Lisa Lynch > Recent Status Updates

"It was, perhaps, the devil's oldest precept, that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person, as often for good as for ill."

"As Fred's own "peanuts" (this time minus the "t") came alarmingly close to being grabbed..."

So this man was just sexually assaulted and I'm supposed to find it funny????

Also, not only has there been a 4th fart joke in less than 30 pages, but we've joked about laxatives, hemorrhoids, diarrhea, stained undies, and there was even mention of a mole on a scrotum.

Fuck this kind of "comedy".

So I'm on page 14 and there have been three fart jokes, two mentions of piss, and a kid picking her nose.

And like... grown adults find that funny???

If I wasn't reading this for a book club, I'd have stopped at the first sentence. Which is, hands down, the worst first line I've ever read;

"The single drop of pee made a pitiful splash."

Ugh.

"The dark man fled across the snow and Arthur Oaks followed."

Oh I see what you did there, Uncle Joe ;)

"... I'm surviving and finding that life does go on and it can be good, even when experienced from a chair."

This book published in 1984, over 40 years ago, has a better message about disability than some modern books I've read recently.

It has been refreshing to hear the word "disability" used far more frequently than the word "handicapped".

"The fellow who wrote about a homicidal Plymouth Fury with a girl's name would be astounded to learn how close he'd come to the truth."

Tell me you're a Stephen King fanboy without telling me you're a Stephen King fanboy.

I mean, it takes one to know one, so...

Ultimately, queerness invites us all, regardless of our identities, to be more undefined, unclear, transitional, merging, interdependent, cooperative, and nonhierarchical-- a very fungal way of being.

"Books are anarchists. They're also like kids: they tell you who they are, they do not stay what you imagined they would be."

"Like everything else we project onto the other, injury and disability will not stay "over there"; they will eventually come for us- our bodies, our families, our beloved places. If we fail to build infrastructures of care, the cruelties and derangements of the Covid era will be only the barest glimpse of the barbarian to come."

THIS.

Disability is INEVITABLE through the natural process of aging. Prepare yourself.

"...many more [disabled people] were likely killed in acts of "wild euthanasia" performed by medical professionals who took it upon themselves to carry out the Nazi principle that care of the disabled was too great a financial strain for a country at war."

If you think disabled people are a burden and don't deserve to live, you think like a Nazi. And we aren't even at war!! (Yet)

"Well before they began killing Jews on an industrial scale in the death camps, the Nazis practiced and refined their methods on the disabled in asylums. In a euthanasia program known as Aktion T4, which officially began in 1939, upwards of 200,000 disabled people were murdered."

You can't tell me that RFK Jr. and Trump don't want to do the same thing.

Only a man would write this...

"I'm just joking, girl. I'm the clingy weirdo, how'm'ever, I know all the single men in town, so I can definitely help you get laid..."

Said no woman in the history of ever, especially not to another woman she just met randomly in public and has been talking to for less than 5 minutes.

Yeesh.

"...Scooter MacLean, a grammar school classmate with unfortunate jug-ears."

There is no need to bring up this classmate from Protagonist's past other than as an opportunity to make fun of someone with a physical difference using an outdated, deragatory term.

What happened, Steve? When did you get so mean? This entire book is... SO offensive.

Like, calling the non-disabled people in this world "whole"??

Fuck that.

"... Scooter MacLean, a grammar school classmate with unfortunate jug-ears."

There is no need to bring up this classmate from Protagonist's past other than as an opportunity to make fun of someone with a physical difference using an outdated, deragatory term.

Why are you doing this, Steve? What happened? When did you get so mean?

And calling non-disabled people in this world "whole"??

Fuck that.

"Dissing disabled people is crap behavior..."

Yeah, Steve, so maybe don't write a book that regurgitates ableist fairy tale tropes.

I mean, I'm appalled. Disabilities as literal curses? A protagonist who acknowledges the voice of the disability community, but disregards it?

I don't want to keep reading this.

Stevie may not be my favorite author after this one of it goes where I think this is going...

"For fuck's sake, hadn't I learned that lesson? Sunday school stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal."

"I have lived a long time," she said. "And the longer I live, the more it surprises me, and saddens me, how wise the young must become to live in this world."

Ok, the hide and seek competition doesn't officially start until part 3, so if you were hoping most of this would be watching the game being played... it's not.

Roughly 70% of this has been setup and backstory. And it's been... ok for the most part.

But I have a feeling this game is going to be disappointing.

"It was a nice story. Perfectly sweet and mostly accurate, focusing as it did on my belief (then as now) that I wasn't special or unique, that I was just a normal kid-- albeit one who happened to have been born without limbs." P. 97-98

*THIS*

I hate the word "special" and so does a majority of the disabled community, because "special" implies "other" and that simply isn't the case. We humans, not oddities.

"I wasn't smashing the patriarchy; I was killing it.

Literally.

One by one."

Hey publishers or editors or whoever makes this decision...

You do NOT need to change "readers" to "listeners" in audiobooks.

Listening to an audiobook is reading a book. So stop changing it!

You're just encouraging ableist snobs to continue looking down their noses at us audiobook READERS.

"Perhaps, then, God is not benevolent and inattentive but all-knowing and cruel."

"Do little boys ever grow out of being fools, I wonder? Or do they simply grow into something worse?"

I've enjoyed this so far for the most part, but I've been bored for like, 50 pages.