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slaughter-books · 8 months

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Day 19: JOMPBPC: Paperbacks

Four beautiful green paperbacks! 💚

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eggsistential-breakdown · 6 days

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Just a couple of teens, chilling in the woods, running from the law

Wish we got to see some of Ethan and Flicker third wheeling while Nate and Teebo were MIA and Kelsie and Chizara were ... uh

Anyways I bet it would have been a hilarious dynamic

Very rough sketch but I've had the concept floating around for a couple years, probably won't polish it. Click for higher quality

#zeroes scott westerfeld #zeroes fanart #ethan cooper #flicker phillips #cambria six #scott westerfeld #margo lanagan #deborah biancotti #nexus #swarm #my art #fan art #digital art #digital sketch

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haveyoureadthisfantasybook · 1 month

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vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

#fantasy #books #Tender Morsels #Margo Lanagan #poll #result: no #l: English

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ofliterarynature · 9 months

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2023 Reading Wrap Up: Favorites from the First Half

Not to sound like a broken record, but I can't believe we're already halfway through the year! (and even further, given how late I'm posting this lol). I've read an ungodly amount of books already, and while I try my best to shout out my favorites as I go or in my monthly wrap-ups, I don't always succeed. So Here I Am, to do a little more shouting about the 10 most memorable books or series I've read so far in 2023!

The God of Endings by Jaqueline Holland

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

Sword Stone Table ed by Jenn Northington & Swapna Krishna

Sea Hearts (The Brides of Rollrock Island) by Margo Lanagan

Spill Zone by Scott Westerfeld & Alex Puvilland

Will Darling/Lilywhite Boys by K.J. Charles

Lord Peter Wimsey by Dorothy L Sayers

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

More discussion below the cut!

The God of Endings by Jaqueline Holland had me entirely engrossed. It's slow and moving and dark, with it's own take on vampirism, with any number of the associated content warnings. All the content warnings actually (but harm to animals, harm to children, and domestic abuse are some of the big ones. Does the Nazi murder make up for it?). Best described as The Historian meets everything I wanted from The Invisible Life of Addie Larue but didn't get.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez I have, in fact, already yelled about a bit. It was so good! Think A:TLA meets The Raven Tower and The Hundred Thousand Kindgoms, and queer! The thing that really blew my mind was the second-person narration, which is always a swing, and I think this nailed it! I loved how it worked with the story and frame narrative, and let me tell you, on audiobook parts of the story felt positively haunted. I won't say it's the perfect novel (I'm a little eh about the last third), but that in no way dampens my enthusiasm. cw for ritual cannibalism.

Sword Stone Table ed by Jenn Northington & Swapna Krishna is an anthology of Arthurian re-imaginings with about a 1-in-3 success rate (for me anyways. is that good for an anthology?) that snuck onto this list purely on the strength of Mayday by Maria Dahvana Headley. I just yelled about my love for unusual narrative structures, so when I tell you that this is a retelling of the Arthurian family drama set in late 19th century America, told only through found objects, newspaper clippings, and manuscript exerpts? I had *such* a great time trying to puzzle things out with my half-remembered memories of the lore (heavily corrupted by the show Merlin, lol). Additional shout-out to Spear by Nicola Griffith, which didn't make it into the collection due to length but was also amazing!

Sea Hearts (aka The Brides of Rollrock Island) by Margo Lanagan was an absolute surprise, for several reasons. For one, I own both a physical and digital copy under different titles and didn't realize it until I was cleaning up my goodreads account! And second, the Brides cover is an absolute travesty and is entirely the wrong vibe - this may be YA (technically?) but it doesn't read like it! Sea Hearts is the story of a small island community with a history of summoning wives from the sea, a tradition only whispered about until an outcast young woman revives the practices to sow discord and revenge among the community members we follow. Incredibly moving and sorrowful, this is for fans of literary, historical, and speculative fiction.

Spill Zone by Scott Westerfeld & Alex Puvilland. This graphic novel is about a city hit by an unknown disaster that has killed or mutated everything and everyone who wasn't able to evacuate in time. Our main character sneaks back in to take pictures to support herself and her little sister, and while I have some reservations about the larger plot, the art of the Zone is GORGEOUS. Sketchy, eerie, hauntingly beautiful, I loved it, enough that I have no regrets. I could see this making a great comic series or animated show instead.

