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We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou...
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Impostors by Scott Westerfeld (Impostors #1)

Frey and Rafi are inseparable . . . two edges of the same knife. But only one of them is ever seen in public.

Frey is Rafi's twin sister-and her body double. Their powerful father has many enemies, and the world has grown dangerous as the old order falls apart. So while Rafi was raised to be the perfect daughter, Frey has been taught to kill. Her only purpose is to protect her sister, to sacrifice herself for Rafi if she must.

When her father sends Frey in Rafi's place as collateral in a precarious deal, she becomes the perfect impostor. But Col, the son of a rival leader, is getting close enough to spot the killer inside her . . . .

TITLE: Impostors
AUTHOR: Scott Westerfeld
PUBLISHER: Scholastic Audio
YEAR: 2018
LENGTH: 416 pages (8 hours 39 minutes)
AGE: Young Adult
GENRE: Science Fiction
RECOMMENDED: TBD

DNF 1 hour 59 minutes in (23%),

I loved UGLIES, but IMPOSTORS feels too young for the adult I am now. It relies enough on knowledge of the first series, but I think I’d be confusing for someone who tried to start here without reading the original quartet. The new stuff that it adds feels very coincidental. Early on there’s a thing that happens to Rafi where's she's thinking about something that she predicts is totally gonna happen. It ends up forcing the moment instead of building any kind of anticipation, messing with my thoughts and chilling the meta-narrative level in a way that pulled me out of the story. There are also references to technology that were thoroughly explain in the previous books, but doesn’t really show how they work this time around. All of this makes it feel like an awkward middle ground between not wanting to rehash things explained before, but also by referencing most things based on them being different this time. Also I don’t like how the romance plot seems very forced.

I'll keep my fond memories of the first three Uglies books and I don't plan to read this new series.

Moderate CW for blood, violence, gun violence, injury detail, medical content, medical trauma, death.

Minor CW for alcohol.

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