Posted on by JenniferShelby

Escape as resistance and other stories

Dear Side Questers,

It has been a difficult month. I hope you are well and finding escape in art or music or something that lets you escape. Escape is Resistance!

I’ve been deep into research about Germany in WWll, and specifically the way everyday people resisted. The similarities are brutally astounding

I’d always known that people hid Jews in secret places, but I didn’t realize that they had nowhere else to go. That even the ones who made it out of Germany were turned back. I didn’t know the Pope granted them asylum in the Vatican and even encouraged the creation of false identity papers to help some families remain safe. It makes me realize the plight of refugees everywhere, that even now refugees and immigrants are looked down upon, hated and feared (even in Canada). Its not something that will change when we become the refugees, fleeing fascism and authoritarianism. Is it better to hide in someone’s attic for four years or risk escaping, only to be sent in some official capacity that ensures the baddies catch you and put you in your camps.

It’s a lot. But I do believe reading is resistance. I think we can learn from the past. Even fictionalized accounts of WW2 resistance, of which I’ve realized there is a LOT of. Our imaginations appear to have been collectively caught by the Holocaust in a way that leads to me to wonder, did we know this would happen again?

In contrast, I have a very well-educated friend in the U.S. who mentioned having just learned about the Reichstag fire. Our educations have not been the same, which sent me digging to discover where I learned so much about the Holocaust, because it wasn’t in school.

The weird thing? It was actually from growing up in the fundie cult. This was a big part of their story, and part of this was based in proving faithfulness via enduring persecution. This is a big part of cult psychology, making you separate and “better” than the rest of the world. It’s BIG red flag that’s been showing up in contemporary mega-churches in the U.S. and, increasingly, in Canada.

Okay, getting back to the point. They held up the cult members destroyed in the concentration camps as the example we needed to follow. We needed to suffer for our faith, so that the deity would love us. Job, all the way down. Thus, little bits of persecution were just practice for the Big Persecution to Come and over time, this gets embedded into your identity and whoopsie, turns out that’s exactly how socialization and propaganda works.

As a result, we had buckets and buckets of historical literature about the Holocaust that I was allowed to access (my reading was fairly restricted so this is a big deal). I’m struggling to realize that not everyone received this education, and I think it’s a big part of why this level of fascism-and following the exact same goshdarn pattern-has come ‘round again.

Remember during the BLM protests in the States when Antifa became a bad word and a lot of us were wondering how “antifascist” could possibly be considered a bad thing? Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

At this point, you must be wondering, cool Jenn, so are you writing some sort of historical WWll fiction? Sort of. The Little Banned Bookshop is being pulled very strongly in that direction, though possibly not in the way you’d expect. I think if Gabby and the Bookshop are going to learn how to resist, they might need to visit the past. Maybe meet a German Shopkeeper and their Little Banned Buchladen.

I usually have this rule where I never talk about my works-in-progress, but this feels different. The Little Banned Bookshop feels, in a lot of ways, something that belongs to us rather than me, that it exists to give us some hope as we journey through troubling times. The human mind is wired to learn through story, and maybe, through stories like this, we can learn how to survive this together, with our humanity intact.

If we can still call it that in the face of what is happening…again.

I’m also escaping. Not outside to the woods, we keep having ice storms and there’s a terrible crust on the snow currently bashing in my shins. It’s the party pooper of the whole winter… until it starts melting, the sap running…

BUT I’m a member of the facebook group Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends (it’s one of the few groups that’s keeping me on the site) and every year around this time we have this event called the Charity Battle. There are several different animal or nature “gangs” and they all battle (by making increasingly unhinged memes) to raise the most money for conservation efforts (these are all visible at wildgreenfuture.org).

I joined character-based IcePack last year about midway and had an absolute blast. So many deep belly laughs. And I’m so glad that it’s come around again because I forgot how much fun it is and what a lovely antidote it is to all the horrors while also helping nature.

