LESSER RUINS, shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize—United States & Canada—for Small Presses

LESSER RUINS
MARK HABER
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3 very grouchy stars of five

Shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize—United States & Canada—for Small Presses Winner announced 12 March 2025

The Publisher Says: From the author of Reinhardt's Garden and Saint Sebastian's Abyss comes a breathless new novel of delirious obsession.

Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work—a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way—from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album.

As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves.

Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, Lesser Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I connected with this sad-sack whiner in his grief for his dead wife, and his beautifully evoked love for coffee.

Apart from that, I loathed him and wanted him to shut his moan-hole.

I live (involuntarily and with poor grace) in proximity to a grievance-led, dementia-addled, old drunk. This is like reading the smart version of him venting his legit sadness and tiresome regrets in the key of "they done me wrong" on endless repeat.

I think this book is better than I perceive it to be, due to my own life's issues and difficulties. It has to be, to have elicited from me the degree of irritated disgust with its protagonist that it did. Had it been simply a poor job of writing or storytelling, I'd simply have Pearl-Ruled it and moved on with my day.

Read the free sample that Kindle offers you, you'll know right away if this resonates with you, and if the resonance is on a frequency you enjoy reverberating to. I very much did not like this read. The reasons I've given suggest to me that others without my life circumstances will feel otherwise.

My rating being an expression of my personal pleasure in the read explains its paltriness. You will most likely, or so I hope, disagree with me.

THE CASE OF CEM, shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize—United States & Canada—for Small Presses

THE CASE OF CEM
VERA MUTAFCHIEVA (tr. Angela Rodel)
Sandorf Passage (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

Shortlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize—United States & Canada—for Small Presses Winner announced 12 March 2025

The Publisher Says: Vera Mutafchieva’s The Case of Cem, presented as a series of depositions by historical figures before a court, tells a straightforward tale: Upon the death of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror in 1481, his eldest son Bayezid takes the throne. However, discontented factions within the Ottoman army urge Mehmed’s second son Cem, a well-educated and experienced warrior, to oppose his brother’s ascension. Bayezid refuses, setting off a ruthless power struggle and forcing Cem into long years of exile, a pawn for European powers as they try to slow the Ottoman Empire’s expansion.

This enticing novel of court intrigue maintains lasting resonance for being a personal exploration of emigration and loss as told through the historical era during which the politics of the East and West were sketched out with utter clarity. These early lines of demarcation, as voiced through Christian and Muslim emissaries, power hungry rulers, unflinching warriors, and poets, have indelibly influenced the word as we know it today.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This Bulgarian historical novel blew my mind: How the HELL has this long, deep, fascinating art object existed for most of my life and I am only now, at *mumblety*-five, hearing about it?! Life is not fair, we all know that, but this gem of writing and thinking remaining unread by Anglophones for most of six decades is a borderline crime against humanity.

Cold Wars, political spats among the too-powerful and too-rich, are to blame for this kind of asininity. Cem's life and times were as transitional as the paradigm shift we're undergoing today. Cem's imagined trial, inspired by a casual remark made by a too-powerful man of that time, is Author Mutafchieva's inspired rendering of History's treatment of the eponymous Cem.

In presenting this case, the first decision Author Mutafchieva had to make was to whom the case was being presented. That decision then dictates where the case is set, how the witnesses are going to present their evidence, all the trappings of a court case. The witnesses are all dead; they address us directly from the afterlife, with their direct knowledge of events and, somehow, of the events that have transpired since their own deaths.

The dreaded second-person narration, the eternal chest-pokey "you," is thus inevitably the main choice the author makes. It was that choice which left this novel unread on my Kindle for months. I will say that this narrative choice was...not my favorite. I was not as irked as I would ordinarily be, however, because the framing device explains the necessity of its use...we're reading depositions from witnesses in a court case.

In the course of reading about the case of Cem, a picture of him emerges. The idea that this dreamy, loving, insufficiently ruthless man could rule an empire is laughable...and the empire would've been all the better for his reign. He would've been a humane leader, and we all know what happens to those honorable souls (ask the late US President Jimmy Carter). Therein, of course, the need for a "case" to be made...a decision rendered in the court of History, which is naturally enough made up of thee and me as History's heirs, successors, and assigns.

