#the subject matter is NOT cringe I don’t like when my warrior cats interest is called that 😤 but the prompt list is cringetober :3

[sticker-books]

Cringetober day 1 prompt: “Heterochromia”

[quaggathemighty]

Stepsister, by Jennifer Donnelly: an emotional, messy review.

Recommended For: fantasy, ya, feminist, fairy tale, coming of age stories, girl protagonist, adventure lovers

         This will be as close to a spoiler-free review as I can make it.

"It's the hunger in our hearts that kills us."

Have you ever read a book that so thoroughly encompassed everything you ever wanted to put on paper? That ripped into the deepest part of you and dragged you along by your emotions until you're raw and hopeful and shattered and fired up all at once? Because I just have.

The Summary:

“Isabelle should be blissfully happy - she's about to win the handsome prince. Except Isabelle isn't the beautiful girl who lost the slipper and captured the prince's heart. She's the ugly stepsister who cut off her toes to fit into Cinderella's shoe... which is now filling with blood.

When the prince discovers Isabelle's deception, she's turned away in shame. It's no more than she deserves. She cut away pieces of herself in order to become pretty. Sweet. More like Cinderella. But that only made her mean, jealous, and hollow. Now she has a chance to alter her destiny and prove what ugly stepsisters have always known:

It takes more than heartache to break a girl."

My Thoughts:

Isabelle is not pretty. She's jealous and she struggles and while she fiercely loves her sister she often feels lost and afraid, or angry and hateful to the world that left her behind. She cut off her toes because her absolutely mad mother demanded it, heating a knife over the fire while she berates her into obeying, and as a result Isabelle's bitterness and jealousy might even kill her. But as the story unfolds she's also breathtakingly passionate and brave and confident and fiery, and she grows a lot over the course of the story, learning to set aside what everyone else has labeled her (and indeed sometimes what she's labeled herself because of their cruelty), to become her own woman. She's strong and real and well written, and I love her. I want to be her. Goddamn I want every girl to be her. To be their own Elizabeth, Yennenga, Abhaya Rani. Strong, brave, dangerous. Beautiful in their own right, and not always on the surface like the world wants.

"Each queen was once a girl like you. Told who to be and what to do. Not pretty, not pleasing, far too rough. Til wounded subjects, anguished dead, mattered more than things the others said. Then, like a flag, her will unfurled. Go now, girl. Remake the world."

UUUGHhhh. Can we just talk about this book PLEASE? Can this get more of a following so I can scream and rave and flail and ugly cry with more people who loved this book? Oh my god. There are so many things about this book I like, from the way she fought for and protected her sister, to the way she grew to see past the jealousy her mother instilled in her against Ella, to the way it doesn't pit the girls against each other for their vastly different strengths. Well, except for one, but I'll get to that.

The book opens up on what has to be one of the most heart-wrenching, cringe-worthy scenes I've ever read in a young adult novel, and it's that scene with the cutting of the feet and the bloody shoes (yes, from the original myth, this ain't no Disney remake, y'all, it gets gory and doesn't hide from it) is what made me actually come back and buy the book. Isabelle had me by the heartstrings the whole goddamn read. For a girl who never grew up as conventionally attractive, who was always too loud or too brash or never had the right interests (witchcraft, necromancy, and vampires, anyone? No? Don't hide your cringe years from me, I know you had them too), seeing a book properly take these oddities and this 'ugliness', and teach a young woman to learn to accept and even love these things about herself, even though it doesn't get her what she's been told she has to want, but instead pushes her to find her own path? Ugh. Yes. Give me a thousand more of these stories, I could do this all day.

Also, boyfriend cries and has open, deep emotions. What?? A young man in touch with his feelings, that doesn't have to be physically strong to be a good man, that is allowed to be physically weak and emotionally open, and have his own strengths and weaknesses that don't boil down to a six pack and a brooding personality? In a YA FANTASY BOOK?! Hold me.

I rooted for Isabelle the whole way though. I cringed with her, I held my breath, I cheered, I finished the book emotionally exhausted and ready to fucking fight. I haven't felt this pumped up after consuming a story or a piece of media since I went to see Captain Marvel for the first time in theaters, and hot damn, y'all, woman-centric stories that don't revolve around the approval of a man or the need to be petty and spiteful to other women are my jam . I will absolutely be shoving this book in the face of every woman, teenage girl, and preteen female I know, all but begging them to give this book a shot. I read the whole thing in one sitting, the same day I bought it just as a way to pass the time and... mmmm.

I'm gonna try and keep this as spoiler-free as possible, just because I don't want to give anything away, but yeah. On to the genuine criticisms.

