Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, a tenth-century German nun, is the first known female playwright. As you’d expect from a nun, her plays often praise virginity and martyrdom.

I felt the dialogue was rather simple with characters frequently agreeing with each other and repeatedly saying things like, “That’s true.” Since the characters are often either pure good or pure evil, they aren’t very interesting as people. The scenes often feel too short and the plays overall go by quickly without enough time to build up any tension.

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In 1936, six women were murdered in a ritualistic way related to the zodiac. A man (who was father to four of the victims and uncle to two of them), left a testament outlining a plan to murder them. However, he was murdered before they were, and in a locked room no less.

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“Wherever there were people, there were secrets.”

Sisters of the Vast Black mainly takes place aboard a living spaceship crewed by nuns who are more interested in providing medical assistance than converting heathens. However, they’ve recently been assigned a new priest who may want to change their mission.

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Every Heart a Doorway takes place in a boarding school for children who have traveled through portals to other worlds and desperately want to go back because they don’t quite fit in to this world anymore. Their parents, while well-meaning, just don’t understand them. They think their children are fantasy-prone and didn’t really go to another world. However, Eleanor, the headmistress of the school, knows other worlds do exist because she has visited one herself.

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“To be in this world, you must always be a little less than yourself. With every day that passes, you must give up a little more.”

After the events described in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a fifteen-year-old Miranda arrives in Milan, but people treat her like a monster. They force her to stay in her room and make her wear a veil whenever she leaves. She wonders if she looks like a monster, although she doesn’t think she does.

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Ugh. This book. Where to begin? First off, its run-on sentences, paragraphs that are pages long, and chapters in which nothing much happens make it a chore to read. There are over a hundred pages of endnotes, so you have to keep flipping to the end of the book while you’re reading. Annoyingly, many of the endnotes didn’t need to be endnotes. The shorter ones could have been parenthetical statements, and the long ones should have just been chapters in their own right. If this wasn’t bad enough, several of the endnotes have footnotes of their own.

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We start with a spaceship escaping from an evil AI. Our point of view characters on the ship are both children who don’t really know what happened, so the mystery of what the AI is and why it’s killing people can last longer. They end up landing on a planet with medieval-level technology. We then shift to the point of view of the aliens, who are truly alien.

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century. Written in 1852, it energized the anti-slavery movement and contributed to the start of the Civil War. It was translated into all major languages and made a worldwide impact. Today, it’s better known for its stereotypical depictions of black people. (There’s also an off-hand anti-Semitic remark and Haitians are called effeminate.) So while it was undoubtedly progressive for its day, it doesn’t entirely hold up now.

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Come Join Us by the Fire has released Season 2 just in time for Halloween. It’s available for free on the Google Play Books app. There’s a bit less stories than the first season, but with 27 horror stories, there’s still hours of spooky entertainment. Since the first season contained a lot of flash fiction, and season 2 only has a couple five minutes pieces, they’re probably about the same length.

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