Tag Archives: Genevieve Valentine

Weekly Fiction Rec Roundup 11

Posted on by

The Weekly Fiction Rec Roundup returns with it’s 11th installment. I’ve got five stories to share with you this week.There is a lot of despair and darkness in this week’s stories, in particular through our middle three selections that have such a similarity of feel that they could easily fit together in an anthology featuring dark stories of women protagonists who are perhaps uncompromising, perhaps a bit broken, perhaps even unlikeable.

Clearly I was gravitating to the uncomfortable in my reading this weak, though that should not be taken as any condemnation of these stories. We need stories of survival and struggle, both on personal scales and larger and these have it. We also have some interesting sci-fi and a moody, though not dark, not really, jazz-age fantasy to look at. Oh, and this will also be the first Roundup to use in-line notes1Because I tend to be mighty fond of adding parenthetical additions to my main point and I’m kind of liking using this system to both get to ramble on a bit and clean up my presentation., so there’s that.

Continue reading →

Book Recommendation: Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine

Posted on by

So I’ve been meaning to write this review for about 2 weeks now. As soon as I finished Mechanique I knew I wanted to write about it, but I haven’t had the time. I teach English as a Foreign Language at a university in South Korea and the end of semester always means two weeks of exhausting work. I mostly teach English Conversation so final exams mean I have to sit down and talk to students. It doesn’t sound so bad but going over the same questions and hearing the same sorts of answers (often with the same sorts of mistakes) over and over again for hours a day over the course of a week is surprisingly draining. There is also the fact that when you’re marking someone’s conversation skill and language ability you really have to give them your full and undivided attention. If you let your mind wander you risk being unfair in your marking. The week after exams is always long too as I usually have a backlog of final tests and homework assignments to mark before I can compile final grades. The payoff for those two weeks of mental exhaustion though are a generally easy job and two months of paid vacation per semester, so I’m not complaining.

This means I’m going to have lots of time for writing and blogging, assuming I don’t let the joy of freedom devolve into long hours of TV, computer games and naps. That’s always a danger. Anyway, expect to see more action here on Looking For a Rabbit Hole (still pondering a name change on that front…). To start us off I should get to that review, yes?

To be clear, I am reviewing the audiobook of Mechanique, which means I’m really reviewing the work of two different storytellers: the book’s author, Genevieve Valentine [ her blog here] [her twitter here], and the audiobook’s narrator, Scott Aiello [other books narrated by Scott here]. Both of these fine artists did a great job in making Mechanique an enjoyable audiobook experience. Early on in my listening I realized that, as someone aiming sqaurely at the goal becoming a proffessional writer, I was very jealous of the writing here. Mechanique is not your standard novel. The narrative is non-linear, effortlessly jumping back and forth through time, and uses multiple points of view; many of the Circus Tresaulti’s performers take their turn in the spotlight.

Continue reading →