Donald

202Vincent @202vincent.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 07, 2024 at 20:04 UTC

Kaijune day 7 - Gwoemul

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 13:23 UTC

#potd 192: ambivalent chicken approves

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:51 UTC

One of the best novels I've read in a long time. Deserves to be discussed alongside Carmen Maria Machado and C. L. Polk as examples of what genre fiction is capable of and maybe what it can do better than other forms of writing.

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:49 UTC

Should have carved a space out for them instead of demanding the children carve themselves out, render themselves hollow to be a better vessel for whatever vision the world wanted to inflict upon them.

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:47 UTC

The novel is brutal because it hurts, it's describing children suffering and being abused, and there is no transcendence through pain. They are not forged by flame and made stronger. They are robbed of their youths and carry that trauma with them, denied the world that should have supported them

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:44 UTC

If these characters don't step up, no one will, even though the characters absolutely do not want to do this. But they do it. Becasue, damn the cost, you don't leave kids to suffer through this.

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:42 UTC

So when the novel jumps forward to the kids as adults who have to face the monster again, the impetus is the fact that it's queer kids who are being taken, kids that have no one else to turn to, have even been surrendered to their fate by their families.

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:41 UTC

The threat they have to face without the help or support of their parents leaves them forever sundered from those families, and it's not just a localized monster they have to defeat. As I noted above, it's something that suffuses the culture.

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:40 UTC

One thing I found interesting is how much the book is a riff on Stephen King's IT. Many key plot points get echoed, but Felker-Martin has a more realistic view than King, far less naive. The trauma does not make the children here stronger.

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:38 UTC

As one character reflects when despairing of finding help, "they couldn't call home and say they were in trouble because none of them had ever really had one." Later a character thinks about the damage fat camp did to his sense of language, how he'd never be able to hear certain words said sincerely

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:35 UTC

however, and this is just one of they ways the novel is so sharp, defeating the monster does not stop that murderous ideology. Those who survive their encounter with the evil are forever changed by it, forever harmed. One of the most heartbreaking parts of the novel is how the trauma endures.

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:34 UTC

Also at play is the broader culture of abuse and dominance that underlies the ideology that says you own your children and have the right to make them obey. The monster here capitalizes on parents' willingness to have a dead straight kid instead of a live queer one,...

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:33 UTC

And that hatred is what gives the monster permission to do what it does, to take its Body Snatchers' route of replacing the children with versions the parents think they want--versions that are not, in any way, the actual children.

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:31 UTC

A very good and brutal novel, even leaving the supernatural elements out. The brutality lies in the hatred at the hearts of the parents who arrange to have their kids kidnapped, the physical assaults the children suffer at the camp, and the children's ongoing internalized misery and trauma.

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 05:26 UTC

#booksky Book16: Gretchn Felker-Martin's Cuckoo. Children sent to a conversion therapy camp in the middle of the desert begin to suspect there's more going on than the routine torture that goes on at those camps. Some monstrous force is replacing the children with duplicates.

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Donald @donaldjdeeley.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 10, 2024 at 03:22 UTC

30/30/30 or three-thirty: $30/hour for a 30-hour week by 2030 It's time

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