What we do not get is anything from Cem himself. He is acted upon, never an actor, as his life from birth as his father's favorite child, born of a christian wife (sin of sins!), is always defined by the loves, hates, and needs of others. His proposal made to his elder half-brother to divide the immensity of the Ottoman Empire was, I think, actually very sound; of course that idea was never going to fly in a world of winner-takes-all and us-v-them thinking. It wouldn't fly today in, say Ukraine for the sake of argument, for those same reasons.

What made this tale of Realpolitik in translation from the Bulgarian a five-star read is the way each deposition/chapter adds another layer of words and thereby ideas over the space that is Cem's. The heart of the book, the sine qua non of the story, the gravity so powerful it lenses the entire Ottoman Empire, and Europe its enemy, from each and every direction the light emitted by all the actors and each reporter of the action thus illuminated occupies. The layers thus accreted form a strange shape. There is no motion from under these layers; Cem is absent and thus volitionless.

How that reality can create an animated image is, frankly, alchemical. It's like the celluloid of the stories told about Cem pass through an undetectable development bath that causes the shadows of him we're seeing to move as different reporters shine light through that celluloid. We're seeing a movie, a polyphonic miniseries, an opera with a huge cast whose parts were written by different composers...all in the same key and tempo.

It should feel shaggy and have holes everywhere; it should be a sieve not a bowl. It is instead a cauldron with rippling waters from many sources and the light from many points combines to cast an unquiet image, now sharp now wavy, interference become more than a pattern.

I applaud the author, long dead (1929-2009), for doing the immense work of researching then reimagining that data. The result is, based on Rodel's work translating it, a masterwork of polyphony. Often when reading historical fiction, there comes a moment of storytelling that is inauthentic. It's an anachronism, or it's not part of the historical record. It *feels* wrong, or at least not right.

I never found that moment reading this story. It earns all five stars from me.

SUCKER PUNCH: Essays, apt title...on several levels

SUCKER PUNCH: Essays
SCAACHI KOUL
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The long-awaited follow-up from one of the most original and hilarious voices writing today.

Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her signature humor and fierce intelligence to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress. She examines the fights she’s had—with her parents, her ex-husband, her friends, online strangers, and herself—all in an attempt to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it's better to walk away.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Koul's funny. Not innocently amusing, funny. She's written before this (One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter) about her immigrant-to-Canada parents and her ongoing battles with their traditional expectations versus her Canadian ones. She had, then, a bit about her elaborate wedding...now it's about her pandemic experience, her mother's health crisis, the collapse of her marriage after that astonishing wedding...and something that's never been dealt with in her life, let alone her prose, before: she was sexually assaulted.

I do not know, or know of, a single solitary woman who does not have a story about her body being at the minimum threatened with sexual violence. Reading about it is, it seems, a means of creating solidarity and permission to say out loud that it's happened to you, like the very public #MeToo movement that's been bringing crimes to light that men are just as glad to have swept under the rug.

A proper millennial, Author Koul does her level-best to spin these facts of her life as...not funny, really, but sources or wry humor as she goes about coping with her wounds from them. I think a lot of women love to read these stories as a way to get perspective on the pain in their own lives. I'm aware of the reality and the awfulness of abuse in intimate relationships. It's not fun, and I myownself am not a fan of it as a topic for humorous coping.

Her other coping mechanism is rage. Full-throated, loudly expressed rage. That one I know from the inside; I do not think it is beneficial, nor appropriate, to valorize is as Author Koul does, while using humor to defuse its painful and destructive consequences on everyone...literally everyone...around her.

This is from my own experience: Go get counseling. Stay in counseling the rest of your life. Nothing will remove the rage. Work towards ways to minimize its footprint in your life, and the lives of those around you.

Three stars because it's trenchant and timely.

AMELIA BLOOMER: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon, a woman of moral certainty and impeccable rectitude who rebelled hard

AMELIA BLOOMER: Journalist, Suffragist, Anti-Fashion Icon
SARA CATTERALL
Belt Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$17.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A fascinating look at an underappreciated woman in American history whose newspaper fostered a national conversation on women's issues.

Those who recognize the name Amelia Bloomer usually do so because of bloomers, the clothing item named after her. While she was a rational dress advocate for a time—calling on women to abandon rigid corsets and heavy petticoats and opt for long trousers, shorter skirts, and sensible boots—it was "but an incident" in the larger story of her life and impact.

Bloomer edited and published The Lily, the first newspaper for and by women. Much like Bloomer herself, it started as a temperance rag before broadening to include some of the most important issues to women in that day, including the right to vote, and included contributions from thinkers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The groundbreaking paper brought the conversation from Seneca Falls right to the doorsteps of women across the expanding nation.

