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thecloserkin · 5 years

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book review: K Webster, Hale (2018)

Genre: Romance

Is it the main pairing: Yes

Is it canon: Yes

Is it explicit: Yes, extremely explicit. In fact if this had been published on literotica i would have accounted it a well-above-average story.

Is it endgame: Yes

Is it shippable: Yes

Bottom line: This is the most vanilla thing I have read in a LONG time and if i hadn’t paid $3.99 for it i doubt I would have bothered to finish it

I picked up this title because shipcestuous added it to her to-read shelf on goodreads, and while it’s clear from the editorial copy (“This book is an epic, emotional, raw love story”) that they think something groundbreaking is going on here, I would like to direct these amateurs to the Sibling Incest tag on Ao3. Or the Incest Shipping Yay page on TVtropes. Or Astrid’s now-defunct blog, if tumblr ever sees fit to restore it. Trust me, you do not have to be doing anything experimental or original for me to enjoy your tropetastic incest story. You don’t even have to be good with words. Stephenie Meyer, for instance, is not what anybody would call a first-rate stylist, and yet I’ve never had any trouble finishing any of her books (none of which feature incest, but the point was about writing generally).

Hudson and Rylie Hale lose their parents in a tragic car accident. Their shared grief is the catalyst for the affair that blooms between them, and I will give them this much: these kids at least know better than to leave any incriminating texts or pictures lying around on their phones. Their vigilance in the digital realm is then completely nullified by the way they conduct themselves irl—they’re walked in on by (1) their aunt aka Rylie’s guardian and (2) Hudson’s roommate at college, all within a week of getting together. I know the risk of being caught is part of the allure of incestuous relationships, but these clowns need to learn to keep it in their pants at least until they can find a closet.

In my opinion this story would have benefitted from an Outsider POV or two. Not every story needs one—Cathy Dollanganger’s first-person POV is more than adequate to carry Flowers in the Attic, and speaking of authors who are shoddy stylists, look at how bad V.C. Andrews was, and how little it mattered—but there’s not enough substance to either Hudson or Rylie’s characters for their alternating POVs to keep the reader invested. In brief, Rylie’s clinically depressed, and Hudson’s attending college on a baseball scholarship. There’s a scene where they watch a movie together and end up fucking on the couch, which would usually be my jam (standard sibling interaction leads to white-hot sex), except I was boooooored. There’s a scene where she visits him at school and they go skinny-dipping in a lake with some of his friends, and they both have to fight off the attentions of prospective romantic partners, and it ends with him carrying her to his truck and fucking her in the back off it. Which again in theory sounds amazing. In practice I think the jealousy trope works better if you’re threatened by your partner’s emotional intimacy with somebody else. And what is Rylie worried about? That this girl has porn star tits, where Rylie is much more modestly endowed. Ok you know who else has small tits? Natalie Portman. Keira Knightley. Emma Watson. Physically unprepossessing women the whole lot of them, amirite? Rylie is overcome by the same unwarranted insecurity when it comes to Hudson’s on-again-off-again ex-girlfriend, who is described as having humongous knockers. I understand how this can make Rylie feel inadequate—women are taught to hate their bodies from day one—but this chick also clearly has nothing going on upstairs, and her emotional connection with Hudson is nowhere in Rylie’s league. So Rylie’s jealousy strikes me as unearned and unrealistic.

Hudson and Rylie spend a good chunk of this book struggling against their feelings, berating themselves for being sick and twisted, all of which would normally be my kryptonite since i am on record gushing about the taboo/forbidden angle of incest and how I’m into sneaking around!! And none of it did damn thing for me in this case. The more reviews I read that contain the word “raw” the more I start to wonder if we all read the same book.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