These memes are so embedded into gang and group lore that they rarely make sense to outsiders once the battle is more than few days in, but here is a silly sampler of mine to give you some idea of the unhinged nonsense we’re up to.

I don’t have much meme skill, so I mostly make 20-frame comic stories that keep me giggling as I make them, and then doubled over in laughter when the other fiends start commenting on them.

It’s the most fun you’ll ever have helping frosted elfin butterflies! Check it out here and if you want to help, please donate to my gang, IcePack: We have the LORE!

Like many others, the anglerfish recorded by National Geographic that surfaced into the light, only to die, captured my heart this past week. This has resulted in enough daydreams that it is firmly lodged in my imagination, but I’m not sure what that will come to, creatively, just yet. I have been enjoying this song by Paris Paloma about the same.

That’s all for this month, Side Questers. Fingers crossed that the first signs of spring will have sprung by next month, the sap will be running, and maybe we’ll all have something to smile about.

Posted on by JenniferShelby · 4 Comments

Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop

You know that phenomenon where you don’t hear from your writer friend for a while and then they suddenly show up and announce they’ve written a book?

I wrote a book.

A novella, actually. It felt like it was time to write about some of my experiences as a cult survivor with everything happening in the world and then this book just sort of poured out of me. I wrote it in a summer workshop, and next came edits, then four amazing beta readers and now… I’ve hit publish on the ‘zon.

Here is my blurb so you don’t have to squint at the cover photo:

Be the magic bookshop you want to see in the world.

Gabby has moved on since she escaped the fundamentalist cult she was raised in 25 years ago, but when an evangelist accuses her of grooming because of the LGBTQIA+ books in her Little Free Library, her life begins to fall apart. Gabby finds solace in the pages of a slim book entitled Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop, which details how to look after a living, magical bookshop. But a magical bookshop that gives out banned books to those who need them couldn’t be real… or could it?

Find out in the book readers are calling “Studio Ghibli meets Roald Dahl-for grownups.”

Links! I should share links!

Amazon Canada

Amazon U.S.

Ingram is coming for you Chapters and Barnes&Noble fans.

And I will say that writing something so deeply personal is terrifying, exhausting, and ever so meaningful. The feedback I’ve received from early had reduced me to tears more than once. One of my beta readers told me that “this is the book needs right now” and that it reminded her that she should be the main character in her own story. Another told me that she knew “this book will stay with me for a long time.” This is the stuff that FEEDS writers, I swear.

That’s all for now, I’ve been going full speed and need to have a lil nap before I wake up and tackle the marketing aspect (gulp!).

Talk soon,

Posted on by JenniferShelby

autumn leaves and funky skulls

Dear Side Questers,
It’s the most colourful time of the year! I hope you’ve had a chance to kick around some autumn leaves, enjoy the colours, and attempt strange leaf crafts that never quite work out. Oh, oops, is that last one just me?

I may have attempted maple leaf faeries.

When I first made them, they looked like this:

The girls thought they were weird. Then a few days passed and they got weirder. Me too, faeries, me too.

But this month’s biggest side quest has been A Binding of Spellwork and Story, the book I received an artsnb grant to write this year. I’m writing the chapters in tandem with a writing class/workshop’s assignments, which is working very well to keep me motivated.

I took a similar course with the same teacher (writer Matthew Ledrew) to get my Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop novella drafted as well. In fact, I’m quietly debating taking this course again already. Its helping me get out of my head and I don’t feel so overwhelmed by the larger projects. It’s also giving me the autumn novel writing community that I used to get from NaNoWriMo.

Anyway, back to Binding. It’s a story in which I’m exploring the role of a writer’s manipulation of story from within the story, where it looks more like a sorceress wielding magic. Part of me keeps expecting people to laugh at this entire premise, but it turns out that it’s just as much fun to write as I hoped it would be when I first proposed it. With any luck, it’ll be fun to read as well!

Gratuitous mushrooms!

