The void is my friend.
This category contains all my book reviews.
As the world fades, I find myself wondering if perhaps purpose is not a single thing one finds, but rather a thing one finds over and over again. I’m only eighteen, but I’ve already had so many purposes. I have been a mortal girl whose purpose was to marry well. I have been a priestess whose purpose was to serve. I have been a monster whose purpose was to avenge. I find that I’m excited to learn what my next purpose will be.
page 312
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​And that is enough.
She could no longer fantasize about being with a woman without simultaneously fantasizing about being her, the two thoughts intrinsically bound up in each other. She longed to dissolve into a diaspora of herself, her molecules, a part of every woman she had seen on the sidewalk or in the store or on a magazine cover, every woman she had longed to understand on some level she felt frustrated in her inability to articulate. She wanted to tell them how lucky they were. She knew they wouldn’t get it.
page 125, Erica
Simran was warm in her arms, her lips soft. Her hair under Vina’s hands was silk. She smelled of smoke and sweat and of herself–of skin, heat, the promise of velvet under Vina’s mouth. Simran gasped against her mouth as their lips parted for a brief heartbeat. They met again like the tide touching the shore.
page 204, Chapter Sixteen: Vina, The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri
The background of the recording was just sections of monster shifting past one another, but in the foreground was the best view yet of a single creature as it reached for the drone. That blind spiral face opening out like a fractal, always with more and smaller arms unfolding from its heart. To a human eye there should have been some commonality there. They were not so infinitely alien, surely. And yet the blindness of them, the weird asymmetry of their bodies, the bizarre intricacies of their construction, like mechanisms, like toys, all spoke of a queasy wrongness.
page 62, 1.5 Light, Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there, trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days.
page 84, Private Rites by Julia Armfield