Taylor’s Reviews > Our Hideous Progeny > Status Update

so the girl helping the jocks succeed in chemistry group projects trope dates back to 1870? oh mary my girl

“GOD FORBID WE INTERFERE WITH HER INFANT’S DIET” ??? when it’s a research animal and you tell that joke to her husband whose child she had complications carrying ?? oh fuck u clarke!

“she was no longer that happy creature who, in earlier youth, wondered with me on the banks of the lake and talked with ecstasy of our future prospects.” the way this book weaves so many references and ties it back so beautifully to the core theme of an unraveling marriage will never fail to amaze me. “i loved you once, when you were not so dull.” when mary tried to play up her honeymoon?? to earn respect :(

this is the dark academia i was promised but oh my god mary give me a hug “it might have been better if I had real bruises to match those he’d left on my pride.” sweetheart he doesn’t think geology is a real science that’s bruising his ego enough..fuck you finlay clarke all my homies hate finlay clarke. if someone talked about my mom like that i’d turn into my father

hearing mary compare her younger sister-in-law to a charcoal sketch and an actress between performances when she is a researcher herself at a university is just devastating, and the “sometimes of it all” with her disability, my heart. also, don’t think i didn’t clock that “accompanying Catherine on her coming out” to the Jamesetjees oh this book is so clever

halfway through chapter 4 and the prose in this book is so lively and i love how the time period enhances the academic tone, instead of monotonous and draggy like how i usually do. “if there exists a way to respond to condolences that doesn’t feel like ripping open the stitches of a wound with one’s teeth, i have not found it yet.” also yay bonding over a fossilized tooth #girlhood