Guided by a rigid sense of morality and a Puritan work ethic, Bloomer remained open-minded to new ideas. She refused to be swayed by social norms and wrote cutting responses to those who tried to intimidate or shame her and her friends, a group that included Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. This deeply researched biography by Sara Catterall follows the many chapters of her life: her humble upbringing in upstate New York, her role in the temperance movement (and its true legacy as a wellspring of the women's rights movement), her years at The Lily, her groundbreaking position as deputy postmaster in Seneca Falls, her troubled health, and her eventual move to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where she continued to move the needle on women's suffrage in the more flexible new governments of the West.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It had never creased my cranium that Amelia Bloomer was a temperance crusader before I read this book. Given that my mother the abuser never drank, and I had one boyfriend in my life who ever raised a hand to me and that never happened while he was drunk, temperance just did not ever cause me to think "good idea". All my associations with Mrs. Bloomer were around her ideas regarding the idiotic way women were caged inside their clothing during this era. Corsets really are the bound feet of Western culture.

I was utterly unprepared to meet this wildly different Bloomer. She was a woman of her time, in many ways moreso than the more famous ladies like her friends Stanton and Anthony...both of whom she knew from living in Seneca Falls, New York, and each of whom influenced her increasingly radical thinking about women's suffrage...as she was married with children and required to earn her living alongside her husband as best she was able while still raising children. Dexter and she were co-workers, as he hired her to work alongside him as a postmaster after his stint as a Whig-supporting newspaper editor landed him the job. A government salary for a woman no less!

Her position as a temperance crusader led her to make the connection that the only way to stop the unregulated flow of alcohol was to exert political pressure to regulate it. That was impossible, on a practical level, absent votes for women. (She didn't live to see Prohibition and its horrifying unintended consequences.) So her rational dress and votes for women all owe their influence on US culture to her christian temperance-movement work. It was spread wider than Seneca Falls by her opening The Lily, a newspaper for and by women that she, despite raising children, suffering chronic illness, and a complete lack of training except by Dexter's example from his newspaperman days. I am *gobsmacked* by her rigidly moral outlook leading her so far in opposition to the stupid cultural norms of "appropriate" behavior for women in a time where they were so very much more entrenched and enforced than they are now.

At this moment in US, and more broadly Western, political history, the example of a woman who looks at the world as she finds it, judges it harshly for its failings, and—at considerable personal cost to herself and her family—sets about opposing that world continuing down its present path, is invaluable. I'd also like to point out her starchy morality was inspired by an upbringing conventionally religious yet her response to it was radically, vocally, and consistently to apply its moral precepts in full and without exceptions.

If more christians were like Amelia Bloomer, the world would be a better place.

I did indeed just say that. Her acerbic wit, another surprise this book held for me, was deployed against obtuse and obnoxious followers of orthodoxy. Yet Mrs. Bloomer's touch with connecting to people who genuinely did not understand the stakes she saw so clearly in the direction society was heading was exemplary. She met those people on their own ground, without preaching or hectoring. I can only envy that skill; I myownself climb onto my ever-present high horse because I'm Right, that ever-losing strategy. Mrs. Bloomer's tone was always respectful...until she sensed ill-will or disingenuousness.

I knew exactly nothing of the substance of her life until Belt Publishing brought out this book. (I also now know that Dexter Bloomer wrote a biography of her in 1896, so I'll Gutenberg that up here directly.) Author Catterall and her publisher are to be praised, and I hope supported with purchases, for telling this unjustly neglected monadnock of probity and moral clarity's story to a needy new generation of readers. All five stars for bringing modern attention to this person from our past with so much to teach us for our future. It's involving prose, built on solidly shown foundations of information.

OUR JACKIE: Public Claims on a Private Life, stealth take-down of modern celebrity culture by looking deeply into its past

OUR JACKIE: Public Claims on a Private Life
KAREN M. DUNAK
NYU Press
$30.00 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Tells the story of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis through her evolving public persona, from campaign wife to First Lady to fallen idol to treasured national icon

When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis became First Lady of the United States over sixty years ago, she stepped into the public spotlight. Although Jackie is perhaps best known for her two highly-publicized marriages, her legacy has endured beyond twentieth-century pop culture and she remains an object of public fascination today.Drawing on a range of sources—from articles penned for the women’s pages of local newspapers, to esteemed national periodicals, to fan magazines and film—Our Jackie evaluates how media coverage of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis changed over the course of her very public life. Jackie’s interactions with and framing by the American media reflect the changing attitudes toward American womanhood.

