Hello everybody! Are there any other vegan/vegetarian readers here? Have a nice day!

Hey y'all! I'm having a bit of decision paralysis, and I'd love your assistance, if you'd be so kind.

Each Summer, I reread a series from my childhood/adolescence to see how they hold up, how I feel about them now, and what things I notice now as an adult. I usually choose something I have fond memories of reading the first time around but haven't read since, though I have also selected books that I've returned to multiple times throughout my life. In the last few years, I've reread the Percy Jackson series, the Jessica Darling series, the Gemma Doyle trilogy, and the entirety of The Princess Diaries among others.

For this year, I've come up with four possible contenders. I'd absolutely love it if you could help me choose which of the four to dedicate this Summer. Also, feel free to shout out any suggestions of series I may have forgot so I can add them to the list for future rereads!

Option 1: The Luxe by Anna Godbersen This is a young adult historical romance series set in Manhattan in 1899. Basically a Gilded Age version of Gossip Girl, it primarily follows the lives of two sisters, Elizabeth and Diana, kicking off with Elizabeth's sudden disappearance and supposed death. It's been a solid 15+ years since I read this and I remember absolutely devouring it.

Option 2: Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery Many of you may be familiar with the story of Anne Shirley and her life with Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert at their home of Green Gables. This is probably my favorite series from childhood -- I deeply identify with Anne and adore her story in a way that is beyond words. I've reread this a few times, but it's probably been about 10 years since I last read the series.

Option 3: Fearless by Francine Pascal This series follows Gaia, a 17-year-old girl who cannot feel fear. On top of that, her mother was murdered, and her father is a CIA agent who has gone into hiding. Now Gaia is living in NYC fending off the terrorists who are targeting her. I remember discovering this book at the Marshall Public Library when I was ten and losing my mind over it, but I haven’t read it since.

Option 4: House of Night by P.C. and Kristin Cast Zoey Redbird is 16 years old when she’s marked as a vampyre fledgling and is admitted to a special boarding school, the House of Night, so she can learn about and survive her transformation into a vampyre. This series came out around my junior year of high school and I spent the next several years keeping up with the story, but I never finished it (I think I had two or three books left).

Thanks again all!!

tired of this girl calling everyone the "angry women" when her inner monologue is literally one of the angriest I've ever witnessed😭

Okay, so I made a post yesterday about my favourite love stories from my culture and asked you guys about yours. The response was so positive — I learned so much, and you can check that post out here. Our stories deserve to be celebrated.

But you will not believe this coincidence. I regularly check YouTube for book drama because, you know, girl's gotta get her tea. And guys. Guys. I am crying because this is ridiculous. A Brazilian author named Carolina Silva wrote a monster romance with Shiva as the MMC, as in, HE is the "monster". A smutty monster romance. Y'all, I genuinely do not know if I should be pissed or if I should find this funny, because she's an indie author, so there was clearly no oversight here. She is not even from India. And this is not a retelling. This is not even a romance story in any meaningful sense. It is a smutty monster romance.

I don't want to be the one to censor anyone, but where do you draw the line? Where do you draw the line? Because you are using one of our gods as an MMC in this. If you were writing a retelling, something like Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Menon where it's actually a retelling with love and beauty and sensitivity, I would fully support that regardless of where you're from. But this? Look, I am an atheist. But I have always loved the stories from my culture. They are full of philosophy, desire, devotion, and a really fascinating play on gender and sexuality. I talked about this in my last two posts, and I have learned so much from you guys about your cultures too. So this is not about gatekeeping mythology. This is about the fact that the author didn't even get the source material right. Shiva had two wives his entire life, Sati and then Parvati, who was the reincarnation of Sati. He was devoted to both of them. BRO WAS LOCKED IN OKAY. And this book makes his love interest someone other than Parvati and treats an active, living tradition as just set dressing for monster smut.

I genuinely do not know whether to be angry or just baffled. Maybe both. But I do want to know your thoughts: where do you think authors should draw the line?

Y'all I'm trying to be nice here I swear. But this is pissing me off. Like I get it. Smut is not a bad thing and I'm really not trying to play into purity culture. I'm from a country that literally produced Kamasutra but even that was way more about just JUST sex and dug deep into the philosophy surrounding the art of love making, being attractive for your partner, grooming yourself, kissing, foreplay, BDSM and sex.

