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checkoutmybookshelf · 2 years

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Sisterhood of the Stab Stab

Both teenage asthmatic me and 20-year-old newly diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis me desperately needed this book, and I am so, so grateful that 30-year-old me had the chance to read it so I can point kids and peers who might need this book as badly as I did toward it. This book has just stunningly well-done chronic illness (specifically POTs) representation, and some really excellent LGBTQ+ representation. It's also rare I get in on preorder goodies, but when I saw how beautiful these character cards were, I couldn't resist! Let's talk One for All.

The tagline for this book is a gender-bent retelling of The Three Musketeers, but honestly the chronic illness representation is what made this book so impactful for me. I'm not a POTsie, but I knew exactly how the crushing fatigue, the constant fight against your own body, and the cruel responses of people around you feel when you have hard physical limits.

Tania is a lovely character to follow and share a headspace with throughout the book. Her complex relationships with her parents, her peers, her musketeer mentor, and her fellow lady musketeers are nuanced and always interesting. As a former dancer (the RA didn't actually kill that activity for me, that was the pandemic), I also strongly identified with Tania's insistence on honing her skills in her chosen sport--fencing--to the fullest extent of her abilities, and accommodating the very real physical limitations her body has rather than pushing to try to be like fencers without POTs. The space that Tania and the other musketeers make to accommodate the POTs rather than trying to magically fix it, ignore it, or insist that Tania could somehow "overcome" it is absolutely incredible. I would love for that accommodation to be the norm rather than the vanishingly rare exception.

Tania is not the only kickass character, however. Our other three lady musketeers are full, round characters who grow with Tania even as they prove that they will never ever let her fall. Each of our girls has a clear character all her own, and they mesh with and bup up against each other's personalities in ways that were never not a treat to see.

Simply put, I adore this book and cannot say enough good things about it. I'm hopeful that we get more stories with Tania and the rest of the sisterhood of the stab stab.

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whimsicaldragonette · 3 years

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Blog Tour and Arc Review: One For All by Lillie Lainoff

Welcome to my stop on the One For All book tour with Colored Pages Tours. (This blog tour is also posted on my Wordpress book blog Whimsical Dragonette.)

Tour Schedule

Book Info:

TITLE: One For All AUTHOR: Lillie Lainoff PUBLISHER: Feiwel & Friends RELEASE DATE: March 8, 2022 PAGES: 400 GENRES: Young Adult Historical Fantasy

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Synopsis:

An OwnVoices, gender-bent retelling of The Three Musketeers, in which a girl with a chronic illness trains as a Musketeer and uncovers secrets, sisterhood, and self-love.

Tania de Batz is most herself with a sword in her hand. Everyone in town thinks her near-constant dizziness makes her weak, nothing but “a sick girl”; even her mother is desperate to marry her off for security. But Tania wants to be strong, independent, a fencer like her father—a former Musketeer and her greatest champion.

Then Papa is brutally, mysteriously murdered. His dying wish? For Tania to attend finishing school. But L’Académie des Mariées, Tania realizes, is no finishing school. It’s a secret training ground for a new kind of Musketeer: women who are socialites on the surface, but strap daggers under their skirts, seduce men into giving up dangerous secrets, and protect France from downfall. And they don’t shy away from a swordfight.

With her newfound sisters at her side, Tania feels for the first time like she has a purpose, like she belongs. But then she meets Étienne, her first target in uncovering a potential assassination plot. He’s kind, charming, and breathlessly attractive—and he might have information about what really happened to her father. Torn between duty and dizzying emotion, Tania will have to lean on her friends, listen to her own body, and decide where her loyalties lie…or risk losing everything she’s ever wanted.

This debut novel is a fierce, whirlwind adventure about the depth of found family, the strength that goes beyond the body, and the determination it takes to fight for what you love.

Click "read more" for author info, my review, and favorite quotes.

Author Bio:

Lillie Lainoff received her B.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing and distinction within the major from Yale University. She currently is studying for her MA in Creative Writing Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia.

Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry has been featured in The LA Review, The Washington Post Outlook, Today’s Parent, via the Disability Visibility Project, Washington City Paper, and The Yale Daily News, amongst other places. She’s received recognition from Glimmer Train and The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and is the 2019 Winner of the LA Review Literary Award for Short Fiction. She was a featured Rooted in Rights disability activist, and is the founder of Disabled Kidlit Writers (FB).

As an undergraduate, Lillie was a member of Yale’s Varsity Fencing team. As a senior, she was one of the first physically disabled athletes to individually qualify for any NCAA Championship event, and helped her team to an end-of-season 10th place ranking by the National Coaches Poll. She still fences competitively and coaches. In 2017, she was named a recipient of the inaugural Spirit of Sport award by the US Fencing Association.

