subtextual

i don’t have much to say other than that this would’ve killed as a wmaf britishized legally blonde type story. instead it was boring and stupefyingly even more condescending than babel…..i understand the impetus to chew up imperialism/racism/empire into baby bird lessons for a specific audience, but WHO thought it would be a good idea to apply that sort of faux profundity on really basic easily wikipediable paradoxes everybody saw on 9gag in 2012. who is this for?? <oh no, he cast a spell> <i quickly vanquished it with the power of LOGIC and CALCULUS> was not a two step dance i thought rfk would ever build a book around but here we are.

i did like the bones of alice’s character: annoying, pretentious, neurotic, arrogant, suicidal, loves to delude and gaslight herself to the point of self sabotage. however her internalized misogyny, which i would’ve lapped the fuck up had alice been given a female rival love interest, weirdly just came off as a veneer for rfk’s own unexamined misogyny, which is becoming an odd pattern in her books. like her surface level interrogations of female relationships never actually go anywhere productive or interesting, female characters stop at being bitchy or slutty or a sycophant and not worthy of respect. like ohhhh my god that one scene where the female prof, upon hearing alice divulge her sexual assault, says something along the lines of, HAHA, you thought i would CARE? when i know you think of me as an OLD HAG? fool. BEGONE. no doubt that there are evil reprehensible women irl but when you keep flanderizing women’s wrongs while having alice rivals to loversly swoon over peter’s floppy hair it’s just hmmm. not a great look.

i hate it when authors invent beautiful, repressed, haughty female characters only to yoke them to a man, instead of psychosexually bouncing them off another female character and generating interesting tension wrt competition, women being pit against each other for male validation, women being self-destructive agents of misogyny, women being forced to sabotage or reluctantly conspire with each other to get ahead, women begrudgingly respecting each other, etcetera. basically, i think alice needed a vivian. if only rfk had a fraction of the visionary talent that amanda brown had….alas

ummmm if i liked it less i’d be able to talk about it more OR_WHAT_EVERRRRRRR i need to reread the entire series stat because i’m only a quarter gripfull over what even happened…..my truth is that i have dnf’ed gtn like 5 times over the past 4 years, primarily due to the humor + dense worldbuilding + overwhelming cast of characters, but was inexplicably struck with openheartedness in august and was finally able to make it past their canaan house arrival for the first time.

like–me in oct 2021: gideon was unlikeable, harrow was unlikeable, i can't remember any other character except the weird twins....someone pls tell me what they see in this book bc i'm not seeing the vision.

OPINION REVERSEDDDDDDDD except for the “weird twins” comment.....why YES I WAS STILL IMMEDIATELY SNIPED IN THE HEAD BY THE WEIRD TWINS! in fact i was an ianthe akgae all throughout and was dreadfully obsessed with the corona/ianthe explicit_to_my_eyes twincest AND corona/ianthe/babs hateful loyal soldier loved by no one x charming but useless JACKIETAYLORCOMPLEXED sister x sordid power hungry and murderously possessive other sister triangulation AND ianthe/harrow annoying pigtail pulling crush x repulsion sisterlyctorhood. i loved IANTHE and IANTHE’S SHENANIGANS only <3 thank you for all the horror and the laffs <3

other notable favorites: campal codependent bodysharing (pal passing camilla a kiss on her knuckles through nona…..are you facking kidding me), sweet sweet nona and cam/nona/pyrrha's polycule_of_Grief, and isaac & jeannemary my little baby child soldiers who died for naught T__T

i did fail to gaf about griddlehark throughout gtn but the posthumous introspection of their relationship in htn via harrow’s lobotomy and “Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn't even want it” moved me for real ngl…..htn was my least favorite reading experience out of the three, 95% of it was a struggle to understand and i didn’t even have the brainspace to pay attention to the og lyctors when most of the story was already wafting out my grasp, but now in retrospect i think it’s a brilliant piece of work and blows the other two out of the water, just from the prose and suspense and character work alone. i completely glazed over the sleeper/wake/dios apate major/BoE plotlines though, which caused me to follow very little of nona…..again i think i need to reread the books at least twice more to wrap my head around the lore and plot.

