Gwen :) > Recent Status Updates

i am a LESBIAN i do NOT wanna hear about how straight women like the smell of mens PITS

this book is SO heavily focused on pregnancy & the body’s changes when having children, which is obviously important to being a biological woman, but i’m tired of it JUST being about that. give me some cultural implications of being a woman or something 😔🙏

the amount of shit rachel steals IS illegal

god rachel is kinda horrible

she dates another james?? GURL

yet another book that’s like watching a train crash happen

i’m already obsessed with the little earl who’s literally 7

her brother is the sweetest and i’m obsessed with him

obsessed with the comparative mythology work being done here… like so many ancient cultures have female goddesses connected with weaving and life & death…

i love lesbian vampires

Rosalie is the Regina George, man-hating lesbian of my dreams. i fear no book character will surpass her.

everyone’s gay and in love with each other!! it’s like a love quadrangle

i will say the worldbuilding of the ministry and their ‘enemies’ is a bit vague to the point of confusion

“This, I learned, was how the Ministry received the power of time-travel. Not through invention but through the fine British tradition of finders keepers.”

margaret is an ICONNNN

“Oh, England, England! The thing you do best is tell a story about yourself. Graham Gore went to the Arctic believing that a noble death is possible because of all those stories and then he became a story. Oh, England, you wanted to make stories out of me.”

“When I look back at myself on the bridge year, I see that I thought I was doing something constructive, escaping exploitation by becoming exceptional. In fact, what I was doing was squeezing my eyes shut and singing la la la at the gathering darkness, as if the gathering darkness cared that I couldn't see it.”

not the unreliable narrator who is lowkey a bad person… having yellowface flashbacks

the concept of these time travelers consisting of a lesbian, a gay or bisexual man, and another vaguely queer man is amazing. 10/10

bro if she falls in love with the commander….

“Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel, or read a book with time-travel, or dissociated on a delayed public transport vehicle by considering the concept of time-travel, will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit.
How does it work? How can it work? […] I'm here to tell you: don't worry about it.”

she keeps making classical myth references and i love it 😋

miss girl has EVERYONE in love w her

I love that this is a world that combines Dracula and Sherlock Holmes… I love it when books are meta to other literary works

as an editor and english major i find it very annoying that some of the dialogue isn’t in quotations or even italicized 🫩

“But she knows that had it not been Alfonso it would have been someone else-a prince, another duke, a nobleman from Germany or France, a second cousin from Spain. Her father would have found her an advantageous match because that is, after all, what she has been brought up for: to be married, to be used as a link in his chains of power, to produce heirs for men like Alfonso.”

Alfonso when i catch you Alfonso

now why is Alex an asshole

i love the vibes and setting of this book… combining a modern sensibility with a fantasy world of royals, alchemists, Wild Woods, and magical creatures

the whole “girlboss” and “reclaiming women’s voices” agenda is a tad heavy handed, but to be fair i spent the last year entrenched in these scholarly conversations, so perhaps it just feels redundant to me.

still i’d like to see more of a focus on the archaeology rather than all this preamble…