lower east side librarian

Tween Black Panther lit! Three kids travel to Oakland for the summer to stay with their estranged and unmotherly mother. She sends them out every day to Black Panther breakfast and summer camp while she stays home and writes poems for the revolution. The story is told from the oldest girl's point-of-view. At 11, and motherless for most of her life, she takes care of her younger sisters and is fearful about hanging out with the Panthers. Still, she takes in their message, and it makes her stronger. Not that she wasn't plenty strong already. Delphine is a nuanced and believable character, as are her sisters. I loved the tidbits defining African-American kids lives in the 60s/70s, them counting black people on television and how many lines they had, encountering white hippies in the Haight and Teutonic tourists in Chinatown, and most of all their getting to see the BPP as an aid organization.

I secretly wish I was a doctor and not so secretly distrust and resent the medical profession, not to mention the health care industry. The House of Hope and Fear touches on the latter, more than the former. The author/doctor exhibits some annoyance with patients (and their families) that want to participate in developing their own treatment plans. The stories detail the cases of various emergency department patients, but the book is more about the Harborview hospital itself. Even so I didn't feel like I ever comprehended Harborview's unique funding model. It gets some public funds, but doesn't rely on them? But part of its mission is to serve the uninsured. The real problem with this book, which I neither loved nor hated, btw, is that it feels like it was written for someone's approval. Probably a few someones, since the book isn't as coherent as it could be.

The story of a more or less orphaned half Danish, half African-American adolescent getting used to life in the 'hood, sometimes challenged by and sometimes rewarded for her blue eyes and good hair, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky unfortunately isn't quite as good as scintillating as I wanted it to be. It's particularly sad because the first chapter really got me.

Johanna, one of my favorite zine publishers, hadn't made a zine since issue 4 of Sisu came out in May 2006. For some reason, although I acquired No History, No Self from StrangerDanger back in November, I didn't get around to reading it until just now. (I have a serious cataloging backlog problem, which I hope to clear up by the end of the year!) I'm a fool for letting it go so long, but at least I finally read it. Like all of Johanna's zines, NHNS has strong political content, particularly regarding race, mixed race identity, and identity politics. She has put in her time as an activist and has plenty of cred in that arena (also in feminist science-fiction and vegan communities), so what is particularly affecting to me in this new zines venture is how personal and open she is, about missing New York, trying to make friends, being depressed and contemplating therapy. She lists some great self-care suggestions for dealing with depression, the top three being sleep, cats, and tea, things I can totally get behind. That emphasis on self-care I think in this case extends to the rest of the world. NHNS is gentler than its predecessors. Johanna, who doesn't suffer fools lightly, is more inwardly focused this time around, maybe because repatriated to the UK she's missing her friends from home around whom she can actually be herself. Reading this zine I wanted to give Johanna a hug. I also want to know when issue 2 will be out.

The third in See's mystery collection, featuring Chinese Ministry of Public Security Inspector Liu Hulan and her American spouse attorney David Spark, takes place at an archaeological dig. The Hulan is charged with solving some unexplained deaths (some of them pretty grisly, so be warned), and David with protecting China's artifacts from a greedy marketplace. There's a large cult-like religion for them to contend with as they set to their appointed tasks and also try to salvage their marriage, which took a major hit when their 3 1/2-year-old daughter died (between Dragon Bones and its predecessor The Interior.

An aspiring journalist ca. 1990 attending a high school journalism camp queried the keynote on what to do to become a foreign correspondent. He (I think it was a he) responded, "Learn Russian." So that is what the Tex-Mex teen set out to do, and that's how she ended up in Moscow for about a year. Hers is a coming-of-age political memoir of a lefty journalist trying to sort out Revolution and her own identity. Well, the identity part sort of came last. She had to visit lots of foreign countries before she realized there were some important things she needed to learn about her own culture.

Another zine by Celia that makes you adore zines despite that fact that you are reading and cataloging 50 of them per weekend! Well, maybe that's just me, but I would think that anyone would appreciate la C-Dog's birthday creation regardless of how immersed to the scalp they may or may not be in zines.

Staceyann Chin had a pretty bad childhood--abandonment, estrangement, poverty, abuse, fear of sexual assault--and then in young adulthood a certain proclivity that is not well tolerated in her native Jamaica. Yet she manages to tell her story without an excess of anger or emotion. There's no need, as the facts she presents speak for themselves.

I've read this novel about three artist sisters from South Carolina at least twice before. The first time I absolutely loved it, and the second time I was a little cooler. This time--probably 15 years after the last reading--I was in some ways reading a whole different book. Being in my teens and twenties for the first two readings, I was focused entirely on weaver Sassafrass, musician Indigo, and especially dancer Cypress. Now that I'm probably closer to mama Hilda Effania's age, I found her to be the most intriguing character.

Hrm. I'm not really sure what to make of this book. It's a pretty good read with a reasonably compelling narrator, but plot doesn't quite gel. The ending left me mystified, and not in that cool dazed way where you contemplate what might happen next. Instead we're left with what essentially feels like a "to be continued," which I would have thought the author would be too classy for.

Anyway, Genna is a smart and solitary African- and Panamanian-American teenager growing up in early 21st century Brooklyn who gets transported back in time to more or less the same location, just before Christmas in 1862. She ends up working for a white doctor as nursemaid to his child and as a sort of nurse-in-training in his practice. (She wants to become a doctor, a psychiatrist specifically, a notion Dr. Brant thinks is absurd. Negroes' heads are small than white peoples', so they aren't capable of being as smart. Same with women vs. men.) She has two potential love interests, one from the present, and one from the future/past, who manages to find her in the 19th century.