Reviews and Comments

...oh.

Yeah.

Good.

I learned a lot of lessons from this series growing up. One I apparently didn't learn was the final lesson of this book.

Sometimes, it's okay to be selfish.

It's beautiful how timely an otherwise-arbitrary reading choice can become.

The wildest thing about re-reading these books is not that I'm only realizing how deeply they changed me the first time and how central they have always been to how I conduct myself; it's that they're changing me again.

Anyway, if you want to understand me, read these books. I'm basically a Targassati wess'har isan.

I've been re-reading this series in large part because I remember being deeply influenced by it as a pre-teen and wanted to see how it held up.

Well, I'd had some realizations to the effect along the way, but this specific books really drove home the extent to which I modeled the kind of woman I wanted and endeavored to be on Shan Frankland.

It's fascinating to see which aspects of myself were shaped by which aspects of her. With my much greater life experience, it's interesting to watch the ways my emotional responses and judgements have evolved, too.

Bad takes on ethics, poor demonstration of proper consent. Do not recommend as a guide on those things. The summary of what kink entails could be useful for the uninitiated.

I read this book (and the entire Wess'har series) back in late middle/early high school, and it had an enormous impact on me. I've never re-read it, so I figured it's time.

I'm about halfway through and it's frankly astonishing how deeply the perspectives of book are reflected in my life, both directly and indirectly.

I'm really curious how I feel about the series's overall theses when I get to them in earnest; I was nowhere near intellectually active the last time I read it.

Read it!

pretty white and institutional but otherwise it's fine ig

Two words: holy fuck.

AAAA!

It's rare that I read poetry, but yesterday I stumbled across Grolier Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I popped in and had a look around, and I picked up and read a bit from this book. It blew me away; I bought it; and this morning I read it cover-to-cover.

Wow.

It manages to capture the ephemeral eternity of love with the knowledge that it will end in a beautiful, consuming, compelling narrative framed as night-time wondering while a lover sleeps.

It's transcendent.

I was pretty frustrated by some early sociopolitical commentary in this book, particularly along racial lines, but that lessened immensely after a couple chapters. It's still dripping with imperial core pretention and high academic elitism. Still, the story has some fun beats, the setting - when it stops being imminently self-congratulatory and Liberal - raises some interesting questions, and the analysis of weaknesses in electoral democracy demonstrates a material experience and theoretical familiarity that would be expected of a storyteller with the author's background. The story really picks up about halfway through; until then it's a bit of a slog. All in all, I wouldn't advise buying the book, but if you have access to it and no compelling reads besides, you could do much worse.

i love oblivious lesbians

thank you autistic butches; thank you autistic fems; thank you sapphics of all kinds