(Rin Chupeco, autocorrect! Rin! Sorry about the typo in the headline.)
Let’s start with this: I apparently have no idea what makes a book YA, and I’m starting to think it really is code for “a fantasy book written by a woman” or, worse, “a book starring a young person,” without regard for content. Sarah Maas is the best example of this, as the later books in the Throne of Glass series include fairly copious amounts of highly detailed sex, and Rin Chupeco’s The Girl from the Well is not only scary as hell but drops a “motherfucker” pretty early on in the text, and while it’s not super sweary in general it’s also not especially shy.
Not, mind you, that any of this is a bad thing, just that if you’re an adult and you generally avoid books with “YA” or “Teen” in their descriptors you probably ought to stop doing that, because it really does seem to be pretty meaningless as a category most of the time. This particular book doesn’t even involve a love triangle, which does seem to be a bit of a trope. No romance at all, actually.
No, what The Girl from the Well gives you is that rarest of things, to the point where I can only come up with a few examples: a genuinely scary book. I’ve read one other book by this author before and I didn’t especially take to it, but The Girl from the Well is squarely in my damn wheelhouse: a supernatural tale of possession, and evil spirits, and revenge, and murder, and to make things even more interesting it’s narrated by one of the ghosts, which was just a phenomenal way to approach the story, especially since the ghost isn’t quite sane. Chupeco uses this trick where she occasionally
uses
her line breaks
for emphasis,
and it wouldn’t work very well with a traditional narrator, but for an angry ghost it’s startlingly effective. You may be getting strong The Ring vibes from the cover, and there’s a good reason for that, as both The Girl in the Well and The Ring are based on the same Japanese myth, so there’s a very similar vibe, and if The Ring creeped you out this book is absolutely going to as well.
I pulled a move for this book that is really only possible when ordering books online, as I actually screwed up and bought the sequel, which is called The Suffering, first, because I didn’t realize it was a sequel. So I had to order this and just sort of hope that I’d want to end up reading both of them, which ended up working out great, since I don’t have to wait for it to get here now. I’m going straight into it, so we might have another review for that book in a day or two.
This is a great read, especially with Halloween coming up. Give it a look, and don’t let the YA tag mess with you. I promise I’m grown, and I loved it.
I am sorry I cannot post tonight I need to finish Rin Chupeco’s THE GIRL FROM THE WELL and then it is likely that I will go directly into the sequel which is called THE SUFFERING and I have already been away from the book for too long so I will see you tomorrow the end.
I’m on at least three post ideas for today so far, and by “post ideas” I mean I came up with something, thought “Okay, that’s today’s post,” and then promptly forgot what the hell it was before I had a chance to put it into writing. So that’s how my day is going so far.
I did manage to get my work tasks squared away early today, by not bothering with the instructional video (tomorrow’s material is the same as today’s, so rather than recording something myself I just linked to someone else’s) and getting the assignment written while working in the Meet and doing other things. Sometimes it’s kinda fun to yell “give me a number!” at a half-dozen kids and then write a math problem about it.
I’m also reaching that point in the week– and it’s alarming to realize that it’s only Tuesday– where my eyes could definitely benefit from doing less staring at screens for a little while.
Actually, there’s this, which I think was one of the things: I had to go to my local Ace Hardware to buy a flagpole earlier, because I’m finally getting around to putting the pride flag in front of my house that I have wanted to put up since last June. And, y’all, we need to protect our retail workers, okay? Because the item I bought ended up not being in their system for some reason, and it took all of five whole minutes before the manager finally shrugged and charged me for a slightly different flagpole (which, whatever; I hadn’t even looked for a price, I just grabbed the one I wanted and headed to the counter) and I think during that five minutes I was apologized to for my incredibly minor inconvenience at least a dozen times by at least three or four different people. And you could just tell that everybody was waiting for me to completely lose my shit about it, and it’s like … yeah, I have so many more important things to worry about right now than this that I don’t even have the energy to reach “this is not your fault but I’m annoyed anyway” level annoyed. Oh, darn, I had to wait five whole minutes.
And you just know that these folks have gotten the shit kicked out of them recently about something similar, right? Because motherfuckers have allowed themselves to get completely out of control lately, and while filming these fools and putting it on the Internet has gotten rather popular I think it might be time to start upgrading to actual intervention. Nobody should be this nervous about this minor of a thing, and it wasn’t just the cashier, it was everyone I encountered in the store.
