“Heir to the Sun” by Jennifer Allis Provost

I forget how I ended up with this book, but somehow I landed a free ebook on Kindle. As far as free fantasy goes, it was pretty middle of the road. Some things were cool, others not so much. Mostly it’s just me protesting over how all fantasy just has to be so sexist, what on earth is with that?

The book starts by following two fae that are trapped in what’s called a doja by demons. They are more-or-less used as sex slaves and it’s pretty brutal even though you don’t get a description directly of the violence. These two are Torrin and Hillel and they start working with their fae guard slaves to try and escape. The story then swaps to a priestess, Alluria, and her guard Caol’nir who are clearly in love with each other, but as a priestess Alluria is sworn to be the mate of their god. So Alluria has to figure out how to leave the priestess role and be his mate. So while that romance stuff is going down, the slaves escape, led by Hillel, and they rename her Asherah (or the Deliverer). They travel around freeing other dojas until they get to the elves. Once there, the elf king Lormac falls for Asherah and agrees to help her. They end up teaming up with some of the fae (including Caol’nir) to take down the fae king, who they learned has teamed up with the demons and is letting them set up these dojas.

They also learn that Alluria is likely the daughter of their god, so she joins the fight with some new magic powers. They capture the king, but in the confusion Lormac is killed by the fae guard that Asherah originally worked with because the guard didn’t want anyone else protecting Asherah. Asherah kills the fae king and she ends up ruling both the elves and the fae all together. Alluria and Caol’nir take off to the countryside to have several children.

The main thing about this book that’s pretty cool is the narrative structure. It starts off as third-person perspective from Hillel and then swaps to third-person perspective of Caol’nir. But then there are also sections called Alluria speaks or Hillel speaks that are first-person accounts of what the characters are thinking or feeling. Which is pretty inventive, giving the reader both sides. But also the storylines of the slaves and the priestesses manage to come together and join forces so now you have the perspectives of multiple characters on the same events. This is used really well during battles when all of the characters are in different places.

But my main complaint is that it’s just such typical fantasy with all of this violence towards women and the general treatment of the female characters. The dojas are basically keeping fae sex slaves to breed demon babies. Asherah talks a lot to Lormac about how she’s “broken” and practically destroyed by her experiences there which is not a very feminist attitude to the whole thing. Getting sexually assaulted does not make you broken or weak or anything else, that’s just ridiculous. There’s also a scene where the demons get into the temple and Alluria ends up getting branded by one of them. Which is really taking this to a whole new level of possession as then there’s talk of her being marked and all that. I’m not about it. Plus in general I think Asherah is the only female warrior we see, Alluria wants to join the fight and is told no repeatedly but she insists on coming. Yes women do fight, but the model of there being exactly one woman is really getting old. And she is constantly compared to elven women who apparently do not fight and sit at home. Can we please move beyond this?

Only other thing I want to bring up is that there is some possible queer baiting. After escaping the first doja it is implied that Torrim and Hillel are interested in each other romantically. There’s a conversation that they have about how some of the other women are having sex with some of the men while they’re like snuggling naked before bed or something like that. But the relationship doesn’t go anywhere, they both end up with men by the end. There is an exchange where they state that they love each other very much, which is cool because platonic love is great as well, but it still seems odd to me that their relationship did not go the way I thought it would. I’m not sure if that counts as queer baiting or not, but it is off putting.

Anyways the book is part of a series, I think the next one continues Alluria and Caol’nir’s journey. Asherah’s seems like it has further to go as well so I would be surprised if she did not make an appearance. I probably won’t pick it up though, I’m just real sick of these fantasy sexism tropes and I think I need to find a series without them if I want to do a deep dive.

This Is Beautiful: Girl Scout Cookies

 IT'S THE SEASON FOR GIRL SCOUT COOKIES AND I HAVE THIN MINTS

“The Dark Prophecy” by Rick Riordan

This is the second book in Riordan’s The Trials of Apollo series (first one can be found here). I honestly think that this one was even better than the first installment! Which is rare, but I think also makes sense for this franchise, the first book had to tie it to the rest of the universe and this one allows the series to open up and breathe a little.

The series opens with Apollo, Leo, and Calypso flying their dragon to Indianapolis. Apollo had visions of the place and then end up landing there to check it out. Almost immediately, the dragon malfunctions and they end up getting chased by demons through the streets to the Waystation, an outpost designed to protect travelling demigods. Right now it’s not used much, one of the Triumverate (a group of 3 reincarnated Roman emperors who want to take over the world or something) is in town and he has his minions all over the place. Emmie and Josephine are two ex Hunters of Artemis and they run the place.

