You don't sound like a wackaloon; you sound like a bibliophile.

Sox, I just discovered Cat Valente recently too! She has a middle grade novel coming out this month, I think, called The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and it's fantastic. Now I need to track down everything else she's written...

Oh, go read her Palimpsest! That's how I first found her. And "The Girl Who Circumnavigated..." is referred to in Palimpsest, which predates "The Girl..."

"The Girl..." wasn't originally intended to ever be written, but she started it as a project on LJ as a way to earn income, and then a publisher picked it up. I forgot that it was coming out as a book in its own right; I need to pick it up.

Anyway, read Palimpsest. It's lovely and mind-blowing.

I'm looking forward to reading Fairyland, and now Palimpsest too!

Okay, I almost ordered "The Girl who Circumnavigated..." based on a Tweet from Kate P earlier this week - but now you guys have forced me to order that and Palimpsest.

sumi, do you mean another Kate P or someone else? I love love love The Girl Who Circumnavigated... , but I'm not on Twitter.

I will definitely have to check out Palimpsest now! And I have Deathless as well, which I would like to get to sometime this summer.

This looks like a lot of fun, too -- a YAish novel that uses found pictures, from Quirk Books. The prologue and first chapter are up here to sample.

hmmm, now I can't think of whose twitter feed I got it from.

Okay. Behind the times here, but I just devoured (sorry) the Hunger Games trilogy. And yeah, I loved it. The holes in world-building didn't bother me, really, only little pet peeves in the first book like for god's sake, Katniss, if you are dying of thirst chew on some leaves, ffs . And it didn't bother me that she spent so much of Mockingjay sedated and/or in closets . She lost much of her agency , true, but since so much of that agency was illusory, I didn't blame her for retreating . Clearly YMockingjayMV. I guessed that she was going to kill Coin , and it didn't strike me as giving up her one goal so much as giving up on revenge and ultimately rejecting her role as pawn of any administration. Plus, it was pretty obvious that Snow was going to die anyway . Katniss was never one for wasting an arrow . And yes, the ending to the whole thing was a bit of a cheat, but it bothered me much less than that of Harry Potter . Especially once I realized that Gale's prediction had come true; she had chosen the one of them who had what she couldn't live without - hope . Chilling, in its own way. Prim's death didn't bother me either (I mean, it devastated me, but narratively speaking; in a way, it reminded me of Anya's in that I didn't see it coming and it's always sudden and war doesn't know when to stop. . And I'm completely convinced that it was Gale's/Beetee's bomb, and Coin's order . Didn't Gale say that he didn't mind killing their spies who were in the Nut, for a larger purpose ?

I don't know. I'm not sure how coherent I'm being. I also want to make it clear that it's not that some people's objections are unfair, just trying to explain why they didn't bother me. I kind of think of the trilogy as sort of a mashup of Gladiator + Survivor + Lord of the Flies + random war movie and it worked for me. I dig flawed, unreliable, badass female narrators (see also: The Blue Place's Aud Torvingen). And given the waterboarding saga of the last several years, I find not sinking to the level of our enemies to be a still-relevant conversation .

I'll be interested to see what amyth thinks of it. I don't know how I'm going to watch the movies, though. I watched that fan-filmed scene of Katniss at Rue's death and nearly couldn't take it.

eta I find it funny that I got all the spoiler tags right, but managed to misspell Katniss.