A Lay-Author’s Thoughts On Women and Herbalism A stained glass window depicting Hildegard von Bingen at Église Sainte-Foy, Alsace via Wikimedia Commons When I sat down to write The Gilded Crown and thought ‘wouldn’t it be interesting if the main character were a medieval herbalist’, I was blessedly unaware of the enormous rabbit hole I was about to tumble into head-first. Cue many, many hours spent trawling books and articles on herblore and hedgewitchery, everything from the historical – Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician – to the scientific – Dauncey, Howes and Larssons’ Plants that Cure and Plants that Kill series (if you ever want to know the chemical composition of any plant poison, they’re your stop) – to the charmingly whimsical, such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage series. It was all fascinating and inspired me to make my own herbal oils and decoctions, but in the process, I came across Burkhard Bilger’s review of John Rid...
Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang Yellowface is about a young writer, Juniper, who witnesses the death of her rival and friend, Athena, and in the flurry of trauma picks up the manuscript from Athena's desk and decides to pass it off as her own. Beyond the opportunistic theft, the problem is that the book is about Chinese labourers in World War I, a topic June knows nothing about and which she has no cultural claim to tell. As she spins more and more lies to keep herself safe, she finds herself caught up in social media battles about race, industry greed, plagiarism, and white privilege. I found this book incredibly stressful. It's satire not in the sense of being humourful, because this book is not funny, but because it holds up the publishing industry to ridicule. The funniest thing about the whole book is that the publishing industry irl lauds it as a scathing commentary, and has made it fit their own narrative of being charmingly self-aware and -effacing. An irony I'm sur...