shawnee > Recent Status Updates

interesting choice to not capitalize “black” and “indigenous” — would like to know the thought process behind this writing choice

what a breath of fresh air after finishing the book i shall not name

all of a sudden he’s rich ????

“‘…I just need to let you all know why I’m finna to keep this seat!’”

…

sickening…truly thought this book couldn’t get worse yet here we are

the fact that most of my students weren’t even a thought in their parents’ heads when obama was elected president…

“…Olga began to notice that her clients were growing steadily richer while the people doing the work were getting compensated in exactly the same way.”

okay intro to sociology

also hasn’t olga been characterized as this smart, ivy-league-educated woman? and yet she’s having realizations that other BIPOC figure out during their frosh yr or before (just without the language to describe it)…i’m upset

“He understood that on the island, that ravaged strip of land, was the map back to the person he had lost sight of.”

…like I see what Gonzalez was trying to go for, but of context, this is giving the white saviorism she is trying to denounce.

“Giving out water was one thing; doing so with rifles was another. Liberating prisons—juvenile or otherwise—landed yet somewhere else on the spectrum.”

is gonzalez trying to condemn the actions of revolutionaries? trying to condemn violence in the name of liberation? what a confusing author

“Her compassion for the blind man was as violent as an agony, but the world seemed to be hers, dirty, perishable, hers.”

“She protected herself trembling. Because life was in peril. She loved the world, loved what had been created — she loved with nausea.”

“The small hand wants to pull away from her mother’s safe hold. The small, dear hand needs to swim, explore, love. The ocean cannot be contained; neither can love; neither can Joy. Wren loosens her grasp. It is so hard to let go.”

“And if Margaret wasn’t talking, she was singing, and to Lewis’s complete vexation, the only songs in her repertoire were snippets of three hits from the early 2000s…as well as Avril Lavigne’s first two albums, which she knew by heart.”

ugh margaret c finnegan is so me

“What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.”

“All the hours he spent theorizing about magic seemed so naive now. The main ingredient in transformation was not magic. It was pain.”

“The doctors focused on subtraction, what was being taken from his human experience, but they failed to see the incredible features and traits being added in the process.”

“The best he had to offer anything was right now. And maybe that had always been true.”

“Through the music’s swells, they swayed, and they knew, and they held each other, and they knew, and they melted, and they knew, and they knew, and they knew: Everything would be different and difficult soon.”

“It was the most hopeful thing anyone could have said, a bypassing of the truth, because there would not be another year to measure against this first one.”

“It was as if her psyche contained a magnet that activated its pull only when she was away from the Great Plains and her mother.”

i wish i wish with all my heart that i can DNF this book, but i actually can’t because it’s part of the curriculum :/