Cupid Bow Mouth

Hola, fandom!! I haven't written anything and completed it in ages and ages. So! I'm just going to drop this here and be on my way. Hope you're well! Love, me!!!


Title: you and me, you and me against the world

Author: seraphcelene

Email: seraphcelene at gmail dot com

A/N: I've seen the Netflix movie and that is all. This has absolutely no ties to the book at all. I was looking for a reason for Noah's anger management issues and wound up defeated by the fact that his parent's don't have names. Make of that what you will. Title from Blackout by Tritonal feat Steph Jones.

Rating: G

Summary: “Elle is that girl. Pretty and smart, scared and brave. Not his sister, but still family. The girl who had held his hand and sat with him in the grass.” There has to be more to the story, right? Elle and Flynn over the years, and not even they see it coming.



10.

Flynn takes a tiny, stunted breath, and inhales strawberry and cut grass, baby powder and sweat. At the edge of his vision, in the corner of his eye, a shadow stretches alongside his on the ground. A thin stripe of pig-tailed girl standing well below his shoulders. Elle, small for her age despite the lie that her shadow tells. Somewhere else in the house, Lee isn't much bigger.

Read it at AO3

Ronan and Adam. I am living and breathing for these two. I haven't shipped anyone this hard since Buffy and Angel. With Opal, Stiefvater gives us an alternately sweet and bittersweet glimpse into the life these two are winding around themselves. It's a summer in-between story presented from Opal's (nee Orphan Girl) oblique perspective on The Barns and its inhabitants. Ronan and Adam are hazed by diffused light and we get to see them folding themselves around each other in nook and cranny moments almost jealously given up by Stiefvater. Opal is full of the things that she does best: foreshadows that I suspect will stretch long into the upcoming Dreamer Trilogy, small, living moments used to reveal character (thus making me fall even deeper in love with Ronan and Adam). Opal, herself, is a great character and I loved how alien she is. She doesn't fit into the world that she now finds herself in, but at the same time she is OF IT. She's an odd, quirky corner of the Pynch universe and although I know fandom seems to like to make her a daughter of sorts (and I get that cause Ronan is totally kind of an odd dad of sorts - he SOUNDS like somebody's dad, anyway), but Opal really isn't, either. She is this curious reflection of Ronan and it is heartbreaking to realize that as much as Opal loves Adam is how much RONAN loves Adam. That realization is painful, sad, sharp, and so sweet that I ache with it.

All in all, a great tease for the coming Dreamer trilogy. My appetite is beyond whetted.

To be honest, I don't even know what to say about The Raven Boys. What I have learned over time is that not all books are for all people. Books, like many things, resonate differently for different people. That realization makes me more tolerant of readers who either love books that I hate or who hate books that I love. Hey, you just can't win them all. The Raven Boys may not be for you, but it sure as hell was for me.

There are many books in the world written about many things. Some books are written well, some not so much. Some books you swallow whole, desperate to reach the end of the story while at the same time loath for the magic to end. Other stories you might not finish because there's nothing tethering you to the universe caught between the book covers. Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Boys falls in the former category of each kind of book. The Raven Boys is a gorgeous carrot cake of a novel, dense and meaty and filled with all the good stuff, but also topped with the sweetness of language used very well. It's got a solid foundation in the story and Stiefvater wraps it up in a beautifully unwinding tale of longing and friendship and family. It's savagely wonderful. The characters are incredibly individual and I fell in love with each and every one of them. No one feels like an afterthought (except maybe one and even that was on purpose). This book is sumptuous and wonderful and quirky and everything BREATHES!

It's crazy that I had never heard of this author or this series because now that I've read The Raven Boys, I am hooked well and truly. I wasn't looking for a series, had actually been actively avoiding YA series, when this kept popping up on my Overdrive app (I check out audiobooks from the library for my two hour commute home). I finally caved because there was nothing else that I wanted in particular. It was the best choice I've made since I picked Joe Hill's The Fireman which was so beautifully read by Kate Mulgrew. Actor Will Patton reads The Raven Boys and he is a god! I wonder if I would love the book as much if I had just read the paperback. I don't know. Good thing that I don't have to find out! (I suspect that I would love it just as much.) When I'm done with the entire series, I have every intention of buying these, but until I get through the last it's me and Will trapped in the car. He is amazing and should be winning all kinds of awards. Surely there are awards for voice actors who read books. OMG!!!

