mumbles fave daddy book so far i can't stop thinking about it please no one perceive memumbles fave daddy book so far i can't stop thinking about it please no one perceive me...more
*said in a voice that is so filled with affection and is very much not fine* i'm fine!
“he doesn’t fully believe yet that a life this big is availab
*said in a voice that is so filled with affection and is very much not fine* i'm fine!
“he doesn’t fully believe yet that a life this big is available to him. but he knows, now, that it's out there. that this feeling exists, and he is capable of feeling it.”
the moment i flipped open the prospects, i cried. not the first chapter, first page, or first line. the cover page. purely for what it meant to me.
it feels like kt hoffman reached directly into my heart and created gene ionescu just so he could hold my hand and walk alongside me.
perhaps that’s why finally reading the prospects felt this overwhelming. so much of my year has been marked by wanting things so badly i couldn’t bear it. forcing myself to keep my dreams an arm’s length away, not wanting them just in case i didn’t get it. so imagine not allowing myself to read this book for months, only to finally pick it up and see that exact fear reflected back at me.
we often talk about seeing characters as mirrors of ourselves. a look over our shoulders at the person we were in high school or college. a kind nod, a gentle reassurance. but gene? gene is me this very moment. and that is such a kindness that it sometimes makes it hard to breathe.
the way we’re optimists reserved only for others. how we hope terribly for many things, but aren’t much good at letting ourselves /want/ them. that’s where it gets dangerous. the preemptive little griefs he experiences over losing things he never had. i, at best, only know how to microdose on hope, so proficient at starving myself of the things i want as it feels to much to hold onto.
the way we intensely fear disappointing others if we don’t succeed, so we freeze instead. as gene slowly sees that people still love him even as he fails, i was doing the same in real life. we learnt it together. it’s a hand on a shoulder, a quiet confidence, and a dream relentlessly persevering.
but for all that gene walks by my side, by the time i turn the final page, he’s a little ahead of me. i see him beckoning me over with a flick of his wrist and a smile on his face, telling me that’s its okay to let myself have it.
and here i am, running towards him, sunlight on my face, telling him i'm on my fucking way....more
in case i have not made it abundantly clear i'm going to spend my whole life yelling over mallory's books prepare to be so sick of me
“there was a t
in case i have not made it abundantly clear i'm going to spend my whole life yelling over mallory's books prepare to be so sick of me
“there was a thrill in being the subject of a magical girl’s devotion.”
mallory is many things. one of the loveliest souls i have the honour of calling a friend. an absolute firecracker. i wept when when she announced her book deal. literally shaking my phone screaming that’s my fucking friend.
i've enjoyed mallory’s words for a long time, consuming them in bits & pieces, falling in love with the books she loves. to have over 400 pages of her lyrical prose at my fingertips? a goddamn buffet. to finally hold her book in my hand? pride doesn’t even begin to cover it.
when sofia's remains are found stuffed into the hollow of a tree growing through an abandoned house, the women who love her—frankie, cass, poppy, & newcomer marya—flock home to uncover sofia's murderer. as they pry further, sofia’s secrets unravel & the women find themselves followed by something that threatens to eat & eat & eat & eat.
at the core of we ate the dark is a story about friendships: intense, messy, bizarre, & so deep it’s mixed up with the core of your being. there’s so much queer love & that nebulous space between friendship & something more, where you don’t know where one person ends & the other begins.
the grief & homesickness then, when an intertwined part is lost through death or distance. yet somehow, it remains. sofia’s dead from the very start, but you feel her presence in every page, a witchy girl spinning through the text. through the remaining women you relieve moments with sofia, the yearning, & the empty spaces.
there’s something so transformational about all-consuming friendships like theirs. a secret language confined within a group, a mass of hearts beating as one. if you know me, you know this is the only way i know how to love—throwing yourself in headfirst.
i don’t say this often but from the depths of my soul: i could eat mallory’s words for the rest of eternity & be wholly fulfilled. forever spent basking in the way her words chip away at your soul & leaves you vulnerable, then fills you back up like good wine. what an eerily beautiful haunt.
in public straight up "crying over it" and by "it", haha, well. let's just say yet another goddamn cat sebastian bookin public straight up "crying over it" and by "it", haha, well. let's just say yet another goddamn cat sebastian book...more
mc's mom gets a kindle and immediately downloads hockey smut. is this fucking play about me???mc's mom gets a kindle and immediately downloads hockey smut. is this fucking play about me???...more
“that's how it goes. ad infinitum. with every single person we touch, we're leaving parts of ourselves. we live through th
fuck. the love of it all.
