Author: katedp

Why add a romance when it’s not needed?

After I finished At the Water’s Edge, I found myself wondering what makes a book a romance novel? Because this book has a lot of the trappings of one, including:

  • a heroine seeing the world for the first time,
  • a neglectful (at best) husband,
  • a sexual awakening,
  • someone who turns out to be secret royalty (reader, I rolled my eyes).

But I wouldn’t call it a romance. Why? Because it’s not about the romance – it’s about the heroine, her crappy childhood, where it got her, and then her adventures (for lack of a better word) making her realize that people have just been using her her entire life. The romance feels tacked on at the end, as though her editor or publisher insisted that there be a romance to draw people in. It would have maybe been a better book for not squishing it in.

I found her journey from neglected wife along for the party to an actual friend with caring relationships compelling. A romance with an underdeveloped character didn’t need to be tacked on.

Friday shorts

Not Red Velvet Cupcakes

It’s October and maybe kind of starting to get cooler. All I want to do is nest – to organize things, to cook and clean, and get my life in order.

Baked goods are an essential part of nesting. I had all of the ingredients for red velvet cupcakes except the red dye on hand, so I made them without the dye. They still tasted delicious.

Red Velvet Cupcakes (from ATK’s How Can It Be Gluten Free Cookbook)

6oz gluten-free flour
0.75oz unsweetened cocoa powder
1t baking powder
0.5t salt
0.25t xanthan gum
0.125t baking soda
8.75oz sugar
0.667c sour cream
6T vegetable oil
2 large eggs
1T red food coloring
1.5T vanilla extract

  1. Preheat oven to 350, line muffin tin with paper liners.
  2. Mix dry ingredients together (note: sugar is a wet ingredient. I don’t really understand why, but it is.)
  3. Mix wet ingredients together (aka, all the rest of the ingredients). Mix wet & dry ingredients together until smooth and well-combined.
  4. Evenly distribute batter evenly into prepared muffin tin. Bake for 20-ish minutes, until toothpick comes out clean.

You should let them thoroughly cool before you put frosting on them and eat them. But I never bother with frosting. They’re good plain. Plus, then you can eat them hot.

Different families get different kinds of stories

Different kinds of families get different kinds of stories in books. A family drama about a white family is probably upper-middle class, there’s probably someone who’s traveled overseas, and there’s probably lots of “finding yourself” type rhetoric. And there’s something to be said for that. Figuring out who you are and what you like is important.

But this is not that kind of book. This is a family drama about an African-American family. There are three generations and they are all poor. All the adult men in the story have been to prison. Racism weighs heavily on them. The father in the story is white; his father killed the man who would have been his brother-in-law. He has only met his children a handful of times; his parents haven’t met their half-black grandchildren. He is the one the mother and children travel to pick up from prison when his sentence is complete.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a heavy book. You can feel the weight of the generations of racism on everyone. The 13-year-old boy is definitely figuring out who he is, but it’s not in a fun lets-go-see-the-world kind of a way. That kind of privilege is absent here. Instead, it’s about learning to take care of your people and understanding who your people are.

Recommended, but schedule a party or something afterwards.

Responsibility and relationships

I picked this up because I thought it would be fun and gossipy about a family, both today and two generations ago. Alas. It wasn’t.

It’s not that The Necklace was terrible, per se. It just wasn’t for me.

It’s about a love and what it means to go find yourself and how your relationships may or may not make it through such a journey of self-discovery. And is it selfish to take time for yourself, to figure out who you are and what you want? I mean, now it’s not, what with our extended adolescences. But it definitely used to be kind of a problem. What if you didn’t want to get married at 18? There’s a dude in this book who travels around the world to find himself, but expects his lady friend to wait at home for him. (To be fair, he does offer to marry her and bring her with, and she’s the one who demurs.)

This one is going to end up in one of the local free little libraries.

Go forth and be a part of the world

I loved At the Existentialist Cafe. Perhaps it’s a Paris thing, perhaps it’s a cocktail thing, who knows. Who cares? It’s a pop history of Existentialism, along with the author’s reactions when she went back and re-read many of the seminal works on existentialism.

I’ve never read any Sartre or de Beauvoir (but I have read some Camus), and here’s what I learned.

Existentialism isn’t the depressing, disaffected Camus of The Stranger. It’s not black turtlenecks and sitting in cafés staring at your coffee, contemplating the meaning of life. The meaning of life is existing and getting out into the world, thinking about your experiences and your relationships with the people around you. You are nothing without the people around you and how you relate to them. Don’t sit back and expect things to happen! Make them happen! Be a part of the world.

I loved that message. I love it even more for not having to read Being and Nothingness and still learn something about it.

This version of existentialism is also totally applicable to the world we live in now: what are your circumstances? What can you do in those circumstances? What do you feel? How does it make you feel? What can you effect? Changing yourself changes your relation to the world, changing your relations to the world changes the world.

Anyway, go forth and be a part of things. You’ll make a difference.

Getting butt-in-seat time

Fangirl is a fun YA book about a young woman (she’s 18) who’s dealing with some things. She’s retreated into writing fanfiction, which is not a thing everyone is happy about.

But Fangirl is nothing if not a love letter to fanfiction and the people who write it. They’re finding their voices, they’re learning how to write, they’re getting butt-in-seat time of getting it done. You don’t become a better writer without, you know, WRITING. If fanfiction is your vehicle for that, great!

And, to my mind, if you’re willing to put what you write out there? That takes guts. The internet is not always a nice place – if you’re confident enough to put yourself out there like that, more power to you. (But maybe that’s how you get feedback too – how do you know if you’re any good without some way of finding out?)

Anyway, Fangirl is fun and I have a lot more respect for fanfiction authors and sites now.

Parenthood on Different Planets

Shortly after finishing The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, I decided to see if Becky Chambers had any other books – A Closed and Common Orbit is the sequel (and there’s a third! coming out sometime next year! I’m excited!).

A Closed and Common Orbit has strong themes around parenthood, specifically motherhood, and about what it means to be human. There are two parallel storylines. First, in the past Pepper is one of many human girls who clean up trash for reuse and recycling, at least until she escapes; how she makes it off the world she lives on, who takes care of her, all of that. Second, in the present day, Pepper is doing something highly illegal: taking an AI who’s meant to be running a ship and put it into a human (robot) body. Her name is Sidra; how Sidra perceives the world and interacts with it and adjusts, that’s this story.

The chapters interweave, letting you see how both are forming who they are and how they react to their very different worlds. This is different form than the essentially short-story collection of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and it works.

This is a universe I love, and you so rarely get good science fiction that focuses on women. It’s all the more precious for that.

Recommended.

Friday Shorts

It’s the end of the week and all I care about is getting to sleep in tomorrow.