Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 48

reading: The Headless Cupid

Our internet is being dreadful. I can't *quite* pin the blame for my being a half-hour after Wednesday on that, but it did contribute!

I read many Zilpha Keatley Snyder stories in my youth. The Greensky books were life-changing for me, but I also really loved The Changeling. I never did read The Headless Cupid, however—until now. (Thank you, osprey_archer !)

The pacing is very leisurely. We meet good-hearted David and his three younger siblings, who are all distinct, charming personalities. We lear...

seen this morning

It's a drought here, and there's a water ban. Grass lawns are burned gold except where trees shade them---there they're still green. (I don't have much of a grass lawn: mine is a lot of thyme and clover and hawkweed and sorrel. Where I have grass, it's the same as everyone else's.)

I went for a walk this morning under a drifting gray sky and saw many good things. I didn't have a camera so you'll have to bear with words. I saw the red-winged blackbird royalty, the princes with their scarlet epaule...

crickets and others

Last year around this time I was terribly unhappy to not hear any field crickets. I remember walking around the block and hearing only one, chirping away in a lonesome solo.

One friend on LJ suggested that maybe they come out later--and indeed, later last year I did hear a fuller chorus of them, and I told myself that maybe I'd only imagined hearing them all summer long all my life--but no; I was right to remember hearing them, because this year I hear them in full strength--now, in June. It mak...

The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball

The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball is a wonderful, unique story. Its protagonist, Piper, is eleven, and I think it has the potential to be a beloved favorite of readers of that age, but it's also a very rewarding story to read as an adult.

I've been calling it a time travel story, but really it's a friendship-between-times story, in that the focus isn't really on traveling through time so much as it is having a friend from a different era. Piper's friend from a different era is Rosie, who's from app...

Yesterday's chalk endeavor

Yesterday, rather than do a drawing, I had the idea to do a very simple choose-your-own-adventure story. The location is the paved path across the common space in this housing development.

The start point for the story was right in front of a bench that's right off the path. There were two choices: to the mountains



Or to the sea



(photographing these is hard at the time of day I drew them... major sun-dappling interference!)

( follow the mountain thread )

( follow the sea thread )

I have NO IDEA how t...

"experiencing an unprecedented pandemic"

The ninja girl made a poem by cutting up Trump's stimulus-check letter and rearranging the words and sentences. The result is excellent:



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reading and other escapes

I finished a review of A Sinister Quartet just 45 minutes late of being able to post it on the day the book launched, which was yesterday. The review is on Goodreads ; people reading here have heard my reactions to the first two stories in any case.

Those two--"The Twice-Drowned Saint" (CSE Cooney) and "An Unkindness" (Jessica Wick)--were right up my alley thematically and writing-wise. The remaining two, "Viridian" (Amanda McGee) and "The Comforter" (Mike Allen) were both excellent tales, slightl...

"An Unkindness" and The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball

I've finished the second novella in A Sinister Quartet--Jessica Wick's "An Unkindness." It's fabulous in a completely different way from "The Twice-Drowned Saint," and isn't that what's great about a good anthology? This is a good anthology.

Ravenna is the younger sister of Aliver, the heir to their peninsular kingdom, which has a bloody past and still has things like bride tasks to win a hand in marriage, but also has tourists and lawyers--a sort of early twentieth century, maybe? Aliver has al...

Holyoke protests the death of George Floyd

Having failed on the weekend to get to a protest in Amherst (because I decided to walk a fairy path--or should I say a ferris path--to get there, and that took longer than I bargained on), today I took myself to Holyoke, where I got to be part of an impressively organized, inspiring protest.

These women organized it. I didn't catch their names, but one teaches ethnic studies at Holyoke High School.


( photos )

It finished with a commitment to continue the work; the one white speaker urged white atte...

"When I Write It"

A 14-minute film that follows two Oakland teens, who talk about writing, reading, being Black, growing up in Oakland, etc. I enjoyed spending time with these two and their family and friends and seeing the city, and I think you will too. They're part of the better world we're reaching for. We'll reach it. We'll build it together.



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