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Cassidy Percoco

mimicofmodes@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 4 months ago

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H. G. Parry: A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (2020, Orbit) 4 stars

A sweeping tale of revolution and wonder in a world not quite like our own, …

Review of 'Declaration of the Rights of Magicians' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

The most important thing to know, if you're going to read this, is that this is not a standalone novel! This is part 1 of 2 and it does not end with a resolution. I considered quitting at the halfway point, but I made myself hold on to find out how it ended ... and it didn't.

A basic summary: In a magical version of late eighteenth century Europe, change is brewing. In England, Pitt the Younger and William Wilberforce want to improve things for Commoner magicians (who aren't allowed to do magic) and achieve the abolition of slavery, both through sensible incremental legal means; in France, Commoner magicians rise up against the Aristocrats, led by Robespierre, a secret necromancer with the power of mesmerism, backed by a mysterious, powerful benefactor. On Haiti, the potion that keeps enslaved people docile zombies has failed, allowing a violent rebellion against white plantation …

Chuck Palahniuk: Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different (2020, Grand Central Publishing) 4 stars

Review of 'Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Perhaps a little unfair of me to review and rate without finishing, but I don't see the point in forcing myself on when at page ten I'm wishing I were done.

I would never have thought to pick up a book on writing by Chuck Palahniuk because we're such very different people with very different styles, but there was a glowing review on Writer Unboxed so I thought I'd give him a shot. The very beginning was compelling, but when I got to "Textures", I hit a speed bump.

The idea of mixing narration, second-person instruction, and onomatopoeia is great advice for a specific kind of voice (to be fair, the authorial voice of someone who's into Palahniuk, probably), but ... it simply doesn't work for everyone and every story, likely not even the majority of either. And when I hit the anecdote about a girl in his writing class …

Eric Ives: Lady Jane Grey (2009) 4 stars

Review of 'Lady Jane Grey' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

An original take - Eric Ives looks past the stereotypes of Jane Grey's story to present a number of points that complicate the standard narrative of martyrdom and tyranny, based on the primary sources. The only negative about the book is that it focuses far more on John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, and his part in Edward VI's government/putting Jane on the throne. That's understandable, as a huge part of the Jane Grey mythos is that he was a power-seeking mastermind who forced everyone else to go along with her succession against the natural law of inheritance, but it's also a bit of a letdown when you expect a book to spend most of its time exploring the title person.

Jerre Gerlando Mangione: Mount Allegro (1998, Syracuse University Press) 5 stars

Depicts the lives of Sicilian immigrants in Rochester, New York, in the first half of …

Review of 'Mount Allegro' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

A fantastic memoir of growing up in a Sicilian community in Rochester in the 1920s. This hits close to home for me as I'm Italian/Sicilian on my father's side; my great-aunt married into this community (or, well, what was left of it; by that time it had dispersed).

It leaves me somewhat depressed, as this world (like the worlds in all older memoirs) is totally disappeared, but so close to us generationally. Mangione was able to go back to his parents' hometowns in the 1930s and meet their friends and relations, and see firsthand why they left. Today my Italian relatives are likely third cousins at best and would probably have no stories to share of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. I have no stories of them passed down in the family - as a third-gen child, my father couldn't even communicate with his grandmother.

It does leave me curious as …

Melissa De La Cruz: The Ring & the Crown (2014) 3 stars

In an alternative past where the Franco-British Empire controls the world's only source of magic, …

Review of 'The Ring & the Crown' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I think that if you like Reign or the Luxe series, you'll probably really enjoy this book: it has a loose historical flavor while actually being a soapy drama about rich modern young people. And that's okay! But I was expecting it to have more substance.

The premise of the alternate universe/alt-history is very interesting - England won the Hundred Years' War, creating the British Empire several centuries early and holding onto it into the twentieth century, and magic is real. Unfortunately, the book just didn't delve into that (beyond the issue of having a Valois family in the shadows) and it's all kind of superficial, an excuse to avoid having the actual tangled politics of Europe in the 1900s/1910s and a way to make the crown extremely important. It just felt like there was so much scope for worldbuilding there that was just left on the ground.

