Blogs where I talk about movies, plays, books, etc.
How do you live in a world that doesn’t see you for who you are? I love me some LGBTQ+ books, so of course I wanted to review one for Pride month. But as a cisgender person, gender identity and transgender experiences are a little outside my wheelhouse, so I …
How do you handle loss? I’ve read Kelly Barnhill’s 2016 Newbery Medal-winning book The Girl Who Drank the Moon twice now, once for pleasure and once for this review. The first time I read it, I was fixated on the storyline of the Day of Sacrifice, and the people being …
What do you do when your life doesn’t follow the plan you had in mind? A common theme in queer media is coming to terms with a piece of your identity that doesn’t fit the life manual you were given. And that looks different for everyone, even those who aren’t …
How do you make peace with the past so you can enjoy the present? Okay, here’s an embarrassing admission: I didn’t read the premise of A Very Merry Bromance before buying it. I saw the title, assumed it was about a bromance, and got excited. We get a lot of …
Can you trust information at face value when it’s being given to you? While working on a separate book, author Sulari Gentill consulted with a beta reader for fact-checking and other notes on how to improve her work. Among the research he sent her was a video of a crime …
What are the benefits of creating and consuming art? Funny story: A few days before writing this review, I stumbled on J.R.R. Talkin’s video essay What Was The Office All About? I thought Michael Schur’s sitcom The Office was fine, if too cringe for me, but out of curiosity I …
“What was it like for authors growing up?” This is the question author Kevin Henkes asked. He then wrote a book in response to that question, the story of young Martha Boyle who wants to be a writer. Olive’s Ocean would later be published in 2003, and go on to …
How do you modernize a story from a hundred years ago? In 1908, Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery published Anne of Green Gables. The novel would later become a beloved classic, garnering sequels, film and TV adaptations, and tourist attractions. Eventually, HarperCollins editor Tessa Woodward put a call out on …
How do you accept new love in your life after devastating loss? In mainstream storytelling, queer romance remains unconventional. Despite the many strides made towards equal representation, it’s rare when LGBTQ+ stories told by LGBTQ+ authors are given a platform to stand on, and even rarer that they break into …
“What Are You Looking For?” This is the question that reference librarian Sayuri Komachi asks of every patron who visits her desk in the community house library. She asks them further questions to get a better feel for which books they would find useful, and then she prints out a …
