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[darkadmn.livejournal.com]

Sign ups are open for the Kaleidoscope Fanwork Exchange!

Kaleidoscope is a multimedia fanwork exchange (fic, art, vids, graphics) hosted by dark_agenda for rare chromatic source fandoms. 36 book fandoms, many of which have been reviewed on 50books_poc, were nominated this year, which means you can request and offer fanworks for them if you sign up.

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Sign-up date: 2011 September 26th to October 8th, 9 p.m. Pacific Time (U.S.A.).
Due date: 2011 November 12th, 9 p.m. Pacific Time (U.S.A.).
Posting date: 2011 November 19th Pacific Time (U.S.A.).

2.37 Bronwyn Bancroft, Possum and Wattle: My Big Book of Australian Words (2008)

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

2.37 Bronwyn Bancroft, Possum and Wattle: My Big Book of Australian Words (2008)

This book is similar to Bronwyn Bancroft's *An Australian ABC of Animals* (2005) which I've already reviewed here. In fact, I think I recognise some of the illustrations which may have been recycled.

It is another picture book showing pictures to make an ABC. It was a notable book in the Children's Book Council of Australia awards... which actually is a surprise to me.

Some of the illustrations seem kind of random. V is for vegetable, vine and valley which don't seem quintessentially Australian in the way D for dragonfly, dideridoo, dingo, duck and dragon lizard is.

Eldorado Red and King Maker

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

Two very, very different takes on the ghetto novel. It probably goes without saying, but both these novels should carry warnings for omnipresent rape, violence, and drug abuse.

15) Eldorado Red by Donald Goines

Apparently a classic example of a 1970s street novel. Eldorado Red runs a numbers game. He's on the top of the world, with women all around him, plenty of money, and people who do whatever he tells them to. His son Buddy apprentices to Red while planning revenge for Eldorado Red having abandoned his mother. And that's when things start taking a turn for the worse for Eldorado Red.

A cast of absurd gangsters and druggies and hitmen populate the lively streets of the story and Goines keeps the action moving with a brilliant sense of plotting. It's a classic pulp story, nothing of any redeeming literary value about it but extremely entertaining.


16 King Maker by Maurice Broaddus

This is the story of King Arthur, recast as an Indianapolis gang war. It is incredibly bad and incredibly hilarious. King's 'Knights" include Wayne, a counselor with a Church ministry; Lott, a low end Fedex employee; Percy, the mentally damaged, simple son of a crackwhore; Lady G, a runaway high school dropout who likes to scrap. King is mentored by Merle, a homeless white guy who talks to his squirrel, Sir Rupert. Their enemies include Dred, King's half-brother sorceror and major Indianapolis gang leader and Green, apparently a reincarnation of the Green Knight, with all sorts of vegetable elemental powers. The book ends with King killing a dragon in a slum basement with his Caliburns, custom-made, gold-plated automatic pistols.

I cannot wait to read the sequel even though I kept covering my eyes in horror as I read.



tags: african-american, sff, drama, pulp, a: broaddus maurice, a: goines donald