Thoughts on Wild and Wicked Things

No, I’m not referring to my life decisions, it’s a book title. Specifically, a book by Francesca May, which was delightfully entertaining. This review was originally published in the February 1, 2022 issue of Booklist.

In Wild and Wicked Things, Francesca May presents a unique setting in England shortly after the Great War, the first war in which magic was openly used as a weapon. Magic has been banned, even down to minor uses of herbs with potential power, punishable by death. On Crow Island, however, residents skirt around the magic ban, and rumors abound regarding some of the island’s residents. Annie arrives on Crow Island somewhat hesitantly, summoned by her absent father’s lawyer to fulfill his final request, with the understanding that inheriting his estate will provide her with the financial freedom she and her mother have never had. She finds herself drawn to both magic and her neighbor Emmeline; both are entangled in her friend Bea’s drama, which began a year ago when Bea moved to the island. Additionally, Annie discovers her father’s research into magic, which leads her to some foolhardy actions. This paranormal queer romance keeps the reader guessing as Annie and Emmeline’s youthful mistakes complicate their lives.

Have you completed a Side Quest today?

What’s a Side Quest, you ask? Well, it’s anything above and beyond your day-to-day necessities. Or maybe week-to-week necessities. Let’s be honest, they’re your Side Quests, so you have control over what goes on the list.

I’ll be honest, it wasn’t my idea. I saw an ad on Facebook for several days about Side Quest cards – a way to randomize chores you might not otherwise get to. Of course, when I went to look for them again all I found were litter box ads, and had no luck finding them through Google. I did, however, find this amusing article about a woman who gamified a chore list for her spouse.

How do I differentiate my Side Quests from my chores? I’ve defined as chores anything I do routinely on a schedule – cooking, changing the litter boxes, washing dishes, even the weekly laundry load. Those are always going to get done, and typically have a deadline of some sort, such as when I’m hungry or before I run out of clean underwear. (Putting laundry away though… that might be a Side Quest.)

Last Saturday, I completed several Side Quests and realized that some Side Quests are single tasks and others are a collection of tasks. Dropping donations off at Goodwill was a single task (creating the donations pile was more like a Quest though, and not entirely my own), but repairing the kitchen bookcase entailed multiple steps: empty bookcase, repair bookcase, wash the placemats and napkins that had been gathering dust on the bookcase, and repopulating the bookcase. (No, not with the cat, please don’t bump the wood while the glue is drying.)

The Side Quest I completed today was a detour when I went grocery shopping, to pick up carrot cupcakes at Smallcakes in celebration of what would have been my Dad’s 95th birthday. I realize they won’t be quite the same as the carrot cakes we used to get him at La Cenicienta, but the commute’s a bit far for that.

Thoughts on The Quicksilver Court

I’ve written about Melissa Caruso’s delightful writing before, both about her Swords & Fire trilogy and The Obsidian Tower, the first book of her Rooks & Ruin series. Last summer, I was fortunate to receive a copy of The Quicksilver Court. Now seems like an opportune time to share it, as the third book, The Ivory Tomb, is due out later this year. (The fact that I went looking for the release date should give you a hint as to how good this series is.) This review was originally published in the October 8, 2021 issue of Booklist Online.

Kicked out of her home by her demon-possessed grandmother, Ryx has teamed up with the Rookery in The Quicksilver Court, the second book of Melissa Caruso’s Rooks and Ruin series. Ryx’s magical ability to destroy everything is contained by a jess, allowing her the freedom to interact with other people for the first time in her life. She and her Rookery allies need to hunt down and contain the demons – other than her grandmother – unleashed in The Obsidian Tower, without knowing their goals or which of the nine demons are loose in the world. They find themselves at the court of Loreice, a place vastly different than Ryx’s Morgrain home, pursuing the Zenith Society and an artifact that could destroy an entire domain by killing every living being in it. Melissa Caruso continues to seamlessly incorporate gender equality, LGBT relationships, and non-binary characters in her unique fantasy setting, exploring familiar coming of age topics as Ryx struggles with human interaction and her personal and literal demons.

