Not to step on my own book review, but at some point this month the blog crossed over a million all-time page views.
Amazing. Thanks, everyone.
#REVIEW: Cursed Daughters, by Oyinkan Braithwaite
This is going to be one of those reviews where I talk more about myself than the book, so … brace yourself, I suppose.
I frequently make snap decisions about books. I learn of their existence and thirty seconds later money has left my bank account and a couple of days later I have a book. The problem comes when I don’t read that book immediately, and it gets worse when it sits on my Unread Shelf for four months.
(There are two books on that shelf that have been there longer. Soon. I swear.)
I have no idea why I purchased Oyinkan Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters. No idea if someone recommended it to me, if I came across the author on BlueSky and decided I liked her … nothing. And by the time I got to it, I’d also completely forgotten what the book actually was. See, that cover kinda yells “fantasy” at me? And the book has the same physical format and size as every hardcover YA book I’ve bought for years. And note the “from the author of” at the bottom. Come on! You’re telling me My Sister, the Serial Killer somehow isn’t genre fiction??
Cursed Daughters is not a fantasy novel and it is absolutely not YA. It is, in fact, hated Litratcher.
It’s fucking brilliant.
I keep saying this, over and over: you should read more books by Nigerians, goddammit. The book scene out of Nigeria is amazing right now.
This is the second time this year I’ve had to apply the word “brilliant” to a work of genreless Literary Fiction. I remain salty about it. Because this is the only book I’ve read this year that came close to Tom’s Crossing. I need the swords and lasers and magic contingent to step up their damn game, is what I’m saying.
At the beginning of the book a Nigerian woman intentionally walks into the ocean to die. The same day, her cousin Ebun gives birth to a daughter. The baby resembles the dead woman, Monife, to such a degree that Monife and Ebun’s mothers immediately decide that the baby is Monife reincarnated. Ebun is … unconvinced, and frankly quite a bit upset by the entire thing. There is also the minor matter of a generations-old family curse, that no woman of this family can be happy in love.
It’s still not a fantasy book. There’s some traditional beliefs mixed into a book set in the modern day in Lagos, and there’s a juju woman as a minor side character, but it’s not a fantasy book. Ebun believes none of this nonsense, and her daughter Eniiyi wants nothing to do with it either, but has to live her entire life in her dead semicousin’s shadow. She dreams of Monife occasionally, and by the end of the book genuinely resents the effect on her life that this woman she’s never met has. She remains Monife’s spitting image, so when she occasionally runs into people who knew Monife she either provokes shock or is genuinely thought to be a ghost. And as her great-aunt gets older, she begins regularly mistaking Eniiyi for Monife, and eventually her dementia increases to the point where she forgets Eniiyi exists at all.
The book follows three generations of the family, with Ebun and Monife in the middle, and jumps back and forth from the nineties to modern day. You eventually learn why Monife chose to walk into the water, and I’m not going to spoil anything but God damn does it end well— like, “I gasped and had to put the book down for a minute” well. I started this yesterday afternoon, read a chapter or two and put it down. When I picked it up again in bed last night it cost me at least an hour of sleep, and I got home from work today and sat down in my chair and didn’t get up again until I finished it.
Absolutely phenomenal work. I ordered My Sister, the Serial Killer about ten minutes ago. It’ll be here tomorrow. Oyinkan Braithwaite is on my “buy immediately” list forever now, and I’d really like to know what the circumstances were that brought this book onto my radar. If it was you, thank you very much.
Oh whatever
At this point I don’t even want to hear it. If this dipshit last night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner counts as an “assassin,” language has lost all meaning. There’s a grainy black and white video floating around of a guy, presumably the “shooter,” although I’m not convinced he actually fired any shots, running right past security. One of the guards pulls his gun immediately and opens fire directly at several other guards. Apparently one person got shot and their vest stopped it; until satisfactorily proven otherwise I’m going to assume it was from that one specific gun-brained idiot.
I’m sorry, maybe I’ve been poisoned by decades of comic books and movies, but I feel like if someone’s going to call you an assassin you need a better plan than “run past security, on the wrong floor, ???, profit.” That’s an underpants gnome, not an assassin. I’ve seen a reference to a manifesto a couple of times, which is another word that I think is probably getting overused. Apparently dude had a Bluesky account, and he followed a lot of people who I also follow. He did not follow me, which I am faintly disappointed by.
