#I heard about this book from forthegothicheroine

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

Nine Fandom Peeps to Get to Know Better

Tagged by @jammerific

Three ships you like: I ship many ships! Trying to give answers that aren’t super obvious from my blog. Mulder/Scully from X Files, Kirei/Gilgamesh from Fate, Rhaenyra/Alicent from HOTD

I haven’t thought about them in a minute but I guess honorable mention to Alucard/Integra from Hellsing because I have written the most fic for that lol

First ship ever: Probably Christine/Erik from Phantom of the Opera?

Last song you heard: Sacrifice by London after Midnight

Favorite childhood book: I had a book of fairytales I read so many times it fell apart. I think my favorite of them was probably Vasilisa the Brave because I really liked the illustrations.

Currently reading: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia!

Currently watching: In order of last watched, Riverdale, Vanderpump Rules, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Penny Dreadful

I have fully been converted to a reality TV person lol

Currently consuming: A… cappuccino?

Currently craving: We ordered a sachertorte for my birthday cake and my boyfriend will be picking it up today 👀👀

Tagging: @bebemoon @allthestoriescantbelies @forthegothicheroine @akilice @cainhuurst @susandsnell @dr-paine @anddreadful @doomsayings no pressure!

[maddie-grove]

Little Book Review: Help at Any Cost

Author: Maia Szalavitz.

Publication Date: 2006.

Genre: Nonfiction.

Premise: Szalavitz examines the history of "tough love" programs for teens, from their super-shady roots in the encounter-group movement of the 1960s, to their track record of abusing and sometimes killing teens in the 1970s-2000s, to the legal challenges they started to face towards the turn of the century. She also recommends better ways to help troubled teens, such as not treating them like dirt and getting them actual, evidence-based psychological help when they need it.

Thoughts: Three quotes come to mind. First, from Holes by Louis Sachar:

If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy.

That was what some people thought.

Second, from blue-beetle (maybe):

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

Third, from Dear Prudence of yesteryear Emily Yoffe, to the concerned mother of a teen boy with a thing for dishwashing gloves:

[Dr. Martin] Kafka says your son needs a complete psychological workup. ... To find the right therapist, Kafka recommends contacting the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers—not because your son is or will be an abuser, but because these professionals are knowledgeable about paraphilias.

People just lose their ever-loving minds when it comes to unruly teenagers. It's understandable, to a degree. Teens are at a developmental stage where emotions are volatile and impulse control is a light suggestion. Some of them also become incredibly strong overnight and/or develop the ability to insult adults with uncanny accuracy. Add to this the serious repercussions for teens (especially those who aren't rich or white) who perform poorly in school or get into legal trouble. It's no wonder parents freak out sometimes. Yet, to let your child be treated with less kindness than a stray dog, or to endanger their long-term physical, mental, social, or financial well-being in order to "fix" behavior in the short term, often while forking over a small fortune without questioning the motives of the people who run the program? It's hard for me to wrap my head around, but Szalavitz describes a waning yet widespread industry that gets parents to do just that, often with the approval of courts and insurance companies.

My prior knowledge of "tough-love" programs came mostly from fiction, plus the odd half-remembered magazine expose. Wilderness boot camps seem to fare better in fiction than other kinds of programs (see the Lifetime Original Movie Augusta, Gone; Wendelin Van Draanen's Wild Bird; and a particularly chilling but under-discussed plot point in 13 Reasons Why). This seems concerning, given that these kind of programs can so easily go wrong due to the already-risky conditions. Other stories, notably "The Pelican Bar" by Karen Joy Fowler and Boot Camp by Todd Strasser, read like the authors had Help at Any Cost open on their desks while they were writing. None of these works fully capture the insidious way these companies work on parents, though, or the devastating long-term effects on many teens.

The really scary thing about this book is that, while there are a few parents who had an extremely distorted and negative view of their child before encountering any of these programs, many more got tricked and intimidated into thinking that this was the only way to save their children from a life of drug addiction and premature death...even if the child in question was a sweet-natured thirteen-year-old whose most subversive act was wanting to accessorize like Madonna in 1985, or a college student who managed to hold down a job while making good grades but sometimes smoked pot in the late 1970s. Now that's Kafka-esque. Maybe even Dr. Martin Kafka-esque.