Between sick kids and a brother in hospital, I took to walking my local Ducks Unlimited marsh in an attempt to save my sanity (and avoid hunters in the woods). There are few birds left at this point, though the dragonflies are plentiful. The dying vegetation has taken to revealing secrets. Following a game trail, I happened upon an almost shockingly intact cormorant skull. 

There’s a whole spiritual aspect to finding bones like this in nature that I’m never entirely certain if I should unpack. I did touch on the subject in my short story The Second Form of Ginny Elder. There’s something very sacred to the discovery that sits a sense of quiet in my chest. Other people feel a sense of disgust. With that in mind, I’m sharing a photo of the kind of skull I found from the internet, since skulls in nature can be a bit yuck: 

Source: https://skullsite.com/wp-content/uploads/dbimages/large/phalacrocoraxauritus_s.jpg

Cormorants are common along the Bay of Fundy and they always tug at the memory of reading Island of the Blue Dolphins when I was young. I don’t remember much else about the book these days, but somehow the skirt she made from the cormorant feathers-and especially the way they took it away at the end of the book to put it in a museum-always stayed with me.

Speaking of books – this week marks the publication of my friend Nancy SM Waldman’s debut novel, Every Rule Undone. I had the pleasure of reading an ARC, so I thought I’d share my review:

This story follows the lead character of Aza Gen, that last name indicating which magical clan she belongs to and thus, her loyalties and abilities. The Gen in this world act as a submissive partner to the Puraples, the leading magical clan. In contrast, their enemies, the Cruiks, have their own submissive clan, the Besin healers. The Puraples and the Cruiks spend their time tossing magical curses at each other, and their submissives scramble to clean them up. If this sounds like an endless cycle, it is, and revolution is brewing when a full-on magical curse plague breaks out.
Added to these four clans is another set of people, folks whose parents broke the law by cross-breeding between magical clans and abilities. If they manage to escape execution, these Undones have no place in society.

Aza leads the reader through this world as unrest grows and builds, becoming the sort of delicious revolution story where unexpected heroes emerge simply because of the situations they find themselves. It is a pleasure to read how Aza and her friends grow, change, and become different people across the events in the book.

I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it at that. If you enjoy a character-driven story filled with difficult decisions that change their worlds forever, this needs to go on your TBR!

Every Rule Undone can be found everywhere, but if you’d like a link, here you are.

That’s it for this month, Enchanted friends! Wishing you a lovely Halloween, fuzzy socks on chilly mornings, and your favourite warm beverage in the perfect mug.

Until next month,

Posted on by JenniferShelby · 2 Comments

Book Review: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

V. E. Schwab’s latest book, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, cast a long spell on me. I read it weeks ago now, but I couldn’t manage to articulate what the story had done to me because it was still doing it. I haven’t felt haunted like this since reading Phantom by Susan Kay when I was in my teens.

About 300 years ago, Addie made a deal with a demon in exchange for her freedom. She avoided a marriage she didn’t want, and what she saw as a one-way trip to dying in childbirth. But her handsome demon was something of a trickster, and now, whenever someone looks away from her, she’s erased from their mind. If she pays for a room to sleep, she’s kicked out when the landlord forgets she did so. If she falls in love, they will not remember her the next day, but they might fall in love with her again… and again… and again, until she grows tired of being forgotten. If she sleeps with them, come morning they’ll have forgotten, embarrassed and thinking her a prostitute they’d hired after too much drink. She moves from broken heart to broken heart, stealing food and clothes where she can, and moves like a ghost through history.

Desperate to be remembered somehow, in defiance of the demon who made her like this, she becomes something of a muse, inspiring arts and words and music.

When she meets Henry, she is astounded that someone remembers her at last. They fall in love, and she experiences what a real relationship can be, what it’s like to have a shelter she hasn’t stolen. Through him, at last, she finds the means to be remembered. But.

But.

This isn’t quite the love story one might have expected at the outset. I leave it at that to avoid spoilers, but I will say this: V. E. Schwab managed to transcend romance (this will make sense when you read it) and the ending, which I did not anticipate, is perfect. Addie’s strength of character and will just blew me away.

