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Book Review: Witchmark by C.L. Polk

Disclaimer: I received this book as a free ARC from my place of employment. It comes out June 2018.

This book was an absolute delight. It was like a banana split on a hot day.

I have to be honest, I didn’t expect this book to be as good as it was. I mean, c'mon. You can’t tell me there’s a book out there that’s a soft sci-fi and a vintage-style mystery and a gay romance and it’s vaguely steam-punk and it covers WWI-era culture and battle fatigue and the Golden Age of Mystery style mysteries seamlessly. It would be absolutely impossible to put all of those things together. One just doesn’t mix Father Brown, V.E. Schwab, throw a gay romance in between a doctor and, oh yeah, a fairy for good measure, and actually get published. Right?

Wrong.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the best paradox of a book I’ve ever read. I’m so glad it doesn’t come out until June, because I can guarantee you I will need that long to wander around my tiny little bookstore wondering what section to put it in. It’s a serious mystery. It’s a serious sci-fi. It’s definitely a romance. It is all three at once.

And it is not chaos. It is not a free for all. It is not some ungodly melee of stereotypes or tropes or stagnant plot arcs. It’s a magnificent undertaking. The ending had me dropping my jaw and squealing in delight. Simultaneously. I think my parents - who were in the room as I read the final pages - thought I was having a seizure. I was making audible and slightly embarrassing noises.

So save the date, everyone, because if you’re a fan of genre fiction, Witchmark is for you.

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Switching Over Blogs

Catch me at @mystic-tea-drinker

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Can someone do me a solid

And spoil Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden for me, please??

I'm halfway through and cannot stand to read another page, but also I want to know the ending.

Thank you.

(Reasons for dislike, if you're curious: very clear American Gods ripoff, slow as hell, all "enemy" characters are flat as hell, I don't really see the point in naming names w the church like this book does)

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Mini book review, bc we fiiinally got this in--it was 6 long weeks of waiting at the bookstore.

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“You can call me Mithrandir,” Gandalf said, “or Randy, for short.“

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Post Infinity War mood :

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Some of my favorite Tolkien book editions. My Instagram ~ My blog

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Cozy knitting 101

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Introversion essentials

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Current obsession.

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Book Review: A Beautiful Composition of Broken by R.H. Sin

Warning: I hated this book. I go after it really hard Inserting a read-more just for length.

I’m going to start this review with an excerpt. Two excerpts, actually. I couldn't decide which was more... erm... appropriate. You'll see.

From page 77:

The Tights You Wear.

wrapped around both thighs black hues and heather grays beginning at the waist ending just at the ankles forcing me to pay homage to your curves

From page 299:

6:16p.m.:

utilizing my tongue as a stress reliever pressing pressure points creating a climax provoking pleasure with ease opening you right up because my tongue is the key

-- This was, without a doubt, the worst collection of poetry I have ever beheld in my entire life. I feel like I could exfoliate with steel wool in the shower and I still wouldn't be rid of the absolute creepiness I've been exposed to within these pages. It is vile. It is demeaning. It is derogatory. It is falsely feminizing, toxicly masculine, and the attention-mongering is real. I have a lot to say about it.

A single moment of disclosure, I didn't actually finish this book. It's 461 pages long. I threw up the white flag of surrender on page 300. I couldn't take another page. I'll explain more in a bit.

Before I get into my full lambasting, however, I do want to say something nice about this book. I genuinely appreciate seeing a male poet so ready to embrace the idea of writing about love and about how it's OK to want love and to want a relationship, instead of just an OKCupid hookup or whatever. That was a nice, refreshing sentiment. If you aren't super-rooted in third-wave feminism (which I admittedly am, and which we'll also get into), you'll probably think this book is amazing. It offers just enough love, enough longing for respect, etc, to be good.

Another positive I want to say about this book is that some of the poems are legitimately good. There are plenty of redeemable poems that have nothing wrong, weird, or unhealthy in them. I'd say 25% of them are fantastic, normal, solid poems with good ideas and thoughts. I was drawing little hearts next to them. In fact, this book is so long enough that if they were collected up and all of the crappy, chauvinistic, toxic poems were removed, he still would have been able to publish a book, it'd just be more like a regularly sized poetry book instead of this insane tome.

That said, the good poems in this book are surrounded by so many poems that are - for lack of better phrasing - complete and utter bullshit, I couldn't take the good poems seriously. For example, there was a very nice poem about how R.H. Sin likes to get to know a girl's mind before he touches her body. This is well and good. It's a valid sentiment. However, it comes in at about page 250. The leggings poem listed above is on page 77. If what you're wearing to walk down the street means he can whistle at you, then what really comes first? What does he really care about?

So for me, the positive sides weren't enough to redeem this collection. I don't even know where to start with my issues regarding this work. I think I'm going to list them out and then elaborate one by one, just so I personally don't get lost ranting. I highly disliked how Sin paraded around like he was one of the feminists but he clearly isn't, I didn't like the whiplash from one poem to the next, the sheer amount of contradictions within the messages he's trying to bring forward, the toxic masculinity so clearly made evident, and the way he views love in general.

I think I'm going to tackle the love issue first, actually. This might have been what bothered me the most. R.H. Sin's idea of how love works, according to this book, is that it only has to do with being earned. If you just work hard enough, if you throw enough flowers at a pretty-lookin girl, if you just say the right words and put in the elbow grease, everything will be dandy. Then, when that's not how love works, he gets incredibly frustrated and blames it on the girl who left him. He sulks like a 5 year old who had a toy taken away, bemoaning that he loved her so hard and she didn't care about him at all and she never deserved him and blahblahblah. It eventually devolves into saying "well I don't care about anyone" (which we'll get into under the toxic masculinity section), before the entire process repeats itself again and again and again. About every 10-15 pages, it repeats. By page 300, he still hadn't learned what was going wrong here.

