If you’re a grownup who enjoyed Harry Potter but wished there was more to chew on, this is for you.
Setting her story at the time of the British Opium War in China, Rebecca Kuang puts fantasy to work, challenging the premises of European imperialism. That sounds heavy, but the action is fast-paced, and the central characters have depth.
Young people with unusual magical talents from China, India, and the West Indies arrive to study at a very peculiar Oxford, only to discover that they’re being turned into tools of empire. Think of it as a steampunk-fantasy with a touch of alternate history—something for nearly every fan of speculative fiction.
I’m an academic, and it is always fun to read a novel that skewers our eccentricities and egotism (there, I admitted it).
What’s great about Moo is that it gives us an academic satire in an unexpected setting—not an eastern liberal arts college but a state university in a Midwestern state that couldn’t possibly be Iowa (or could it?). Leading characters teach botany and animal husbandry. One of them is a very large pig—a real pig, not a metaphorical one. And the book is very, very funny.
Brilliantly funny satire set in a contemporary American university.
Deep in the wheatfields of the American midwest, Moo University is in a state of disarray...
In this witty and biting comedy of manners, Jane Smiley turns her wryly perceptive eye towards a community where men and women, the innocent and the cynical, thinkers and careerists, live and work together - in complete disharmony.
'Satire on a grand scale, a microscopic examination of contemporary American mores conducted with great wit and gracious indulgence for human frailty ...Trying to describe this book's marvellous variety is like trying to describe London to someone…
I’m a fan of alternate history fiction, but I get bored with one more speculation about the outcome of World War II or the American Civil War.
Everclear transported me to an entirely different continent, tracing an alternate history in which the people of the Congo resist and expel the vicious regime of King Leopold of Belgium and construct an independent nation. I loved that the storyline is not simple. Not all the Africans are heroic, not all the white characters are on the wrong side, and everyone is prone to mistakes.
History moves in the right direction, but it’s jerky and messy, something I really appreciate as someone who’s been an academic historian for many decades.
Everfair is a wonderful Neo-Victorian alternate history novel that explores the question of what might have come of Belgium's disastrous colonisation of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier. Fabian Socialists from Great Britian join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo's "owner," King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated. Shawl's speculative masterpiece manages to turn…
Quakerism is more than the guy on the Quaker Oats box or the Statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia City Hall. The Religious Society of Friends (that’s the fussy official name) is a vital worldwide religion that is thriving not only in Britain and the United States but also in Africa and South America.
My wife and I wrote the book to highlight this world reach. It touches on the history and unique theology of Quakers, typical practices on Sunday mornings, which will be different if you’re in Nairobi or Nashville, and Quaker political and social action. We kept it short and to the point.
