, a magical body switch has swordswoman Maeve looking at her cousin Raven in a whole different way, quite literally.

On the whole, the book was quite enjoyable. Some stories were more entertaining than others, but I chalk that up to my own leanings toward the Regency romance and fantasy genres. Lundoff’s pacing and tone was even throughout; while each tale had a unique voice and perspective, you could tell they were all authored by the same person. Aside from the title story, each tale has been published previously, but for those who either have not experienced Lundroff’s writings, or who may want a volume of her work, this would be a great addition to a reader’s bookshelf.

Casey reviews The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

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I read Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt soon after finishing Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp novel Odd Girl Out (1957), so I was understandably feeling jaded and a bit guarded.  Bannon’s novel, for those of you who haven’t read it, ends quite depressingly when one of the two lovers, Beth, decides that lesbianism was a mere phase for her—caused by a lack of love when she was a child, surprise surprise—and the protagonist Laura is left alone to go to New York city, where hopefully she’ll find some real queer ladies to love and hang out with.  The Price of Salt begins in New York, so this more queer friendly setting made me initially hopeful.  In fact, Highsmith’s well-written novel is very different from the melodramatic pulp that Bannon writes, although it does have some similar problems for contemporary readers reading lesbian novels from the 1950s.

The Price of Salt is essentially a love story, but it becomes a kind of thriller, like Highsmith’s other more famous non-queer works; the narrative turns into a chase where a private investigator follows the two women in love, Therese and Carol, around the U.S. while they are on a road trip.  Therese is a woman in her early twenties who is an aspiring theatre set designer, just starting out in New York; she is working at a department store over the Christmas season to make some extra cash.  She meets a striking, assertive older woman, Carol, while at work, and impulsively sends her a Christmas card.  Thus begins their initially tentative relationship.  After their romance finally starts to flourish on a vacation they take together, Carol’s ex-husband interrupts their new-found bliss by having the investigator trail them; Carol is in fact in the middle of divorcing him, and arranging the custody of their child.  Her ex is trying to collect evidence that she is a “homosexual” to use against her in their custody battle.  What’s worse is that he knows about Carol’s previous Sapphic background.

The eventual denouement of the narrative is relatively disappointing, from a twenty-first century perspective at least: Carol is forced to choose between custody of her daughter and any further contact with Therese, or any similar relationships with women in the future.  Deciding she has already lost the battle, Carol gives up trying to have a relationship with her daughter.  While realistic, Carol’s defeat in court with her ex-husband is devastating; however, there is evidence at the end of the novel that Therese and Carol might actually have a chance to “end up happily ever after,” a far cry from the required dead-or-married-to-a-man plot structure of other 1950s lesbian novels.  I was actually expecting a more depressing ending, so I was pleasantly surprised by what Highsmith chose to do.

What bothered me about the novel instead is that I felt like both Carol and Therese were emotionally and psychologically just out of my reach as a reader.  I never felt like I really got to know them, or understand their personalities, feelings, and motivations.   An earlier reviewer on the lesbrary, Orange Sorbet, has a similar problem feeling like the characters were ‘real.’  The setting and atmosphere of the novel actually felt more like characters than Carol or Therese did.  The smoky, eerie feeling of New York City streets at night, the sterile, lonely ambience of restaurants and department stores, and the tension and fear of being on the run are all quite clear in my mind still, even though I read the book a few months ago.  Perhaps the new film version in the works, starring Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska, will help make these two women as vivid as the exhilarating narrative and haunting atmosphere.

Lesbrary Link Round Up: July 6-18

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AfterEllen posted Why smart lesbians read (and write) fan fiction.

Autostraddle posted

Bending the Bookshelf posted GUEST POST: Representing Bisexuals in Fiction by Amy Gaertner.

Books To Watch Out For: The Lesbian Edition posted A Justice of Mysteries.

Elisa posted

     

Good Lesbian Books posted Lesbians in Space: A Reading List and Books About Lesbians with Physical Disabilities.

I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the Hell Do I Read? posted The LGBTQ Q&A at the #LA12SCBWI Summer Conference!

Kool Queer Lit posted A New Release, A Contest, and A Book Giveaway!

Lambda Literary posted

Lesbian Life @ About.com posted Lesbian Summer Reading List 2012.

lesbian meets books nyc posted Here are the Lesbian Writers: Novels, Erotic Thrillers, and More.

LGBTQ Recs Month posted lgbtq_recs master list for June 2012.

   

The Outer Alliance posted News and Events.

Out On the Shelves Library posted Authors Around Vancouver and Author Spotlight: Sarah Waters.