Over the course of four decades, Jackie was alternatively praised for her service to others, and pilloried for her perceived self-interest. In Our Jackie, Karen M. Dunak argues that whether she was portrayed as a campaign wife, a loyal widow, a selfish jetsetter, or a mature career woman, the history of Jackie’s highly publicized life demonstrates the ways in which news, entertainment, politics, and celebrity evolved and intertwined over the second half of the twentieth century.

Examining the intimate chronicles of this famous First Lady’s life, Our Jackie suggests that media coverage of this enigmatic public figure revealed as much about the prevailing views of women in America– how they should behave and whom they should serve– as it did about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as an individual.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: How ghastly it must be to be famous. Nothing, not even your underwear preferences, is personal and private. Mrs. Kennedy was the first media celeb to experience this in the television age...though TV was most assuredly not the worst offender in depriving this upper-class woman of her private life (looking at you, recently-twitching corpse of The Saturday Evening Post).

The fact is, we never knew the elegant, cultured woman, comfortable in her own skin, that wore masks to keep the hoi polloi from knowing how very much of the haut ton she was. And the best thing about it all is, she knew what she was doing. She was a very careful curator of her, and her family's, image. She was a participant in this game, and a victim of it; the ways she worked to contain the access of an intrusive forcee of curiosity onto her private life were defensive, effective, and after a certain learning curve, collaborative.

Author Dunak has gone into what feels like every archive of 1960s media there is to find the scraps and bits that illuminate American ideas about this icon of our culture. I'm deeply impressed at the sources! It seems the author has synthesized the opinions of the entire spectrum of the US media landscape...what a grisly task that'd be, thank all the goddesses she didn't have social media to grapple with!...into several archetypes of sorts. Mrs. Kennedy as Grieving Widow-in-Chief. Jackie O. as selfish traitor who abandoned her country to run away with an ugly old rich Greek guy. Jackie Kennedy as aspirational American homemaker-cum-style icon. JKO, the book editor at Viking...until they published a book about the Kennedys that was a hatchet job, when she moved to Doubleday...the erudite, late-life Career Woman. None of them was the woman herself, though that's outside the scope of this book. We have here a chance to grapple with the essential issue of celebrity culture: These are people, and we as consumer-celebrity units, treat them as property. Our responses of pleasure, when the icons are well-behaved, to outrage when we think they are not, is not new, though the outrageous extreme of cancel culture is worse now than in, say, Ingrid Bergman's day, but it's still not new.

Author Dunak offers us a thorough and deftly presented categorization and analysis of this strain in US popular culture. It affords the reader the clarity in distance to think about the ways in which we individually play along with, support, and/or amplify the idea that we "own" those we admire. We're asserting control over women, particularly, but in fact over all those who dare to be tall poppies in our field of vision.

It was a sobering take-away but one that felt omnipresent if never shouted at me by Author Dunak.

It's not quite a five-star read, as it is definitely academic if more accessibly so than most.

POPULAR HITS OF THE SHOWA ERA, reposting my 2010 review

POPULAR HITS OF THE SHOWA ERA
RYU MURAKAMI (tr. Ralph McCarthy)
W.W. Norton (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In his most irreverent novel yet, Ryu Murakami creates a rivalry of epic proportions between six aimless youths and six tough-as-nails women who battle for control of a Tokyo neighborhood. At the outset, the young men seem louche but harmless, their activities limited to drinking, snacking, peering at a naked neighbor through a window, and performing karaoke. The six "aunties" are fiercely independent career women. When one of the boys executes a lethal ambush of one of the women, chaos ensues. The women band together to find the killer and exact revenge. In turn, the boys buckle down, study physics, and plot to take out their nemeses in a single blast. Who knew that a deadly "gang war" could be such fun? Murakami builds the conflict into a hilarious, spot-on satire of modern culture and the tensions between the sexes and generations.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Six dreadfully bored, dreadfully sociopathic young twentysomething men find each other, and for want of anything better to do, start hanging out. They drink, they eat, they talk at but not to each other, and no one bothers to listen because no one has anything to say that means any-damn-thing in the others' solipsistic brainiverses.

Six dreadfully bored, dreadfully ugly and unloving, unloved thirtysomething women find each other, and for want of anything better to do, start hanging out. They drink, they eat, they talk at but not to each other, and no one bothers to listen because no one has anything to say that means any-damn-thing in the others' solipsistic brainiverses.

