val > Recent Status Updates

a proposal and a rejection within 30 pages. whatever happened to slow burn, gabriel oak?

me when the book involves the heroine saving a man !!!! yippee.

"manner demanded by the saddle, though hardly by the woman" is such a wonderful line. what the situation calls for does not often align with what is expected of you.

you know the pen on fire gif. or the gif of penelope featherington serving face while she's writing a whistledown article. well, that's how i felt annotating "vanity" next to "woman's prescriptive infirmity" only to have my annotation affirmed at the end of the first chapter #womeninpropheticfields

Everything just fell into place. This is excellent.

This isn't simply a novel about a reclusive woman discovering herself and her capacity to love. This is a novel about a historical wrong that was never righted. This is a novel about the inerasable marks that our predecessors leave, and how time merely reveals certain scars. Time reveals; it does not bury.

Wait. Wait a second. Oh. Oh my god. OHHHHH my god. Okay if Eva's here to claim reparations, I'm honestly not even going to be mad. Go girl.

WHAT IN THE REVERSE FINGERSMITH IS GOING ON WHY CAN'T I JUST HAVE SAPPHIC FICTION WHERE EVERYONE JUST GENUINELY FALLS IN LOVE WITH NO STRINGS PRE-ATTACHED

kissing your brother's girlfriend who you swear you hate (but not really because it's just internalised homophobia) and then pretending like nothing happened the next morning is absolutely insane, 10/10

"I'm nothing like my brother" SO. NOTHING LIKE LOUIS (EVA'S BOYFRIEND) OR HENDRIK (THE GAY ONE). LIKE. HELLO.

This is her DEBUT NOVEL. Holy crap.

promised i’d reread this on the plane but i started crying because of turbulence so i only got a little bit into it 🥀 i promise i’ll keep going though. i’ve already uncovered so many bits i missed the first time because i didn’t know about ELX back then 😈😈😈

and the second best bed has been mentioned!

"have you not always said you will have two children?"
"i have," she says.

subtle foreshadowing.

WHAT THE FREAK WHAT THE FREAK WHAT THE FREAK WHAT THE FREAK WHAT THE FREAK

love but also the sheer amount of animal imagery linked to agnes is legit sending me into val plumwood space

why is agnes literally clairvoyant. im confused. if she is shouldn't she be able to see that judith has "the pestilence". like.

okay. thoughts:
-cool that agnes is such a special individual with a beautiful link to nature. uncool that it plays into #hyperseparation and persistently associates women with the natural world.
-extremely intrigued by how both agnes and william have childhood trauma and are bonded by that
-obsessed with how the narrative jumps between time

"oh wow i wonder what's going on here! oh wait never mind."

second most awkardly introduced sex scene ever (with the first being the beach moment from brooklyn).

her writing style is so insanely interesting; that weird twist between second and third person!!! the fact that most characters have gone unnamed so far but are so obviously certain people!!! argh! my irish faves i am reading this before i watch you in cinemas!

"not great love, then... but just the common humble average of human love was hers."

damn.

i think this book is really about female vulnerability in a world that demands material worth

the only issue i have with coming to this conclusion more than halfway into the book is why this wasn't foregrounded a bit more at the start (or maybe i'm just dumb)

nick, buddy, let me hold your hand when i say this-- what else did you expect her to do???? wait and throw herself at your feet and beg you to stay? that was not the nature of the arrangement you had, buddy!!! playing cat and mouse is not going to work!

it's astounding how incredibly selfish everyone in this novel is, 10/10 stuff truly

I hate to be that person, but I think that this book may have worked better as a short story. The main conflict feels like it's been dragged out a bit: simultaneously, though, the rest of the narrative works just fine in terms of pace, so I don't know what to feel.

so susy just got dumped because nick realised that she was manipulating their mutual friend's infidelity to cop a house. damn!

the mounting tension is so brilliantly written... edith wharton you're so cool.