Piercing Fiction posted Caring for Kara – Lesfic Community Responds and GCLS goes to Provincetown.

The Rainbow Project posted 2013 Nominations: 1 Juvenile and 5 YA Books to Look For!

Readings In Lesbian and Bisexual Women’s Fiction posted Readings talks Stilettos and Steel and Readings welcomes JE Knowles.

Readings LAB posted news and links for week of July 8, including book releases, publishers’ news, etc and Events Calendar.

Sistahs on the Shelf Literary Promo Blog posted

Women and Words posted Good Books.

     

“Three Heads Are Better Than One (Or Two): LGBT Pride Month” was posted at The Readventurer.

emily m. danforth was interviewed at Hooked On Books (the post also includes a giveaway of Cam Post!).

Sarah Diemer (aka Elora Bishop) posted

Rachel Gold was interviewed at KFAI.

Nicola Griffith posted Ask Nicola: Recreating the past, steering the future.

Jae posted Caring for Kara and FemSlash Con 2012.

     

Karen Kallmaker posted Are You Censoring Your Own Blog?

Malinda Lo posted Adaptation’s Full Jacket.

Sassafras Lowrey posted NYC Release Event! October 12, 2012 – Bluestockings.

Catherine Lundoff posted

Rachel Spangler posted Let the updates Begin: 10 for my Twenties.

Rebecca Swartz was interviewed in Outwords.

     

Molly: House on Fire by R.E. Bradshaw was reviewed at Lambda Literary.

All We Know by Lisa Cohen was reviewed at Lambda Literary.

Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman was reviewed by Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian.

Strangers by DeJay was reviewed at The Rainbow Reader.

“Aurora Awakening” by Thalia Fand was reviewed at Good Lesbian Books.

Being Emily by Rachel Goldwas was reviewed at Frivolous Views.

Don’t Explain by Jewelle Gomez was reviewed at Sista Outsider.

     

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith was reviewed at Reading Rambo.

Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution by Linda Hirshman was reviewed at Lambda Literary.

Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner was reviewed at Good Lesbian Books.

Rhapsody by KG MacGregor was reviewed at The Rainbow Reader and Lambda Literary.

Taking My Life by Jane Rule was reviewed at BC Studies.

Love Ruins Everything by Karen X. Tulchinsky was reviewed by Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian.

A Fighting Chance by Barb Wolfe was reviewed at Good Lesbian Books.

Guest Post by Amy Gaertner: A Literary Love of Women

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I love women. That’s… not just a statement about my dating preferences. I love watching women, hearing women, reading about women; as a writer, I love writing about women. (And, okay: I love men, too. Especially when they’re interacting with women!)

I hate to see female characters all painted with the same brush, or treated as one of a handful of ‘types’. (There’s the silly one, the brainy one… and then there’s the slut!) So often women characters are pushed off to the side, treated as background, or ignored. “See, here’s a woman!” her existence says, even though we know nothing more about her than the color of her hair. (Which is supposed to tell us everything we need to know about her.) I hate to see the majority of female characters lumped into the categories of “boring” or “unrealistic”―fitting into the mold, or breaking it, and therefore losing credibility.

Very often, when conceiving of a story, I’ll immediately cast the protagonist as a woman. Very often, I’ll make her a lesbian. (Or bisexual, and in love with a woman.) Also very often, I’ll start to have second thoughts: I’ll wonder if I’m being too boring, too predictable, or too repetitive. After all, most of what I write is not in the genre of romance, and whom my character would prefer to date or sleep with just isn’t relevant to the plot. If I make her a lesbian, won’t it look like I’m trying too hard, maybe pushing that mythical ‘gay agenda’? I worry: is my feminism showing?

Well, writers who write heterosexual characters never think about their writing that way, and writers of male heterosexual characters certainly don’t. The experiences of men, especially heterosexual men, are ‘normal’, and therefore everyone is expected to be able to identify with them. If those authors get to write about the characters they want to write about without a second thought, then so do I.

Because I do have an agenda. For one, I’d like to see more LGBTQ persons in writing and media, and I want to do my part to make it happen. Yeah, that’s definitely part of it. But more than that, well, it’s like I said: I love women. I want to write about women. I want to show them courageous and vulnerable; fun and adventurous and timid; ingenious and daring; dating, working, solving crimes, committing crimes, working on the side of the angels, and dancing as the world falls down around them. A woman can do anything a man can do, and as far as my characters are concerned, well: they can start with having some fun!

From Honor Among Thieves by Amy Gaertner:

I could hardly remember crossing the room to stand by her side. “Would you like to dance?”

