ZNote

To a child that has been bounced around from family to family, all while her own mother is always "somewhere else" that isn't here, it seems like love is impossible for Galadriel "Gilly" Hopkins to feel or find. Every lashing out of her anger is a misdirection that she doesn't fully understand, and the incomparable, almost-nauseating Trotter shows through the simple acts of patience, compassion, and community how to live in new light. Affection beyond postcards shows that not only is love never gone, but it will bloom in ways that subsequently disarm and nourish us. The final exchange is simple, but its core is moving.

Completely impressionable when I first was exposed to this story as the stage musical in second grade. I loved the story when I read it proper not long afterwards. Re-reading it many years later, its power has not waned.

Despite Lachman's best efforts, the book cannot fully escape the overall framing of historical fiction. The best way to glimpse Hildegard is not through this book or the movies that have been made about her like Visions, but rather in reading translations of her actual work, which are more present than ever. The Hildegard present in this book is, at-best, a construction assembled from her writings and biography. While ambitious, I could not help but feel like I was reading the thoughts of a homunculus. Especially given that Lachman uses the King James Bible for certain passages rather than a version that Hildegard would have been more familiar with, there's also a religious ideology distance that is unintentionally created. Hildegard as a religious and feminist (depending on who you ask) figure is too fascinating to be condensed in this manner.

That being said, the passages themselves are the product of thorough research and are rhetorically written in a way that makes for easy reading. It provides a surprisingly adept overview of the many feast days observed in the Christian liturgical calendar, as well as attempting to get to the heart of the sociopolitical climate of the time. There are, however, times where it feels that information is being crammed in as much as possible, creating pockets of density that don't make for the most mellifluous flow. Perhaps it is a necessary evil or consequence that Lachman's book can't quite "do everything" within the one year it explores, but as an introduction to Hildegard, it has its uses.

Wielding the notion of a conventional faerie tale-esque story on one hand and a surprisingly sincere sense of self-perception and the ability to believe in the magic of oneself and personal belonging, even amidst spiritual decay. Whether intentional or not, The Last Unicorn as a queer text is so embedded within the material that it's difficult to not feel the weight of lines about dying bodies and loss of identity and memory. These are characters who are, in some way, entombed within ideologies or bodies that they cannot easily reconcile or break, and those that can realize or ascend themselves to higher planes of understanding, even if they come with pyrrhic endings. Beagle's ability to paint a setting or a mood is simple, but like E.B. White, he knows exactly which words and tone to use to convey a sensation that feels foreign enough to possibly be unfamiliar, but real enough to be understood.

Some lives, like the grammar, punctuation, timeline, or coherence (or some combination thereof), fracture until there are few things remaining except wisps of happiness bygone. They bask in the mellow and go away like the light in the door. For the other lives, they cling to what they know and survive through all that has been unfairly done to them. "The Sound and the Fury" is a story of struggle and what comes from that. Like I says, you can persevere or wither. Just keep an eye on the time.

Walt Whitman's poetry, especially in a cynical and ever-looming-terror 2026, carries with it so much raw energy and passion for the universe that it feels foreign to an American. Through Whitman's eyes we see a romantic soul who saw every "leave of grass" as a friend waiting to be made, each person a part of the continuum of the home he loved, and the simultaneous celebration and disintegration of the body such that it could assume new forms with each interaction, breath, and sensation. Naturally, we cannot be blind to the horrors of America that existed at the time of his writing (and since), however, decades before James Truslow Adams articulated the American Dream in his Epic of America, Whitman was the one who came the closest to seeing what it looked like through the power of the word. His was an America worth living in, a vision that, for all the progress made since, is still light-years away. But perhaps more than anything, Whitman's complete poems are a testament to the belief in the spirit's ability to make peace with what it calls its tangible worldly home. If a better world is waiting on the other side of the morning, we must make it ourselves, with joy and love.

I believe it when he wrote, "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

~Song of Myself