I continue, somehow, and despite all evidence, to be shocked by the incompetence of the Secret Service and the security in general at this event. I’m a fucking overweight middle school teacher and I’m not allowed to tackle people much less shoot at them and I halt people running through hallways multiple times a week. These candyasses barely even react other than to react wrongly, and apparently not only did they let Trump fall on the way out of the goddamned dinner, they got Vance out first.
(Yes, he’s old. But you know why he shouldn’t have fallen? Because they should have been fucking carrying him. Each of those agents should have had a hand on his belt. Good luck dropping to the ground as they’re hustling you out of the room under those circumstances.)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, staged, false flag, blah blah blah. These people are the biggest fucking liars on the planet and they’re also complete fucking morons and that makes it difficult to discern actual incompetence from feigned incompetence, and I have no idea why feigned incompetence would be a thing in the first place. I feel like if I was going to stage a goddamned assassination attempt on the president of the United States I could figure out a way to make it not look stupid. If these have both been staged, they did a shit job both times. This is fucking exhausting. I don’t care any more. I don’t want to hear about any future assassination attempts unless they’re fucking successful at this point. Don’t even bother reporting about them.
God, I hate it here.
(Regarding the photo: if the newspapers can print smiling, posed photos of white men after they kill their families, I can sure as shit use that one.)
I don’t wanna write words today
So I’m not gonna. G’night!
I managed to not kill anyone today
Believe it or not, this post is not about my students.
(It was a long day, but by “late April in a middle school during a week where we took two 150-minute standardized tests” standards, it was fine.)
I went to Barnes & Noble after work, feeling the need for some retail therapy– it was payday, after all, and after discovering that pay-per-teaching-hour for that summer school gig I was talking about yesterday was a fucking astounding $94.20, I went ahead and applied(*)– and so I drove to the mall, since that’s where our Barnes & Noble is. You can’t see it in that picture, but the entrance to the lot is just past the bottom-right of that picture, and I hope I can explain this coherently: the lanes to enter the lot split off, and there’s a yield sign, but not a stop sign, for people entering the lot. There is a little triangular raised divider in between the lanes to turn left, toward B&N, and right, toward … I dunno, I never turn right.
A car in front of me pulled toward the right, stopped, and let two people out, who immediately walked in front of my car without so much as glancing back over their shoulders. To be clear, that’s not a crosswalk and there are not supposed to be people there– but if they are, they should be fucking looking for cars. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I’d have hit at least one of them.
Anyway, I bought some books. I didn’t mean to, to be honest, but it happened anyway.
And on the way home the same fucking thing happened again, where a couple– an adult and an older teenager this time, one of them walking a bike– just blithely crossed the road in front of me, ignoring the fact that oncoming traffic had a green light and without so much as glancing in my direction. This would absolutely have led to deaths if I hadn’t been paying attention. The other one would have been a hard bump at worst, since there’s no way to drive fast into that parking lot– broken bones, maybe, but it would have taken some extra bad luck on top of all the stupid for anyone to die. This? If I’d glanced down at the wrong moment I’d have plowed into them at 35 miles an hour. And, again, it’s not like they saw me coming and dared me to hit them. Not even a glance at the direction of oncoming traffic, either time.
I’m not leaving the house for the rest of the weekend.
(*) $6500 for 23 days with students, including half an hour of prep, half an hour of breakfast, and three hours of actual instruction, which is the only part I’m counting. The first week of June is all trainings and onboarding.
How did that happen?
Completely lost track of time tonight; I had my club kids after school, one didn’t get picked up for forever, and then I think I melted in my chair for a little while, maybe? Either way, whatever I had planned for tonight clearly isn’t happening because I plan on being thoroughly asleep in an hour. I’ve already decided I’m not teaching tomorrow, ILEARN review be damned; the kids are out of their minds and I’m exhausted so to hell with it. I’m going to pass out progress reports and tell them to get something done then hide under my desk for the rest of the day. The math test is next Tuesday and after that the school year gets a lot easier.
(Also, is $6400 for five weeks of four-hour days worth it? Yes, right? Obviously yes? I should definitely do summer school.)