Hot Goodreads Take: One largely positive review calls the book "a bit of a biased account." I think the bias they're talking about is that Szalavitz clearly thinks these places are bad.

[carterhaughs]

Sick book meme

tagged by @upstartpoodle - this was great fun, thank you! and thanks for sharing your own recommendations with me. let me know if any of you check out my recs so we can discuss. :)

1) Diabetes: A very sweet book.

Everything on a Waffle by Polly Horvath. A young girl lives in a fishing village bouncing around from family to family after her parents disappear in a typhoon. She finds comfort in the company of her uncle and the independent, spirited owner of a local restaurant she loves - The Girl on the Red Swing, where everything is served on a waffle. Each chapter begins with a recipe that is thematically relevant to the chapter’s plot. A thoroughly sweet, darkly funny book that also acts as a sincere examination of grief and hope in a charming oddity of a town. 

2) Chickenpox: A book that you read once and will not read again.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, required reading in my high school senior English lit class. I got a scholarship writing an essay about how much it disturbed me actually, and was one of the only people in the class to read it all the way through despite my hatred of it, and the fact that many other people agreed with its perspective and didn’t even finish it. Know your enemy, I say. That’s why I read it all the way through.

3) Influenza: A contagious book that spreads like a virus.

The Hunger Games series, and rightly so. Unfortunately, as with Harry Potter and Twilight it inspired lots of mediocre imitators (although Twilight was horrid so a lot of its imitators were actually improvements lol). But it was a good step forward for diverse speculative fiction in the YA genre, and still inspires me with the hope at its center and its careful treatment of the protagonist’s voice and how she deals with trauma.

4) The Cycle: A book that you read every month, every year, or very often.

I’ve probably read The Lord of the Rings series more than any other, although A Song of Ice and Fire is getting up there now too - both long, nuanced, detailed feats of top-notch worldbuilding and characterization that inspire me in my daily life

5) Insomnia: A book that kept you up all night.

I stay up late all the time reading for pleasure but one of my favorite examples of that was when I was reading The Fellowship of the Ring the first time when I was 12, and my heart was actually pounding in my chest in the middle of the night as I read about the crossing of the bridge in Khazad-Dûm

6) Amnesia: A book that’s been forgotten and failed to leave an impression on your life.

I usually don’t finish books that don’t thrill me but probably the best example of this is when I tried reading the Twilight books when I was 16 bc I had a friend who knew I loved vampire stories and so recommended them as did an English teacher whose opinion I respected. I was very bored by it - found the prose plodding and repetitive and then I got to the line that made me quit which was when Bella asked if she could watch them hunt and kill animals in the forest...ew

7) Asthma: A book that took your breath away.

I somehow had never heard of Jane Eyre when I was 16 and found it on a summer reading book display at the library which drew my attention to it. Read it in three days, completely drawn in by it and thrilled by the promising combination of beautiful prose, a dark and serious yet ultimately hopeful look at humanity and society, and one of the most carefully written and feminist romances I’d ever read

8) Malnutrition: A book that lacked food for thought.

Guess I’ll have to say The Fountainhead again, as it’s the only book I truly despised that I actually finished bc it was for a class. Rand doesn’t understand humanity a fraction so well as she thinks she does, and it shows on every page. 

9) Motion sickness: A book that took you on a journey through time and space.

Cloud Atlas is a wonder of a book I’d highly recommend to anyone (along with any David Mitchell book really) - masterfully juggles different writing styles, genres, and time periods in a way that boggles the mind and arrests the senses while expanding everything you thought you knew about man’s place in the universe.

tagging @gulbaharsultan, @charlottemarney, @ameliasscanwells, @laurakinney, @elizabethwchynoweth, @ladytharen, @forthegothicheroine @chelli-lona if any of you all would like to do it!