Anyway, The Raven Boys is highly recommended. The story unfolds rapidly and no space in the story is wasted. Steifvater gives us a story full of complex, nuanced, fallible characters and it is a beautiful thing to behold. Because these people are damaged and they get things wrong, but they are friends anyway. I like stories like that. I also LOVE that this is not so much a YA love story as it is a story about a group of people who are all in love with each other in one way or another. Steifvater does what many YA don't manage, she gives them all equal time and pays homage to the different KINDS of love that exist in the world. From Blue and her haphazard and unconventional family, the (essentially) three Shakespearean witches, and the boys, these characters are knitted into each other's lives and sewn into each other's skins. There's familial love and motherly love, sisterly love, brotherly love, and romantic love. Everything gets tangled up together and examined from many angles. It takes a gentle pass at classism and poverty, does quite a lot more with issues of self-esteem, self-perception, the nature of families, and abuse.

I love that Blue is a girl who wants to be special, knows that she is not really, and is mostly okay with it. Her falling in with the titular Raven Boys has less to do with her needing them to feel better about herself (a terrible trope in many YA fantasies) and more about her curiosity and desire to have an adventure. She recognizes in them something outside of her comfort zone and she tackles that. Embroiling herself in this THING because, well, why not. She is whole-heartedly complicit in all the shenanigans and I really LOVE that.

I don't know how many ways I can say that I loved this book. There are flaws, I'm sure. Nothing is truly perfect. But to be honest, what didn't work is, for me, severely overshadowed by all that does. Including, Ronan Lynch and his knife edged smile. Ronan, who is very possibly the thing that I love best about this book besides Steifvater's glorious and deft use of language. He is such a character. An exposed nerve, a beating heart, a train wreck of a boy careening wildly and enthusiastically towards catastrophe. I ADORE him. But then so do I love all of the Raven boys, and Blue, and the ladies of 300 Fox Way. This book is so much magic. SO So So much magic!

I was, as usual, not prepared for how creepy this book got. David Morse was divine reading it and I LOVED how he nuanced the telling.

Revival is a gorgeous slow burn of a novel, building over decades to this horrific ending that sets up the potential for a sequel. I loved seeing the evolution of the characters over the years, how Jamie goes from being a sweet-faced boy to a 50-something man, all of the bad choices and tragedies of his life thrown in between. I also liked watching the unraveling of Pastor Charlie and how he lost himself as sure as Jamie found himself. It's an interesting study in contrasts and one that King does well. He is a master at throwing his characters in the mud and making you want to follow them down the rabbit hole of their nightmares.

The writing and the imagery of the Null was vivid and horrifying. I was creeped out every time I got out of the car and once I finished the ending, I slept the night with the lights and the TV on.

Now, the end of the story is kind of a gimme. King lays out the ending and goes heavy handed with the Frankenstein mythology in a fast paced ending that doesn't quite do justice to the slow build that the rest of the novel is treated to. Which might be why I'm hankering for a sequel. There feels like a lot more to tell in this story and the resolution is anything but. Definitely worth reading. Infinitely worth listening to the great David Morse narrate.

I liked A Wrinkle in Time as a child. I don't remember that I loved it, but I do remember reading it and liking it. Unfortunately, I didn't remember exactly what it was about when I set out to re-read it ahead of the movie release. It's a short book, 232 pages, but it took me a couple of weeks because I kept putting it down. Unfortunately, this classic of childen's literature didn't stand up against my childhood memories.

There were things about the story that I really liked:
- Meg's complete and utter ordinary uniqueness. She is just herself and she has no super powers. In fact, her complete commitment to being herself and no one else IS her version of a SUPER POWER and I think that's pretty awesome.