Sunflowers!

A large sunflower

Sunflowers make me smile, particularly in my own garden where I can see them every day. When I grow them in the backyard, they face away from the house, so I have to go outside to really enjoy them. When I grow them in the front garden, the sunflowers face the front door in the morning, and then turn towards the street later in the day, making the Spanish translation “girasol” (literally rotate + sun) a rather accurate name.

A resilient sunflower, broken at the base but still flowering

Sunflowers surprise me at times with their resilience. The stem for this particular sunflower was split, though I’m unsure whether it was by the foxes that play in my yard or a windstorm. The roots are still in the ground and the flowers opened despite the damage.

Several small sunflowers

The locations surprise me sometimes too. There are the sunflowers I planted, and then there are the ones the squirrels plant from the bird feeder.

If you aren’t growing your own sunflowers, there may be a farm near you that has a field of them. In our case, Kuipers Family Farm in Maple Park has over 7 acres of just sunflowers that can be visited starting late August.

Own your mistakes

As Billy Joel says in You’re Only Human, “You’re not the only one who’s made mistakes, but they’re the only things that you can truly call your own.”

Everybody makes mistakes. Unfortunately, as a culture, we tend to spend a lot of time looking for someone else to blame instead of just owning our mistakes, learning from them, and moving forward.

Yellow crocheted Duplo brick, folded over and stuffed with catnip

This is the result of a mistake I made last week while crocheting. I’ve been working on a series of “Duplo” bricks – rectangles with bobble stitches in a two by three pattern. I was super excited about it, since yellow was the last color before I started assembling my various pieces. Then I reached for this piece, already tied off, and realized that I had left off a pair of bobble stitches. Whoops! I grabbed the yellow yarn again and made a replacement, which is easy enough when I’m crocheting something small.

But that left me with a crocheted brick that had no purpose, a waste of yarn if you will. It’s too small to take apart and reuse, particularly knowing that I’d be a little short on yarn for assembling a brick.

I initially flung it to the cats to play with, and they weren’t particularly interested in it. Then I realized I could improve on my mistake by folding it over, filling it with catnip, and crocheting it shut. I’ve seen three of the four cats playing with it, so I’d say that solution worked.

Be creative, if it’s an option, and turn your mistakes into something that makes you smile.

Garden Update: Summer 2022

Well, this is a long overdue post about my garden. Not to say I’ve been neglecting the garden, I just forgot to post about it. To begin with, I had a late start at planting this year – I didn’t plant any seeds until we returned from our vacation late April. Then the weather was topsy-turvy, with some excessively warm days (great for germination) followed by cool ones (poor confused plants), including some late spring weeks where I turned on the air-conditioning and the heat in the same week.

The backyard, from a hydrangea to raised beds & a minion rain barrel to the mulberry bush

We’re solidly into summer now, a surprisingly dry one according to my somewhat brown grass. It’s been just wet enough that I’ve gotten by with minimal plant watering (and I never water the lawn). We’re already harvesting peas, strawberries, mulberries, and blackberries, and the volunteer tomatoes have started producing flowers. There may be okra hidden under the peas… I’m honestly not sure if they’ve survived, though we’ll find out soon as the peas die out in the heat. I planted a few more okra seeds in another bed, just in case.

We’re growing sweet potatoes! After resounding success with purple potatoes last year, we decided on a mixed package of sweet potato plants with three different varieties. It’ll be a while before that harvest, but the vines are sprawling nicely.

The sunflower circle

Last, but certainly not least, is our “mammoth” sunflower circle. These plants have the potential to be significantly taller than us (up to twelve feet, if I remember right), so the area is intended as a reading nook. There are two rows of sunflowers wrapping around in a circle, with just enough of an opening for someone to walk in.

Do you ever wonder when you started a habit?

