Christina Bargel Bargel itibaren Ambari, Assam 781316, Hindistan itibaren Ambari, Assam 781316, Hindistan

The one where Cecy and Kate and their husbands go on a marriage tour of Europe and wind up entangled in a plot. I'm afraid this lacks a good deal of the charm of Sorcery and Cecelia. It's longer, and more conventional in structure, and while we still get first-person accounts from both Kate and Cecy, they're not talking to each other, so we lose those hints at the cousins' relationship that made the first book so much fun. My first problem here is that I still can't tell the people apart -- not Kate & Cecy, and not James & Thomas -- and having them all together makes it even worse. I could have kept a chart, I suppose -- X is a magician and Y is not, X likes opera and Y hates it, etc. -- but in the end, if the voices are the same, it doesn't matter what other differences there are. My second problem is that the structure (with excerpts from one girl's diary and the other's deposition) means that you end up having to read certain key scenes twice, once from each point of view. This is annoying. Finally, I'm bothered by the book's incuriosity about gender politics. It is in fact almost an AU in which there's equality between women and men in the time of the Napoleonic wars -- almost, but not quite. In practice it's just a story in which inconvenient things like a vicious double standard and a lack of civil rights and an inability to earn a living are all just kept offstage. This is an extremely gender-polarized time period, with rules governing a woman's behavior waking and sleeping; how can there not be limits placed on women's magic? And if there aren't limits on women's magic, why haven't women used that magic to see to it that they get to be full citizens? And how can you have a villain plotting to bring back the cult of Diana of the Woods without it seeming to occur to anyone that, um, hey, as things currently stand, it turns out that women are really, really powerless!

A variety of essays by a variety of personalities on racism, sexism, and feminism introduced quite eloquently by Morrison - relevant not only in terms of the Clarence Thomas issue, but the divisiveness of American society.