- Meg's fear and how she has to work very hard in order to overcome it. I also loved how she never really gets over her fear, just shoves it down enough to do what needed doing. In fact, I love how everything was just difficult for Meg, but how she gets on with things anyway!

- Charles Wallace cause he's just pretty awesome overall. I also liked that Charles Wallace was the one even with all of his special skills and abilities who has to be saved.

- The kids with the balls in Camazotz. Super creepy.

Otherwise, A Wrinkle in Time, unfortunately, didn't do it for me. The Black Thing and IT were kind of unambiguous evil, but not in the good way like how the original Michael Myers is pure evil for no good reason. Space and reality hopping evil intending to take over the universe, I don't know, kind of needs more of a raison d'etre. I was left with just a lot of questions and the ending was a little anticlimactic.

So, not my favorite ever, but I'm sure that there are tons of kids who need to read this and who will find it awesome. If for no other reason than that they need to meet Meg who is a hero worth knowing.

Swing Time is a story of identity, stereotype, expectation and self-destruction. Smith sets up two biracial girls raised in similar circumstances by very different parents and then follows them from girlhood and into their 30's. They start off mostly on an even playing field, but over the course of the novel, we realize that the parts that they play in their lives are as self-created as anything else and that, in the end, they turn out to be their own worse enemy.

The unnamed narrator, our primary protagonist, is ever in tension with her purported BFF, Tracy. Even when Tracy isn't around, it's like some kind of weird competition. Tracy is obviously the shadow self, the Id and their connection over the years was an oddity to me. This is a book populated with unlikable characters: from the self-reverentially blind protagonist, damaged Tracy, privileged popstar Amy and the protagonist's ambitious and intellectual mother. Everyone in Swing Time is selfish and that made the book a really hard sell for me.
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I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked up The Book of Phoenix. I had heard about the author, so I decided to give her a try. It was the one thing that the bookstore had and I wanted something new. Turns out it was exactly what I was looking for in the moment that I read it.

Phoenix Okore is, in essence, a genetic experiment that goes so right that it goes completely wrong. The Book of Phoenix is her story, her evolution from complacent lab rat to vengeful and avenging angel. In a world too much like our own, Phoenix ultimately fights to re-assert balance between nature and all men.

The Book of Phoenix is a morality tale and it asks some big questions about the world we live in. The framing story that bookends Phoenix's story even calls that into question. In the end, what is the nature of men and can they ever live in true harmony with the world around, must everything be continually subverted and bent to the needs and intentions of a few? Perhaps, that is the point of Phoenix Okore and the story as a whole, continual rebirth is the destiny of mankind because what happens always happens, it never doesn't happen. No matter how many times we try to change, ultimately the greed and smallness of mankind prevent them from understanding and embracing a perspective that exists outside of a dichotomy of mine vs yours.

The opening of Phoenix's story was a bit choppy in the execution, but smoothed out beautifully as it went along and the author found her feet. Much of what happens in the story felt very convenient and there was less conflict than I would have imagined given the story's premise.

Brave, how I love thee, let me count the ways.

Too often, Disney films featuring female leads (generally a princess of some kind and in one way or another) revolve around reductive agency. Even with heroines coded as independent and with subplots that suggest a higher or greater purpose (i.e. Belle's pursuit of knowledge in Beauty and the Beast, Ariel's thirst for freedom and adventure in The Little Mermaid, or Pocahontas's desire to save her people) the story always winds up as a treatise on how Our Heroine gets a man in the end. Happily Ever After as it has been codified for women in Disney films means marriage, of course.

Culturally, American society likes to privilege romantic love over every other kind of love and nowhere do they showcase that preference better than in films. So, the first time that I saw Disney's Brave I was utterly thrilled and completely charmed. I fell in love with the essential relationship at the heart of the story, Merida and her mother, Eleanor. Like many Disney princess films, Brave is a love story. However, unlike the typical Disney princess films, it is not about romantic love, rather it is about familial love. A few years later, Frozen would do something similar and come under fire for it in the process, but let's not forget that Brave did it first.