The flag’s gonna look nice, by the way. We’ve taken it down already to get the folds pressed out, but I hung it up long enough to take a picture, which the wind promptly made twice as complicated as it needed to be. But nonetheless:
I need to either figure out how to start being done for the day at 4:00 instead of 7 or 8:00, or give up on the idea of posting every day for a while. Because I just got my video posted for tomorrow and I’m ready to fall the hell over.
Is there a word for when you are tangentially aware of something– enough to know it exists, but not enough to really actually know what it is, only you have an inkling that the thing in question aligns with your interests in a significant way and you would probably enjoy it were you to look into it at all, but you’re never able to summon the energy necessary to take five minutes and figure out what the thing is, thus bypassing any chance at said enjoyment? And so you just wonder about it, forever?
A quick recap: In the now-five weekends since school started, I have had two (2) weekends where students in my building lost younger siblings to gun violence– one who was playing with (or at least near someone who was playing with) a loaded weapon that went off, and another killed in a drive-by shooting at a birthday party. Last weekend, one of my former students apparently fired a shot or two at someone she had gotten into an altercation with at a bar, and then her gun went off while she was in the back seat of what was effectively their getaway car, going through the front passenger seat and killing her best friend, another former student.
Today’s horror involves a killing this afternoon at my local mall. I came across this Facebook post just now; one of those where you don’t know the person but someone you know interacted with them and so the post makes its way onto your feed. I would like you to direct your attention to the first two sentences, in particular:
Now, I don’t know this dude, which is why I didn’t respond to him on FB, and is why I’m cutting his name out here. He’s going through some shit I’ve never had to go through right now and I feel for him.
But God damn it, this impulse toward oh don’t make this political, when the problem is, oh, gun violence is completely the fuck out of control, is part of the god damned problem. This comes from the same impulse that occasionally leads to ignant shit like this:
And … nah.
You cannot “make” gun violence political. Gun violence is inherently fucking political. You cannot take politics out of gun violence. When we have a political party in this country that is literally encouraging its followers to stockpile as many guns as they can and the fucking person masquerading as our nation’s President is actively calling for gun violence in response to the results of our upcoming election, you can not take politics out of gun violence.
America has decided that it does not matter how many people die; their guns are more important than the lives of children, the lives of their friends, the lives of their families, whatever. That is a political decision. These folks literally don’t care who dies so long as they get to keep their toys and people with darker skin than them don’t. And the “be like Bob and Sally” bullshittery exists to obscure that, to hide the fact that for a whole god damn lot of people politics is literally a life and death matter and it is not only perfectly fucking okay but frankly the only sane decision to cut people out of their lives who have made the political decision that you are not human and your life does not matter. My white skin and manly cishet genitals are going to protect me from this to a certain extent but sooner or later these fuckers are going to get around to the atheists. This is not fucking theoretical to me. Not at all.
We are at the point where one of our two major political parties is actively courting fascists and white supremacists. Where actual fucking Nazis not only support the party holding the White House but hold positions of power within that party and are not actively shunned by those individuals who don’t yet identify specifically with them.
When you have one Nazi sitting at a table with eleven people who don’t mind that the Nazi is there, you don’t have one Nazi and eleven “adults” who don’t want to rock the boat. You’ve got twelve Nazis sitting at a table.
America is the world’s largest source of gun violence because America has made the political decision to be the world’s largest source of gun violence and Americans who disagree have not managed to summon the political will to stop them. If you are trying to skate around that to avoid fights and losing friends, you are part of the problem.
Every day, while I am in my Meets with my students, I can hear a smoke alarm giving a battery beep … somewhere. It has been going on for weeks, and I have been keeping track of which students are in the room while I can hear it and it is not common to any one student.
At no time whatsoever during the rest of the day can I ever hear a smoke alarm. It is absolutely not in my house, because the battery would have died by now, and I would have noticed it at some other point in my day. I would have noticed it on weekends. My son or my wife would have noticed it.
It is absolutely not happening in this house, and at the same time it is clearly not happening in any specific student’s house. In fact, since I’ve been typing this, it’s stopped, but no one has left the Meet while I’ve been typing.
There is a Goddamned ghost smoke alarm living inside Google Meet, and I don’t know how to make that particular kind of ghost go away. Please send me an old priest and a young priest.
