For the love of books
The evaluation of a single series, that might not even be a series, is not necessary going to be the perfect place for collecting information, but can hopefully still lead to interesting insights.
Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto is an experiment in perspectives. Following a film director and her hired translator who write their own scripts for the same movie, it takes the reader through the perspectives of a variety of characters, both real and film creations, to tell the story of a massacre that happened during the Philippine-American War in the village of Balangiga.
I skimmed the book and could hardly recall what it was about before I picked it up again to write this article, so I don’t remember whether I noticed this particular section the first time, but the book’s introduction talks a lot about making your books contain realistic teenagers.
The protagonist’s life becomes a vessel for the past, for fixing mistakes. All sorts of horrors, building until it cannot be contained. I suppose the evil dark lord figure in Lydia’s story would be racism and sexism, and the systems that keep them entrenched in our lives, and Lydia is tasked with trying to defy them without any choice in the matter.
Beyond the Black Door, by A. M. Strickland is a book about souls, and also a book about asexuality. The protagonist, Kamai, is asexual, and she comes to know more about her identity as she battles the forces of evil.