But THIS is just violence against the philosophies my culture is set in where desire and devotion and sex are looked at in a very particular way which isn't different from meditating. Yes. Kama or desire and sex is a way to attain liberation or nirvana in some parts of my culture. So to write smut with a GOD from an ACTIVE tradition who's LOCKED IN?? HE ISN'T ZEUS OR HADES. GIVE ME A BREAK.

Edit: she threatened her critique with lawsuits. I'm crying.

Edit: ya'all she's a white brazilian. And of course she is 😭😭😭😭 and she wrote shiva as a "blue god". HE IS NOT BLUE Y'ALL. He is either a pale ass schmuck with a blue throat or incredibly dark with a blue throat. But he's not fully blue I can't- He's just REPRESENTED as blue to represent the vastness of the sky.

Edit: it gets worse. The fmc becomes involved with Shiva because she reads an inscription on Taj Mahal without knowing she's offering her soul to Shiva. Yes. Taj Mahal. A famously MUSLIM TOMB built by Shah Jahan for his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal.

I'm here with more info dump and more questions about your culture. Because I believe PageBound is where we can also pass down stories and I think that's beautiful. So I would like to know your most favourite, most insane love stories from your culture, please. Eg: Romeo and Juliet. Like, people always bring up stories like Eros and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice (my favourite) when talking about mythology and romance, but I genuinely think there are so many more of such stories in different cultures.

Because in my culture we have the story of Sati and Shiva, and I think it’s genuinely tragic that the practice of self-immolation got named after a goddess who didn’t kill herself to give her husband a “good life” or whatever patriarchal reinterpretation people later made of it. She killed herself out of rage. Out of fury at her father for disrespecting both her and the man she loved. Which is such a different emotional framework. It’s less “devoted wife sacrifices herself for husband after his death” and more: fuck you, my death is in your hands kind of thing. And honestly, that same energy exists in the Ramayana too.

Quick rundown: Rama is exiled, his wife Sita is kidnapped by Ravana, and Rama wages this enormous war to bring her back. But after they return to the kingdom, people start gossiping about Sita because she spent time in another man’s palace. So Rama exiles her while she’s pregnant because he has to “do his duty as king." (BUT NOT BEFORE LITERALLY PUTTING HER THROUGH A TRIAL BY FIRE TO PROVE HER INNOCENCE THE AUDACITY OF THIS MAN Y'ALL) And later, after she raises their sons away from him and he finds her and begs her to bring his sons back to him along with herself, he asks her to prove her purity again. A trial by fire. Again. And this time she refuses. Tells her sons to be good boys and she basically says, if I have been truthful and faithful, let the earth itself take me back.

And the earth literally opens up and consumes her. Y'all she's so badass. She's like hahaha we're never ever getting back together.

And Rama is just left there with their sons And I think there’s something so powerful about that ending. It’s Sita essentially saying: you don’t get me anymore.

But the story that always destroys me is Sati and Shiva. Sati falls in love with Shiva despite everyone thinking he’s strange — this ash-covered hermit sitting in cremation grounds, wearing snakes, smoking weed, completely detached from society. In one version of the story, during her swayamvar (think the bachelorette), where she chooses her own husband by putting a garland around a candidate's neck, she throws her garland up in the air and it lands around Shiva’s neck. In another, she meditates and worships him for so long that he finally agrees to marry her. But her father, Daksha, despises Shiva. He thinks he’s beneath her. So one day Daksha hosts this huge ritual and intentionally refuses to invite Shiva and Sati. Shiva tells her not to go because he knows Sati will be humiliated, but Sati insists because, well, it’s her father.

And when she gets there, Daksha humiliates both her and Shiva publicly. So Sati calls upon fire and immolates herself right there. As a final fuck you. And Shiva loses his mind. He becomes so consumed by grief and rage that that he picks up Sati’s burned body and starts dancing the Tandava — the dance of death and destruction and creates these forms of chaos, including Bhadrakali (translates to the dark one who is gentle), who KILLS EVERYONE AND BEHEADS DAKSHA, the irony y'all. And his grief is so immense that it literally threatens cosmic balance. The gods have to intervene because Shiva is basically going to destroy existence itself. So Vishnu uses his chakra (a weapon) to cut Sati’s body into pieces, and the places where those pieces fall become sacred temples across India. Like. I’m sorry. If your love story does not involve cosmic devastation, grief so intense it destabilises the universe, rage powerful enough to birth gods, and dancing with your lover’s charred body until reality itself starts collapsing… is it even love?