As far as canon incest happy ending goes, the “run away together to where nobody knows you guys” strategy has its drawbacks, namely that it means leaving loved ones behind. I have discussed my preference for Option B before, but that option isn’t on the table for Hudson and Rylie because THEY GOT THEMSELVES CAUGHT IN THE ACT and exposed their relationship to multiple people so they can’t plausibly carry on denying it. Especially when Rylie starts popping out kids. Look, I’m into pregnancy kink as much as the next person but it just seems unearned. As is the fact that Hudson found a good-paying steady job even without the college degree their parents worked so hard to push him to get (he was kicked off the baseball team + lost his scholarship due to a combination of grieving for parents & obsessive infatuation for sister). This is America, where good jobs don’t just fall into high school graduates’ laps (unless you have family connections, which the Hale kids don’t, bc they had to move a thousand miles away to live amongst strangers!). And I can’t write these lapses off to the influence of the genre because I know there can be coherent class discourse in a romance novel.

A professor of mine once gave me a copy of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (1984) by Janice Radway, and it remains to this day one of the most transformative nonfiction reading experiences of my entire life. Janice Radway conducts interviews with dozens of mostly-married, mostly-middle-aged women in a midsize midwestern American city, and finds that for them reading romance novels is a form of self-care. They spend the rest of their time supporting and nurturing their families & extended social networks, but with a Harlequin romance in hand, husbands are much less likely to bother them. They can carve out time and space for themselves, they can draw from these escapist fantasies the emotional sustenance that their marriages/children are not providing. They can form friendships with like-minded women who also read a lot of romance. It resonated deeply with me even if I’m not a middle-aged white homemaker in middle America in 1984, because ever since, I’ve been very clear-eyed about why I read romance: To meet my own emotional needs that are for some reason not being met by my existing meatspace relationships. That, to me, is the point of the romance genre, and to hell with character and plot. And that’s why I say Hale let me down, because it didn’t succeed in making me feel anything.

There’s a post floating around that contrasts the way we categorize published fiction (by genre, ie. what happens—wizards or starships? corsets or lawyers?) with fanfiction, which is organized based on how it makes us feel: fluff, angst, hurt/comfort, etc. And fic has never let me down in that department, so I guess that’s why romance and fanfic fall under the same mental classification in my head. In this essay I will

#book review #hale #k webster

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scramblednoodle · 3 years

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Day 2 - Anxiety

This is a vent post; you have been warned.

I’m turning off the filters because I’ve been holding a lot of this shit in. And here is a comment born of anxiety: NO ONE IS GOING TO FUCKING CARE ANYWAY.

Please don’t message me that you do care. Please don’t. I know you do. LOGICALLY. But logic and anxiety DO NOT MATCH, and if you don’t grok this, then you need to think long and hard about what that REALLY means to people with this fucking malady.

Yesterday, at the end of the day, I was hit by crushing anxiety because of an incidental interaction, that I can’t even remember the details of, just that it called into doubt NOT ONLY the individual interaction, but the cascading tree of causality of all branches of my own personal Yggdrasil.

I have anxiety, pure and simple. I worry about everything. I analyze and I double analyze and I triple analyze, and even when I set a course, I do so full of doubt. I think that people who don’t have to deal with this sort of anxiety lack even the barest hint of understanding on how deeply this affects those who do. This is not to say that they have not experienced or experience anxiety; those with the disorder just experience it at an exponentially enhanced factor.

This is Day 2 of my transition. I felt great yesterday. Almost euphoric. And by the end of the day a little...weird. I looked at the side effects of Spironolactone and Estradiol. The former wasn’t of much worry, but one side effect of the latter burned itself into my eyeballs: anxiety. And like a hypochondriac, it may have been the very suggestion of this POSSIBLE mental shift that began the spiral.

I began to question. Myself. What I’m doing. Who I am. Lingering thoughts from work intruded. Did I do the right thing? Did I make a mistake? Was my analysis of that DKIM question correct? Was my reaction to a campaign vendor out of line? Did I offend that random person in my last ticket update? I could handle it, though.

And then someone in one of the various chats I’ve been in did something that I had been thinking about, and what’s more, they did some of the things I’ve already done. And I think they did it better than I could, and they did it CASUALLY. What took me tremendous amounts of mental effort seemed to be a casual thing for them, DESITE them claiming they were new to this. What is wrong with my brain? Why do these things become a herculean struggle for me, when others breeze through them? Why can REVEILLE not be special? Why am I so mediocre? People must think I’m useless, worthless, a whiner.

