forever we try

I reread two of my old-favorite, middle-grade/young adult historical fiction novels, The Beaded Moccasins: The Story of Mary Campbell and The Ransom of Mercy Carter. Both are about real-life colonial girls who were kidnapped and eventually assimilated into Native American tribes in the 1700s, and I was both glad and, to be honest, a little relieved that they both held up. The Ransom of Mercy Carter especially is just as good as I remembered.

I also read two other middle-grade historical fiction books that are slightly in the same vein. Blue Birds is about Roanoke Colony and split between the POVs of a colonist, Alis, and a Native American girl, Kimi. I picked up When Daylight Comes on a whim; it's set during the 1773 slave insurrection on St. John Island in the Danish West Indies. The book itself was written in 1985. Given that, it's definitely not perfect--the main character, Helena, is white and a magistrate's daughter captured by the rebels, so there's plenty that's intentionally problematic and then a couple of elements that are most likely unintentionally problematic, but its good points outweighed its flaws, at least for me. 

Rapture of the Deep took me a good couple months to finish, just because I got sidetracked in the middle. It's Book 7, which puts me a little more than halfway through the Bloody Jack series. I sped through My Bonny Light Horseman, Book 6, which was surprisingly short--Rapture of the Deep is much longer, but it's also full of pirates and undersea deep diving and sunken Spanish wrecks, so I couldn't help but love it. 

My biggest in-progress read is still Anna Karenina. I'm about 300 pages into my copy--up to Book III--and trying to read at least a chapter a day, usually in the mornings before I start on schoolwork. Making the reading a part of my morning routine has really helped me get back into the flow of it, which is great because I really do love this book. On the other hand, it leaves me craving shorter, snappier books because it...is very much neither of those things. But I've been enjoying leaving myself a pocket of time every day to sink into it for a bit. 

Reading

My highlight of last week was finding a brand new copy of Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino on the college library's "Free Books" cart (maybe they ordered too many copies?), so I've been working my way through that! Currently about halfway through the "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams" essay, which is great, though my favorite so far is probably "Ecstasy"; I didn't grow up Evangelical or in a megachurch, but her descriptions of drifting away from it as a teenager, plus that weird, mixed-up feeling of ambivalent on the one hand, needing to be a part of something bigger than yourself on the other, hit close to home.

I stalled out in the middle of Mississippi Jack (aka Bloody Jack #5) and am working on getting back into it.

Read

Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola, which a good friend recommended to me with the selling points "It's about a repressed woman in an unhappy marriage and also Amber Gray would make a fantastic Thérèse in the stage version." (And yep, there's a stage version! And Keira Knightley starred in a production in 2015! And Elizabeth Olsen starred in In Secret, the 2013 movie adaptation! With Oscar Isaac!!) Which, I won't say my main take away from this book was "Amber Gray would make a fantastic Thérèse," but boy would Amber Gray make a fantastic Thérèse--she's a bit of a Helene Kuragina dialed up and down at the same time, much more reserved and not willing to flaunt her affair in her husband's face, but also willing to conspire with her lover to get rid of her husband. Which, you know, murder doesn't tend to make you any less repressed or any happier than you were to begin with, especially when your husband was selfish and ineffectual but basically harmless, and your lover is, at best, a bit of a sociopath. 

Anyway. I loved this book a lot. Its biggest strength is that it's ridiculously readable and enjoyable despite being creepy, gruesome, and depressing with some honestly sickening moments. Nobody comes off that well (duh), least of all Thérèse, but everybody is layered and complex in their awfulness, and Thérèse's romance (?) with her lover, Laurent, is both the least romantic romance in the history of unromantic romances and very hot in its own way. 

Oh, and:

* I was listening to "Down by the Water" by P.J. Harvey a couple days after finishing the book, and now the two are fused together in my head. This should give you some idea of how Thérèse and Laurent decide to off her husband.

* Aside from the husband, the character who comes the closest to an innocent victim in the book is the mother-in-law, Madame Raquin, and by the end your heart will absolutely break for her. 

September so far has been jam-packed (by my standards, anyway) and stressful; things should calm down by the end of the month but probably not before then, so in the meantime here are some nice things that happened in between stressing about travel and stressing about classes:

1.) I finished Under the Jolly Roger...which probably isn't quite my favorite Bloody Jack book, but still most definitely worth reading and a ton of fun. Almost too much fun, considering this is the book where Jacky gets press-ganged into the Navy and nearly raped by a sadistic captain, only to be saved at the very last second when the captain's heart fails and he literally dies on top of her. And okay, there's usually at least one rape threat per book (Do I love this series to pieces? Yes. Does it have its issues? Also, yes.), so I came to this one prepared, but...yeesh. Of course Jacky manages to turn the situation to her advantage and bounce back in record time; there's much more focus on the trauma of her battle experiences than, y'know, the trauma of being under constant threat of sexual assault.

2.) I started In the Belly of the Bloodhound, which I had to buy since it's one of the books in the series that none of the libraries in my area (NONE) have for some reason, and so far it's been seven bucks well spent; this just might end up being my favorite (next to the original Bloody Jack, obviously). This time around in breezily traumatizing plot points, Jacky and a bunch of other students from the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls in Boston are kidnapped by slavers to be sold to harems on the Barbary Coast. I have a huge weakness for we-all-need-to-band-together-in-order-to-get-through-this storylines, and this one is shaping up to be a good one. 

3.) I've been tossing around the idea of writing about War and Peace for my senior capstone--aka the final huge paper you have to write as an English major--so I checked out a book called Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex, and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth Century Russian Fiction from my college library. Sadly, I haven't got a chance to read the Leo Tolstoy section yet, but with a title like that it's got to be at least interesting, and hopefully helpful.

4.) I wrote a fic for jump_scare_exchange ! And received an awesome fic in return! Both my fic and my gift are for Black Sails--I requested a couple different characters and pairings and got my favorite tiny rarepair plus ghosts. (And totally in-character dialogue! Seriously, what more could a girl ask for?)

My gift:

hope your road is a long one by thedevilchicken : Abigail has had a good life. Charles Vane might be dead, but he's been there for most of it.

My fic:

A Kingdom of Sand: “This place ain’t right. Never has been.”

Among other great prompts, I got Anne/Jack and haunted/eldritch places, which I tried to do my best by. I did tinker with this fic quite a bit before it gelled in a way that I was even halfway happy with, and I'm still not sure I really nailed what I was going for, but then again I never am. (And while I was grabbing the link for this post I realized I'd completely overlooked a typo in the first few sentences...oops.) Anne was ridiculously fun to write, though, and I'd love to write more of her some day.