Ally > Recent Status Updates

...how terrible all the words were for body parts and how fast you used them up. Rod, manliness, womanliness, soft mounds, staff, nub, pleasure bud, stiff peaks. [...] Sugar stick, cranny hunter, fornicating engine, plugtail? [...] Cat heads or Cupid's kettledrums for breasts. [...] tuzzy muzzy, dumb glutton, crinkum crankum, venerable monosyllable...

[this book is so full of joy]

Lucky people found the work they were meant to do. Unlucky people found love.

"Did you know that once your grandmother sent me a link to a ridiculous piece of fan fiction about Barry Manilow Potter? He grew up and became a pop star and got together with Ron at the Copa Cabana, like the song, only with a happy ending and much weirder Voldemort. Her name was Vola. She was a noseless showgirl."

[I LOVE THIS BOOK]

"Oh my, do we have an *individual* here?... Hold on to that, honey."

[how exactly we get the flamboyantly gay stylist in a world where people are murdered for sex outside marriage is unclear to me]

"America. I'm supposed to be providing for you. It's humiliating for me to come here and have you do all this for me [feed me some pastries]... I'm not some charity case, America. I'm a man. I'm supposed to be a provider."

[if this isn't an act to free up America to go after Maxon, this guy is *such* a dud, ugh.]

[I shouldn't think too hard about dystop-YA worldbuilding but how on earth does the artist & performer class end up below the professional & educated classes? What changes about human nature that an art career stops being the most highly-valued luxury good for the elite?]

Hostile encounters between state and citizen are routinely preceded by the expression "Put your hands where I can see them!" We count on pockets even in despair, as when Virginia Woolf, before she waded into the fast-running River Ouse, weighed down her pockets with river stones to ensure her drowning.

[WTactualF is this passage - I hate academic humor & its abstraction of death & suffering as impossibly far away]

[Belle Kearney after a 1903 quote of hers is described as a "future Democratic senator" - she was a state senator, not a national one as a reader might guess from this - and "WCTU superintendent" w/o further qualification - she was superintendent of the youth branch of the Mississippi chapter. I'm suspicious of a pattern of elevating minor characters to magnify oppressive veins in historical feminism.]

My initial impression of January LaVoy's narrator voice is positive, but the audio setup is busted in a way I can't quite put my finger on - there's a bunch of extra bass that indicates maybe some wind past the mic and some treble noise that maybe is an artifact of excessive compression? It's not a standard mistake I know the sound of but something is weird.

Aside from a couple of frustrated maudlin affairs with straight girls in my adolescence, I had only ever dated women who looked like boys. First I had gone from the dreamy, long-skirted, messy-haired girl to the pony-tailed high-school jock, and then the androgynous downtown college hipster, all the way to the androgynous downtown hipster transgender boy, female-to-male.

[ew the narcissism]

I needed money before I could make that call [to the dealer]. In fact, I needed money for more than that. Life in New York cost more than it had in Boston, from subway fares to food. I only accepted the bare minimum from my parents…

[ok I think that phrase is a dealbreaker - can anyone who writes that understand the world?]

If that great red-walled room was a womb, I was its heart.

[huh? like the heart of an embryo? or like a really really dangerous internal hernia?]

"This wall between us! We all call it that [the c*ck blockade]." She smacks the palm of her hand against the brick wall. Yet another word I don't know.

[uhhhh which word of that two word phrase is the one our narrator doesn't know?]

Both ["accidental" arsons] were a result of her angrily monologuing about Valentine's strictness and chucking around sparklers that she snuck into camp. Since she's upset now, I need to assess that anger on a range from tree arson to whole-planet arson before I tell her the entire story.

[erggggg prose agggghhhh]

A few parents and students passing through the wall's gate stare at Delilah's palpable dark aura the longer she emanates her fury.

[ok this sentence is strike two]

"You paid for a single room!" she says, raising her bumpy nose at me, the only physical similarity we share as best friends.

[ok, this sentence, what? does the author mean *wrinkling* her nose? does the author expect friends to look related? does the author really want the very first thing our narrator calls attention to about a character, indicating how the narrator sees the world, to be her nose bump?]

[uggggggh flipped to the audiobook - where do these narrators come from? is it all revenge for not being cast in their high school plays because of their overacting?]

https://archive.org/details/livingwit...

oh my god oh my god what have I done why did I ever think I could sing, why did I ever think I could be seen, be known

[oof this is more disemboweling than anything involving knives]

That should be enough.

[omg damn that page turn is brutally timed?]

[I usually love the presentation of LittlePuss’s books, but the gutters on this one are too small - I’ve creased the binding after like two pages - and the typeface is really awkward (intentionally so according to the end note? I hate that)]

...she'd insisted that because I was tall, everything looked shorter on me than on other girls, and while she was very likely right, I'd always so desperately wanted to be allowed to dress like the other girls... which is probably why I still style myself... like a 1990s animated Nickelodeon teenager.

[LET ME AUDITION FOR THIS ROLE I HAVE IT IN THE BAG FOLKS]

Rom-coms aren't simple humorous stories about two people falling in love. They're all, in essence, about people who become better versions of themselves in the course of falling in love.

[um... like, you mean, there are characters with character arcs?

and... Josh-but-not-too-proud-to-work is growth, but is Ari-but-married-to-money growth? The growth must be 'less avoidant to Josh' but maybe Josh should be avoided!]

Something under her skin thrums.

"You have three minutes until your breakfast burns," he mutters, resting her legs on his shoulders.

Eight minutes later, Ari bites into matzo brei that's completely charred. She doesn't mind one bit.

[OK, so the victory sex lasts... six minutes and change? oh hooray!]

His mind feels blank, like there's a blinking cursor waiting for a line of code.

[ah yes, the post-nut bash prompt WHAT IS WITH THE SIMILES IN THIS BOOK]

"I know, I feel you, you're so close."

[this would immediately kill the vibe for me]

"We fit together. We literally fit together."

[& this, yikes]

"We're so good for each other."

[on a first time. yep, heck no.

I don't need romance characters to be like me or be my type, banter that would put me off can be fine... but a sex scene that wouldn't do it for me casts a shadow over the book - why is that?]

"You feel so good," she whispers. "God, you feel so good." Her vocabulary is also operating at a first-grade level.

[NO, JESUS, DO NOT PUT THE WORD "FIRST-GRADE" ON THE SAME PAGE AS PENETRATION. And I thought the "burst of serotonin" / "pleasure centers of the brain light up like neon" prose was a vibe killer.]

There's this idea of her that exists in his mind, where she's some kind of enigma, where the passcodes are always off by one number, where she almost opens up, but not quite. [...] Josh is good at memorizing these things.

[I understand what this is aiming at, intense attention + competence is a hot fantasy, but in my actual life it's very not hot when someone treats my orgasm as a puzzle - turned off by this]