Last month I went to a yarn swap, where knitters and crocheters went through the yarn they had at home for things that bought but that they knew they wouldn’t use. We then ‘shopped’ each other’s yarn stashes. During the swap, I picked up this kit for some cute little wrist warmers.
Just a little something from the Yarn Swap
I’ve been on the waiting list for this book since the beginning of June. So, when it came available right as I was finishing House of Hollow, I knew it would be a perfect match for a new knitting project. Briseis is a gardener and magical, so starting something with a leafy motif seemed ideal.
This is a spooky little modern folk lore tale about Iris and her sister’s Vivi and Grey. When they were little, they went missing on New Year’s Eve for weeks before turning up mysteriously and changed. They all had little scars are their necks, their hair had turned white blonde, and they couldn’t remember what had happened or where they had been. Now, ten years later, Iris must delve into her family’s secrets now that Grey has once again gone missing.
I enjoyed the fairy tale and folk lore elements of this story and the dynamics at play between the sisters. This was a fun, twisty little read that I binged my way through. I really liked the main character, Iris, and the supporting casts of her sisters, Grey and Vivi, and Grey’s boyfriend Tyler were interesting and dimensional. The ending was good enough that I’m not clamoring for a sequel, but there were some threads left open that I wouldn’t mind continuing with these characters. If you like stories that play with folk tale elements and mystery, this is a fun one. Check it out.
I started watching the K-drama Black Out (CW: SA, victim blaming, ‘boys will be boys’, murder) and it was making me SO MAD, I thought I’d go ahead and see how mad the source material made me.
I don’t remember where I heard about this book, but I thought, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” So, I put myself on the waiting list for both the physical copy and the audiobook at the library. The audiobook came available first and I checked it out but I couldn’t make myself start it. It was something that I wanted to read and yet I was having trouble even beginning to read it. There was just something about the subject matter that made me think, “Oh, this is going to be a hard read. I don’t know if I feel like reading something hard right now…” And, I kept coming up with excuses until I had to return the audiobook unread.
Well, when the physical copy became available, I went and got it. The memoir is only 145 pages, so it is a little whisp of a book. That made it seem a little less daunting. (Although the audiobook is only four hours so, I don’t know what my deal was.) And it wasn’t hard to read. The prose was thoughtful and I was pulled into the story. Ciment’s memoir is about her relationship with artist Arnold Mesches and is part a revisiting of a previous memoir Half a Life and in part just a new memoir about a marriage seen from a new perspective. The story starts at the beginning of the relationship when she first started taking art classes from Arnold as a sixteen-year-old and follows through his divorce from his first wife, their marriage, and their life together up to his death at the age of ninety-three.
I think I was expecting something more negative and maybe not so much critical, there is nuance here. And a lot of questions are posed that the text really doesn’t answer. What we see is a relationship, the give and take and the joys and sorrows, just like you would have in any relationship. But there was also an investigation of power and understanding. Ciment tells us about being a teenager or someone in her early twenties and feeling powerful. She talks about when she felt jealous. She talks about when she felt supported or when she had to be supporting. As someone looking at a relationship that is now over, she has the 40,000-foot view, but also the memories of what it was like being inside it. She discusses how things that are obvious in hindsight, like how it feels cliche to think that she was, as a sixteen-year-old looking for a father figure, whom she found in someone her father’s age, but how clicheness of it part of the truth that we shouldn’t look away from just because it feels obvious. Ciment discusses what it is like being the younger woman, even as they age, and what that meant for her, watching her partner fall apart when she is still very much in her prime. I don’t know, I think I was expecting this to be more condemning of the relationship, but it wasn’t and I’m glad it wasn’t. Even though there was a power imbalance and even if, at seventeen, she hadn’t been considering what it would mean to be married to someone so much older than her, she still had agency and she exercised it. Following his divorce from his first wife, her husband had an artistic revival, something that may never have happened to him otherwise. And she went from painting to conceptual art to writing, a path she might not have otherwise taken without his support. This was thoughtful and interesting. And it left me with more questions than answers. I’m writing this review hours after I finished reading the book (so I could reference it before I have to return it to the library), but I have a feeling this is a memoir I am going to consider for quite a while.
Celine Rosseau has fled Paris for New Orleans, in hopes of starting a new life. She’s running from a secret that weighs heavy on her. She begins her life in New Orleans at the Ursuline convent with her new friend Pippa, who has also left things in Europe in hopes of finding a new life.
Unlike some of the other girls who came over on the ship with them, Celine and Pippa don’t have what you might call practical skills. They weren’t governesses, so they aren’t meant for the classroom. They can’t cook or garden. Pippa is a painter and Celine was apprenticed at one of the best ateliers in Paris. So, they are relegated to making little baubles and selling them outside the church to raise money for the orphanage. They hear rumors about a violent murder that has taken place in the city. It must have something to do with the court, the gossipers say.
While selling her handstitched handkerchiefs, Celine meets Odette Valmont. One of the upper echelons of society, money is no object for Odette. It is carnival season in New Orleans and she needs something absolutely smashing for the masquerade ball. She asks Celine to design a costume for her. Celine, of course, agrees. She has mad fashion skills and it would raise a lot of money for the orphanage. How could she say no?