Anyway. What’s the most unhinged, devastating, or beautiful love story from your culture’s mythology (doesn't have to be myth can be a literature type of legend too)?

TL;DR - How do you guys feel about authors writing about social issues that do not affect them, but affect oppressed groups they do not belong to?

Personally, I don't think there's an issue with someone writing a character that doesn't reflect perfectly the author's own identity or personal experiences. That's what writing, and especially writing fiction, is. But my hackles will always rise when people write from a position of privilege on something that specifically does not/cannot affect them but affects a minority/oppressed group. When the author doesn't/can't have a personal understanding of this experience but they seek to profit from that experience and that story nonetheless.

The reason I'm thinking about this right now is I have a couple of Nat Cassidy books on my TBR, and I'm gonna be real, I thought this was a female writer. It's quite an ambiguous name and I was not previously familiar with his work. Now I know it's a cis man writing about some really thorny female-specific/woman-specific experiences* (and not just tangentially - from what I understand, these experiences form the heart, the engine of these narratives) from the perspective of female characters... yeah I'm side eyeing this a bit.

To be clear, I'm not saying this is outright wrong or somehow immoral or that stories should never be told unless they're told by someone who has directly experienced them or been impacted by the themes they deal with. I think that's a little silly.

But I do think if we are intending to write marginalised experiences we need to ask, why am I telling this story and why do I think my voice was the necessary one to do so? Why is my perspective the one that should be published? Am I benefitting from systemic harms done to others and leveraging my position of privilege to amplify my own voice rather than theirs?

Specific to my example, I have read good things about Cassidy's work, but I feel like maybe there are more appropriate voices to tell these stories that I should be supporting instead. I don't know. What are your thoughts?

[potential spoiler warning for Cassidy's novels below, but not really because I haven't read them]

*From what I have been told, Cassidy has written novels about menopause, medical gaslighting, motherhood and traumatic labour, and the horrific ways in which female people and female bodies suffer these experiences under patriarchal conditions.

hello!!!! welcome to the werewolf quest!!!!! thank you so much for joining the pack!! we’re all werewolves here!!! awooo!

tldr: drop your suggestions and recommendations here!!! if they fit the quest, I’ll put them on my consideration shelf to vet them further. just a reminder that a spot on my consideration shelf is not a guaranteed spot on the quest! there’s some supplemental reading that can be found on this shelf, once again, thank you so much for being here!!! awooooo!

I wanted to create a space dedicated for people to drop any recommendations and suggestions for the quest (please be respectful), I’ll start off with some light reading suggestions that didn’t quite fit the quest, but are important pieces of werewolf literature. They will be on my The Werewolf Within Supplemental Reading Guide shelf for easy access!!

When researching books to add to the quest, I found a surprising amount of graphic novels about werewolves! I compiled them all into one place and have created a werewolves in graphic novels shelf if people are interested.

Bisclavret by Marie de France, written in French in the 12th century, this is a poem about a baron, a knight who is trapped as a wolf, and his wife who trapped him as a wolf. It is available to read as a pdf online for free, and there is a lot of online discourse surrounding the story if you wanted to dive in.

The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous, written in Ancient Sumeria around 4,000 years ago. It is considered one of the first written instances of a human transforming into a wolf.

The Metamorphosis by Ovid, written about 8 CE, features a myth about King Lycaon of Arcadia, in which King Lycaon tries to feed Zeus human flesh and is turned into a wolf, but still retains his human eyes, as a punishment for his wrongdoing.

There are a few different werewolf-like myths in the Norse Saga of the Volsungs written in the 13th century. One features Princess Signe and her brothers, who all get fed to a wolf, except one; another is about a thieving father-son duo who find wolf pelts and put them on and find they cannot take them off for 10 days and they have to live as wolves until the 10 days are up.

The Topographia HIbernica is a story written by Gerald of Wales in 1188 and it is about an encounter between a priest and a werewolf where the wolf asks the priest for last rites and communion for his dying wife (who turns out to also be a wolf).

and finally, The Werewolf in the Ancient World by Daniel Ogden, which is a collection of ancient werewolf myths.

okay whew I know that was a lot and if you’ve read this far, THANK YOU!!!!