I was pretty excited when I found the Genderbread Person meme. It clears up the confusion about what defines gender, sexuality, and biological sex. What I really like about it is the use of the word ‘person’. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop calling those doll-shaped gingerbread biscuits ‘gingerbread men’; but it allows for the possibility of ‘gingerbread women’, and everything else in between. It is only in the last decade that the majority of the Western World has come to understand that gender isn’t cut and dried, that gender is a performance, and gender is fluid, not a binary.

So let’s breakdown the concept of gender binaries for the Victorian era. Basically, whatever a man was, a woman wasn’t. Men were strong; women were weak. Men were tool-users; women weren’t (so who do you think invented grinding stones, baskets and slings?). Men were innately honest; women were deceitful by nature. The…

(5/5 stars *****)

If you want a tale of suspense, thrills, and the supernatural, you’ve come to the right review. Kara Jorgensen’s second self-published novel is just as good as her first (see REVIEW: The Earl of Brass), adding the dark world of the spiritualist movement to her series.

What I came away with after reading this novel was a sense of the author’s emotional sensitivity. Though the book covers the supernatural and steampunk, it is not purely an adventure story of a German student or a Bildungsroman of a young, naïve spiritualist. The novel covers some dark material: serial murder, horrendous torture and the death of loved ones. Though the tone is often bleak (especially the chapters covering Immanuel’s torture- the young German student) and Jorgensen’s descriptions of wounds very detailed (I like that thing myself but for the faint hearted, I’d skip a few lines every now and…