I thought the love story kind of made sense if you forget the age gap. The whole idea is that >!they’re psychics who need to marry other psychics to produce psychic children!<, right? I understand how that could supersede irrelevant details like age, race, etc, and create a true spirit bond that goes beyond the physical. There are just two problems:

1 isn’t it a bit convenient that Lady Silence / Silna is young(-looking) and a virgin? For the purposes of the sixam ieua, she could’ve just as well been a thirty-five year old widow with a previous child. In fact, that might have made more sense, since she’s also a skilled and wise spiritual leader who the rest of her clan looks up to.

2 why can’t we get more of her POV? Her backstory? Did she struggle to accept her unusual destiny or know it right away? Did she have to argue with the suspicious old shaman to prove that her >!marrying a kabloona!< was the right thing for her people? Was she shocked to find that Crozier wasn’t a handsome young man, or was she primarily concerned with his mental/moral readiness for his destined task?

The whole 3rd act definitely made me intrigued and wondering how accurate it was to real Inuit religious practices. I’d also read a different version of the Sedna myth in Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012 book that I found very moving. Can anyone recommend good books by First Nations people from the northern Canada/Alaska/Greenland area that go deeper into this stuff, especially thriller/horror novels?

I’ve read Sarah and I have no idea how anyone thought it was autobiographical. I mean, a truck stop in the Deep South serving super fancy gourmet haute cuisine? It’s magical realism through and through.

I love Walden but especially love his journals. Soul nourishing reading.

In theory, a YA book series like that would rock.

In practice, I don’t see how any current YA author is not going to screw it up by making it one more piece of divisive politics: ie here’s the villain, oh look, they’re exactly like the stereotype the average liberal has of the average conservative! Star Trek was able to tread that line of being political but in a universal way, showing characters deal with serious moral questions but not turning into culture wars IN SPACE. From what I’ve seen of recent YA fic dealing with political issues, I don’t see them producing something as universally inspiring as Star Trek anytime soon. I’d love to be proven wrong on this, though.

Yeah, it was pretty silly “gotcha twist” book. Honestly though, it could’ve been a lot worse. I read it for a book club and was scared to death that it would have tons of triggering ableism (my usual experience with thrillers that include mentions of “mental illness” stuff), but instead it was just run of the mill dumb, and certain details about the self-absorbed horribleness of the staff rang true to me.

An Empire Wilderness by Robert D. Kaplan. A nonfiction travelogue about trends in North American society, published in 1998 but feels like it could’ve been written yesterday. Here’s some quotes:

“The same spirit of individualism that helped build the nation may henceforth deconstruct it, as new worldwide settlement patterns link similar communities by new computerized technologies and air travel while traditional states defined by geography wither […] in a computer-driven, knowledge-based world economy, educated Americans may have more in common with (and, ultimately, more loyalty to) their highly educated friends and counterparts in Europe, Latin America, and Asia than they do with less educated fellow Americans a few miles away.”

“[…] there are two Americas: the people who own stocks and mutual funds and have seen their assets rise dramatically in the 1990’s and those who are completely dependent on wages, which have risen far less if at all.”

“Today’s volunteer army is different from all others in America’s history. Soldiers are becoming like doctors and lawyers: a professional group we would like to need less but upon which we rely more.”

(about St. Louis): “Suburbanization here does not mean decentralization as much as it does jurisdictional sovereignty for well-off whites so they can isolate themselves from the problems of predominantly black inner cities.”

“Our culture is getting real thin.”