Honestly? I didn't have that many. There were a couple of places where I was kind of annoyed, like the catty girl in the village that I wanted rid of, but the way it was handled in relation to Isabelle's story makes me more forgiving, if only for the way she learns to control her temper and not goad more fights out of people that don't really need an excuse. It bothers me that she has to just sit there and take it for her sister's sake, but... maybe that's just because it hits too close to home for some of us. It's a relatively small part of the book and I'm really not too fussed in the long run.

One thing that did throw me at first was the inclusion of the other points of view, like the skip from Isabelle's first chapter in the beginning to the introduction of "Chance," whose band of miscreants and misfits is a little distracting at first, but ultimately entertaining once you figure out how they're involved, and who serves as a sort of 'greater story' framing device for the real world conflicts taking place in the background. "Chance" and "Fate's" cat and mouse game ended up being one of my favorite parts of the underlying tensions in the story, and really helped drive home how make or break Isabelle's ultimate path was, even after she ended up going in a direction no one, not even herself, expected in the end. But it really added to the whole "we make our own path and only we can tell our story" message that ended up getting told as the underlying themes for the whole book. And I can thank it for that.

Right. Now. The big block quote I used up above. Chance decides he needs to tip the scales somewhat, and his whole part of the narrative so far as Isabelle can tell is as a rich eccentric trying to get his misfits and servants to help him put on a play. The play ends up... less a play, and more an inspirational third act speech meant to give Isabelle the push she needs to go and 'do the thing!', and as such it's... kind of cheesy, in hindsight. But at the same time while wrapped up in the story I didn't really notice it save to get super emotional and flaily about how many names were on that list that weren't centered around white western history, and I'm totally here for it. I am absolutely down with the cheese if it brings about the good feels, and the bolster to Isabelle's courage it gave delivered.

I also really like that one of the men driving the story kept pushing that love was what she needed, and automatically brought in a boy to do the job, but it ended up being Isabelle's love for her horse, herself, and her family, and the forgiveness of her step-sister, that really did the trick. Thank you so much Jennifer Donnelly, for not making this be about a man.

I really wish this review could do it more justice, but I'm pushing the limits of my word count as it is, and I don't want to risk repeating the ugly, happy blubbering I was doing at the end of the story. Suffice it to say I ABSOLUTELY recommend this book to anyone who likes fairy tales, feminist stories, girl-centered stories, coming of age stories, fantasies, everyone, really. I can't sum it up any better than Jennifer Donnelly herself in the forward of this book: "To everyone who's ever felt like they're not enough."

SNIIIIFFF. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go eat a pint of ice cream and watch Xena: Warrior Princess reruns with my puppy. Peace!

[b0rtney]

Why I Do What I Do, Part 2: Every Good Writer Reads

When I was little I read everything I could get my tiny fingers on. I read my way through my elementary school library– the librarian wouldn’t even bother sending me back to class after a certain point, because she knew that if she did I’d be back for another book by the end of the day. I read a lot, and I got fast at it, and I loved it. 

I especially loved the Warrior Cats series by Erin Hunter. Gail Carson Levine was a staple for me; I never read Ella Enchanted, (because I didn’t know that had a book counterpart yet, I just knew the movie), but I loved Fairest. I can’t remember the title, but I remember a book about a girl who was a genius, but intentionally flunked all her tests so nobody would separate her from her only friend in her grade. I remember a book called Savvy, about a family with inherited preternatural abilities that don’t always work quite right. I read Girl in Blue over and over and over again. I loved Greek mythology and fairy tales and folklore, and I read that whole shelf of the library twice. Until I was twelve I loved every book I came across.

 I can only remember reading one book that I didn’t like– I don’t remember the title, but it was a very slice-of-life novel about a teenage girl and her mom not agreeing on where the girl’s life should go, and bickering about what kind of sweater she should wear– and I hated that book. It took me three years to slog through it. 

Everything else I chose haphazardly and read voraciously. Fantasy, sci-fi, action, school life, home life. I didn’t go to bookstores very much because there weren’t any close by, but when we did I spent hours picking one promising-looking book– because I knew reading was an expensive hobby, and I’ve been a little frugal since I was young.

A lot of it was probably escapism as a coping mechanism, but I just knew I was having a blast even when my neurochemicals didn’t really want to cooperate with me, or when getting out of bed was too much.

When we moved to California, I stopped reading as much, but I still read some in middle school. The Found series was great until I lost one of the books. I read a biblical fiction book, Lineage of Grace, which was an unexpected treat– and it should be mentioned that I first read the Bible in sixth grade, and understood next to none of it. I discovered my two favorite book series of all time in middle school (I think in eighth grade): the Monument 14 series by Emma Laybourne and the Unwind series by Neil Shusterman. Both of them have been my favorites for a long time, and still are. 

