Kanwulia

“A child should not be a chain, used to yoke a woman like cattle to a role, a purpose, a life she would not have chosen for herself. And yet she felt then, with an aching resentment, how Vikram would use their child to reduce and erase her. She hated him for that, for stealing the quiet and strange intimacy of her and her own flesh and blood and making it a weapon.”
― Tasha Suri, The Jasmine Throne

“Supposedly, he didn’t used to be a douchebag, of which you are the proof. At one time, long, long ago, he was someone your mother could love. We don’t quite believe this, even though he will occasionally roll his eyes at one of your colorful outfits or pseudo-revolutionary statements and say something cryptic like If you only knew me when I first met your mom, like you’re too late, you missed your chance to have a parent who actually understands you, and now you’re stuck with this prematurely balding man who works seventy hours a week at a bank and drives a gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive Suburban, even though he never hauls anything around except his new brat kid and way-too-young and obnoxiously boring trophy wife and the occasional large electronics purchase.”
― Amy Reed, Over You

“There were muscles under her shirt, her dark brown skin showing, and Rory had caught herself admiring them more than once. Not that she would admit it. Rory Derosiers was very much into not admitting anything.”
― Laura Pohl, The Grimrose Girls

“I will call for the physician,” he said, and in that she heard a wealth of things: his fear that he had, perhaps, hurt her and by extension hurt the child within her. The belief that all she’d said was a product of her flesh—her pregnancy, her so-called womanly weakness of heart and body—and not evidence of her intelligence, her political acumen, and all that she was.”
― Tasha Suri, The Jasmine Throne