Genres
The Scarlett Letters: My Secret Year of Men in an L.A. Dungeon by Jenny Nordbak
9 hrs. 11 min. | St. Martin’s Press | Macmillian | Release Date: 4/4/2017
Jenny Nordbak’s podcast, The Wicked Wallflowers Club, has been one of my favorite podcasts this year. Their author interviews are always a fun mix of craft talk, raunch, and bookish squee. After hearing Nordbak share a few snippets of her time as a dominatrix on the podcast I decided to check out her book to get the full story.
This memoir follows the two years in Nordbak’s early twenties where she secretly trained and worked as a dominatrix at a BDSM dungeon in Los Angeles. Nordbak weaves together the events of her “vanilla” life with anecdotes about her sessions with clients as she becomes Mistress Scarlett. I found the peek into the BDSM scene fascinating and enjoyed getting to know the irreverent found family Nordbak creates for herself.
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Sam and Ilsa’s Last Hurrah
211 pages | Knopf Books For Young Readers | Contemporary | 4/10/2018
*sigh*
I’m sad to say this book was a huge disappointment. I’ve read and enjoyed nearly everything this duo has put out and I was so ready to like this but it was a hot mess.
18-year-old twins Sam and Ilsa are known for the dinner parties they host in their grandmother’s luxury rent-controlled Manhattan apartment. When their grandmother decides to finally sell, the twins host one last dinner party before everything changes.
I honestly don’t want to spend too much time trashing this book. There are multiple Goodreads reviewsfor that. This book has one of the lowest Goodreads ratings I’ve ever seen and while I noticed that going in I also liked Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List--which most people hate.
Reading this felt like someone put Cohn and Levithan’s previous books through an algorithm and had a computer write this book.
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Damsel by Elana K. Arnold
unrated | 7 hrs. 42 min. | Balzer + Bray | YA Fantasy | Release Date: 10/2/2018
So about this book. I’m not really sure what to think of it. I like that it’s not trying to be what you expect in a YA fantasy. It’s not a story about rebellions, handsome princes, faithful sidekicks, and adventure–instead, it manages to be…I’m going to go ahead and say viscerally transgressive.
I can see Damsel being used to that introduce teens the concept of how to do a feminist reading of a text or apply feminist literary theory (which is totally a class I took in college, okay) It’s chock-full of allegory and symbolism in a way that is raw and at times a bit heavy handed but it’s the kind of strangeness and unease that you can’t look away from.
And whooo, boy…that ending. Like I get what Arnold was doing but I was not expecting that. . .
Check out the audiobook review on AudioFile !
Pride By Ibi Zoboi
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
15 hrs 4 min | Henry Holt & Co. | YA Fantasy | Release Date: 9/29/2015
Ya’ll remember this book? I can’t believe it came out almost 4 years ago! I am the queen of reading popular YA stuff super late so here I am. I picked up Bardugo’s debut Shadow and Bonewhen it first came out and never got into it. I actually criticized it for not having enough “political nuances, rich detail, and brutality.” Well, let me tell you she stepped her storytelling game up because that pretty much sums up all of Six of Crows. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about how this book is violent AF.
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