Major, heartfelt shout-out to K.J. Charles, who absolutely saved my sanity for a few months there. My brain was in a weird spot for a few months and I burned through a good chunk of her backlist, so it's absolutely necessary to name drop a few of my favorites. The Will Darling series, a 1920's spy adventure/gay romance, did not immediately win me over, but exposure makes the heart grow fonder? I don't think they say that, actually, but I love a competent dumbass, and when I finally picked up on the crossover with Charles' England duo, I absolutely cackled. I can't wait to reread these! Any Old Diamonds of the Lilywhite Boys series did catch me immediately, even if I managed to read it out of order with one of it's prequel series. Jewel thieves, a heist, revenge, family drama, what's not to love? I loved every single book and novella in this series.

Lord Peter Wimsey (series) by Dorothy L Sayers. This has been a work in progress since 2022 and has consistently made my favorites lists, but truly, she saved the best for last! Murder Must Advertise was stellar, but everyone who said the Harriet Vane novels were the best is absolutely correct. I don't know why I love them, other than that they're wonderfully complex mysteries, but I do. I definitely need to find another long mystery series for my mental health or else I'm going to start these from the beginning again (I still need to read the short stories after all).

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. I'll be honest, I didn't write a review for this at the time, and my memory for non-fiction is terrible. But I loved this book, I love John Green, and this was fantastic on audio. Thank you John for putting hope and goodness and beauty into the world.

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff was a beautiful little book for the book lover. It's a collection of letters between the American author and a used-book seller (and family and associates) in London in the 50s and 60s. Its funny, it's friendly, it's lovely, but there's also an underlying tension that builds throughout from the repeated invitations to the author to come visit, and the book copy saying that THEY NEVER MEET. It about killed me, and did make me cry. For further reading you can also check out the author's related memoirs, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street and Q's Legacy.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. Frankly, I'm impressed by my nonfiction choices so far this year. This one is what it says and it HURT. SO. MUCH. I am absolutely a generalist and it's made life frustrating, so reading this was both extremely comforting but also enraging, because society doesn't need another reason to suck. Alas.

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florriescreamlagoon · 2 months

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Nothing in my tale seemed to surprised the woman. The cat, on the other hand, seemed not to find a word of it credible.

Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels

#margo lanagan

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the-hearth-and-the-wild · 1 year

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Seals do not sit about and tell, the way people do, and their lives are not eventful in the way people’s are, lines of stories combed out again and again, in the hope that they will yield more sense with every stroke. Seal life already makes perfect sense, and needs no explanation.

Margo Lanagan, Sea Hearts (The Brides of Rollrock Island)

#book quotes #margo lanagan #sea hearts #the brides of rollrock island #selkie #selkies #books and libraries #literature #fantasy literature #fantasy quotes #nature quotes

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sbbarnes · 1 year

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I've been thinking a lot about ratings for books.

I just gave a romance novel (The Best Man's Problem by Sera Taíno) four stars on Goodreads. Prior to that, the last two books I gave four stars were The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan and Passing by Nella Larson.

These are wildly different books.

The Best Man's Problem is an enemies-to-lovers, opposites attract somewhat spicy mlm romance that I read in about two hours. The Brides of Rollrock Island is a harrowing, folktale-adjacent story about generational trauma. Passing is about the lives of two light-skinned Black women in the 1920s, one of whom lives as a white woman.

Of the three, Passing is probably the one that would get the stamp of being "highbrow". It got an artsy film adaptation and everything. My motivation for reading them was entirely different: I wanted to read Passing out of curiosity, I had heard about the movie and wanted to read the book to educate myself. The Brides of Rollrock Island I read because I love the author's work and I knew it would make me feel melancholy and achy in the best way. The Best Man's Problem I read because I wanted to have a comfortable, easy and enjoyable read in the space of an afternoon.

They all got four stars because they all matched that motivation very well. They didn't change my life (I'm stingy with five stars, sue me), but I enjoyed every one of these books a lot for the purpose I set out to read them.

It just feels really weird to me to rate them all on the same scale, because I'm rating them very subjectively. Did this book give me what I wanted out of it? Yes. Four stars.

I know there are people out there who rate via categories that seem more empirical. And to a degree, I guess that makes sense. But rating craft, like beautiful sentence structure, word choice, dialogue...I mean, I could do all those things, but it would still be subjective. I think The Brides of Rollrock Island is probably the most beautiful of the three in craft terms; someone else might choose something else.

