Cait > Recent Status Updates

this prose is too purple for me bro :(

“all that’s left is to let the quiet thicken about him like a shroud as it runs a tongue around the rim of his ear”

encountering this metaphor on page like 3 is a LOT…

call me overly skeptical, but I don’t think crawling on top of an antique piano to get yourself off is good for the piano

They’re Just Having A Different Night Than You.

oh lmao they’re flippers? let the bitches die

“But even they are not exempt from a major trait of the king’s paranoia: freedom. They are bound by location and need special permits to leave the mines.”

that is…poorly constructed I’m afraid

b**** when the radical priest come to get me released we was ALL on the cover of newsweek!!!!!

oh the prose in this is fun

this level of miscommunication only works in the sphere of the most overwrought and deranged fan fiction…like…clearly there is a reason I don’t trust published authors to do it well because casey mcquiston what are we doing here…this is not delicious…

oh my god how did I not realize this is a graphic novel (THATS FINE AND NOT A PROBLEM IM JUST OBLIVIOUS)

I dream of a world in which well intentioned anthologies are good and in which editors do right by inexperienced writers jesus christ not fixing basic tense errors from an author who is writing in english when their first language is clearly not english???? come ON!

so “the tree in the back yard” was really bad, like has no one ever told the author that stories have to have SOME kind of resolution, even if you elect for an ambiguous ending. just an utterly unsatisfying nothing of a short story :\

almost abandoned this because of the sapir-whorfism of the first story but rich larson’s “tidings” (story #3) did give me shivers and made my eyes well up so we’re back in business

linguistic determinism my old enemy…

“Babylonian school began in early puberty, but what is really remarkable is the reason we know this. A clay tablet containing a basic school exercise of the kind that students would be given early in their education was found with a set of teeth marks in its upper right corner. The student, whoever this was, must have tried to take a bite out of the tablet after finishing the exercise.”

typically, in romance novels, it is the male lead—whom we as the reader do not follow as closely & with whom we are not, in all truth, meant to identify as closely as with the female lead—who fucks up and who must, subsequently, grovel. voskuni plays with this gendered expectation by consistently having her generally femme-leaning pov characters be the most massive fucker-uppers in existence. in this essay I will

so she’s mad at her brother for getting into stanford on a golf scholarship, “but at least I know I got into berkeley on a regents scholarship, which will forever be a point of pride” like…oh this is the downside of california books…I am experiencing a great deal of contact embarrassment. where’s the button to indicate ‘I don’t wish to see or be seen by people who care to make these sorts of flexes’

these beeps have GOT to stop listening at the door

“[her] little boy grinned at the mention of chocolate” PLEASKSKKZKEEE his mom is trying “vanilla cacao” tea for the first time AS WE SPEAK & this is only the second use of the word “chocolate” in the book: at the beginning you talked about playing around with the hitherto mysterious “sweetened cacao” from TropicalJungleLand……rebecca be serious about your worldbuilding it doesn’t pay to be sloppy

I could really just quote this whole entire book and have done with it. my bookmarks are currently looking like amateurish student annotations, which is to say, I’ve found it hard to fight my feverish compulsion to indiscriminately highlight the whole damn thing

FUCK!!!!! BITCH!!!!!! OKAY!!!!!!! ME??? WITH TINGLES OF THE HEARTSWOON FROM A YA NOVEL???? OKAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Palestinian refugees are, in this sense, like nomads travelling across a landscape of memory. They carry their village in their hearts, like an internal compass where 'north' is always Palestine. They pass this compass down to their children, who sketch in the details on an ever-fading map—the hills and trees and wadis—from their own imagination."

damn this shit is kinda metal for YA…I rly appreciate krystal sutherland lol

you can have prose this purple (I guess) or an audiobook narrator determined to chew the scenery (I GUESS) but you sure as hell can’t have both omg

this scene where elnora knocks sadie reed down a peg with the Power of God would make for an interesting pairing with that bit in VILLETTE where she mercilessly humiliates the mean girl in the school to assert her dominance

so I'm realizing that I actually think I....don't like catherine ho as an audiobook narrator. :( her male character voices are way too silly (might also be part of the reason why GOOD FORTUNE didn't quite strike for me tbh) so since this has two central male characters I'm going to try this again in ebook format

whatever happened to the fourth wall of the internet? what ever happened to the fourth wall of the internet? why are we so afraid to keep a healthy distance between the spheres

I think I may just be profoundly and fundamentally uninterested in Came Back Wrong narratives

I swear to god if kj keeps teasing these queer women without actually DOING anything about it

why is this lowkey the most miserable emily henry…which is not necessarily to say that this is the WORST emily henry (evaluative and comparative judgments will be reserved until after I’ve finished), just that even at their ostensible happiest all of these people are so desperately unhappy it’s choking lol. not unrelatable (“lol”)! but also perhaps a weird choice for the genre