I'm going …

Anna Whitelock, Alice Hunt: Tudor queenship (2010, Palgrave Macmillan) 5 stars

"This book brings together a selection of recent, cutting-edge research which, for the first time, …

Review of 'Tudor queenship' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

A great comparative look at the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. In pop culture, the two are typically presented as strong contrasts - Mary an oppressive, unpopular ruler enslaved to her husband and forcing a dour Catholicism on her people; Elizabeth a bright and shining figure whose natural accession to the throne brought joy and freedom - but the essays in this text make strong cases for a continuity from one to the other. Section II, "Precedents and Traditions", in particular focuses frequently on ways that Elizabeth followed in Mary's footsteps in terms of iconography or presentation. Section III, "Educating for Rule", is shorter but has some very interesting information on how Mary was eventually given a princely rather than simply princessly education. And Section IV, "Love and War", includes discussion of the way that Protestant propaganda has influenced later views of the realities of Mary and Philip's marriage, …

Flora Fraser: Princesses (Paperback, 2006, Anchor) 2 stars

Review of 'Princesses' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I may come back and finish this book and update the review, but for now I'm putting it aside.

I was very excited to read Princesses as I'm very interested in royal women, especially somewhat obscure ones - and in pop culture, no royal women are more obscure than princesses who don't marry major monarchs. Unfortunately, the text turned out to be very difficult to get through.

The problem is that the book is mostly based on the letters of the princesses, their parents, and the people around them, and rather than mining them for research and then using that research to construct a narrative, it's like Fraser passively reports on what they say happened as time went by. There's no critical interpretation of these sources (they're all taken completely at face value, and even more, lukewarm statements are repeatedly taken as evidence of strong feeling - we'll be told …

Denys Clement Wyatt Harding: Regulated hatred and other essays on Jane Austen (1998, Athlone Press) 5 stars

Review of 'Regulated hatred and other essays on Jane Austen' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I don't typically read literary criticism, but this book on Austen's work is so readable. It's got the incisive commentary of a historian with the conversational tone of a fandom meta writer. Harding was not reading as an English lit scholar, but as an intelligent person who loves Austen. A must-read for all Austen fans, which will open your eyes to all sorts of interpretations you never considerd.

The title relates to what Harding sees as Austen's view of and attitude toward society. She was fundamentally not someone writing about a society she was comfortable in, and her characters are often not entirely comfortable with each other - there is a regulated hatred, negative emotions that are not allowed to be passionate or impolite. While this makes some consider the books stultifying, it's realistic, especially when the rules of politeness required significantly more social contact with people one didn't like. …

Susan C. Greenfield: Mothering Daughters (Paperback, 2003, Wayne State University Press) 4 stars

Review of 'Mothering Daughters' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Technically, I only read the intro and the chapter on Emma, but that was quite interesting! The Emma essay focuses on the way that Emma's mother and her death are almost never actively referred to in the text, but still have a huge impact on Emma's development and actions. It's a great exploration of her psyche and adds an interesting layer to her views of/interactions with Jane Fairfax, Mrs Weston, Miss Bates, and Mr Knightley.

Nancy Bazelon Goldstone: The rival queens (2015, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, the Orion Publishing Group Ltd) 3 stars

Goldstone documents the turbulent mother-daughter relationship between Catherine de' Medici and Marguerite de Valois to …

Review of 'The rival queens' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

I was excited to read this as I want to improve my knowledge of royalty outside English history, but in the end I just couldn't do it. It seemed like the main sources Goldstone was using were primary ones (that is, documents from the sixteenth century) and she by and large seemed to be taking them at face value, without doing the kind of analysis a scholar should to deal with the intentions and biases of the writers. I couldn't stop yelling inside my head about it, so I gave up.