Celine meets the most beautiful man she has ever seen, Bastien, on the way to take Odette’s measurements. She finds out Bastien and Odette are both members of this mysterious court. And then, of course, there are more murders. Can Celine solve the murders before she becomes a victim? Is Bastien a jerk in a nice suit, or is there something special underneath his gilded exterior.
This was a fun and fast read. Celine is a great main character. She has good energy. She grows through the story. Bastien is good, too. There’s an excellent cast of character surrounding them. The plot is intriguing and includes a mysterious villain who is planning these murders with an ulterior motive. The villain’s chapters are in first person while Celine and Bastien, who both of chapters from their perspective, are written in third person. It was really interesting to see the narrative arc unfold from Celine and Bastien’s point of view and to then get explanations and little details here and there from the villain in the shadows.
There’s a bit of a twist at the end that sets up the second book in the series. I’ve already picked it up from the library, so you know I enjoyed this one.
So, if you like historical fantasy and/or vampires, smart leading ladies, and you’d like to see an interesting twist on New Orleans vampire lore, I’d say check this one out.
I don’t often DNF a book. If I pick something up and make it past the first few pages, I’m usually in it for the long haul. I used to try to finish everything I picked up, but I abandoned that policy a while back. I do a lot of reading for work, so if I’m not enjoying the stuff I read outside of work, I don’t make myself finish it.
Well, it would have been a real slog to finish Barbarian Alien by Ruby Dixon. the tl;dr on this is that it was a lot of the same conversation over and over again in which a human woman clearly states what she wants and an alien man disregards it and is surprised when she doesn’t ‘behave’. 0/10, not even for the spicy bits. This one is not for me. Everything from here has spoilers for both Barbarian Alien and its predecessor Ice Planet Barbarians.
These books are notorious on booktok and in romance circles. They have some pretty massive consent issues and there is sexual assault in them (if no longer on the page, it is certainly implied). In the first book, the heroine Georgie wakes up in a spaceship following an abduction. She and the other women have been taken from their homes and are going god knows where. They are the spares, and they know this because they aren’t in special hibernation tanks. Their spaceship crashes on an inhospitable frozen planet and after rebelling against their captors, they have to find food or help or both. Georgie is up for the task. On the planet, she meets Vektal an alien who is big and strong and immediately in love with her. All the aliens in Vektal’s tribe have a parasite,a khui, that helps them survive on the frozen planet. The khui also tells them who their perfect mate is. Isn’t that sweet? It’s like imprinting from Twilight only instead of it being something magical, it is a parasite! Anyway, the first book was fine because Georgie was pretty awesome, we get introduced to some of the ecosystems and wildlife on the planet and, despite how shitty it was she had been kidnapped and then left on a frozen world with a poisonous atmosphere, Vektal was pretty good about boundaries and she got to make her own choices. All problems aside, it was fluffy alien romance with some spice in it. It certainly isn’t the first time a ‘perfect pairing’ or ‘soulmate’ or something similar has been used as a conceit (see the Twilight reference above. Or, The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf or this nightmare of a book Dark Guardian.)
Barbarian Alien follows a different woman who was kidnapped, Liz. It starts where the first book ends, with the women being rescued by the aliens. They are then taken on a hunt so that they, too, can get parasites and survive on the planet. I might be misremembering this from the end of the first book, because it has been a while since I picked it up, but I thought it had been decided that the women got to choose whether or not they were going to take the parasite or accept a quick death on the ice planet. Well, Liz, who is also pretty awesome, tries to back out of getting a parasite but Raahosh, an alien whose parasite has already let him know she’s his lady, can’t bear the thought of her dying without one, so he forces it on her. Then, because he knows he’s in the wrong! He kidnaps her away to a secret cave so she can’t tell people what he’s done. He reasons that once she’s pregnant, they’ll be sufficiently far enough along in the mating process that no one would dare try to separate them.
So, Liz is a bow hunter, but she’s super precious to Raahosh and she can’t possibly hunt, she might get hurt! So, he keeps her confined in his cave. And she keeps refusing his advances because of course she would. She also says, repeatedly, I don’t care what the parasite says, I get a choice. And I don’t choose this! But Vektal told the alien dudes that they had to respect the human mating rituals and this is all part of the fun human mating ritual, right?
So, our leading lady has been kidnapped by aliens, crash landed on a different alien planet, had a parasite forced on her because *soul mates* or whatever, has been kidnapped again and separated from all the other humans, and for reasons Raahosh speaks English, but he doesn’t tell her that, just listens to her talking to herself and wonders at how chatty she is. I mean, he doesn’t really listen or engage with what she says and when she finds out he speaks English his statements can be pretty much boiled down to, “We’re mated, why are you fighting the inevitable?”
Because she said no. She doesn’t want this. This book is not for me. But! silver lining! That means the third book is also not for me, so I can unhaul it! This annoys me, however, because my mom bought me these books because I asked for them. They’re in perfect condition. Ugh. That makes me sad.
So, those two books are headed to the unhaul pile. And I need a palette cleanser.
2 Women, So Many Books 