In a world where “hero” is a licensed and regulated title, dusty and barefoot Jack Farris walks into The Academy For The Education Of Potential Adventurers And Legends. He wants to learn the best way to save people. He ends up a guide major, meant to tend to the horses and identify edible plants for the rest of his League while the hero does the rescuing and fighting. His study group consists of Rupert, of a blueblooded hero whose family has been in the business for generations, Grey, a sage who comes up to his elbow and whose aspirations include skipping adventuring entirely to become a librarian, and Laney, a mage who cultivates terrifying competence like it’s effortless (like she’ll lose something if anyone ever sees her fail.) When they learn that their apparent stickler for the rules hero is sneaking into town to engage in illegal, unlicensed vigilante hero activity, fighting Things in the Darkness in the parts of town too poor to afford protection from a licensed League, they all want in. Well, Jack and Laney do. Grey thinks they’re all crazy for risking their necks for fun in their spare time. But Jack continues not to wear shoes and fights a little too well for a backwoods nobody, and Laney prefers her gun with bullets she enchanted herself to the traditional enchanted sword, and Rupert brings along armor and after battle snacks, and somehow Grey ends up lending his advice because without it these idiots are probably all going to get themselves killed. And of course they fall into adventures. But while the story ends when the day is saved, life goes on, and Beanstalk follows them through it: classes the day after on too little sleep, what’s left in a monster’s wake, and the aftermath of heroism.
1. I have been excited constantly about this book from the moment I started it to the moment I finished it.
2. It passes my “this should not be so difficult for the majority of fiction to pass” test: At least one main character of color, at least one female main character, at least one queer main character. You could technically argue that the queer characters, that’s right I said characters plural because this book is a gift, are side characters because they’re not part of the main four, but even the “side characters” are well developed, and get screen time and important roles in the plot and are literally only not main characters because they’re not the main focus. You see them having their own lives and adventures when they’re not intersecting with the main characters’ adventures, and get the feeling that they’re the main characters in another story happening alongside the one you’re reading.
3. Piggybacking off number 3, the characters are well-rounded, well-written, likable, flawed people. I love them deeply, each one of them, with the kind of idiotically proprietary affection that causes me to screech at the page “be nice to him! he’s sad!!!” every time anything remotely bad happens to Jack. Or Grey. Or Rupert. But not Laney because she has the situation under control and can take care of herself. The emotions are genuine, the motivations are understandable, they’re written with rich inner lives and realism.
4. The ebook version, and its TWO sequels, holy shit look how much more of this pure joy you have to look forward to, are all free to download here on the author’s site. You can also buy the print versions if you want, and if I find that they have a paypal or something I’ll post it here, because I prefer the ebook version but I’d still really like to pitch them some money for all they joy I got out of their writing.
5.This is not your typical “everyman farm boy dreams of heroics, falls in with some supporting cast who rocket him into heroic situations, and saves the day, wins the girl, and is admired” story. Trust me, I’m sick of those too and I would not steer you wrong. This is a story about the people who get glossed over in those stories. This is a story about identity, about who you are to your friends, to your family, to the ones who’ve heard stories about you, to yourself. This is a story about found family and real family and people who care about each other. This isn’t a story about adventures and heroics deeds, although they do occur. This is a story about the people who have adventures, and the people who are left behind.
ive been reading a book that basically explains how so-called “brain differences” between the genders is the result of gendered socialization and not the cause of it. i honestly expected the book to be very cis-centric but its actually the opposite, the author stresses that testimony from trans ppl is actually indispensable because we’ve, in a sense, “lived both experiences”
more cis feminists should have this mindset
one of the first examples that she uses to introduce her point about how perception by others can shape a person’s performance actually uses a trans woman. it explains that as a certain trans woman became to be seen as a woman more and more frequently, the ppl arond her eventually started viewing her as being ill equipped for tasks that they did not bother her about pre-transition. eventually she even found herself underperforming in these tasks herself.
I knew it was this book before I’d finished reading the first two lines. Honestly this book is indispensible if you want to debunk any gender determinism people claim is science. I can’t recommend it enough.
(Bonus bonus: I am myself a neuroscientist, and the old white men mentioned above – who are not – could not have missed the point harder if they’d actively tried. Which. Maybe?)
Reminder that The Book Depository is owned by Amazon. I hear people recommending it as an alternative to Amazon all the time but it’s not. Amazon bought it in 2011.
Try Hive instead! They give a percentage of every sale to a local bookshop of your choice!
Also bookfinder – you search for a book and it lists all the sellers (both used and new) and their prices from low to high (just generally super useful – also good if you want to sell books and want to check how much they are worth)
You can also try thriftbooks! They have a good selection of new and used books, and the used prices are very reasonable. They also offer free shipping on any order over $10. Shipping is very timely, and their customer service is great; I once did not receive a book I had ordered, and they overnighted it to me the same day I sent in the request to customer service.
hey, so, i feel weird promoting this, but you know how the collective we of tumblr are always like, someone should write a cookbook that’s actually easy? i did the thing, just in time for gross summer heat/seasonal affective disorder, depending on the hemisphere, to kick in.
Cooking is terrible, and food is often a massive pain in the ass. Eating is sometimes ok, sometimes a giant drag, and somehow still a thing that you have to do multiple times a day, which seems enormously unfair.
This book isn’t going to teach you how to cook, or turn you into the kind of person who hosts effortless dinner parties, or make you more attractive and popular and interesting. At best, it’s going to make it slightly more likely that you manage to eat something in the ten minutes between walking in the door and falling into the sweet embrace of the internet. I’m not joking—a lot of this can be done, start to finish, in ten to fifteen minutes. I resent thirty-minute meals because it feels like about twenty-eight minutes too long to spend on feeding myself.
If you’re excited to get home from work and spend an hour cooking dinner, this isn’t the book for you. If you really value authenticity, this isn’t the book for you. If you literally only eat three foods and you’re happy like that, this isn’t the book for you. If you, like me, are tired and depressed and just need to get some food into your face once in a while, this is definitely the book for you. You should buy it. Maybe it’ll help.
anyhow, you can buy it for $5 on amazon (for kindle files) and gumroad (for a pdf and epub), and any money earned goes towards things like paying my rent and buying groceries.
i’m disabled and mentally ill and a single parent, and i’d love to be excited about food, but most of the time, it’s just an inconvenient thing i gotta do to stay alive. i wrote this for people who’re kinda like me. i hope that maybe it helps someone.
I’ve read this, and it’s super useful– a whole lot of lists and easy to make meals that are better than eating nothing, again, for the sixth time this week because everything is too many.
I suspect it’ll be super useful to a lot of y’all– brain weasels suck, and being out of ideas for food sucks, and being hungry because you open the fridge and then stare at everything and cry because it’s too many to work out what food is super sucks
(thank you!! summer is the worse season for me bc of POTS, and failing to eat only makes it worse, so I need to get my act together)
i'll apple your turnover 