Book review: The Saint of Dragons by Jason Hightman

This was a thrift store purchase from Savers. I picked it up because the premise sounded really interesting. Amazon/back of the book summary:

The ancient dragons -- of the time of the legendary Saint George and earlier -- have never disappeared entirely. Instead, they've moved undercover -- and into human society. Now one lonely schoolboy is about to learn where the dragons have gone ...

Educated at boarding schools, Simon St. George has never met his parents. When a ragged-looking man shows up claiming to be his father, Simon is skeptical, and when the man kidnaps him, he's indignant to say the least.

Then the man claims to be a descendant of England's Saint George and a career dragon fighter. Why should Simon believe any of this nonsense? But what if the man is telling the truth? What if the dragons know he's out there?

Rich with the dragon lore of legend, the saint of dragons continues and enlarges on the tale of the centuries-old conflict between dragons and humans that rages even today.

Neat, right? You know I love me some Chosen One/mythological creatures are still around stories. A lot of the elements from this book are very familiar: parentless boy at boarding school, picked on by classmates, dreams of something larger, learns of his fantastical lineage/destiny, etc. Overall I thought this book was good, if a bit done, but the writing was off somehow. Things went by too fast, and very little was fleshed out or explained in a satisfactory way. I was unsurprised when I read the author's note in the back, where he said he went to film school and wrote a screenplay about this book. It definitely reads like a movie, where we go from scene to scene and it's all very visually minded, but it lacks that true novel feel. We don't feel truly settled in the book or story; we're kind of just watching it whizz by.

Hightman definitely places plot and thrills over characterization; the characters feel like movie tropes in the way they interact with each other, and it doesn't feel real. I think Simon is the most fleshed-out character, but that's because we're seeing the book through his eyes. He makes a lot of stupid choices in the book that are incredibly annoying to read. Why don't characters in fantasy books read other fantasy books? I have to include this quote from one of the Amazon reviewers about this book because it's perfect: 

The plot reads like a series of short adventures and nothing seems very hard (including escaping from somewhere no one has ever escaped from). Like Rowling's books, there are plenty of inconsistencies with details only making sense for a specific scene and then being thrown out the window.  ~Joshua Koppel

There are a lot of cool inventions and world-building (as it were) things that we don't get explanations for. There are runes on the special dragon-fighting armor that enable the wearer to fly when touched! But how? What language are the runes in? How is the armor made? Most of the cool stuff is handwaved away with "a magician made it". There's also a prophecy that falls flat. Personally there are too many things jam-packed into this book.

The title is misleading and makes it sound like the St. Georges are the patron saints of dragons, rather than their sworn enemies. There's also a plot [SPOILERS] where dragons assimilated into human society by posing as them and are in charge of every political party in power/crime syndicate/big evil business/etc., which is way too close to the antisemitic lizards in charge of everything conspiracy (google it). I don't think this is what the author had in mind, as many people don't know the lizards conspiracy is about Jewish people, but still. The dragons were stereotypes of the countries they were from, especially the Chinese Black Dragon. I thought it was super weird that the black dragon was the only nice dragon, but the magic that emanated off of him was still dark magic that did bad things like make acid rain and conjoin people who walked next to each other on the street???? idk. I think dragons are cool and I wish more of them had been good. [END SPOILERS]

Anyway, this was entertaining enough and was a pleasant enough way to pass the time. Kids won't have the same complaints I do about the writing and pacing; in fact, it might be a good book to hand a kid who prefers movies to books. You could definitely do worse than this book, but if the things I mentioned drive you nuts, I wouldn't recommend it. If I come across the sequel, I'll read it.

trigger warnings I'd apply to this book: blood, gore, animal (ish) death, human death, magical violence, violence, fire

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: early December
From: thrift store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away 

App game review: Matchington Mansion

her face looks way better nowadays. I guess she got work done?