Here Apollo learns that one of the ancient Oracles is in town. It’s a wild one, there’s a cave you enter that destroys your sanity and gives you a prophecy. You then exit and sit on the Chair of Memory to release the prophecy and regain your senses. Jo and Emmie’s daughter went there and they think she was captured. Apollo gets enlisted to help them, so he goes into the enemy camp with Calypso. There they manage to free the griffins that were kidnapped from the Waystation and Apollo is reunited with Meg. They head back and make plans to return and find Jo and Emmie’s lost daughter. They do find her, and many others that they then free. The Emperor starts making plans to find the Waystation and destroy it, Apollo and Meg though need to find the ancient Oracle so they peel off to do that. Meg then gets infected with the prophecy, Apollo drags her back and returns to a fight. One of the griffins is killed in the fray, but our heroes are eventually successful. Meg’s prophecy is a Shakespearean sonnet telling them to head to Camp Jupiter, and saying that they need a satyr to guide them. The book ends with Meg finding Grover Underwood and telling him to lead them.

There’s a lot to love about this book. To start broadly, I love the world building within the Midwest since that area tends to get overlooked. The Waystation is a really cool piece of history and it makes for a neat stopping point for the crew. There aren’t many places that demigods are able to grow old (we don’t even see that at Camp Half-Blood, it’s just Camp Jupiter) so it’s good to see more of that emerging in the world.

There’s also world building within the universe of this series. One of the liberated captives from the emperor is a demigod who is from Yoruba mythology. His powers are clearly different from the Greek/Roman gods, even though it isn’t specified at this time. Riordan has implied this in the past, but this is the first confirmation that we get from Apollo that this is a real, and valid, occurrence.

Finally there’s clearly a move to make this book really accepting. Apollo is very queer, and a lot of this book revolves around him as a parent and as a person. Previous relationships that he’s had with men are brought up and play a large role in it. And it’s never seen by any of the characters as odd or strange. And there are multiple instances where it’s specified that everyone should be respected regardless of ability. This is stated in response to some demons being color-blind, and when a character is literally blinded by Apollo. It’s really nice to read this and to not have to encounter hatred within this fictional world.

I’m very excited for the third installment. Grover is one of my favorite characters, and it seems that we’ll be back at Camp Jupiter seeing that cast of characters. Onwards!

This Is Beautiful: Performing

 I had my first performance with my glowsticking group in several months this weekend. I took last semester off to focus on teaching, hence the several month break. It is nice to be back at it, I love performing and this is the group that tends to get asked to do guest performances the most. It can be stressful and nerve-wracking, but in the end it doesn't matter how you did, it's just fun! It's good to be back.

“The Tower’s Alchemist” by Alesha Escobar

I got this ebook for free somewhere, I don’t remember how. It’s… fine. For being free.

The book is about an English spy during World War II (WWII), the twist is that she’s a magician/alchemist and that’s just a normal part of the world. Having said that, I can’t figure out why this is part of WWII other than for the shock value to be honest. If you set your story during WWII you can then do horrible things to your characters and it’s not as questioned. Anyways the main character was trained at The Tower but then left to do the spy thing and make a difference or something. Also her dad was also trained there and he’s on the run from the alchemist authorities so she doesn’t see him very much.

I found a lot of the spy plot pretty confusing, there’s a bunch of “well that happened so now we have to go here” without a justification for WHY we are going there other than to advance the plot. So I won’t summarize that since it likely won’t be coherent anyways. There’s a whole subplot of her kinda sorta dating another spy who she then accuses of betraying her and then they break up. This leads to lots of pining for a normal life where she can be a heterosexual lady and date and have a family or whatever (which I can’t relate to being a non-heterosexual).

I’m being a downer on this book but this was an entertaining read, I think alternate histories can be fun. In terms of the writing though it sometimes gets bogged down in exchanges where the author throws in references to pop culture of the 40s and feels the need to explain it. Personally I think readers can either look it up or likely already know it.

This book is part of a series; I have no desire to read the others but this also wasn’t a bad time. I think the author just needs to figure out why she’s writing about this time period to shore up the plot a lot, there’s potential for better things here.

This Is Beautiful: Winter Parties

 Last night my friend threw a winter friends party that was a potluck, donation gathering, and party all in one! It was super fun, and it's in general really nice to see friends when it's the winter and everything's cold and sad. It really lifted all of our spirits I think. So go see some friends! Kick that seasonal affective disorder out!

Ancestry and Genetics

 This is adapted from a post I made to an anti-racism server earlier. I thought since it was so long, might as well turn it into a blog post!

Hey so while we’re on the subject of ancestry, thought I’d share some thoughts that I have from a genetics perspective since that’s what I study and I have many thoughts on this. Please let me know if anything’s confusing, since I also want to teach genetics so figured this’d be good practice for me. Sorry in advance for the essay!

Ok so ancestry can be important to you culturally or personally, I’m not trying to discredit any of that. But from a genetics perspective? A lot of it is nonsense. And a lot of this gets co-opted by white supremacists, so I think it’s really important to understand the science of what’s actually going on here.