In Brave we are shown the importance and intensity of familial love. Personally, I think that it's even more important that it's Mother/Daughter love. Too often that relationship is depicted as fraught an unforgiving. It plays into the stereotype of toxic and competitive women's relationships. An even though the relationship between Merida and Eleanor begins strained, over the course of the film they each learn to understand the other. There is never a question that they love each other, but it is the way that they learn to deal with each other and to LISTEN to each other that, I believe, is most important here. The result of that relationship rekindling is never demonstrated more beautifully that at the end of movie when Bear!Eleanor breaks free of her bonds and takes on Mor'du as he towers over Merida, roaring in preparation of the kill. It is telling, I think, and deeply appropriate that neither Merida's father nor any of the men of the clans are able to save Merida. It is Eleanor's job to do and the opening up of Merida's relationship with her mother has lead them there. Their conflict becomes overwhelmed by the action in that moment and the battle is beautifully representative of what has always been true, even when Eleanor and Merida could not see it for themselves: Eleanor's love for her daughter (and Merida's for her mother in the moment when she defends Bear!Eleanor from her father).

I love the battle between Eleanor and Mor'du because I am a sucker for Mother/Daughter relationships. And Eleanor, willing to sacrifice herself to save her daughter, is the epitome of the ultimate mother sacrifice. Merida's realization that perhaps she realized her mother's value much too late is equally impactful. But of course, this is a Disney film. But here happily ever after doesn't end with a man and a wedding gown, rather it ends with Merida and her mother having learned to understand and appreciate each other. Their love for each other is point and it is recognized and celebrated as the ultimate prize.

Title: Fundamental Things

Fandom: Castle

A/N: Found on my hard drive. Not sure why I never posted it. Thru Castle 3.24 – Knockout.

Disclaimer: Castle belongs to people who are not me including Andrew W. Marlowe and Disney-ABC.

Summary: Castle stands to your right and the shot, when it comes, is a very loud crack splitting the afternoon's quiet. You look up because it is so out of place, so unexpected, but you will not remember this and you will not remember falling.

You won't remember this.

Not the noon time sun directly overhead or the over saturated blue of the sky and and how the daylight is so clear and almost too bright in that blinding way that's equal parts shock, grief, and bleached out California sunshine. Later, after, when you try to snap all the pieces of your memory together, what little you do recall won't make sense because how can the day be both so very vivid and so monochromatic all at once.

Maybe you will remember the coffin, the flag draped and tucked across the polished mahogany curve of the lid. Perhaps, you will remember the drums and the bag pipes. But then again, maybe you won't. It will feel distant and out of focus like a ghost memory that could belong to a myriad of other days. Any number of funerals that you've sweated through in your dress blues where all you really recall is the lonely, solemn sound of Taps and the pristine whiteness of your gloves.

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So here begins 2018 and my the launch of one of my goals which is to get back into posting. This is kind of a cheat. What's easier than recapping the previous year, eh?

1. What did you do in 2017 that you'd never done before?

This year was chock full of New Things! I turned 40 (for the first and last time ever)! Part of that new thing of being 40 was to celebrate my birthday every single month and to try and do new things. So, what did I do new this year? I went indoor skydiving, unlocked a castle, held a baby alligator, did a paint and sip class in which I painted a pretty beach sunset, attended a Fried Chicken Festival, managed not to spit on anything at a plantation in Louisiana, escaped from the po-po during a bank heist in an Escape Room (maybe I'm being a tad it dramatic there), made falafels from scratch, successfully dry brined a turkey, got a glitter tattoo and a flash tattoo (still not the real thing, I know), went to Lake Tahoe, drove down Christmas Tree Lane, sat in a steam room (LOVED IT), rode a gondola up a mountain, attended a Fried Chicken Festival, and destroyed the Death Star.

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Oh, and 2018 is looking pretty good cause I have a first already. Sunny Moraine asked to read my fic "kiss me and you will see how important I am" for Keep Singing: a Bethyl Walking Dead podcast and I consented. She has a beautiful voice and is a wonderful narrator. She reads two other chapters from other fic. My piece starts at 1:16:30. I am tickled by the honor.

Keep Singing reading series pt. 9