“Are you making the same thing I am?” the woman asked me at Fabricland six-feet away. I was still getting used to the distance, to projecting; to reminding myself that I wasn’t being rude talking to someone from a distance.
“No, I want to make some scrunchies.” I told the woman while holding two packs of elastics. I was also buying some items for my t-shirt quilt, my big sewing project for 2020. The closing of non-essential businesses had just started and I had luckily gotten to Fabricland the day before they closed. Continue reading
Before this, I’d never listened to an audiobook before. I’m very old school with my reading and don’t hate on others who use e-readers or audiobooks to read, literature has become much more accessible and available to people and I’m all for it. But since all the libraries have been temporarily closed down and part of my job while working from home gave the option of e-reading/listening to an audiobook and reviewing said book, I thought this was a good time as any to dive into the world of electronic reading. Continue reading
I go grocery shopping once a week now, not that I did it that often before but now, as the only not at risk person in my house, I do these errands. It isn’t a toll or anything, it just requires some more planning on shopping per week, knowing what to pick up and when, how much we’ll need before the next week. More thought is put into the grocery list now than it used to be. Continue reading
“‘How did this happen to me?’ Then I realize something, a truth lodged inside me, not the telling. ‘My parents would never have agreed to this.’
‘You were an organ donor right? I remember reading that the first to upload were organ donors. That would make sense. You’re nearly first-gen. Maybe your parents didn’t even know.'” (Flynn 16).
I’m going to be really honest right now and say the only reason I read this book so quickly over all the other books I got from the library before it temporarily closed was that the summary said it was about a quarantine and I thought “hey that’s fitting and oddly appropriate.” I don’t even remember putting this book on hold but it made me wonder about when I did put it on hold because it was definitely before COVID-19 became something I had to worry about where I live. I wonder what I thought about the book before all of this, was it the quarantine that intrigued me then or the androids that made me put this book on hold? Whatever it was, this book was disappointing as a quarantine read and about androids. Continue reading
“If you ever have chance to bear witness to a dying world, don’t,” (Albert 115).
It’s been two years since I read Melissa Albert’s debut The Hazel Wood and for the most part I enjoyed it. I’m a sucker for fairy tales, the darker the better and Albert was able to keep the tropes and darkness of fairy tales while also turning them into something completely new. Something with blood and teeth, something that sticks inside your brain, that beckons you forward into the dark. I’m also a sucker for books where characters travel into the fictional stories they’re reading, and it was one of my main criticisms for the book. So when I heard about The Night Country I was hesitant to read it because of that disappointment. But with more and more reviews coming out praising The Night Country I knew I had to read it for myself. Continue reading
Many months ago (okay, it was January, but it seems like longer than that right?) I joked that last weekend was going to be the “weekend of Sarah.” I rarely put attention on myself, but last weekend was supposed to be the HamilTEN Festival when The End of July was supposed to premiere as well as a small kick-off for the GritLit Festival where I was going to read an excerpt of my story What Happened to Natalie? in front of people. Hence the weekend nickname, which I was very excited for. Both events were happening at the same venue which I thought was an amazing coincidence and I was excited to have such a busy artistic weekend. Continue reading
“‘I love you, Bunny.’ I quietly prayed for the hug implosion all year last year. That their ardent squeezing might cause the flesh to ooze from the sleeves, neckholes, and A-line hems of their cupcake dresses like so much inane frosting…That they would choke on each other’s blandly grassy perfume.”
Bunny has been on my TBR list for a long while and after my last few disappointing reads I’m happy to say that Bunny was worth the wait. Following MFA scholarship student Samantha Heather Mackey, she is an outsider as outsider can be at the elusive Warren University. From her dark stories and darker imagination, she can’t stand the other girls in her fiction course, the Bunnies until one night she is invited into their secretive Smut Salon. Abandoning her only friend Ava for the sweet and sinister world of the Bunnies, Samantha travels down a rabbit hole where fiction and reality blur and Samantha must come to terms with her own creative process and herself as a person. Continue reading
Well a lot has fucking happened in a week huh? I’m still drifting though now it’s more of a numbness edged with anxiety, something that flutters somewhere in my belly like some dying thing that my numbness smothers every so often. Not to death, just to sleep before it awakens again. Continue reading
It’s a weird time right now. Big events and venues are closing and everyone just kind of seems to be drifting, or at least that’s how I’m feeling right now. Like a current is slowly dragging me along, not out to sea or anywhere dangerous, I don’t know exactly where it wants me to go. I guess it’s more like a lazy river, being pulled along and following the path before me, though I don’t know what that path is, none of us do. Continue reading
I was incredibly excited to read The Grief Keeper after learning a big part of the story was an immigrant girl allowing herself to be experimented on by the U.S. Government so that they could gain asylum into the country sounded amazing and not exactly fictional. Of course I have no idea if the U.S. Government experiments on immigrants in exchange for asylum, but it’s one of those horrifying ideas so scary that it sounds like it could be true. The idea of it horrified me and I was intrigued at where the story would go with that plot but was unfortunately left disappointed. Continue reading
Sarah O'Connor 