Matchington Mansion, aka the reason I've read almost nothing the last few months, is a typical match 3+ game with fireworks and other power-ups. The difference is, instead of just playing the games to move up the levels, each completed game gains you a star, which you can use to acquire things for your mansion and complete activities. You also gain coins, which you can use to remodel your house and buy things in the regular way. The cost of the items varies. For some reason, it only costs 30 gold coins to buy a runner for the huge double stairway, the same as a houseplant, but it costs 150 coins to buy a reproduction of a van Gogh or Mona Lisa. The prices seem chosen at random.

The matching part of the game is pretty straightforward and similar to other matching games (e.g. Sugar Smash rather than Bejeweled). However, when 1-direction fireworks are hit by other firework blasts, they explode in that 1 direction, even if that's the same direction of the first blast, rendering the firework useless. In other games, 1-direction fireworks/rockets erupt in the opposite direction when hit by a blast (i.e. left/right --> up & down and vice versa). In other games, you can choose the direction by swapping it with the shape above (vertical) or beside it (horizontal). It is nice that you can make a firework blast vertically one level down/up/right/left when needed, but it should go off in the opposite direction of the other firework's blast. One thing I do really like is that firework blasts don't affect rainbow balls, the way they do in other matching games. I've lost too many rainbow balls prematurely because they took a firework going off near them as an invitation to select a random shape near them and whisk all of those away, instead of waiting to be used by me. If I have two rainbow balls in columns next to each other but several shapes above/below each other, I can use a firework to put them next to each other. It's very handy.

Another thing I would change is that when you lose, you don't get a "hail Mary" option to set off all your fireworks and rainbow balls to see if that will help collect the shapes and things you're still missing. I've only seen Sugar Smash do this, but still. I do like that they set off the fireworks at the end AND let you tap to skip that! I've probably lost days to watching the celebratory end fireworks points grab after winning games. There are too many taps in the rest of the game, though.

The game shockingly has no ads, but there are obvious cash grabs going on constantly. There's always a "sale" going on for coins, power-ups, etc. to buy for real. I would rather eat my own hair than spend real American human dollars on fake gold coins for a video game. It costs FIVE HUNDRED (500) coins to buy five more turns when you lose a game, which is just Trumpian levels of shameless robbery. In a different game, it costs 70 coins to win five more turns. Ridiculous. It costs 400 coins to fill up your lives when you've run out (it should take 100, max) and each life takes 15 minutes to regenerate, which is just way too freaking long. Lives should regenerate in 10 minutes, maximum. The only way to gain coins on purpose (other than winning or being awarded) is to buy them with actual human money. They should give us the option to watch ads in exchange for a coin or life, the way all other mobile games do. We should also be able to watch an ad for more turns when we lose a game all the time and not just sometimes randomly when you have unlimited lives and don't really need that option anyway. You can watch an ad to get a free booster or life before you actually start the game, but only sometimes. I will say that the ads are much shorter than the ones I've had to suffer through in other games.

You are encouraged to join a team of other players; I joined one called The Librarians. Every so often a team challenge comes along, which our team never wins, but the best thing about teams is that you can request lives from your team members!!! You give a life to a team member by tapping a 'give' button on their request, and you get a coin in return. They do the same thing for you. You can get up to five lives from your team members, unless you already have your lives full. Even if enough time has gone by since you made your lives request that your lives are full, the lives given to you by your teammates will still be there waiting for you; they don't expire. That is the best part of this game, imo.