What does anyone know me for, anyway? The trumpet? I suck at it. I practiced my heart out at it, and still I was mediocre. I couldn’t hack being in even a low-end, community symphony orchestra. I can’t hit the high notes in the funk band I’m in the way the subs could. The ESTABLISHED LEAD could not perform as well as the subs were sight-reading the parts. What the fuck am I doing there? I’m not a trumpet player, I’m a fucking hack. And all of these synthesizer, this music shit. I have such great ideas, and when I sit in front of these things, I stare. Or I make something, and it feels mediocre. It feels like I strayed from my original intent.

What else would anyone know me for? Posting excessive amounts of pictures of VRChat on Twitter? I can’t even get most of my fucking old friends to play the fucking game, so why would they fucking care about the “neat” things I do? Neat things that other people have already posted about. I’m retreading everyone else’s path. I don’t know why I fucking bother. Half the time in VRChat I’m horribly lonely anyway, and the great times that I KNOW happened are fully eclipsed by all the fucking times some asshole in that fucking rexie crowd stepped in front of me in a conversation as if I wasn’t fucking there. or the times in my protogen group that I said something that felt relevant, but turned out to be from an old fuckface that has nothing in common with these young, excited, optimistic kids. that That’s ALL I REMEMBER. I remember that I DIDN’T EXIST.

My art is awful. I don’t practice enough, but how can you practice when everything you touch is shit? I diddle, I dabble, and when I seek some sort of affirmation that someone appreciates my garbage, it’s always the same people. It’s like drawing a stick figure and your mom putting it on the fridge. At some point you realize she’s doing it BECAUSE YOU MADE IT, and that makes it special TO THEM. It SHOULD be special to me, that I mean that to someone, but IT DOESN’T.

I surround myself with STUFF AND THINGS because each little item has a dream associated with it, each item, EVERY ITEM, has a story not just about what I’ve already done with it, but an even bigger story of WHAT I WANT TO DO WITH IT. They will never happen. Look at this 3D Printed Toothless. “I will paint that someday” I say, but I won’t, because I would ruin it with my shoddy painting. “Look at this dull knife? I will learn how to sharpen this dull knife.” But I don’t because I’ll just scratch it and make it worse. Look at this Loopstation. I’ve made some fun loops, but I’m going to get better at it, I’m going to practice. But I won’t, because I KNOW that I can’t make it work the way it works in my head, in the story that I wrote for it. Look at this fucking trumpet I bought that costs as much as a new car, 4 top end fursuits, or a year of mortgage payments for someone in a “reasonably” priced home. The THINGS I COULD PLAY, but I FUCKING WON’T because I CAN’T. Because I’m TERRIBLE.

I love to dance. It makes me feel alive. The music just moves me. VR has been a blessing for this. I can dance whenever I want, to whatever music I want. And then someone shows up the other day and starts cutting loose. They’ve never even been to a fucking club. They watch YouTube videos. They just started doing it. Their energy is TREMENDOUS and overwhelming and I CAN’T COMPARE. I realize that I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING CLOWN when I dance. I preach to people that it doesn’t matter, that everyone looks goofy, that it’s okay, but I’m FUCKING LYING because everyone is looking at me and judging me and thinking how embarrassing it is that I’m even in the same fucking ROOM with them. WHY DO I EVEN TRY?

Do you have ANY IDEA how life is when EVERYTHING YOU DO is worthless in your eyes? It’s not that I THINK it’s worthless, it’s that I KNOW it’s worthless.

You want to argue? Fine. Logically, you are correct. There is a rebuttal for EVERY SINGLE ONE of these admissions, and a rebuttal for the hundreds of other issues.

My hair looks dumb.

I look stupid with painted fingernails.

I can’t drive very good, and people notice.

My musical taste is awful.

I’m doing a bad job raising this new kitten.