I was flipping through the newspaper the other day…

“Wait,” you say, “an actual newspaper?”

Why yes, that’s a funny story. I looked outside Sunday morning just as the lady who delivers the newspapers on this block backed up to my neighbor’s and tossed his two bundles mostly onto his driveway. I wondered why she was backing up, then realized there were two bundles on my driveway. I suppose she has extras in case of mistakes, because she didn’t bother to pick them back up.

Anyways, I noticed that while I read most sections of the newspaper like a book or magazine, from front to back, I treat the Sunday comics differently. I read the front page, flip them over and read the back, then open it up to read the insides. I have no idea when I started that.

Other habits are easier to pinpoint. I started carrying a spare pair of reading glasses in my purse – previously reserved for computer use – the time we ate lunch at a dimly lit TGI Friday’s and struggled with the menu. I started enjoying gardening (as opposed to just seeing it as a chore) when I was introduced to vegetable gardening; before that was just weeding and tree trimming. The inevitable gardening planning (a necessity for a project manager’s large garden) followed as the vegetable garden expanded, and is now scheduled for late winter/early spring every year. And as a habit, I sometimes just stand at the window and smile at my garden. (Really, I should go outside and pick some snow peas.)

If you take a moment for introspection, whether you recall how it started, what habit makes smile?

Thoughts on The Raven Spell

I just realized that the sequel to The Raven Spell is coming out soon, which seems like a good time to share this review of the first book in the Conspiracy of Magic series. This review was originally published in the February 15, 2022 issue of Booklist.

Luanne Smith kicks off a new magical series with The Raven Spell, set in Victorian London where a pair of sisters, Edwina and Mary, run a trinket shop. Living in a large city makes it easier to hide their magic from mortals and avoid the attention of the Witch’s Constabulary, which enforces laws relating to magic. Mary’s ability to capture a person’s memories at the moment of their death, transforming the memories into a small stone, is the catalyst for this story when the sisters find a private detective, Ian Cameron, dying on the shore. When Ian survives, Edwina accidentally restores the wrong stone – with somebody else’s memories – into his mind, then embarks on a mission to help Ian retrace his lost time without magic. As Edwina grows closer to Ian, she becomes aware of the growing distance between herself and Mary and the mystery of Mary’s nighttime activities. Smith wraps up the plot neatly while leaving a clear hook to entice delighted readers back for the next book. 

Who will you march for?

There was another shooting today (9-Jun-2022), this time in Maryland. Early reports say that 3 people were killed. We have enough “mass shootings” (loosely defined as at least 3 victims) in this country that there’s a Wikipedia page specifically for mass shootings in the United States (here), and it includes a link to a “more comprehensive list” of the 2022 shootings (here).

March For Our Lives, a group organized by survivors of the 2018 Parkland, Florida shooting, is organizing marches around the country on Saturday, June 11th, calling for reasonable gun safety laws.

Will you march in the hopes of saving someone’s life?

The Paramount Theatre presents Hand to God

I’m not sure I can do justice to the Paramount Theatre’s latest production, Hand to God. It is everything live theatre is supposed to be: intense, insightful, and, in its own way, educational.

It is also, according to the Paramount’s own ad on Facebook, offensive. Their website and the ticket reminder both state that its rating is “Suggested for ages 18+ for strong adult language, sexual harassment, simulated sex, simulated statutory rape and violence.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, people were offended. Some were even offended enough to leave at intermission (and then respond to the Facebook ad, so we could all see they were offended). You know, after Act 1, when the characters have done almost every stupid thing they can, and the audience is questioning the characters’ wisdom and sanity, wondering how in the world they’ll recover from their mistakes.

The real problem, as I see it, is other than the possessed puppet, people were offended by things that happen in real life. And while we should absolutely be offended when they really happen, including them in theatre helps bring awareness to these issues. And, as expected, the characters grow and learn in Act 2.

Hand to God is playing at the Copley Theatre through July 10th. I highly recommend it.