The game is replete with challenges, each one coming on the heels of the other, so you're constantly racing remote control cars/in a pillow fight/gathering food for a food truck or juice stand, etc. I don't mind the extra opportunities to gain coins and power-ups, but these challenges should be decor-based. It makes more sense for me to join a challenge that has something to do with interior decor, given the theme of this game. I'd love the opportunity to win more furniture and decor pieces, candles, etc. It would make more sense if I was helping a local furnishings shop decorate for the holidays, or helping a neighbor remodel. If I wanted to gather food items, I'd download a cooking/restaurant game. The neighborhood children are the ones who invite you to the race car/pillow fight challenges, and they are annoying, but the adults who own the food truck and juice stand are beyond the pale. I cannot imagine for a second running one of those food establishments and then relying on other people to give me the ingredients that I need to run my business! I get the money they make by selling their products, but still. My least favorite is a random old-timey adventurer ballooner guy who just lands on my street and demands I set off fireworks so he can have hot air to power his balloon with. The gall! Fix your own problems, jerk! I also hate how when you're doing a challenge, you can't just hit 'replay game' when you lose; you always have to X out from a guilt-tripping box that says "are you SURE you want to quit? You'll lose your X game winning streak!" It's the freaking worst, and it's there even when you haven't collected anything for the challenge or are out of money. Also, the challenges go on for way too long. There's no way two elementary aged children would be allowed to have a remote control car race for a full week straight, nor would they have the patience.

There is a big cast of characters to interact with, chief of which is your "best friend" and interior decorator, Tiffany. She is the stand-in for you since you cannot actually interact with anyone in the game (accepting packages, building things, setting things up, etc.), although everyone acknowledges and addresses you by name. It's weird that she's an interior decorator, ostensibly there to help you decorate your house, yet you are the one who chooses everything. Maybe she narrows down the choices? She lives with you in your mansion, rent-free, and is with you 100% of the time. In everything but name, she is your girlfriend. Think about it: the only bedroom that is furnished is yours. There's a couch in the entryway and in your bedroom, but no sign she sleeps there. Her clothes are in the master room closet alongside yours. At one point she sets up a cute picnic to have with you in the garden.  You commission a bookshelf to be built in the library to house her books! I mean, come on. In contrast to my theory, she constantly flirts with Jack, the carpenter and handyman, which is understandable because he's a total hipster hottie, but he is completely clueless. #acerep  My favorite thing about Jack is that he is literally in love with the mansion. Normal.

The antagonist, or the closest thing to one, is Rex, a sexist Southern casino owner. The former owner of the mansion, Jane, a famous novelist, was his cousin, and he believes the mansion is rightfully his. She bequeathed the mansion to you because you were best friends (another blow to the Tiffany BFF story), and she and Rex were estranged. Rex does some annoying things in the beginning, but we are slowly getting to know him and seeing another side of him. I still want to get a restraining order against him, though. At one point Rex's dog digs up the herb garden, and he didn't apologize or offer to fill it in. I had to (pay to) fill it in myself! Rude-ass bitch (the guy, not the dog).

The other most important characters are Jia, the gardener; Antonio, the mailman; and Ravi, the cook.   Jia is Asian, and a typical Wise Brown Person who spouts aphorisms. She is a neighbor, which suggests she owns a house similar to yours and comes from a similar social standing as Jane, but she always comes over and does your gardening for you (for free? or are the stars payment for her?). It makes no sense. Ravi appears to be South Asian, although he peppers his sentences with Italian phrases and mentions being in Mexico and having an Aztec curse placed on him, so who knows. Having only the POC characters (besides Jack) be in obvious service positions? Racist. We also have a latino dude named Carlos who is a G-rated Latin Lover stereotype who walks around composing love songs with a guitar, and a g*psy stereotype lady who sits in a caravan wagon with a fortune telling ball, wreathed in scarves. Falling back on extremely tired and old stereotypes? Racist. Gustavo the ballooner guy is black, as is Antonio (their Hispanic names suggest they are Afrolatinos), and the latina museum archaeologist lady and little black scientist girl are cool, but everyone else is white. My least favorite character, besides Rex, is Edna, a neighbor who is the human version of Sadness from Inside Out. She's deeply boring and serves no purpose.