I did a horrible job raising Bean.

I did a horrible job raising Harley.

I’m terrible at physicality.

My cooking is mediocre and samey.

I’m fat and gross.

I’m ugly as shit.

I look stupid in a dress.

My makeup looks like a kindergartner with a sharpie.

I suck at all video games.

No one likes the books I read.

I like the MCU and that’s horrible.

I like Apple products and that’s horrible.

My taste in computer hardware is shit.

My taste in clothes is shit.

My taste in cars is shit.

My glasses look dumb.

I made a mistake the last time I got my eyes checked because I’m stupid.

Only morons have as many knives as I do.

My voice is awful.

My photography was a joke, and I was a fool to have ever thought anyone gave a rat’s ass about my photos.

People think I’m a useless stoner.

I drink too much and am a fucking drunk that no one wants to hang around with.

My various bands have me there because they don’t know how to tell me to hit the road.

My VRChat characters are unremarkable and beneath notice.

DO I NEED TO CONTINUE???

These are the random thoughts that went through my head in rapid fire in the past 5 minutes. It took me longer to type them, at over 100wpm, than it did for them to fill my brain with their toxicity.

Do you have any idea what that’s like? To have everything you’ve done, ever done, and will do be called into question ad infinitum? To second-guess everything you say, everything you do, even every thought that goes in your head? Now wrap your head around this part:

Every one of those thoughts goes through multiple iterations of “Is it real? No it’s not real. But what if it is? What if you’re wrong? It’s probably real. Yeah, it’s real. But is it real? What if it is? Maybe I’m wrong? Yeah, I’m wrong, it’s real. But what if you’re wrong about it being real? Maybe it’s not real? Yeah, it’s probably not real. But you could be wrong about that, too.”

Every.

Fucking.

One.

*deep breath*

I started this post with the intent to write a little bit about the anxiety I’d been feeling. Turns out, I was wrong about how much was in there. I have anxiety dreams on a regular basis, more times than I admit, and likely even more than I can remember. I was at a convention last night. As usual, I missed every event. As usual, I missed every friend. As usual, I was late to every party. As usual, there was an elevator. Usually the elevator goes tot he wrong floor, or dumps me off either at the top of a maze of hotel rooms, outside a giant building with multiple staircases, or in the service tunnels beneath the building.

This time to elevator fell.

And it fell.

I legit thought this was it. I was going to die in this dream.

The brakes snapped on, and I woke up.

I never got back to REM. Tossed and turned for a few hours. Tried my usual trick of counting backwards form 100. I would lose count at about 94. My brain just...disintegrated. Over and over, it fragmented, then reformed back at my anxieties. When I don’t sleep, I’m especially susceptible to anxiety and depression.

Case in point.

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I’ve been mulling over what I just wrote. I felt all of that, in the moment. It looks silly now, on paper, as it were. But that’s just another aspect of the anxiety. A coping mechanism, if you will. “You’re just being silly”. And as usual, I’m already getting brain-foggy over the things I said. I forget about it again, because that’s what the brain does: it suppresses trauma.

All I know is I was near tears when I wrote all of that stuff up there; I remember that much, very clearly.

That memory will fade too.

And anxiety says to me, to write “It will fade, just like everything about me.”

So I wrote it, and I pretend to myself that I don’t believe it. That I don’t feel that I am all of those things I wrote about above. That everything...is fine.

And, at least for a little bit, it will be. Those scores of thoughts will reduce to, oh, maybe 10. Not all will be toxic, but most will be a worry of some sort. A question. A question to myself, of myself, about myself.

Anxiety and Depression and ADHD and Mania and other “Mental Misfires” are not things that ever “go away”. I may wake up, and the dream may fade, but the harsh reality is that, no matter what meds, no matter how much therapy, if you have this stuff, the dreams will come back. The severity will come and go., but...

The dreams always come back.

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I’m out of steam. The fire is cooled. I’m done writing for now, and no one wants to hear anything else about this, anyway, least of all me.

Peace, y’all.

#anxiety #crushing anxiety

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