Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: A Room Away from the Wolves by Nova Ren Suma Deborah Stevenson, Editor Suma, Nova Ren A Room Away from the Wolves. Algonquin, 2018 [336p] ISBN 978-1-61620-373-3 $18.95 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 8-12 Bina is supposed to be going into exile (well, being taken in by friends) to give her warring family (really her bullying stepsisters) a breather, but instead Bina makes a break for it, heading to Manhattan. There she seeks out and finds Catherine House, the old-fashioned boarding house her mother stayed at in her youth, and she's welcomed as a legacy and given a tiny room. She's thrilled at this connection with the mother she loved, the mother who had possibilities beyond merely acceding to the man in her life, and she enjoys her budding friendship with willful fellow resident Monet. Catherine House is strange, though, in ways that Bina finds increasingly disturbing: the frantic devotion of the other young women there to the house's benefactress, Catherine de Barra, and the legends around her death; the opal ring that belonged to Bina's mother and now seems connected to Catherine; and the seeming inability of its inhabitants to leave. This is Muriel Spark's great boarding-house novel The Girls of Slender Means turned to creepy gothic, and turned to it very well indeed. Suma's writing is taut, potent, and enticing as she establishes Bina's vulnerability and crafts the oppressive, plush, and enigmatic world of Catherine House. As with her previous books, however, the situation is a stage for girls in liminal or marginalized states to play out their emotional transitions, so Bina's family drama and her mother's painful distancing are a keen and anxious harmonic line. The book's structure, with an opening scene set after Bina has been at Catherine House for a month, primes readers to be alert to strangeness but leaves twists in store for them, and there's plenty of room for discussion afterward about the implications. Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.147 | 0.129 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".