I will remember Addie. And I highly recommend this book. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Posted on by JenniferShelby · 2 Comments

Book Review: Boulders Over the Bermuda Triangle

Peter J. Foote’s debut novella, Boulders Over the Bermuda Triangle, is the third episode in Engen Books’ multi-author Slipstreamers series featuring the adventures of Cassidy Cane. In the series, risk-loving anthropologist Cassidy Cane is hired by one Professor Gamgee to explore a series of portals that may lead anywhere. Think Indiana Jones meets Doctor Who, with the portals acting as TARDIS.

In Boulders Cassidy flies through a portal over the Bermuda Triangle that lands her in deep space. Her aircraft fails and her only hope is what looks like a space station ahead. With a bit of luck, an adolescent, reptilian alien named Agnoix, notices Cassidy’s plight and launches a rescue. What Agnoix doesn’t know is that she’s about to save a human, one of the reptilian Xik’en species’ mortal enemies. Rather than turning Cassidy in, Agnoix decides to fight her learned prejudice and see the human as simply another soul in need of help.

While the youth’s struggle to overcome her cultural bias was my favourite part of this book, there were many other elements that delighted me. Foote knows his way around reptiles and it comes through in his imagined space station: organic tunnels lined with plants and humid, smelly air. He has also employed a clever work around to keep the mining station safe from the asteroid field they work in, but I’ll let you read those details on your own.

I give this book a solid 4/5 and highly recommend this book, especially for Doctor Who fans like me. Which brings me to one more not insignificant detail…

(cue suspenseful music)

I am also writing an episode in this series! Eee! Come back tomorrow for more details!

Posted on by JenniferShelby

Book Review: Riverland by Fran Wilde

Fran Wilde’s Riverland isn’t a particularly easy book to read, but it is worth it. The difficulty comes from the abuse the young protagonists face. Wilde articulates the constant edge of living in an abusive household, the careful interpretation of every twitch, every air, and every mood, waiting for the monster to appear. There were moments my chest was so tight I swore I’d never put down the book again until it was finished. I couldn’t leave sisters Eleanor and Mike there, I couldn’t leave myself there.

To feel safe enough to sleep, the sisters hide under Eleanor’s bed, where she has set up socks on the sharp coils of the springs, and Christmas lights for cheer, blankets positioned to hide the light from outside their protected space. She’s been reading The Hobbit to Mike, a brief escape, when one night a river appears beneath them, and the girls tumble into another world.

Once inside a strange world of herons, birds, ponies made of rags, nightmares made of smoke, and a lighthouse with a light solid enough to travel by, the girls learn their matrilineal ancestors had promised to protect this place. They’d set up glass fishing buoys to catch the nightmares and stop them from entering the “real” world. The girls know these buoys, they once hung in their house before their father smashed them in a rage.

The girls’ worlds soon collide, the weight of keeping their family’s dark secret against the girls’ mission to save Riverland sending shards of glass into the impossible foundation of their lives. There’s a friend and a grandmother who offer hope, but the girls are in a terrible place. Everything they face is too much for their tender ages. I spent the last third of the book clutching it, white knuckled and muttering, “Oh, Fran, please save them. Don’t leave them there, don’t leave them there.”

I guess I’d call this middle-grade horror fantasy, and it got to the core of me. Protect yourself if this kind of content triggers you, but for me? I give it 5/5 stars.

Posted on by JenniferShelby · 2 Comments

Book Review: The Drowned Country

The Drowned Country, by Emily Tesh, is the sequel to Silver in the Wood and as such, I cannot properly review it without revealing spoilers regarding Silver, so please, be warned.

The Drowned Country opens upon a bereft and sulking Henry Silver, his grand house a shambles, his mood dark, and Bramble furious with him. Silver is the Green Man now and Tobias has left, called to aide Henry’s mother in her magical work, and their brief romance ended in anger. Heartbroken and still struggling with the new weight of an immortality he’s ill-equipped to handle, Silver is ruled by multiple waves of deep grief.