ALSO……last month i was blessed to be conferred incredible tridentarii scholarship straight from the gods during my very first jaunt into the ao3 mines. op literally gets it: their mutual possessiveness, their habit of treating people outside of their dyadic orbit as playthings, the gross necromantic body mod fucking veering straight into horror noncon, the constant power struggle between them…..corona toying with ianthe, because it is her only source of power; ianthe lashing out abusively, to remind corona of her true dominance over her; them coming back to each other again and again, hurting each other for the sheer orgasmic pleasure of it, because they LOVE each other and ARE SISTERS through it all, but are so warped by the twisted rituals and customs of their upbringing that they’re unable to fine tune the controls of their violence so it oscillates between basic mean girl bitchiness and mutilation. i shed many happy tears :’)

so many incredible quotes and passages i could c+p here but i'll just leave you all with my favorite observation of ianthe:

You had been watching Ianthe. She could not bear meetings, or any kind of organised activity where she might be forced to deal with anyone else’s opinion, which you found strange considering that she had spent her entire life at the hip of her twin sister. She was sitting in her chair with her pallid arm crossed across the shiny gold of her skeleton one, both framed hideously against the coalescing rainbow whites of her robe. Her hair fell in thin, straight sheets over her shoulders, and she rested the back of her head against the chair-back as though she might nap at any moment. She looked to you; you looked away quickly, but you had been caught watching.

Lately you found yourself praying that the traitor was not Ianthe, all the while having seen for yourself the living Coronabeth in the arms of Blood of Eden: the twin who, as far as you could tell, was the only human being Ianthe loved more than herself. For the sake of this sister Ianthe had held your gaze while sliding a knife through the palm of your hand.

reviewed with gtn

i don’t really care for the dark academia genre, but tsh has been on my tbr list for a while so when i saw it while browsing at the library i thought i’d give it a read. overall, i found it to be not very dark, and not even that academic, but the prose was spectacular and rich with beautiful turns of phrases that beguiled me for all 500 pages despite the dragging plot. if nothing else, i’d recommend reading it just to experience the sheer visual pleasure of well-written navel gazing.

the thing that was kind of amusing to me is that donna tartt was clearly asking: is it worse to be a murderer or to be annoying? and my answer was: it’s hands down worse to be annoying. so i was expecting everyone to kill each other/themselves at the end but instead it was just pages and pages of them being hysterical and paranoid trying to cover up their murder(s) with very poor opsec. since i didn’t care about any of the characters (i don’t think you were meant to care about them anyway, they were all functionally archetypes) i was expecting some good entertainment at least, i genuinely was under the impression that there were going to be cannibalism and bacchanal orgies and whatnot but at worst they just killed their most annoying friend and surpriseeeee the twin blondes were in an abusive incestuous relationship…..well tazmuir’s abusive incestuous twin blondes were much more interesting to me anyway! now what.

in general i feel like the odds were already stacked against me liking the story/characters anyway since 1) greco-european classical studies is literally the average liberal arts major and i don’t find it mysterious or romantic, 2) there are better, more interesting ways to depict the inner workings of classism and elitism in these elite institutions than “rich people can actually be just as stupid as poor and middle class people”, and 3) i wish it HAD taught me something interesting about ancient greece/linguistics/classical literature instead of using the subject as a glorified plot device.

but again, her writing is electrifying and moody and humorous and very special. that by itself is worth reading this for imo.

His students – if they were any mark of his tutelage – were imposing enough, and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world: they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks – sic oculos, sic ilk manus, sic oraferebat. I envied them, and found them attractive; moreover this strange quality, far from being natural, gave every indication of having been intensely cultivated.

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free!”

To compound this – all these unpleasant recollections to the contrary – so much remained of the old Bunny, the one I knew and loved. Sometimes when I saw him at a distance – fists in pockets, whistling, bobbing along with his springy old walk – I would have a strong pang of affection mixed with regret. I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head. It seemed impossible then that one could ever be angry at him, no matter what he did.

Or maybe it was a question of his making people see. He had the far more remarkable talent of making himself invisible – in a room, in a car, a virtual ability to dematerialize at will – and perhaps this gift was only the converse of that one: the sudden concentration of his wandering molecules rendering his shadowy form solid, all at once, a metamorphosis startling to the viewer.

Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand.

“I could help you.” “I don't want you to help me.” She raised her head and looked at me: her gaze hit me hard and sweet as a shot of morphine.

saw the tl talking about jagvi and her packer so i put this on hold at the library without knowing a single thing about it…..well it was kind of like a bad book and a good book had a baby and i read it basically in one sitting. the premise: what if you were possessed by the malevolent eldritch spirit living in your local cave pit and you had to be strapped down by a hot butch (also your brother’s ex girlfriend who you had an antagonistic crush on growing up) to survive it. also, when i saw blurbs from yael van der wouden AND tamsyn muir on the back cover i was like my god……they’re all oomfs with each other.

the book: i liked it, mostly. the small town folk horror atmosphere freaked me out at times, the venom-style Capitalization of Monster Inner Dialogue never fails to unsettle me, i do love it when authors play with form! i was eating up angelina/jagvi toxic butchfemme yuri AND angelina/patrick/jagvi triangulation so hard…..having weird unexplained and embarrassing teenage feelings towards your older brother’s girlfriend and then catching her in the taboo act and ruining her life and driving her out of the town only for fate to keep colliding you all back together in the same cesspool hometown, only this time it’s worse because you’re adults so you’re exponentially more practiced in hurting each other ISSSSSSS the most classic and beloved trope guaranteed to snipe me in the brain instantly….i say this while not being able to cite another example off the top of my head but trust me. the weird family and small town dynamics were strangely wholesome despite the undercurrents of homophobia and racism, i guess to show that jagvi was an outsider among outsiders but i was really just questioning the sociopolitics of the siccos and their position as the Big Family of cadenze despite only having like 10-20 members total. like is that not a regular family size. maybe not in this san fransokyo style crossover between italian village and remote appalachian town…..

my issue is that it’s really unsatisfying to me when the horror aspect of queer horror is entirely only an allegory for the consequences of repression/denial of wants & desires/being trapped in your small podunk town, with no real dedication to the canon in-universe mythos of the evil, like “the real monster was homophobia/racism/[insert oppression] all along” is NOT enough for me…..when the monster revealed that it was after jagvi all along instead of angelina because jagvi’s life had so much more potential now that she had chosen to leave cadenze, basically mirroring what had been said in text about how “this town swallows up options” literally in the first couple of pages…..like that’s it? monster lurking underneath the veneer of peace in a small town is another super classic trope that you really have to dress up to make interesting, otherwise the lampshading becomes too painfully obvious to ignore. i did like the last chapter about the future, i found it cathartic that they had begun to make peace with their small lives in cadenze but sad that they never made it out after everything….really good and dreamlike.

my other more minor issue is that i found some of the writing around cadenze and the sicco family to be kind of clunky, there was a lot of telegraphing with the exposition and foreshadowing. the reveal about angelina’s father jumpscared me for real though…..i wish the authors had committed more to the horror because i was fully expecting some serious dead dove gory body snatching gay sex but the body horror only happened for like 2 pages at the end and it wasn’t even sexy *smashes phone* they should’ve monsterfucked in da pitt. otherwise what was even the point.

“You and I have always been very simpatico like that,” Angelina said. Jagvi laughed. That old teenage thrill ran down Angelina’s back; she was used to ignoring it by now. She didn’t want to impress Jagvi anymore, but sometimes her body forgot.

- ha.....a classic

If you threw something into the pit at the back of their cave, you could wait forever and never hear it land. Patrick had a similar pit inside himself, and it was where he kept his love for Jagvi. No matter how many times she messed up, Patrick never stopped forgiving her.

- the triangulation with the straight brother was good, i liked that jagvi had multiple people in her corner even if she didn't realize it, and it wasn't sibling romantic rivalry so much as three corners touching each other because they continued to love each other

Jagvi could tell when Angelina was coming, these days. It felt like fear, or some panicky instinct of danger, the way animals raise their noses to the wind and scatter, or when a phone rings and the pulsing in your gut tells you it’s bad news. Except along with the prickle of sweat breaking out on Jagvi’s lower back and the way her heartbeat amped up, it also made her mouth go wet. Made her palm herself, curl her knuckles over her crotch, ready and hungry for her monster.