#REVIEW: The Reanimator’s Fate, by Kara Jorgensen
Standard disclaimers! Kara Jorgensen and I are mutuals on basically everything, although we have never met, and which precise social media thing we met on has been lost to the mists of time, at least to me. The Reanimator’s Fate is the fourth and final book of the Reanimator Mysteries series and the fifth of their books I have read. Somehow, this will be the first full review I’ve written of one of them— Book Three, The Reanimator’s Remains, got to share a review post with a couple other books, but somehow I appear not to have mentioned the other two books in the series. I’m not sure why— I’ve liked all four of them.
At any rate: The Reanimator Mysteries are the story of Oliver Barlow, an autistic necromancer who works as a coroner, and Felipe Galvan, Oliver’s partner and investigator. Both work for the New York Paranormal Society; they aren’t cops, precisely, but the Society gets brought in on investigations that obviously involve magic in some way, so they keep pretty busy.
Oh, and Felipe’s dead, technically, although nearly no one other than the two of them knows that, and the two are linked through a magical tether that allows some limited psychic linkage between them (strong emotions can bleed through, and they can “tug” on the tether to communicate if they want) and keeps them from being able to get too far apart. Oliver and Felipe are a great couple and I love reading about how they interact with one another; the way they balance each other out is fascinating. Oliver’s issues are a little bit more front and center, especially since he’s the primary character, but Felipe needs Oliver just as much as Oliver needs Felipe.
The Reanimator’s Fate begins with a naked man trying to steal a magic book, which promptly turns his blood to ink and exsanguinates him, just in case you were thinking this was just a romance book.
There is a lot going on in this book, above and beyond the central mystery, to the point where I really wasn’t sure Kara was going to be able to pull the ending of the book off successfully with about 20 pages left. The Paranormal Society itself gets a lot of development in a way that I don’t really want to get into to avoid spoilers, and while everything does knit itself together satisfyingly at the end, I feel like the book could maybe have used another 25 pages or so to breathe.
The problem is I really want to talk about the ending, and I can’t do it especially effectively without indulging in spoilers, which I don’t want to do. This is the last book of the Reanimator Mysteries series, and while Kara doesn’t kill off the main characters or anything like that there is a major status quo shift at the end of the book that fully justifies calling this the last book.
What I’m really hoping for, though, is that this is the last Reanimator Mysteries book, but it’s not the last Oliver and Felipe book, because there’s no real reason it has to be. Kara’s wheelhouse is the nineteenth century (have I mentioned this is a period book? It’s a period book.) and following the characters would involve taking them out of that context, but I really want to see it. I don’t know if that’s the plan or not, but it should be, damn it. The people demand more Oliver and Felipe! I am the people!
Meanwhile, you should read the series so you can join in the popular uprising for more books.
Deep breath
Just tossed a job application off into the void, likely to never be heard from again. It’s a moonshot; there’s a national search taking place and, well, that’s probably enough right there to not stress myself out about it. But fuck it, I’m definitely not gonna get it if I don’t apply, and the hour or so it took to update my resume and dash off a cover letter isn’t exactly a massive time investment. It took longer to find a copy of my resume that wasn’t a .pdf than it did to do the writing.
It was a long day today. We started the final round of ILEARN testing today, so <insert rant here> as you see fit, and then I had an interaction with a student at the end of the day that led to me genuinely wondering why I don’t just slap a motherfucker in the face once in a while. To be clear, I was thinking about doing the job application before that— I’ve been tossing it around for a couple of weeks, in fact— but hearing “I’ve been written up 600 times this year and nothing ever happens to me” definitely was a factor in pulling the trigger.
The number is 24, by the way, not 600, and considering that the kid has been absent for nearly eighty days this year (not counting suspensions) I think it’s fair that she does, in fact, have some experience interfacing with the office. I’ve done a good job letting this shit roll off my back this year; life is going to take care of this kid sooner or later, so it doesn’t have to be my job. I normally try to have a little more compassion with my kids, but this one wasn’t even one of my kids, just some random shithead in the hallway being a shithead, so to hell with her.
Anyway, I promised a book review today, which is going to have to wait until tomorrow, but if it helps any there may be a semi-irate in-progress video game review after that? I dunno, we’ll see.