Weekly media report - for the week ending 2025 05 28
May. 28th, 2025 10:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gentlyepigramsBooks
Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Social Safety Net, by Jessica Calarco. Calarco traces how America chose as a matter of policy to dump systemic risk on women as part of the Reagan revolution (which the author doesn't exactly identify as that, but it is). When nobody is available to do caretaking, in personal life or as a job, it falls to women, who are usually insufficiently compensated, for systemic reasons.
The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh. Really fantastic boarding school mystery with a Deputy Head with secrets as a protagonist. The twists in this one are really excellent. Five stars!
A Trinket for the Taking, by Victoria Laurie. The ideas in this mystery were solid but the execution was lacking. The narrator/protagonist is super cool, beautiful, powerful, immortal, and dumb as a rock in her personal relationships to the point of it having to be magic. Not sorry I finished instead of DNFing, but the second one isn't out and I won't be looking for it.
Tideborn, by Eliza Chan. Second in what I think is a duology set in a southeast Asian inflected post-apocalyptic science fantasy. Taking up from the disaster at the end of the last book, the surviving characters scatter to deal with the fallout and come to some good and some gruesomely awful resolutions. Chan sticks the landing.
Short Stories
For Ever and Ever, by Mary Anne Mohanraj. Paywalled. The third in a series about a mother who commits a crime for her son and is expelled off-planet for him.
Movies & TV
Murderbot, Episode 3. Ends on a real cliffhanger as Murderbot finds out who did the bad thing, sort of.
Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Social Safety Net, by Jessica Calarco. Calarco traces how America chose as a matter of policy to dump systemic risk on women as part of the Reagan revolution (which the author doesn't exactly identify as that, but it is). When nobody is available to do caretaking, in personal life or as a job, it falls to women, who are usually insufficiently compensated, for systemic reasons.
The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh. Really fantastic boarding school mystery with a Deputy Head with secrets as a protagonist. The twists in this one are really excellent. Five stars!
A Trinket for the Taking, by Victoria Laurie. The ideas in this mystery were solid but the execution was lacking. The narrator/protagonist is super cool, beautiful, powerful, immortal, and dumb as a rock in her personal relationships to the point of it having to be magic. Not sorry I finished instead of DNFing, but the second one isn't out and I won't be looking for it.
Tideborn, by Eliza Chan. Second in what I think is a duology set in a southeast Asian inflected post-apocalyptic science fantasy. Taking up from the disaster at the end of the last book, the surviving characters scatter to deal with the fallout and come to some good and some gruesomely awful resolutions. Chan sticks the landing.
Short Stories
For Ever and Ever, by Mary Anne Mohanraj. Paywalled. The third in a series about a mother who commits a crime for her son and is expelled off-planet for him.
Movies & TV
Murderbot, Episode 3. Ends on a real cliffhanger as Murderbot finds out who did the bad thing, sort of.