And I'm not saying that love doesn't require work, ok? It does. Being in a relationship means making decisions for 2, taking another person into account, worrying about them, checking in with them, etc. But being in love is also something relatively mundane. It's thinking someone is cute. It's having similar interests, a general respect for them, a general attraction. Within the poems presented here, I highly doubt R.H. Sin understands that. He genuinely seems confused that a woman might arbitrarily not be into him simply because she's not into him. He writes about women is like they're just prizes to be won over.

I think this ties into the toxic masculinity theme, so I'm going to dive into that next. This part isn't so obvious. R.H. Sin is definitely pretending like he's third-wave. He says all the magic words: he uses "women" and "warrior" in the same sentence multiple times, he has a whole poem using the word independence, he says women are strong, he even has a poem that says, "I hate this idea of a woman being silent."

But don't be fooled by the catch-phrases, kiddos! He's faking. If you read the excerpt at the beginning of this review, by page 77 you're already gonna know he clearly thinks that the decision to wear leggings is an open invitation for him to check you out on the sidewalk. If you choose not to like him, then you're just not good enough for him anyway and you never deserved his love. By the 200s, he's going to admit flat-out he knows women are silent because they're done with your shit--but he already said he hates it when women were quiet.

As if that's not contradictory enough, he starts gaslighting with his poems. He says he doesn't like silent women, but then he writes a poem "you don't have to explain why you left to the person who made you leave." He says you're allowed to leave anyone, but if you leave him, then you never meant anything. It's nonsense. It's infantile.

And that brings me to my main point of the toxic masculinity: R.H. Sin didn't admit a single fault about himself in all of the 300 pages I slogged through. Every. Single. Time. something went wrong, the finger was pointed at someone else. It was always that someone didn't love him enough, that they didn't understand him, that they wanted to leave, that they decided to choose Mr. Wrong over him, etc. Even people who had criticized his poetry meant nothing to him and were just jealous. He was completely and utterly incapable of sitting back, critically thinking through a situation, and admitting that he had any sort of flaw in his behavior or his logic.

As another example, there's a poem on page 160 that says, "I've come to the realization that loving a woman means making an effort to make her smile at all times." This is a terrible, terrible idea. Love is so much more than smiles. Trying to make someone happy 24/7 is the perfect basis for a mentally and emotionally abusive relationship. Does he get this? No. By page 219 he's saying "trying and trying is something that i'll no longer do. loving you until i realize that it'll change nothing. these things take time and i'm patient." No, you literally just don't understand what love is and you're glamorizing an unhealthy relationship dynamic, then having the audacity to turn around and behave like this act of self-sacrifice somehow earns you brownie points. It doesn't.

Anyway, I think that covers all of my major points. As a final note, I do have to say I thoroughly enjoyed ripping this book to pieces. I'm a firm believer in annotations and dog ears. This book looks more loved than my copy of Milk and Honey, which I've read... six times, I believe? Which is not bad considering I literally didn't even finish this book. My Snapchat story is littered with sassy annotations I added to the pages. My love interest, who doesn't even believe in annotations, was begging me to add further commentary and thoroughly joining in on the rampage against the godawful poetry and the godawful ideas R.H. Sin presents in this book. It was decidedly much more fun that if I'd actually spent the day reading a poetry book I enjoyed. In fact, if you want to get some thorough stress-relief by way of ranting about bad ideas of love, I'd solidly recommend this book. It's great for that.

Other than that, yeah, it's a really crappy book. My sincere apologies for whoever gets my copy after I get rid of it, both because the book sucks and my annotations surely do not improve on the theme. Yeah.

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Book Review: Motherhood by Sheila Heti

Disclaimer: I received this book as a free ARC from the bookstore where I work. It hits shelves in hardcover June 7th.

I loved this book and I can't quite explain how. Motherhood is a book about the decision to have or to forego having children. After reading it cover to cover, I'm still not sure if it's memoir or fiction. It reads like the narrator's intimate journal. It's stream of consciousness without being a train wreck. It's first person without being amateur. It's woo-woo and spiritual without sounding off the rocker. There's entire pages filled with the narrator asking questions of the i-ching. There's entire sections named after what part of the menstrual cycle the narrator is in. It's intimate, detailed, personal, and thought-provoking.

What really drew me in was how it felt like me. That's the best way I can put it. I don't think I've ever had the level of connection with a book that I had with Motherhood. It felt like something I could have written, and I was fascinated to hear my exact opinions voiced on the page. There were passages that I stared at and all I could think was "I have this exact sentiment paraphrased in my journal." I was sending snapchats to the people who know me most intimately like 'is this not something I'd say? is this not my exact opinion?' That's not to say the narrator is me - she and I are almost nothing alike - but I'm absolutely floored by how thoroughly I identified with her.

I adored this book and I'm so glad I had a chance to read it. I think women everywhere are going to rally around it. That said, I don't think it's a book for everyone. You have to be in a certain headspace and a certain frame of mind to read this. It is a little bit spiritual. It is a little bit something else. There will be people who don't get it and say "well that's just weakness on the narrator's fault, to be so indecisive for 350 pages." But indecisiveness is the point. This book isn't about deciding something and heading on a journey--it's the journey of a single decision that took years to make.

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Just some more simple stuff. Instagram ~ Lunreye

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“Her soul belongs to words and books. Every time she reads, she is home.”

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