Then his mother appears, engaging his assistance in the rescue of a girl from a vampire, and he agrees for the chance to see Tobias again. Upon their reunion, Tobias’ stoic exterior plays further tricks on Henry’s tortured mind. When they find the girl, her situation not quite what they expected, Henry catches a glimpse of the Drowned Country, a remnant of fairy land lost, and a sharp spark of hope ignites in his woebegone heart that leads the three of them deep into a world hidden by a dark sea and full of unexpected danger.

I’ll stop there. I enjoyed this novella, missing Tobias myself as much as Henry Silver, but the tone shift from Tobias’ stoic, gentle focus on nature to the twisted torture of Henry’s grief was hard for me, living in Pandemica as we are. It works to get us empathizing with Silver, but I would have given anything to slip into the sweet soothing mind of Tobias for a moment. I begrudgingly took a star off for this, leaving the book with a more than respectable 4 out of 5 stars.

I like the way the story ends, it feels cozy, and there is a reveal and a kindness that pleased my storied heart. Sorry, no spoilers, but this is an easy read in a few short hours to get at that ending on your own. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Posted on by JenniferShelby · 1 Comment

Book Review: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Before we get started, I’d like to put out a content warning about partner abuse in this book. The abuse isn’t gratuitous, it’s pivotal to the plot, and you can’t skip over it. Please protect yourself.

The Space Between Worlds follows the story of Cara, a woman who travels between worlds, quite literally, thanks to a technology that allows her to travel through the multiverse. The caveat to this travel is that should a version of yourself already exist on the world travelled to, you will not survive the initial arrival. Because of this, people who have endured high-risk lives, such as Cara’s impoverished upbringing and life in Ashtown, a town exposed to the harsh elements of a heavily polluted Earth. Cara has died enough times that she is able to traverse to over 300 worlds safely, offering her the appearance of safety in the rich, environmentally-protected city of Wiley. But that protection pivots on the Eldridge company’s need for her particular skills and a secret she must keep at all costs.

In every parallel Earth Cara travels to, she meets different versions of her loved ones. Her mother ranges from loving prostitute to a disapproving zealot, her sister from innocent to cunning. Her once and former lover, Nik Nik, is always cruel, always abusive, and always the Mad Max-like emperor of Ashtown when she finds him. Sometimes he knows her, sometimes he doesn’t, but her Ashtown family remains under threat beneath his rule and their history. When she finds a version of Nik Nik that is not, everything in the all the worlds she thought she knew begins to unravel and Cara discovers that she’s not the only one at Eldridge with secrets.

Johnson’s novel makes for excellent commentary about privilege. The disparity of life between the rich Wileyites and the Ashtowners holds no secrets: we see the trauma of Cara’s lives, the terror of the Runners as a child, the rare kindness she found in the safety of her mother’s brothel. We see the obliviousness of the Wileyites, who have little idea what life is like outside their protected bubble.

I found the abusive sections difficult to read but the ending of this book, oh the ending. It is a breath of beauty, an ending so perfect I had to close my eyes and hug my e-reader for a moment. No, I’m not going to spoil it, but as a writer? This is the kind of ending I aspire to, an ending that takes into account everything that has come before, the story it is telling, and the world that has been built. I give the book 4 out of 5 stars, but the ending gets 6 out of 5.

Posted on by JenniferShelby

Book Review: A Song for a New Day

TW for discussion of the pandemic

The weirdest thing about Sarah Pinkser’s book A Song for a New Day is that it was written last year but reads like it’s about this year. The plot follows two paths and characters, beginning with musician Luce Cannon. Let’s have a moment of appreciation for that name. I love it. Luce is a musician about to play her first big stadium gig when terrorism shuts the world down. She still plays, earning her the dubious honour of being the last known musician to play a live show in the future that follows.