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My Review:

★★★★★

I loved this book. I mean, I went into it knowing I would because, genderbent Musketeers? Everything I ever wanted. And I did love it for that, but mostly for Tania. She is *such* a great MC, not least of which because she lives with debilitating chronic illness AND IS ALSO a great fencer and a Musketeer. This book does an absolutely amazing job driving home the point that yes, you can be disabled AND competent -- AND that competence *does not make you any less disabled.* This is maybe the only book I've read that makes such a clear point of this. Disability does not equal incompetence. Competence does not equal a lack of disability. They can both be true. Tania's illness is never far from her. She never takes a breath free of the dizziness, and we never lose sight of her struggles or her determination. Her illness is threaded through every scene, every moment of the story -- but it does not define the story, and it does not define her. It does not truly limit her, not in any way that matters or that she and her sisters in arms cannot find a way to overcome. Aside from that, I love the way Tania and her sisters in arms grow closer and come to trust and rely on one another. I love that they are trained and trusted to go on missions to protect the king, even if they are denied official entry into the Musketeers. I love that they use every means at their disposal to complete their missions -- and are also relatable teen girls. Another thing I absolutely love is that the four girls' names are clearly related to the original Three Musketeers (and D'artagnan), and that they also share some of the same personality traits as their namesakes. It's such a clever and subtle nod to the original. I love how Tania's father steadfastly believes in her and teaches her to fence despite her mother's worries and despite her illness. And that his lessons give her tools to combat the dizziness she feels. I also love the musing about others like her, reduced to begging and being disbelieved. About how there are so many words for disbelief that a girl can be having the physical symptoms she complains of. About how it's the poor who suffer during a regime change. This book has a lot of really powerful passages that hit hard and don't shy away from ugly truths. And yet it still manages to be fun and empowering. Empowering is actually a great word to describe how I feel about this book. As someone with chronic illnesses myself, I really deeply felt Tania's frustrations and rage at being disbelieved, mocked, treated like a delicate object, not seen. Her journey is uplifting and empowering and I am so glad that I read it. And even more, I'm so glad Lillie Lainoff wrote it, that it will be available to future "sick girls" who secretly yearn to be Musketeers and save themselves for a change. I also had the chance to listen to the audio arc and I have to say that I wish the narrator had done more justice to this story. She spoke at a reasonable speed but left long pauses between sentences sometimes -- maybe between paragraphs? -- which made it difficult to pay attention no matter what speed I tried. She also didn't really distinguish very much between character voices which made it difficult to follow different speakers. She also had a little bit of a monotone quality to her performance which meant my mind tended to wander while listening. *Thanks to NetGalley, Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, Recorded Books, Colored Pages Blog Tours, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing an e-arc and audio arc for review.

Favorite Quotes:

When was the last time we’d touched when she wasn’t providing support for my wavering legs? When was the last time she’d reached for me and it wasn’t because I needed help?

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Now, whenever I had a good day, people were quick to assume I felt better. It was hard enough living with the knowledge that if I felt healthy, it didn’t mean the next day would be the same. Being reminded of that fact by others was a painfully close second.

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Men wanted quiet wives, quiet wives with quiet nervous habits. Not even our bad traits, our unconscious traits, belonged to us.

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If I’d known the directions, if I could’ve drawn her a map, I would have done it in an instant. I would have ripped up the precious books in my room for paper and used my tears for ink.

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This Paris was nothing like the Paris of my hazy dreams.

 It was loud and people-full and the smell stuck to the inside of my nose and grime was everywhere and oh, it was beautiful.

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We are not the ones who are written into history. We are the ones who ensure history exists to be written.

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But the party was still a crashing wave that broke at my ankles, the clash of music against voices, against laughter, against clinking glasses and the susurrus of shoes against marble.

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And even though dizziness lingered at the edges of my vision, even though my toes were clenched tight within my slippers, I was gliding across the smooth surface of a stream. It was just a bout without the swords — a bout that I would win.

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…all those years of doing my best to pretend nothing was wrong had stitched a permanent mark into my skin.

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That’s what Musketeers did. Earned their wounds.

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I wasn’t any less dizzy than before, any less sick. But my legs were stronger. They were fighting for me. All the same symptoms, but no fainting.

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They may not be the Musketeers I’d imagined. But they were better, because they were mine. And I knew, as I looked at them and saw the cold steely resolve inside me mirrored in their eyes, that I was theirs.

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It was just like what Papa told me. Yes, I was dizzy; yes, his body swayed before me like the rocking of a ship; yes, my legs felt as if they’d collapse at any moment. But I knew the rhythm of this bout. It was in my bones, in the throb of my wounded arm, in the beat of my heart.

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Being sick meant, at any moment, the people I cared about could decide I wasn’t worth the trouble I put them through.

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The entries were tedious. Descriptions of medical theory, the four humors, hypochondria, so many different words and entries for women in pain that wasn’t believed.

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“The three of you made me realize that whatever this dizziness is … well, maybe it’s never been the real problem. It’s horrible and it hurts and it makes me feel fragile in a way I never wanted, but it’s not the thing that tears me apart. The problem, the real problem, is the people who decide I’m unworthy because of it.”

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“Fight me!” I shouted. “I am not the fragile, breakable thing you’d have me be. I am a Musketeer.”

#lillie lainoff #one for all #sisterhoodofthestabstab #colored pages tours #OneForAll #blog tour #netgalley #shilo reads #arc review #chronic illness rep #POTS rep #three musketeers

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