Malinda Lo

Earlier this month, the March newsletter from the Sirens Conference arrived in my in box1, and to my pleasant surprise, it included a review of Ash! And what a lovely, smart (and extremely flattering) review it was, too! You can go here to read it if you’d like. One part that jumped out at me ... More→

I saw Salt last weekend. I thought it was awesome. And I kept thinking about it, until I wrote up this whole blog post about the way that femininity is turned on its head in Salt. (Spoilers necessary for analysis ahead!) As the movie begins, Angelina Jolie’s character, Evelyn Salt, is imprisoned and tortured in ... More→

Yesterday, after reading Annalee Newitz’s thought-provoking analysis of Avatar (the new James Cameron sci-fi/CGI spectacular), I went and saw it. Wow. I’m not saying “wow” because I thought the special effects were so fantastic. Maybe they were, but I was pretty much aware the whole time I was watching it that I was watching special ... More→

Yesterday my latest Notes & Queeries column was published on AfterEllen.com. Titled “Rachel Maddow, Butch Fatale,” it’s a response to the mainstream coverage of Maddow that almost always references her lesbianism and then focuses on her appearance. Here’s a teaser: It was easy to be irritated, if not offended, by Daphne Merkin’s flashy article about ... More→

This fall I read Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep (2005), which is about Lee Fiora’s four years at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. Beginning when Lee is 14 years old, Prep chronicles each of her years at Ault. Prep was a bestseller and has been widely compared to Catcher in the Rye for its memorable, detailed ... More→

Graceling is set in a world in which some people are graced with gifts. They might be as pleasurable as the grace of fine cooking, or as deadly as the one that Katsa has; she is graced with the ability to kill. Because of this grace, she becomes the tool of a corrupt king who ... More→