Hello again, and a bit of housekeeping

leila roy

leila roy

— 4 min read
banner image: bookshelves of doom
yes, i still have pretty much the same banner that i've been using for... going on 25 years? what can i say, i'm sentimental, and i still clearly remember creating that flying vampire book with literal scissors and paper (i am! so! old!) while i was supposed to be working the circ desk

Hello, friends!

I hope, very much, that you are as well as can be.

I also hope, very much, that this newsletter makes it to your inbox—while I loved Substack's ease of use, I was not a fan of their whole platforming Nazis and TERFs thing. Which resulted in guilt every time I used it, which resulted in getting generally bummed out every time I wrote, which resulted in not writing.

So I took the advice of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, and moved my newsletter over to Ghost, which seems like a company that is actually trying to do things... ethically? Is that really possible? Do unicorns exist? I hope so.

She smiled, but it was tight and sharp across her face and the edges of her mouth cut into her cheeks. A brittle smile, precarious and breakable.
—A Good House for Children, by Kate Collins

A few more notes, and then a couple of book recommendations:

  • Going forward, I'll be linking to Bookshop, and not Amazon.
    • Bezos can kick rocks. It took some doing, but I've almost entirely disentangled myself from Amazon. Washington Post? Gone. Goodreads? Gone. Amazon purchase? Not since September of last year.
    • I'll need to eventually replace my Firestick with something else (recommendations welcome) when my Prime membership ends, and I'm looking at a Kobo to eventually replace my Kindle (recommendations welcome on that front as well).
    • Once I started the process, I realized how much of my daily life involved Amazon—not to be too dramatic, but it started feeling like I was fighting a hydra—and so even without the Bezos of it all, relying so much on one company made me feel... well, uneasy? Like, dystopian? Taking that power back has made the inconvenience feel almost good.
labyrinth gif: you have no power over me
obviously, bezos is no david bowie, but you take my point
  • I left Twitter for Bluesky quite some time ago (come for hot takes on 30 year old television shows, stay for the crafts), and I'm in the process of axing Facebook and Instagram. You can also find me on Letterboxd.
    • Deleting Facebook—and with it, my inability to resist looking at the awful, awful comments sections of our local news channel, some of them from people whose names I recognized, these are the drawbacks of small towns—from my phone left me feeling such a feeling of relief that I was only sorry I hadn't deleted it sooner.
    • All of these apps, at different points, have brought me joy—while I was getting things in order to start my Deletion Bonanza, I came across a screenshot from the day Voya blocked me (IYKYK), and remembering the absurdity of that day made me laugh for what felt like five minutes straight. For lots of you, I'm sure, the joy and the community and the connections still outweigh the bad stuff. We all have to find our own paths through this, right?
    • Long story short, for me, those sites had become sources of stress, and my lifelines have moved to different places: Slack, Finch, Bluesky, straight-up email, text, and face-to-face. And hopefully, here.
book covers: a good house for children, by kate collins; the ivies, by alexa donne; how can i help you, by laura sims; what the river knows, by isabel ibañez

And now, back to the books

Here are a few I read during my hiatus—my commentary is pulled directly from my notes, so please bear with the even more stream-of-consciousness than usual:

A Good House for Children, by Kate Collins

I absolutely adored this one; feminist folk horror with some timeslip business. Gorgeous prose, quiet and almost sedate on the surface, but with roiling undercurrents of frustration, claustrophobia, loneliness, and anger. Elements of city/country, absolutely hammers into patriarchal bullshit.

The Ivies, by Alexa Donne

Truly delightful. Twisty, turny, and MEAN. Loved that SPOILER ended up being just as much of a dirtbag as everyone else, and loved that the meanest mean girl ended up being the least-awful of them all. Kept me guessing about whodunnit right up until I broke and flipped to the end to break the tension. Will 100% be reading the few Alexa Donna thrilllers that I haven’t already read asap. A couple of elements that I saw coming, but in a way that felt satisfying and inevitable, versus feeling rote and predictable.

[Note from now: I have now read all of her thrillers.]

How Can I Help You, by Laura Sims

Lots to like: Two women who are quietly obsessed with each other (not romantically, just like OBSESSED); smart and satisfying structural choices, in that we get multiple scenes twice, first with Margo directly narrating as she experiences them, and then with Patricia observing Margo as the moment plays out; Shirley Jackson is a factor.

In some ways, this vibes like a historical, but it's not. I had such a hard time letting go of the fact that this all seems to play out in a present day in which fingerprints are not a factor? Like. Margo is a former nurse, wouldn't her fingerprints be on file somewhere?????????

What the River Knows, by Isabel Ibañez

EYEBROW QUIRKING IS NOT A PERSONALITY OMG

Standard fantasy-historical-romance-adventure storyline with not particularly surprising surprises (of COURSE SPOILER was bad), the love interest was not particularly swoony (truly a walking pair of eyebrows, but the only person who can make that work is Peter Gallagher, and you, sir, are no Peter Gallagher), the dialogue is occasionally BONKERSLY anachronistic and YET i kept turning pages until i hit the final insult: a cliffhanger. Certainly made me want more in this Amelia Peabody vein, but this was just so… bland.

That said, I can't promise I won't read the sequel.

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