More dangerously, if you read across the board, like me, that leads to a trend towards giving more points to "serious" literature and less to genre fiction. It's no secret people kind of look down on romance as a genre, especially explicit romance, especially especially explicit romance starring lgbtq+ leads of color, all of which is true of the example I'm using. It's "easy" reading, predictable and often formulaic, true, but if that's what you're after, why shouldn't that be worth the same as a more complex book when you're in a different mood?

I don't know that I have a point here, I guess what I'm saying is:

Rating everything we read numerically is not really all that helpful.

Therefore, I have elected radical individualism and rate solely based on the criterion of how happy reading a book made me.

#bookblr #goodreads #four stars #romance novels #lgbtq romance #fairy tales #folk tales #passing #nella larson #the brides of rollrock island #margo lanagan #the best man's problem #sara taíno

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quirkycatsfatstacks · 1 year

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Review: Someone in Time Anthology

Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed RomanceAuthors: Nina Allen, Zen Cho, Rowan Coleman, Jeffrey Ford, Sarah Gailey, Theodora Goss, Elizabeth Hand, Alix E. Harrow, Ellen Klages, Lavanya Lakshimanarayan, Margo Lanagan, Seanan McGuire, Sam J. Miller, Sameem Sadiqui, Catherynne M. Valente, Carrie VaughnEditor: Jonathan StrahanPublisher: SolarisReleased: May 10, 2022Received: NetGalley Someone in…

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somegirlsaretrouble · 2 years

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“Not one would dare spit upon this woman, or call out at her. She had a different kind of boldness, a strength that did not defy that of men so much as ignore it, or take its place without question beside it — Urdda wanted some of that boldness.”

- Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan

#tender morsels #margo lanagan

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pithia · 29 days

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If only I could direct my thoughts, instead of their trickling away like spring runnels from a snowpack.

—from "When I Lay Frozen" by Margo Lanagan (The Starlit Wood)

#quotations #Margo Lanagan #thoughts #direction #this is my life

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slaughter-books · 11 months

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Day 28: JOMPBPC: Books In A Bag

Rainbow books in a bag! ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

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eggsistential-breakdown · 1 year

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Back on my Zeroes bullshit with the world's smudgiest teethan and some nexus doodles

Regular pencil was smudging so bad I finally switched to color pencils. How do people do this it's so nerve wracking the proportions are so wack

#posting to a dead fandom again #zeroes scott westerfeld #zeroes #nexus #scott westerfeld #margo lanagan #deborah biancotti #fan art #my art #traditional sketch #doodles #ethan cooper #nate saldana #flicker phillips #kelsie laszlo #chizara okeke #thibault durant #doodle

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bookcoversonly · 7 months

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Title: The Brides of Rollrock Island | Author: Margo Lanagan | Publisher: Knopf Books (2012)

#books #The Brides of Rollrock Island #Margo Lanagan

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ofliterarynature · 1 year

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Sea Hearts, aka The Brides of Rollrock Island, is the story of a small island community with a history of summoning wives from the sea, a tradition only whispered about until an outcast young woman revives the practices to sow discord and revenge. This moving and sorrowful tale has been hiding on my shelves for ages behind a YA label and a very unassuming cover, but don’t let it fool you! For fans of literary, historical, and speculative fiction.

#selkies it’s selkies #but before you get too excited #they’re not really developed as individuals and they never get their own perspective despite the multiple narrators #which is incredibly disappointing #also it’s very heteronormative #but! I overall really enjoyed it #it was published in 2012 so it is what it is #bec posts #2023 #from Instagram #the brides of rollrock island #sea hearts #margo lanagan #also fun fact:#I did not realize I had two copies of this for YEARS #because the audiobook I have was titled Sea Hearts #only figured out when I was cleaning up my Goodreads lmao

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florriescreamlagoon · 2 months

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You may never be entirely happy; few people are. You may never achieve your heart's desire in this world, for people seldom do. Sit by enough deathbeds, Branza, and you will hear your fill of stories of missed chances, and wrong turnings, and spurned opportunities for love. It is required of you only to be here, not to be happy.

Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels

#margo lanagan

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lindensea · 1 year

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Currently a third of the way into The Brides of Rollrock Island, and I honestly think I must have gotten this confused with a different book, because selkie trafficking is NOT the plot I was expecting.

#i thought it was an almost romance with the Selkie king or something #not that I'm complaining because it's pretty good and refreshingly different #and the writing is... lush #sometimes a tad too much for me but most of the time just right #the brides of rollrock island #margo lanagan

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