ASRC 2021: Week 6

Hello everyone and welcome back. If you need a refresher on the rules, check out our initial blog post. We love hearing about what you're doing, so be sure to drop a comment down below. Once you do, fill out this form to enter for one of our great prizes.

Here's this week's Monopoly Board.

Current Literary Monopoly Board

Now for this week's staff participation:

Elias: Another high rolling week with a 9, landing me past GO and on the Read a Short Story space. I took this as the excuse I needed to finally dig into a collection of short stories I received while I worked for the campus bookstore in college: Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from the Social Justice Movement, edited by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha. I had less time to read this week so I was glad to have a shorter assignment, though I did end up reading three of the 20-odd stories in the collection.

Originally I was going to jump around and read LeVar Burton's short story "Aftermath" but when I saw it was an edited excerpt from his 1997 book of the same name, I figured starting from the top would be better suited for this category. Of the three stories I read, adrienne maree brown's "the river" stood out to me the most. It's a story about gentrification, nature, and life in a "dying" city. In the story, the Detroit River is as much a character as its protagonist and the whole thing is written without the use of capital letters. By doing this, it takes on a poetic verse and a rhythm not unlike that of the river it is titled after.

At just ten pages, "the river" is a startlingly effective story, though I did find it hard to get my footing at first. Were it not for the river's voracious and targeted appetite, it would not fall under the category of Science Fiction (though a sentient Earth river already strains credulity within the genre, though the lines between magical realism, fantasy, and scifi are quite porous.) All the stories in this volume have this reflection of the real world put front and center, where our current ugliness is magnified or modified or simply moved to a new setting. "the river" is a reminder that life is not always obvious from the outside and to forget risks destruction, be it to oneself or to the life one is ignoring, because, even if those outside cannot see it, the people within the city and the titular river are alive...and they are not happy about being treated as dead.

I give the story 4/5 stars.

Elizabeth: This week I rolled the max, 12, and landed on "Children's/Juvenile Lit." I chose to read The Insiders by Mark Oshiro. I read it in prepub and it won't be out until September 21st. This is Oshiro's middle grade debut and it has fantastic BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ representation. When Héctor moves to Orangevale from San Fransisco he faces a lot of bullying for being gay. One day he runs into the janitor's closet only to discover that there's a room that shouldn't be possible inside of it. He meets two friends from across the country and they work together to solve the problems each face. While the kids handle things on their own for the most part, the adults in their lives are supportive and awesome. It's the kind of book I wish had existed for me when I was a kid. This is the best book I've read so far this year and I give it 5/5 stars.

Let us know what you've been up to and we'll see you back here next week!