Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 115

Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer, by Kelly Jones

A delightful middle-grade novel about a girl who acquires a flock of chickens with superpowers.

I feel like that’s really all that needs to be said. Either this is something you immediately want to read, or not. But a few more things I liked about it…

- It’s epistolatory, told completely in the form of letters, chicken quizzes and pamphlets, to-do lists, etc.

- There are a lot of completely accurate chicken facts.

- The superpowers are used the way that actual chickens would use superpowers if they had them. They’re not superintelligent chickens, just regular chickens with unusual abilities.

- The heroine, Sophie, is biracial (white father, Mexican-American mother) and while this is relevant to the story, it’s not what the story is about. Are you or do you know a Latina girl who wants a book where someone like them is the heroine and it’s not about Issues? Do they like chickens and/or The X-Men? Then they are the perfect reader for this book.

- Honestly though anyone is the perfect reader for this book. I guess unless they hate and fear chickens.

Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer[image error]

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Quick question for wheelchair users

This is for something I'm writing. The character uses a manual wheelchair. She's visiting an office and is impressed by how accessible it is, unlike pretty much the entire rest of the world. What features can it have that she'd notice?

It's a New York security agency which she's visiting as a client, but she can also notice ways in which it's accessible for anyone who works there as well. None of the current employees are physically disabled, so she'd be seeing the potential rather than noticing someone else navigating it in a wheelchair.

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Decluttering Drawers: Kitchen, Beside the Under the Sink Space

Being on crutches, in an apartment up a flight of stairs, has certainly made decluttering more challenging. I cannot take anything to trash/recycling, but have to get someone else to do it for me (and I live alone). Also, it's a lot more difficult to carry things from room to room.

Nevertheless, I persisted!

KonMari has completely changed a lot of household chores for me, from things I hate and avoid to things I actively want to do as a combination of relaxation/meditative activity and geeky hobby. (I still hate washing dishes though). Sherwood and Layla, who have both seen my apartment in various stages, can attest to how much this has changed how it looks.

Here is a set of shelves in my kitchen which had not been decluttered in twelve years. There's a huge space in the back of them which is very hard to reach into. Consequently, when I stash anything there, it tends to drift toward the back, where I can then neither see nor reach it. Otherwise I only opened it to grab a tool from the tool box.



The other day, having hired someone to run some errands for me and also take out the trash, I parked myself on the floor and pulled everything out, a task which at times involved lying flat on my stomach and using a tool to sweep things toward me. I really wish I'd photographed the floor once everything was out, because it was a hair-raising mound of trash and weird junk. I found a half-drunk bottle of Kahlua which had probably been there for twelve years. I found paper towels so old that they shattered like glass. I found a bag of birdseed that was at least ten years old, dating back from when I thought birds would come if I put out food. (They wouldn't.)

I dumped the trash in trash bags and sorted the rest. Here is the end result:



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Days of the Dead (Benjamin January, Book 7), by Barbara Hambly

Ben and Rose have just gotten married when they receive a letter from Hannibal saying that he's being held prisoner in a Gothic mansion in Mexico where he's forced to play the violin for the delusional owner of the mansion who has regular hallucinatory conversations with Aztec Gods; he can't flee because, among other obstacles, the police want to hang him as the believe he poisoned the owner's son. Ben and Rose to the rescue!

This had a lot of very thought-provoking and sensitive stuff on the historical treatment of mental illness, legal slavery vs slavery in all but name, religion, and Ben's dilemma of never having a place where he can both feel at home and not have to deal with racism. This was all neatly married to a solid murder mystery, a family drama, and tons of adventure and bonding. Hambly is really good at writing established couples who are still madly in love, and I really enjoyed all the Ben/Rose moments as well as the Ben/Rose & Hannibal. The supporting characters were vivid and interesting, as was the new setting.

The climax didn't rise to quite the batshit heights of the last one, but not for want of trying.

( Read more... )

Grimness quotient: Low, all things considered. There's a visit to an asylum which is awful and tragic, but the man running it is compassionate; it's mostly about how people just had no idea what to do about mental illness then. Some people stuck in miserable nunneries. Poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, but also lots of people just living their lives and managing to make pretty good ones despite it all.

Days of the Dead (Benjamin January, Book 7)[image error]

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Gene Wolfe, 1931-2019

What struck me on the beach–and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow–was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck across so many leagues, and if it now rested in the new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then it might rest in everything, in every thorn in every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground.

- Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator

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Winterdance, by Gary Paulsen

Gary Paulsen, best-known for Hatchet, was also once possibly the worst-prepared person ever to enter the Iditarod. I don’t know if/how much this book is exaggerated, but I would not have believed he survived if he hadn’t written it himself.

