The Radish

Aya Surheyao " Nishat can be anything she wants to be, except herself " (Jaigirdar 204)   In 2021 I’m making an effort to branch out from sci-fi/fantasy books and read more realistic fiction. Full of love, laughter, and tears, The Henna Wars does not disappoint. This novel, by Adiba Jaigirdar, tells the story of a Bangladeshi teenager who moved to Ireland with her family when she was young. At home, Nishat grapples with her new family dynamic when she comes out to her parents. At school, she’s used to the occasional rumors flying around about her culture and her parent’s Bengali restaurant. She’s shocked when in a school business competition, two of her classmates (including the starter of the rumors) decide to start selling henna designs, just like her. Furious, Nishat becomes determined to beat them. Throughout the story, Nishat displays great strength and persistence. She refuses to break down after her mother essentially gives her ultimatum saying, “Your Abbu and I love v...

     Although I am going to continue blogging about fairy tales for the time being this will not be a continuation of the Grimms' Fairy Tales blog. The stories do come from about the same time from an author just a country away from the Brother's Grimm. This blog will of course be about Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales . Hans Christian Andersen is of course best known for writing The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling . And although The Ugly Duckling is in this book, unless it was renamed The Little Mermaid is sadly not. Other than The Ugly Duckling the book includes 28 other stories The specific fairy tale the blog will be about this time around is The Garden of Paradise . It is a rather strange story about a prince's search for the namesake garden. So without delay let us start the synopsis.     The story begins with an explanation by the narrator of the prince's grandmother explaining the Garden of Paradise to him. The Prince is utterly absorbed b...

                         The Andromeda Evolution  is the second part of the book I did my last blog post on, The Andromeda Strain  by Michael Crichton .  It is set several generations after the original book, and discusses a potential re-emergence of the mysterious hexagonal shaped microorganisms that nearly caused a global crisis in the previous book (Disclaimer: as this book is the second part in one that I've already done a post on, so it will contain spoilers). Like its predecessor, this book hooks the reader on the first page and makes it difficult to put the book down. Before finding this book, I didn't think it would be possible to create one better than its prequel. I haven't finished the book yet, but from what I've read it seems like this book will not disappoint. It is exciting and enjoyable to read for many of the same reasons as The Andromeda Strain. Michael Crichton introduced ma...

  Kathryn Phillips “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” Seventeen-year-old Alice Prosepine and her mother, Ella, have been living on the road their entire lives in an attempt to escape the terrible luck that seems to follow them around wherever they go. But when Alice receives a letter telling her that Alice’s estranged grandmother Althea Prosepine, the author of a famous cult-classic collection of dark fantasy stories called The Hinterland has died alone on her estate, Alice learns how bad her luck can get. After her mother mysteriously disappears, leaving behind nothing but an excerpt from The Hinterland , Alice must reluctantly team up with an Althea Prosepine superfan, Ellery Finch, and travel to her grandmother’s estate to find Ella. The two soon realize that Althea’s fairy tales might be more fact than fantasy. The main reason I loved The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert was the characters. They’re extremely well-written, with realistic aspirations, personalities, ...

    While Roadside Picnic's story and characters are extremely interesting, with the main character, Red, having significant character development as the book takes place over many years by skipping large groups of time.       Before the events of Roadside Picnic some sort of alien visitors arrive and create a large area filled with extreme dangers like slime that destroys anything it touches and an area completed destroyed by some sort of plague. However along with those dangers there are valuable artifacts like batteries that never run out and disks that can't be separated. These treasures cause scavengers called Stalkers to sneak past the guards and brave the dangers in hopes of getting fabulously rich; Red is one of these Stalkers.      What makes this setting so interesting to me is how limitless the possibilities it is. The book makes it extremely clear how only the well known parts are explored and that the closer to the cent...

Aya Surheyao  “Her power slit their throats, flung them back against the wall, dove inside their screaming mouths, and burned them from the inside out… And then, Rielle looked down at herself and saw that again… her hands, her boots, her skirts were drenched in fresh blood. (Legrand 384)”       Dark, heart-wrenching, and action-packed, Kingsbane makes for a great fantasy read. It is the second book in the Empirium trilogy, written by Claire Legrand. In the world of Avitas, an ancient war between humans and angels ends with the angels tricked into inhabiting The Deep, a realm where their bodies are stripped from their consciousnesses. Now they seek escape … and revenge. This book straddles two timelines, with one set farther in the past where Rielle struggles to believe that she is the Sun Queen and not the Blood Queen, meant to doom humanity. One can infer from the passage above which one she turns out to be. The second queen is Eliana and her story takes place ...

     If you could not tell from the terrible pun in the title this blog is going to be about the Grimm Brothers' Fairy Tale . It is a collection of the fairy tales we all know and love written by the brother Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. These fairy tales were written back when caring about children's mental health and not murdering people in children's books was not something many people cared about. These were stories meant to instill messages in kids' minds, one way or another. As you can probably tell these made the fairy tales I read in this book rather grim, I'm sorry that's the last pun. Another thing to note is the fact that the brothers did not make up most of these stories, someone else did. The brothers made a collection of tales they got from other people, which they then did some edits to. So with that all established, let's get into one of the weirdest stories I've read.     The first story I want to discuss is The Gallant Tailor  which was publ...