“that's how it goes. ad infinitum. with every single person we touch, we're leaving parts of ourselves. we live through them. i thought that was bullshit and i was wrong, because it isn't. […] and you know what? i’m fucking grateful for that. it’s horrible, but i’m grateful.”
in order to talk about how close family meal hits to home, we have to go back to december.
there’s a certain grief to having someone stroll into you life, completely alter it, & how acutely you feel that hollowness between your ribs when they leave (what kind of queer kid experience—)
that was december for me, when i met someone important from my past. someone who rewrote chapters of life when maybe i was just a footnote in hers. every single time i read a bryan washington novel, she is who i think of. as fate would have it, i met her right when i read family meal.
till today, i quietly carry parts of her with me. in particular, the way she uses food as a love language: have you eaten? do you want more food? i made you breakfast. i went to a party & the cake was really good so i brought home a slice for you.
there’s plenty of grief & ghosts in family meal. it’s a bryan washington novel after all. it asks what happens when the love of your life becomes the loss of your life. the heart of family meal, however, is how we show a love that persists through the grief. the love that carries on. the nuances of it all.
one of my favorite things about humanity is how we weave so much of our i love yous into our actions: waking up earlier & staying up late just to send a smidge more time together. text me when you get home safe. that made me think of you.
family meal is full of it.
there’s also the stilted, choppy words, the breaks, everything in washington’s novels that should cause discomfort & yet here i am, comfort in the chaos. comfort in the mess. because i know this ruin.
it echoes sentiments that i hold close, that i let myself find solace in: how i give pieces of myself to people, how i am pieces of everyone i have ever loved. how i believe love is a tangible thing. because we exist.
did i build a life around bryan washington’s words or did it build a life around me?...more
“i wanted to live even though i wasn’t always sure why. i wanted to live despite my missing dad and my broken heart and all the thrown milkshakes.
“i wanted to live even though i wasn’t always sure why. i wanted to live despite my missing dad and my broken heart and all the thrown milkshakes. i wanted to live because, sure, life sucked a lot, sometimes it was unfairly horrific, but it was always worth sticking around for me to see what came next.”
noa north wakes up floating in space outside a spaceship called qriosity. taped to his suit is a note telling him not to panic. he panics. trapped aboard qriosity are DJ & jenny, two other teenagers with no clue how they’ve ended up there. their mission: survive & get back to earth. but who the hell kidnaps a couple of sixteen-year-olds & sticks them on a spaceship anyway?
it's impossible to talk about this book without sounding bonkers. each SDH book is so unique, crafted in a way like no other, unlike anything i’ve read before. the first time we spoke i yelled at SDH about how obsessed i am with his mind. how he spins the most interesting tales, constantly swerving and giving me whiplash. how he writes pretentious characters that you can’t help but root for anyway.
here, while stuck on a spaceship, he asks how the past affects the future. how to move forward if you never stop running away. what happens when who we are isn’t who we are, but how that doesn’t limit who we can be anyway. he makes you think about autonomy—what choices do we have control over? how we make the best of what little agency we have, choosing to fight till the very end.
rereading a complicated love story set in space (fall out boy wants their long ass titles back) two years after reading it for the first time felt like returning to familiar territory—safe, comforting, close to heart. it’s no secret that sci-fi and i are fairly new friends but before that, there was SDH. from shrinking universes to a big red button, there was soft sci-fi in a way that only SDH could write.
since then i’ve found home on iskat with kiem and jainan, spent months mulling over my existence aboard the coordinated endeavor with kodiak and ambrose. i’ve found home across many universes, only because i first found it in SDH’s, the very one who held my hand along the way....more
me, begging on my knees before starting this book: please do not blow this everything this month has been mid
me, now: thank u tess sharpe aka god and me, begging on my knees before starting this book: please do not blow this everything this month has been mid
me, now: thank u tess sharpe aka god and jesus
“you need to pick your moment. my smile, when it comes, is slow. sweet at first, and then on the edge of creepy, because it sharpens into something that shouldn't belong on such a pretty girl's face.”
for five years, nora has been pulling the ultimate con: pretending to be normal. pretending she isn’t the runaway daughter-slash-protégé of a con-artist. but when a trip to the bank with her ex-boyfriend-slash-current-best-friend & new girlfriend ends in a hostage situation, she needs to be all the girls she’s been before. she’s not stuck in the bank with them; they’re stuck in there with her.
after fist fighting a string of very mid books i am so relieved to say: folks we ended the month on a banger!!
the girls i've been was a thrill, jumping back and forth between present and past. a slow reveal. a gradual unwinding. but never slow, never gives you time to breathe. to the point where i was actively annoyed whenever i had to put it down to do silly things like sleep or work or be a functioning member of society.
for a story about cons, this book is honest. honest in it’s friendships. kinships. those of the unshakeable kind, if you will. friends who would die for one another, who’ll go down kicking screaming clawing. friends who see each other’s broken edges because within those shards, are mirrors of themselves. friends who become each other’s glue, holding all their pieces together, even though it’s hard & messy. because they’ll never give up on you.
people you hold onto when the world tilts. people you fight for when you realize you’re not alone anymore. it’s no longer you against the world. it’s letting people in, letting them become the core of you, just like every other version of you who’s lived under your skin before.
it’s looking over your shoulder down a dirt road at every person you’ve been before—the good, the bad, the ugly. the skin you’ve shed. it’s the sour taste in you mouth when you look back at where you broke. but eventually, it’s the sweet victory of knowing that every version of you that existed in the past led to who you are now. & perhaps, that’s slowly the path of being the person you want to be....more
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