His wife throws him out of bed after a close encounter with a skunk and he goes and sleeps with the dogs, he falls off multiple cliffs and gets dragged on his face and slammed into trees, builds a makeshift sled the likes of which has to be read for yourself, and acquires the aptly named Devil, a sled dog who bites him hard enough to draw blood every. Single. Time. Paulsen goes near him. I suspect someone unloaded Devil on the rube.

Paulsen’s memoir is often hilarious, very gripping, a beautiful account of pushing oneself to the absolute limit and simultaneously loving it while suffering an incredible amount, an ode to the natural beauty of Alaska, and a love letter to dogs and a completely serious account of how he felt that he more-or-less became one himself.

Warning: two dogs die during the story, neither of them his but both deaths are pretty brutal. Also, the ending takes an unexpected swerve into what in context is utterly tragic (no dog death), so much so that I immediately looked him up to see if it was really as final an ending as it seemed. (It wasn't, quite.) ( Read more... )

Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod[image error]

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The Twelve and the Genii, by Pauline Clarke

Max, an eight-year-old boy, moves with his family to a new home in Yorkshire. There he discovers twelve old wooden soldiers who come to life when he unpacks them. They all have distinct personalities, plus a history and myths.

Max soon realizes that they are the twelve toy soldiers that the Bronte children played with and wrote about, and whom the soldiers call the Genii: their protectors and Gods. Max and, eventually, his sister Jane become the soldiers' new Genii. But due to the Bronte collection, the soldiers are sought after by collectors and historians...

My favorite thing, an old-school British children's fantasy, with all my favorite virtues of the genre: a strong sense of place, precise prose, vivid images, an unsentimental view of childhood, and small-scale and very magical-feeling magic.

This one captures the childhood feeling of a very small world with very small people in it; you indignantly protest to adults that you're not "playing" with your dolls or animals, because to you "play" means games and silliness, when what you're doing with them is inhabiting and playing out serious dramas in a very real world on a miniature scale. In The Twelve and the Genii, Max comes to realize for the first time that stories don't just exist, they are created: the Brontes created their stories, the soldiers created their own, and Max can create his. Moreover, making stories actually alters reality, whether by literally bringing things to life, making myths that didn't exist before, or making a new life or fame for a writer.

This feels like a classic, halfway between The Borrowers and The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and I’m not sure why it isn’t one. The Claw, I suppose. (I can't find the link, but it's the idea that why one thing takes off when other, similar ones don't is essentially like the claw in the arcade game that comes down and grabs one toy from a giant pile of similar toys.)

The Twelve and the Genii[image error]

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Guess which cat did a runner today?

Bloody Alex knocked out the screen and apparently climbed out the TOP of the same window Erin escaped from the other day. Both had like two inches clearance both times so I'm still not sure how they did it.

I've had both cats over a year and they both escape for the first time this week, when I'm not weight bearing on a boot and it's incredibly hot if I close all windows. Frat boy neighbor helped retrieve him.

Neither seemed to enjoy their escape but windows are going to be closed unless I'm in the room from now on.

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Cats and crutches

My cats have adjusted to my new routine by sitting on my wheelchairs at all times. In the morning I open my bedroom door and see them both on the chair I need to use to get out of the bedroom. I shove them off it, put down my crutches to hold the chair still while I sit down, and one of the cats takes the chance to jump on it again. I scoop up that cat and try to sit on the chair holding it, and then the other cat jumps on the chair. I frequently end up scooting around my apartment clutching two cats and a pair of crutches.

Alex licking my icepack in a highly dignified manner.



No crutches will deter Alex from my shoulders!





Meanwhile, right in the middle of what was already an incredibly stressful day, that little asshole Erin escaped for the first time ever. I realized she was gone just as I took my boot off to ice my foot, called and called, heard piteous meowing from DOWNSTAIRS, on the side of the really treacherous wood stairs. I went down, traced her to UNDER THE APARTMENT BUILDING NEXT DOOR, coaxed her to come close enough to grab, and then realized that I had no way to get her back upstairs as I'm on crutches. I sat there holding her by the scruff of her neck and literally yelled for help.

Thankfully the neighboring building landlord was there, and I directed him to get the carrier from my apartment and bring it down. I crammed her into it, he took her up, and I hobbled after. He said he saw me yelling on the ground and thought someone had tried to murder me!

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Being eaten alive by hyenas is less painful than you would think.

I recently had the delightful experience of dipping into a recipe book which includes instructions for surviving a cobalt bomb.

It has 380 pages, starting on page 5. Give me a number between 5 and 380, and I will give you a quote from that page.

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