Alison Rose > Recent Status Updates

Somewhere inside lived a shoot of hope that she had not culled. She allowed it to grow when a moment of happiness appeared in her life, like a mulchy patch of earth that she nourished overnight. This root was stubborn. It took hold.

Kit's self-assurance ebbed and flowed like the water in the Delaware River. The winters of her self-doubt would freeze over, and it fell to Sabrina to thaw out its edges. But when it swelled over its banks, Sabrina had to run for cover and wait for the flood to subside.

[whew, this is getting heavy]

[really not loving the whitewashing of an abusive controlling shitty man and the weird natalist vibes and also Elena thinking Leo should be a mindreader and screaming at him when he isn't]

[wtf even is this story]

[just call her Mary Sue Poppins]

[listen, this book ain't perfect, but fuuuuuuuuuuck i'm having a damn hard time making myself put it down and go to sleep]

[but also LOLOL ruth who the hell name-drops their own book in another one of their books? dork]

Luggage claim & customs were the usual nightmare of wailing babies & grown men pushing & shoving to get to a case that would come around the carousel again in less than 5 minutes. From the aggression of my fellow travelers, you'd have thought the bags disappearing behind the plastic curtain were about to get incinerated, rather than popping out unharmed a few feet farther on.

[Haven't flown in 16 years but ACCURATE]

Father sits with his hands in his lap, thinking. I am certain we think the same things. The village is not what it was. Their relief of having someone to blame. There was a need for it, in these times.

They were open to me, but what I saw, looking into them, was hardly impressive. They sought to share this moment of mocking me, mocking darkies, laughing at the poor slaves, with joyful spirited clapping & stomping. I looked at one woman who might have been intrigued by me or taken with me, the entertainer. I saw the surface of her, merely the outer shell, & realized that she was mere surface all the way to her core.

There were those slaves who claimed a distinction between good masters and cruel masters. Most of us considered such to be distinction without difference.

----------

'Yes, but them people liked it, Jim. Did you see their faces? They had to know them was lies, but they wanted to believe. What do you make of that?'
'Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares 'em.'

I was as much scared as angry, but where does a slave put anger? We could be angry with one another; we were human. But the real source of our rage had to go without address, swallowed, repressed.

----------

I suspected at that moment that I would not die, but it was unclear whether I would be pleased about that fact.

'White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don't disappoint them,' I said. 'The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.'

[One thing about this series that bugs me is that Gemma has a dog that she leaves alone in the house all day while she's at work, with apparently no access to the yard. And then sometimes, as just happened, she gets home from work, the dog is super excited to see her, and then an hour later she leaves again for a date or whatever. Bad dog owner!]

The actor extended a vein-lined, liver spot-encrusted hand. I took it in mine. His grip put me in mind of the last piece of cod at the fishmonger's at the end of a hot day.

[LOL excellent description]

I stood when she reached the table and we did that fake kissing thing, looking like a pair of budgies about to peck each other to death.

----------

Ryan fixed his big brown eyes on me with a phony look of pity and regret. Briefly, I considered leaping across the desk and biting him until he bled.

[I do truly love Grafton's knack for tossing in occasional lines that make me snort with sudden laughter.]

'I hope you'll forgive my saying so, dear, but you seem bitter.'
'I'm bitter by nature. I always sound like this.'

[LOL]

[I am really enjoying this one. These flashback/other-POV chapters are unclear but I can tell everything is going to come together and I'm imagining it to be wild.]

Why were we given this unearthly radiance, this blueness,
if not to seek it out, to love it with all our hearts?

Widowed by men, I married the dark firs,
as if I were walking in sleep toward their arms.
I drank, without fear or desire,
this odd fire.

Now shadows move freely within me as words.
These are eternal, these stunned, loosened verbs.
And I can't tell you yet
how truly I belong
to the hiss and shift of wind,
these slow, variable mouths
through which, at certain times, I speak in tongues.

Home's the place we head for in our sleep.

[The fact that Mallory was so shocked and speechless over this reveal is aggravating. Why do YA fantasy authors insist on making their FMCs dumb as shit?]

'Yes,' he said solemnly. 'I've been slowly poisoning myself for years so that my guests will never suspect me when I start to kill them off with mugs of hot chocolate.'

[me if i hosted dinner parties]

The unplucked apple, the beloved just out of touch, the meaning not quite attained, are desirable objects of knowledge. It is the enterprise of eros to keep them so. The unknown must remain unknown or the novel ends. As all paradoxes are, in some way, paradoxes about paradox, so all eros is, to some degree, desire for desire.

Every hunting, hungering lover is half a knucklebone, wooer of a meaning inseparable from its absence. The moment when we understand these things--when we see what we are projected on a screen of what we could be--is invariably a moment of wrench&arrest. We love that moment&hate it. We have to keep going back to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact w/the possible. But this also entails watching it disappear.

Sappho says, and breaks off:
I'm in love! I'm not in love!
I'm crazy! I'm not crazy!

[Very fitting that Sappho is the godmother of all queer femmes, because those two lines are SO GAY. Like, that could be a dictionary definition. That is every queer summed up nicely.]

How many wrong turns must a person take in order to find the right road? How many false promises do you have to give in order to keep your word? How many times must you move to another country before you reach home? How can you change your life when you've memorized it like a poem? How many hours must I count, how many hourglasses must I empty, to return to the point when the clocks still told the right time?

When a beloved person goes, they leave behind an awful, jagged crater--and you can never grant anyone a glimpse into your abyss, never let them see the extent of the damage.