I'm beginning to think... That there might be a little bit of social commentary about the state of the world post-Covid in this novel.

Just kidding, I've been thinking that since chapter 4 at least.

Also, I'm loving (and hating!) the shift in Agent Layne from being kind of a goofy himbo to being an asshole representative of government overreach. Really curious about any reveals regarding his character.

It's really fascinating to posit that "active hope" doesn't require optimism, and you can (and should) be actively hopeful in scenarios that make you feel hopeless. That seemed really counterintuitive to me, but I'm understanding that what they're suggesting here is that you can keep a practice of hope that doesn't rely on waiting to feel hopeful, only on having the intention to express hope. That it's less a passive experience of hope and more an active commitment to it. And because of that, because it doesn't require positivity but really just a faith in what is within your own agency, you can practice hope while also practicing grief, and they do not have to be mutually exclusive. I think that framing is really interesting.

Wow this Haudenosaunee principle of thinking not of yourself, not of your family, but of a generation 7 ahead genuinely stopped me in my tracks. That's what, almost 200 years? When I hear most people talk about the future and their hopes and dreams they talk about their intentions for their older self, or they talk about leaving the world a better place for their children, or maybe they talk about a very abstract future they don't really imagine in any concrete terms. I think the specificity of seven generations kind of forces a reframe, to more directly envision a future where you existed and made choices and have been long buried, and you may not even be remembered but your decisions will still have a ripple effect. How do you do right by THOSE people, now? What will you work to leave behind?

this book is already absolutely blowing my mind. i had no idea the racial implications of the genrefication of magical realism and how it's been historically used to marginalize Latine authors. Latine authors were pushed to "magical realism" as a genre as part of a campaign by the CIA to uphold liberal values and distract audiences from anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist sentiment. James Baldwin what are you doing here???

In short, both genres look to history, but from opposite positions. Fantasy discovers the New World, whereas magical realism is the world invaded by violence. If fantasy is a literature of world-building, then magical realism is the literature that results from world-breaking. [...] Magical realism is not a neutral literary genre but a marginal one. It is racialized, connected to colonial ideas of primitive mysticism and magical people of color with an Indigenous connection to the supernatural. It is an exoticized, backward world, the global south of stories. And if magical realism is the global south of stories, then what is the global north? Fantasy.