Now that the holiday season is over, I should start to write in this blog more regularly.

I recently came across an interesting article on the feminist aspect of "The Lava in My Bones". http://artthreat.net/2012/11/lava-in-.... I thought the review was quite perceptive. To be frank, a while back I was quite nervous about how the whole gender issue would be interpreted in this novel. Stereotypes of men and women are satirized throughout the book, but there is always the danger that the reader won’t get the joke and instead think that I mean to reinforce these problematic gender categories. In the Ice section for example, Franz’s inane comments about women (and Veronika) are there to ridicule misogyny rather than partake in it. Sue`s shame at her own body early on in the book is a result of her inadvertently accepting the centuries-old view of women`s bodies as the source of sin—-an attitude she fervently rejects later in the book. I wonder though, what if the reader stops reading at Part Two? Won’t she or he get a false understanding of what’s intended? The wicked stepmother in Part Five reverses this traditionally misogynist character in that she's not a stepmother at all and Sue creates her own birth-mother in the sky. In any case, I was reassured by the many insights in Morgenstern’s critique.