In 2007 I joined Goodreads and wrote reviews of some of the books that had most transformed me as a reader. I have since, over the years, taken an absurd amount of geek pride that my review of this book is (I think) the most popular one. And for everyone writing "GET OVER YOURSELF" in the comments, as a response to my using my own little corner of the internet to tell a story about how my life as a writer and a Catholic and a woman was shaped by this book, there were a dozen other women responding "OH MY GOD, ARE YOU ME?" I love that. I love this weird little internet mini-community we've built out of being weirdo outcast girls who felt inspired and empowered by this book about a weirdo outcast girl who becomes a raging badass. And then today I read this: http://www.teleread.com/writing/mario...And this: http://deirdre.net/marion-zimmer-brad...And this: http://deirdre.net/marion-zimmer-brad...And this: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014...And about twenty more.Every consumer of art gets to decide for themselves how much the life of the artist matters to them. Sometimes brilliant creative geniuses are assholes. Sometimes they're criminals. Sometimes that makes a difference to how you read their work. Sometimes it doesn't. The words of twenty-six-year-old me, pouring forth my passionate love for MZB's words, remain untouched and unedited below. Because that story, of how I fell in love with that book as a child, is still a true story. I haven't decided whether I will re-read this book again, whether I will keep it or get rid of it, knowing the things I know now about the woman who wrote it. And I'm not telling you what you should do. But MZB's daughter says out loud not only that her mother abused her, but that part of the reason she hid that abuse was because of MZB's status in the SFF community as a champion of women. Because she didn't think anyone would believe her. Because this is an important feminist work. Because her mother's fans would be angry at her for accusing their icon of such horrors. And I won't be complicit in that. --Claire Willett (June 27, 2014)ORIGINAL REVIEW BELOW________________________________________You have to be a particular kind of girl to fall in love with this book the way I did.--You have to be in the sixth grade, a freakishly precocious reader, whose beloved sixth-grade teacher brings a box of her ten favorite books to class and sets them up on the chalkboard and leaves them there for weeks for you to look at, including one HUGE book that looks like it's a billion pages long with some cool fairy priestess chick on a horse on the cover.--You have to have grown up reading King Arthur stories and LOVE the movie "The Sword In the Stone."--You have to be so hopelessly nerdy that you would rather sit on the side of the playground reading than play kickball, never mind how much the other kids make fun of you about it.--You have to be Catholic enough to understand the mentality of the occasionally hateful Christian characters in the book (as well as to be baffled and perplexed by all the sexuality which will make a number of plot elements only make sense to you when you re-read the book as a college student and go, "Ohhhhh. Now I get it").--You have to be the kind of girl who loves and relates to the plain outcast Morgaine who is treated as a freak has to learn how to rely on herself alone. --You have to hate the shallow blonde princesses, even when they seem like they might be kind of nice people, and always root for the feisty brunette. --You have to be a fantasy geek who LOVES any book with swordfighting, magic, princesses, and doomed romance. --You have to be patient enough to read 800+ pages that cover one woman's entire lifetime from before her birth to old, old age.--You have to come to the end of the book and secretly wish that (despite your religious conviction in your Catholic upbringing) Britain had never been Christianized and we were all still witches. --You have to secretly wish you belonged to a mystical female cult where you had to have a blue crescent moon tattooed on your forehead.--You have to wish you knew how to ride a horse in a dress and look majestic, instead of falling off every time you were forced onto a horse at camp or on vacation and now you hate them and they scare you.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

In a time before history, in a harsh and beautiful land near the top of the world, womanhood comes cruelly and suddenly to beautiful, young Chagak. Surviving the brutal massacre of her tribe, she sets out across the icy waters off Ameria's northwest coast on an astonishing odyssey that will reveal to Chagak powerful secrets of the earth and sky... and the mysteries of love and loss.

In the dawn of history, a valiant people forged a pathway from an old world into a new one. Led by a dreamer who followed the spirit of the wolf, a handful of courageous men and women dared to cross the frozen wastes to find an untouched, unspoiled continent. Set in what is now Alaska, this is the magnificent saga of the vision-filled man who led his people to an awesome destiny, and the courageous woman whose love and bravery drove them on in pursuit of that dream.A sweeping epic of prehistory, People of the Wolf is another compelling novel in the majestic North America's Forgotten Past series from New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear

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