Lara > Recent Status Updates

All right. 1100 pages of the-Nazis-won alternate history. Let's do this.

Honey, first rule of acquiring yourself a fake husband on the trail to California is that you BE HONEST WITH HIM about your reasons for needing a fake husband. Besides, the way you keep salivating over his broad shoulders, you're going to blurt out the truth at an inopportune moment anyway...

Oh honey, you should have run the second you realized Dead Grandma had a Doll Room. Nothing good ever happens in or around a house with a Doll Room.

"Five and a half years...have I not waited long enough to come home?"

This book punched me in the heart on page 7, and shows no signs of letting up. Going to have to bring the tissues with me when I read more at lunch.

Look, I think Evie's heightened sense of smell and the way she makes it work for her is pretty clever, but if one more person smells like "jalepeno rage", I'm going to dissolve into giggles.

And here's the Western trope I despise the most, where the girl is kidnapped by outlaws/Indians/both and gets used mercilessly (if not in detail) by them all. Ugh.

Gonna be a long ride to Montana with this much taciturn, sweaty masculinity going around.

I've waited twenty-four years to maybe find out what happened to my girl June. Here we go. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

My dear girl, he just went down on you in the back room of a tavern until you forgot your own name, why are you so insistent that he can't possibly have any romantic interest in a tall, Amazonianly-curvy, blonde violet-eyed spinster like you?

Because then this book would be very short, that's why.

So if someone had TOLD ME that this book was Chaotic Neutral Lesbian Sorceress Sherlock Holmes in a Lovecraftian Multiverse, I would have read it MUCH SOONER.

The chapters from the perspective of 17-year-old Cate, raised in church and going to church twice a week and encouraged only to date/spend time with boys from church (but never to encourage them, boys are so easily tempted!) are so familiar they hurt to read.

Despite The Forgotten Beasts of Eld being one of my favorite books, I have somehow never read this trilogy. Let's remedy that.

Enjoying it thus far, but man, can't one book set in the rural South/mountains of the South have a sympathetic preacher character? Was every single preacher between 1900 and 1945 a slovenly lech wanting to "purify" the mountain girls? Ew.

Reminds me in places of Francesca Lia Block, although without the cutesy-wootsieness of Weetzie Bat and its sequels. Xochi's California isn't a dream paradise, its magic has teeth.

This book is weird. I am intrigued, don't get me wrong. But weird. Also, ffs Venetia please stop bewailing your advancing age, you're eight years younger than I am and I have never once considered applying snail slime to my skin.

Huh, Alison Weir is taking and running with an...unexpected theory regarding Anna of Kleves.

Also, yeah, if I laid eyes on 48-year-old Henry and his abscessed leg after expecting Young Portrait Henry, and the wedding was in a week, I'd be drinking a lot of wine too.

Me: TINY PRECIOUS BABY.

Roger Middleton: Ma'am, I am a seven-year-old who adores reading to the exclusion of all else and am also the embodiment of an alchemical principle--

Me: TINY PRECIOUS BABY. SMOL DOPPLEGANGER OF MY YOUNG SELF. PROTECT AT ALL COSTS.

I like Margaret and John. I want to slap Margaret's father until his ears ring.

Enjoying it 100%. It's slow reading because the viewpoint character I'm meant to identify with who's awkwardly out-of-place in the Teixcalaan Empire is still as far apart from my perspective as she is from the Empire's (a danger in far-future SF), and so it's two new cultures to learn rather than just one.