Biologically, each person comes from two parents that you share a (random) half of your DNA with. (Doesn’t have to mean that these people are in your life or anything, but you have 2 parental slots in your ancestry.) Go back another generation you have 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, and so on. If we assume each generation is 25-30 years and each generation doubles in size, 500 years ago you had 1,048,576 ancestors. A thousand years ago you had 1,099,511,627,776 ancestors, which is now more people than have ever existed! (I think best estimate is 107 billion people have ever existed, might be slightly out of date on that though.) Basically the solution to this paradox is that some people occupy multiple positions on the family tree, and that there is overlap in everyone’s family trees. If you do the math, anyone with European ancestry shares one common ancestor from the 10^th century in Europe. And this is nuts, this isn’t how we typically think about ancestry. We think that we come from a distinct line, when in reality my ancestors are also your ancestors. We are all much more alike (genetically) than we think, the differences between individual people make up less than 0.1% of the genome. 

This also makes sense from a historical standpoint: people move around, borders aren’t static. People go places and have kids and move around in relatively short periods of time. Insisting that you come exclusively from one village means that you’re ignoring a whole lot of your family history (could be lost or just uninteresting). It also means that you’d be dangerously inbred if that were true. Sidenote on that: you get 2 copies of each gene, one from each parent. Your genes are actually happier with 2 different copies than with 2 of the same copy. Since we all share 99.9% of our DNA our bodies can handle a certain amount of sameness, we are all inbred to some extent (fun stuff!), but when everything is the same is when there’s a problem.

Let’s take my family as an example. (Take all this with a grain of salt, I’m only one person and not representative of a lot of other people and I’m very privileged in many ways here.) I’m Italian American, and honestly I’m proud of it, growing up Italian American has had a big impact on my life. My family is so Italian we once put in a bulk order for shirts that say “Legalize Marinara” because everyone wanted one. I don’t know very much about my family tree (mostly because that never interested me, I think my mom put in some work to develop one though) but let’s look back at what I know. My parents both grew up in New York City, my grandparents were kids when they immigrated to the US from Italy just before the Great Depression (early 1900s). My great-grandparents (8 of them remember) we’ve traced back to a few cities in southern Italy. My great-great-grandparents (16 in total) I have no idea where they’re from, probably some of them lived in Italy, but I’m willing to bet a good chunk of them lived in various places around the Mediterranean. Italy wasn’t even unified until 1871 (and some areas didn’t join until after, but this initial time is right about the time of my great-great-grandparents) and before that it was different territories with different governments. So why do those borders not matter when considering ancestry? Why do I give a full stop at the modern Italy borders? And if you go back farther, my great-great-great-grandparents (32) probably came from all over Europe and the Mediterranean!

Even looking culturally, it doesn’t say much about me. When my family immigrated, it was the heyday of discriminating against Italians (this is not the case anymore, Italians are white). There were lots of traditions they stopped under the pressure of assimilation. I have a great-grandparent who went to Sing Sing prison for demanding fair wages for being Italian, and when he didn’t get that, he burned down the overseer’s house. (I only mention this because THAT’S COOL AS FUCK it’s one of my favorite family stories.) It even affected my parents to a certain extent, my dad was sent home from elementary school with a note saying that he had to stop speaking with an Italian accent. Really most of the traditions we have come from my parents growing up in an Italian American enclave in New York City. Great example of this is that we used to have a pasta course during Thanksgiving dinner (very Italian American given that Italians don’t celebrate American Thanksgiving). We don’t do this anymore because it’s just too much food. So we’re even losing those traditions since culture is constantly evolving. If I have kids, they likely will just be raised with American traditions, maybe with a side of marinara sauce.

Alright so given alllllll of that, what do I even mean when I say that I’m “proud to be Italian”? I’m not even sure, it can feel a lot like I picked a random aspect of my upbringing to hang 90% of my personality on. But I think it also means that I want to feel connected to my family, and to our specific traditions. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it can often be used in a way to imply things that simply aren’t true.

Apologies again for the essay, but let me know if anything’s unclear. I can also dig up sources for further information if you’d like, but I’d highly recommend the book How to Argue with a Racist: What Our Genes Do (And Don’t) Say About Human Difference by Adam Rutherford since he talks about this and other genetics ideas embedded in racist arguments. 

This Is Beautiful: Helping With Interviews

 Every January, my graduate program has interviews for people who applied to join it. I've been volunteering as a host since I joined, so the past four years, and I really enjoy doing it! Having said that, I do suspect that this is my last year, I've been doing it for a while and it can be time consuming.

The past two years recruitment has been virtual, which isn't as fun but it does take up less time. This was the first time it's been in person in a while as a result! It was just really nice to talk to the applicants face-to-face and to answer their questions over dinner instead of over a zoom call. I think they all prefer it too.

Recruitment is fun, I'll be a little sad to not do it anymore. But also, it means that I'll have more time during interview season.