The Chosen One is a staple of the fantasy genre, especially in YA, but it’s the attempts to contort or subvert it that I tend to find the most compelling. Emily Thiede stretches the trope like silly putty in her debut, This Vicious Grace. Alessa was chosen by Dea to be this generation’s bearer ofContinue reading “A Different Kind of Chosen One in ‘Grace’”
Author Archives: Elisabeth Ring
‘Wolf and the Watchman’ Grim but Compelling
Look, I know Scandinavian literature has a reputation of being dark and brooding, but I have to admit I was not ready for just how dark and brooding eighteenth-century Sweden is in Niklas Natt och Dag’s The Wolf and the Watchman. I was also not expecting how thoroughly I would be riveted by it. BodiesContinue reading “‘Wolf and the Watchman’ Grim but Compelling”
‘Ducks’ A Heavy, Spectacular Read
Kate Beaton is known for her long-running Hark! A Vagrant webcomic series (RIP), which I, like many others, first encountered through an excellent reaction meme adapted from an excellent comic. So I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that a comic so bright wouldn’t also have a shadow, which in this case is, unfortunately, herContinue reading “‘Ducks’ A Heavy, Spectacular Read”
‘Harvest’ Gives Bumper Crop of Chills
Rural towns and wide-open fields have proved fertile material for horror stories for decades. What moves in the corn? Nothing good, probably. But in Ann Fraistat’s What We Harvest, it’s what’s underground—what’s in the very soil—that you have to watch out for. The farmland that 16-year-old Wren’s family has worked for the last six generationsContinue reading “‘Harvest’ Gives Bumper Crop of Chills”
‘Little Eyes’ Not Looking to be Liked
Growing up, my little sisters had a Furby. It was one of the first-gen ones, not these smarter, freakier modern things, but it would still say things that seemed way too canny for being a hunk of plastic and fake fur. In Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, the Furby-like creatures in question can’t speak, but theyContinue reading “‘Little Eyes’ Not Looking to be Liked”
‘Sennen’ More than Meets the Eye
It can be tough to pull off a good “world you thought you knew is actually walled off from the ‘real world’” story, and even tougher to make it feel fresh and new and thought-provoking. Sennen, the debut graphic novel by illustrator Shanti Rai, does all this alongside nailing a strong coming-of-age story in anContinue reading “‘Sennen’ More than Meets the Eye”
‘Dirty Work’ is a Sobering Reminder of What Lurks in the Economic Shadows
Commercial butchering, oil drilling, being a guard at a prison—they’re tough jobs but someone’s got to do them. But in the case of Dirty Work, author Eyal Press argues that the social stigma against these types of work means we collectively don’t have to consider the cost or the moral weight that gets placed on theContinue reading “‘Dirty Work’ is a Sobering Reminder of What Lurks in the Economic Shadows”
‘Dragons’ A Poignant Commentary on Sexism, Self
My day job right now has me looking through lots of records—many primary sources—on the ways heteronormative gender roles were constructed and enforced during the midcentury decades. Looking back at the rigid structure our collective grandmothers were expected to squeeze into, and the lack of rights they had within it, is both sobering and enragingContinue reading “‘Dragons’ A Poignant Commentary on Sexism, Self”
‘What Moves the Dead’ a Creepy Gothic Horror
The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher‘s take on Arthur Machen’s short story The White People, has still left me, three years after reading it, uneasy around dolls and deer skeletons (which, to be fair, I encounter more often than the average person). The picture on the cover of What Moves the Dead was of a mangled-ish rabbit andContinue reading “‘What Moves the Dead’ a Creepy Gothic Horror”
‘Crane Wife’ Questions Identity, Relationships
No close relationship is totally straightforward; that’s impossible whenever two people entwine themselves around each other for whatever purpose. But romantic relationships, and the relationships we have with ourselves as beings who may get into romantic relationships, are fraught with all manner of expectations and suppositions—often implicit and inherited from our families and/or the societyContinue reading “‘Crane Wife’ Questions Identity, Relationships”
Ring Reads 