The conversation I hadn’t bothered to listen to as I approached stopped. The group stared at me in a stunned silence.

Liz, for her own part, looked startled by my offer.

Then she looked into my eyes and smiled. “I’d love to.”

The sound of four men choking on their own indignation accompanied us out onto the dance floor.

“Shall you lead, or shall I?” I asked wryly, once our heels clicked on the polished wood of the dance floor.

“Well,” she said, suddenly shy, “you asked me, so I do believe it’s your prerogative.”

My lead. Right.

Thank goodness for that glass of champagne I’d managed to grab. I was hardly an accomplished dancer, and working in a profession that counted on my ability to not draw attention to myself, I wasn’t thrilled to suddenly be the center of everyone’s attention. Ah, well―I’d gotten us into this. It was time to make the most of it.

Amy Gaertner is a debut author. Her short story, “Honor Among Thieves” is now available in e-book formats through Storm Moon Press. You can follow Amy on Twitter @AmyGaertner or on her blog at http://amygaertner.wordpress.com/

Anna K. reviews Times Two by Kristen Henderson and Sarah Kate Ellis

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Sarah Kate Ellis is the vice president of marketing at Real Simple magazine, and Kristen Henderson is the bassist and a founding member of the band Antigone Rising. And they’re a lesbian couple who both became pregnant via the same donor on the same day. Terrible plan, you think? Maybe…if it had been the plan. In Times Two: Two Women in Love and the Happy Family They Made, they narrate the long road that led them to such a scary, coincidental, but joyous family trajectory.

After they met through mutual friends in New York City and got together in 2005, they shared their dreams of motherhood and family. By 2008, both in their mid-thirties and after weeks spent surfing for the perfect donor and one miscarriage, they’d both had rounds of the fertility drug Clomid, and Sarah was pursuing IVF. Their difficulties conceiving were far from their early dreams of starting a family together, in which Sarah would carry a baby while Kristen toured with her band, and then Kristen would get pregnant. After a number of frustrated attempts, they both went forward with trying to get pregnant. They experienced each stage of their pregnancies in tandem and gave birth to healthy “twins,” a boy and a girl, three weeks apart, in the same hospital room.

This memoir of their struggles to get pregnant is narrated by both partners in alternating segments. This structure provides tons of relatable information and support for any woman (gay or straight) struggling with fertility, but it takes away from the sense of Sarah and Kristen as a couple in love. As partners navigating this unique territory, they could have included more on their feelings toward each other in these emotional times and how their relationship faltered and grew. They each briefly discuss their coming-of-age, coming out, and meeting each other, but the bulk of the book is about fertility, pregnancy, birth, and new motherhood. It’s a touching, quick read, especially for those seeking lesbian nonfiction that is more “everywoman” than political. Also recommended for those interested in personal, individual perspectives on pregnancy and trying to conceive.

Mfred Reviews Fire Logic by Laurie J Marks.

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A friend recommended Fire Logic to me, partly because I am a long-time fantasy novel enthusiast, but also with the specific note that it is one of those “invisibly queer” books. By invisible, I do not mean closeted, repressed, or filled with subtext– instead, Fire Logic presents a world where queer characters are never explained; their lifestyles are never narrated as being capital-Q Queer, they just are. Characters never question their sexuality, defend it, or even really discuss it. Rigid gender roles do not exist either; a sword-fighter is as likely to be a woman as a man, and the same for farmers, metalsmiths, etc., and all with very little discussion or explanation. It is a refreshing and delightful thing, to encounter a world where subculture is ordinary, and magic is everyday.

Fire Logic is set in a country at war– the land of Shaftal, left bereft after the leader died without passing his magic onto an heir, was invaded by the ruthless Sainnites. For fifteen years, a guerilla army has been resisting the occupation, with decreasing success. The story is divided between three main characters, Zanja, the sole survivor of her tribe (although, thankfully, this is not a rape-revenge fantasy novel), Emil, a scholar forced back into soldiering by the occupation, and Karis, a metalsmith with a terrible drug addiction and even more powerful secrets. Warfare, politics, romance– Marks rather deftly weaves all together into a well-written story that is both thoughtful and interesting.

I will admit that the prose is, at time, strangely distant. I occasionally struggled to be emotionally engaged. The first third of the book is very slow, and so I had a hard time paying attention to the intricate details and politics. It does pick up, however, and I did become more engrossed– even if I was a little bit removed. Overall, I really liked it, and I look forward to continuing the series.

(Fire Logic was also reviewed previously by Danika)