One day, one of the men decides, after a horrible sleepless night, to kill one of the women. Thus begins a kind of grisly tontine scheme of murder and reprisal that ends in the death of an entire Tokyo suburb.

Ick. I feel defiled. There is nothing believable about this book, thank goodness, because if there *was* I would be forced to sharpen my longest knife and go out randomly slitting the throats of passers-by.

Ryu Murakami, it would seem, is the Dennis Cooper of the Japanese literary scene, exploring the revolting images that modern Japanese society casts in the funhouse mirror. He's won a boatload of prizes for doing this. All I can think is, Japanese society being so buttoned up and tightly controlled, this kind of transgressive hooliganism carries more of a shock-and-awe sensation than it does in our American laissez-faire emotional environment. All it does for me is make me feel like I've spent several hours with the most absurdly overacting players of overwritten parts in an overwrought melodrama that, while effectively satirizing the anomie and autarky of armed camps that constitute modern societies, loses a lot of its force and impact to sheer overexuberance.

Thank goodness it's short. Fifty more pages and I'd have to mail-bomb the publisher's offices.

OH NO THEY DIDN'T! REMARKABLE WOMEN: Fascinating Facts You Never Knew About Amazing Women!, a juvenile book about women with power

OH NO THEY DIDN'T! REMARKABLE WOMEN: Fascinating Facts You Never Knew About Amazing Women!
ERIC HUANG (illus. Sam Caldwell)
words & pictures/Quarto Group (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this myth-busting guide to remarkable women past and present, everything you think you know will be proven wrong!

Remarkable women have been at the forefront of history. They’ve changed the world and are leading the way to our future. But how much do you really know about the remarkable women who’ve shaped our world? We all know that. . .

Frida Kahlo made her name as a painter

Jane Austen wrote simple romance novels

Men pioneered scientific breakthroughs in the past

AND that ancient people only worshipped strong male gods. . .

Or did they. . . ? Because. . . OH NO THEY DIDN'T!

Misconceptions about women from the past and present are everywhere, but none of them are true! In Oh No They Didn't: Remarkable Women myths are busted about over 50 remarkable women from politicians to legends, performers, activists, scientists, mathematicians, creatives, and more.

In this fresh and funny guide learn about inspiring women from all over the world as well as their influence on history and popular culture. Stylishly designed and humorously illustrated by Sam Caldwell, Oh No They Didn't: Remarkable Women makes learning fun with unexpected facts and a playful, upbeat approach to non-fiction.

Oh No They Didn't: Remarkable Women is the perfect inspiring guide for ALL young people to learn about the influential women who may have been left out of traditional history books and deserve to be celebrated.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: My mother was my introduction to the waste of potential, and the weight of prejudice, that has plagued women since patriarchy took over the globe. Her (probably sexually, certainly emotionally) abusive father convinced her she was unable to understand math, science, or any other "male" stuff. He forbade her to accept a scholarship to study journalism, another to study acting, because she should get a husband and have babies.

Sadly for her she obeyed, hated her life, and "raised" children whom she neglected and abused...and she wasn't alone. May books like this one teach girls especially, and the boys they'll make lives with too (on current trends compulsory heterosexuality is on the way back, which this book quietly resists), that biology ≠ destiny.

Where we're going; with whom we're going; and even here, note that Motherhood Comes First.

The statement of purpose is quite lively, colorful, and well-judged, IMO.

Okay, they're the universal mother archetypes; but really...?


More to my taste, these are the women engaged in the USE of power...a message we can not afford to skimp on giving to the young.

Lest those darker impulses feel shamed, here are the role models for being angry, and still getting shit done.

That's what the good people of the Quarto Group allow me to share with you in the way of illustrations. I think this subject, empowering girls and normalizing them having and using power, is one we are woefully poor at passing on...it's telling that, when adding this book to my database of books read, not one library of the dozen or so I searched had this book in its collection.

It's up to us, grands and aunts and mothers. We're (surprise, surprise, surprise! in your best Gomer Pyle mental voice) gettin' no help or support for this message from The PTB. This book is part of the Oh No They Didn't! series, and the author penned the mythbusting entry in this series on US Presidents, as well as Pride: A Seek-and-Find Celebration: Adventure Through the History of the Queer Community, aimed at the same age group. You'll clutch your pearls, I'm sure, when I tell you these aren't in my searched library databases, either.

Resist being shoved back into being subservient to a straight white man, and model it for all the youth.