In seventh grade, I saw an advertisement for the movie adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, and I asked my mom if she knew what book it was based on. She said she’d heard of it, but that I probably couldn’t read it because it was very long and very difficult to get through. So, being who I am as a person, that was the book I bought next time I found myself in a book store, and I read Atlas Shrugged in a month or two– I’m still proud of that because there have been several people (all grown businessmen, which grinds my gears even further, personally) who scoffed at me and told me that middle-schoolers can’t read that book, because they couldn’t. It pissed me off so much once that I dragged the offending man into a philosophical discussion of Ayn Rand’s point– I don’t agree with all of her philosophy, but I wanted to piss that man off as much as he had pissed me off. I was an angry seventh-grader, but I digress. 

By high school, with three AP classes each year and accelerated classes as part of my high school’s trimester system, I was reading less and less “traditional” literature in my free time, except for my assigned reading for my English classes. Lucky for me, I loved most of those too. “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Jane Eyre, and everything written by Jane Austen (admittedly, I haven’t read much of her yet, but I’ll get there) were all instant loves. Catcher in the Rye was interesting, if not as much of a favorite as some others. Hamlet was good, if only because I appreciated something (anything) that I could interpret as homosexual or homoerotic (yes, I am talking about Hamlet and Horatio). The only thing I can distinctly remember reading and disliking was Romeo and Juliet– all the characters were a little too short-sighted for my tastes. 

However, I discovered a new reading love in high school– and you may cringe when I say: Fanfiction. I fell in love with fanfiction, and I still love it just as much as Unwind or Pride and Prejudice or The Hobbit. I won’t spend a whole lot of time here talking about fanfiction and why I appreciate it just as much (if not more) than traditional literature, but I may give y’all an update down the road about it, because I am genuinely passionate about treating fanfiction as a genre of literature just like any other written piece. For now though, I will move on.

In college, I spent one semester knocking out all my prerequisites, which meant mostly math and science classes, and one English 201 (my AP classes let me out of 101 and 102). That English class was miserable, probably one of the most miserable classes of my life. Everything we read was misogynistic, at least semi-racist (of course, under the guise of “historical realism,” because we all know people of color were first seen in 1963), and depressing to top it off. Whatever literary, technical merit the works had as representations of the craft of writing was entirely washed out by the abysmal or just plain repulsive subject matter and themes. This English 201 class did teach me, however, that there is a world of difference between being good at writing and being a good writer. I hope to be the latter. 

My last three semesters at my current college have been significantly kinder to me. My major, Creative Writing, means I get to take a lot of literature classes, even if my community college only has one writing class. 

I’ve taken a Shakespearean literature class, and loved it. My teacher opened the class by calling herself a heretic, and that some of her opinions about Shakespeare (he was not an illiterate wool merchant, he had male and female sexual interests, he was a feminist despite him writing “Taming of the Shrew,” and he was absolutely insufferable to be around) are borderline psychotic, as far as some other academics are concerned. So, of course, I love her to death. I followed her to two more classes in subsequent semesters, both being one half of a British Literature sequence from the inception of the English language to modern-day. My favorite works from these classes are Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (again, you’ve gotta love the queer representation, and the hilarity), Austen’s “Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters,” and Mill’s “On Liberty.” 

I took a similar literature sequence for American literature with a different professor, but I took the “Civil War to Contemporary” section before the “First Contact to Civil War.” This professor is another whom I love to death– he majored in English with an emphasis in Queer and Gender Studies, and wrote his dissertation on video games as a form of literature (also, he’s written peer-reviewed academic essays on my favorite video game series, Bioshock). So almost everything between these two semesters of American ltierature had a focus on people of color, indigenous people, genderqueer and nonbinary people, and queer people. We read Passing by Nella Larson, and I met some girls in the class and we got so excited about the book that the professor told us he’d let us come in to talk about it to future semesters. I also loved reading Benito Cereno with the class, mostly for the discussion and the essay I got to write about it. 

This semester, I’m taking a World Literature class, and I’m currently in the second half of that British Literature sequence– which means, after this semester, I will have taken every literature class my community college offers except one– as well as a philosophy class, my final semester of required Spanish, and a creative writing class. 

You have two out of the three pieces of the puzzle of where I’m from now. You know about me as a person, and you know about what I’ve read. I’ll see you here, same time, same place, next week to tell you what I’ve written, and then we can move on to the present. 

I can’t wait to see you guys again. I hope everyone is staying safe, healthy, and happy.