jaggedwolf | Reading Update

What My Mother And I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break The Silence, edited by Michele Filgate

I haven't read an essay collection in years. It's a well-written if harrowing one. Some of the writers have had really awful moms (and dads). The essays that had less ambiguous conclusions were kind of a relief, whether from terminated relationships, death, or a happy relationship. Favourites were Alexander Chee's, Carmen Maria Machado's, and Melissa Febos's.

This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

I was as appropriately entertained as I expected to be by time-travelling agents on opposite sides writing letters to each other and then falling in love. Felt like it operated on a sort of dream-logic and dream-description. Not a criticism, more that it was easier to be occupied by the atmosphere than the details, and so there were a couple of times I forgot what upthread/downthread meant and waited a chapter to be reminded, haha.

It makes sense to end the book there...but also damn it, I wanted a prison break scene. I did love the reveal that the Shadow was Red herself (I'd guessed Blue at one point), and that the impossibility of two opposites to survive together is solved by them literally becoming a little less opposite, the absorption of bits of each other.

The moment where Red is presented with the crossing timeline and dimly notes that the lines are grey and green was pretty great, too, in starting to think of Red and Blue as distinct from their factions and not synonymous with them.