Next, we meet Rosemary Laws, years into the digital future, and from her we understand a scarring pox virus hits soon after the bombs, and life changes drastically. The world goes into lockdown and everyone isolates. School goes digital, dating goes virtual, concerts become a virtual, online event, usually through the StageHolo venue, a link in the monster Superwally conglomerate which monopolizes the future. Packages are delivered by drones and thanks to virtual reality tech, life goes on from isolation.

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This section of the book was enormously comforting to read from my own lockdown and isolation. Many of us are worried about how life is going to look post-pandemic and here is an easily believable future already imagined for us. We survive, and it isn’t that bad at all.

Except.

Sigh.

It turns out that the Superwally’s of the world were making a little too much money off of this new status quo, so much so that they developed a vested interest in keeping people isolated and using their gear. Twenty or so years on, there are congregation laws that dictate people aren’t allowed to meet up in any numbers but there hasn’t been any outbreaks or terrorism in a long time. Luce is heavy into an underground scene of speak-easy like illegal concerts where people attend to experience live music, elements of which never quite translated to the virtual space. The artists chafe against StageHolo’s monopoly of the music industry.

Meanwhile, Rosemary has been hired by StageHolo as a talent scout and is venturing outside her family bubble and meeting people in the real world for the first time, which both terrifies and exhilarates her. She’s about to find out that her safe digital world might be an economic prison fabricated with methods she doesn’t agree with.

This book is a good read, especially from a mid-pandemic perspective. I like that it gave me hope and rang true while also projecting a few cautionary elements that are based in corporate nature. I thought a lot about my musician friends, especially the ones who have been hosting facebook live concerts since March, while I read this book, but I also thought about my own situation.

As a writer, I can handle a degree of isolation without my art suffering for it (unlike Luce). As a mother of young children living in eastern Canada, I’m largely left out of the wider social world of writing conventions, so when conventions went online, I felt like a kid in a candy store. Some aspects of this digital world have far-reaching benefits and I’m not in a place to accept their downsides without a fight. Therefore, the second half of this book made me as grumpy as the first half comforted me. People in similar situations, or people who have disabilities that keep them isolated, may feel the same.

Ultimately, the story wins over my own moodiness. If your mental health is in a place where you can read about a pandemic, do yourself a favor and grab this book. 4 1/2 out of 5 stars.

 

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Book Review: The Medusa Effect by J.S. Pailly

I seem to be overcoming my anxiety-related reader’s block. It’s also possible that the compounding anxiety has just cancelled the old anxiety out, welp. All told, it’s good news, because I’m excited about the Medusa Effect: A Tomorrow News Network Novella by J. S. Pailly.

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I finished this one the same day it came out: it’s that triple-threat of a great premise, easy to read writing, and excellent pacing.

The story’s teenage protagonist, Milo, is something of a screw-up. He lives with his family on a lithium mining colony on a far-flung planet. He has no memories of Earth and struggles with his grades and agriculture duties. When not overwhelmed by the science of the mines, Milo spends his time with his girlfriend Lianna, watching Talie Tappler and the Tomorrow News Network online as they travel through time and space recording the great tragedies, disasters, and events throughout the universe.

When he sees Talie and her cameraman, a cyborg addicted to illegal emotions named Cygnus, at his colony, he knows something terrible is about happen. I’ll stop here before I spoil the story.

Something that stood out to me with Pailly’s writing is the hard science embedded into the story that can easily confuse readers who may be unfamiliar with the more complicated concepts. Pailly glides the reader through these tricky bit with easy to understand explanations and admirable clarity. I suppose this is to be expected from a writer who also publishes a science blog.Click here if you’d like to visit that blog for yourself (I recommend it). Pailly is also a wonderful artist, as demonstrated on his blog and his cover artwork (did I already mention triple-threat? Yeah? Okay, I won’t say it again, then).

The Medusa Effect ends all too soon but there is a also a bonus short story at the end that introduces a rival time-travelling network (!!) and hints of more Tomorrow News Network stories to come. I’ll be first in line for those. I give this one 5/5 stars.

The Medusa Effect: A Tomorrow News Network Novella is currently available as an ebook for kindle. Click here to go check it out.