woah, woah, woah!! what a wonderful debut!? The Brides felt like the perfect sequel to Dracula (I am saying that confidently despite having not yet read Dracula - coming up next with Dracula Daily).

from the very start there is an omnipresent air of foreboding. as if watching a car crash in slow motion, the epistolary narrative drags you towards an already foregone conclusion; dread builds and freezes into horror that chills and races straight into panicky terror.

pacing was excellent and the split timeline served well to add tension and mystery. the characters were well written and i was drawn into their interpersonal relationships effortlessly.

tragic, monstrous, and a new favourite!

I’ve been crocheting my mom a blanket. Somehow everything I needed for a specific pattern coalesced, and I didn’t even have to go to the store for her favorite colors. As happens with most of my projects, I have overestimated how large a throw blanket should be, and I know I have dropped and recovered at least two stitches in the barely twenty rows of two hundred I’ve completed. Every row, I get a little more confident where the last stitch is supposed to go, because I’m not keeping count: I’m listening to audiobooks from the library that remind me of what it felt like to be a little kid. The crowning achievement of my twenties happened on a visit back home, much like the one I will make in a few weeks, when my mother told me that she could see glimpses of that little kid again. The one with a ceaseless joy, and a voracious appetite for wonder that she was afraid had disappeared forever when I stopped being an only child.

The two things I remember liking the most as a kid were dinosaurs and the movie The Iron Giant. Some of my earliest memories are pouring over glossy encyclopedias that I couldn’t read (but pretended that I could) and drawing pictures to write my own sequel to The Iron Giant. I remember being so upset when there wasn’t a sequel like so many of the movies I’d been introduced to by the age of four. I guess that’s when my love for storytelling started. Setting aside that my first brush was with fanfiction and the implications that likely has had on my writing, I still vividly remember the story I’d come up with. The Iron Giant wakes up, and is found by a little girl Hogarth’s age who lived in that world of snow so alien to a Texas-reared child. They walk a very, very long time together across a frozen world, she helps him learn to talk even more, and in the end, she takes him back to his friend and leaves them both behind.

It’s funny to realize only since reading The Left Hand of Darkness—a story about a person who rescues another person before they walk a very, very long time across a frozen world, and in the end the rescued is returned to his friends, and the rescuer leaves him behind—that I’ve realized how attracted I am to stories that involve a trek over a wilderness landscape. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and Call of the Wild by Jack London were top IPs for me in the years following The Iron Giant. I suspect I’ll never escape my love for long, meandering journeys that render a destination valuable, rather than the other way around.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is a memoir-esc meditation on how John Green specifically experiences and thinks about the world. It meanders like the rivers he mentions having always loved, and never truly arrives anywhere but at a sense of hope that maybe there will be somewhere to arrive at all. It, like many of the narratives I’ve loved before it, is a journey that contextualizes the value of that destination. Life is what we make of it, love is what we make with it, and wonder is what I feel further compelled to feel for it all.

I give The Anthropocene Reviewed four and a half stars.