Also racist? The "tea garden" you have the option to decorate and win. It's a very clear Japanese garden situation, and is cultural appropriation. Every so often you get the chance to decorate either your mansion for the holiday or another place during a certain amount of time (usually a few days). The method of decorating is not by gaining stars (although you still get 1 per game) but with gaining and spending light bulbs (amount varies by game). I like that once you've bought something, you can switch it up and change style without paying anything extra, unlike in the regular game. If you finish decorating in time, you get to keep the decorations/place. I've gained a mountain cabin that way, but I've failed to acquire the other places because I kept getting stuck on games and running out of time.

That brings me to my least favorite thing about these games: some of them are almost impossible to win, leaving me stuck playing them for days. This is deeply annoying and keeps me from doing anything at all, since I can't gain stars without winning the game, and I can't buy more lives or power-ups because I don't have enough money to do so, and I can't get money because you have to win games to do so. It's ridiculous. They should make it so that if you lose a game ten times in a row, you should get a free power-up to help you win. I know they do that on purpose so that you'll get frustrated and buy unlimited power-ups/lives or whatever. You'd think that when you finally get through a super-hard game, the next couple games would be easy, but noooooo. It's ridiculous.

The game is decent, when it comes to user experience. There's a bit of a learning curve with everything but the matching itself, and the game acts like you know more than you do sometimes even though you've just started. For instance, whenever the juice stand challenge happens, Tiffany and the owner go through this spiel where she thinks he's his twin brother. I have been playing this game for months and have never encountered this twin. It's weird. There's an address book in the game with all the characters you meet and info you learn about them, which is why I've been able to include  their names in this blog post. IMO, that space would be better served by having a Help menu to explain everything. I didn't realize you could actually visit other real user's houses until a month or two into the game.

The methods of renovating don't make sense to me. We should renovate the inside of the house before working on the outside, but we work on the outside entry first, then on the entryway and parlor, then on the bedroom. The gardens and grounds are 75% completed already, although I've only finished renovating/decorating 6 rooms and 1 bathroom. There are many other rooms to be completed, most of which aren't that important, such as the ballroom, but still. This game had me renovate the library immediately after finishing renovating the bedroom and bathroom, which was great for me, but it doesn't make any logical sense. They had me renovate the dining room before we did the kitchen!!!! They're making me work on the garage!!! Madness. I should be able to choose what room to do next.

I really like decorating the rooms, but I disagree with some of the ways things work in this game. Some activities/items take 2 or more stars to do, regardless of difficulty level, when I think they should take 1 star. You use your coins to buy the furnishings, but I wish there was more variability in the options. You get 3 options for most things, although you can gain more options by visiting other players' houses and seeing what they've done with the place. Whichever of the 3 options you choose, you are locked into a color scheme, as the furniture, walls, and floor/carpet are all supposed to go together. So if I choose a green couch, I have to choose the green walls and carpet, since the other colors will totally clash with the couch. There have been times when I've liked a patterned rug or something, but it didn't go with the current furniture I'd chosen at all because of the color.

I wish they would let you choose the pattern and the color separately, instead of having to choose between the brown plaid, solid blue, and pink Victorian wallpaper. There are WAY too many plaid and checked options, and not enough flooring options. I had to go with tile for my upstairs hallway because all of the other options were hideous. There are plants as well, and there is an overwhelming amount of options for them. I wish I had 12+ options for furniture and decor! I hate everything you can choose for the bedroom, except for 1 cool-looking couch. There are some items that the game doesn't give you options for, which is annoying. I wanted to choose my desk and chair for the library!
You can change whatever options you picked for things, if applicable, but it's annoying that each plant is treated as a separate thing, and when you get a new option you have to tap on all the plants to acknowledge the new option. It's a drag.

Anyway, I do enjoy this game when I am not fruitlessly losing an impossible game calculated to pressure me into spending real human dollars. I love interior design and matching games, and this game lets you live out the dream of inheriting a mansion from your best friend, a famous rich author, and getting to decorate and live in it rent-free with your blond femme girlfriend and your cat and dog. Truly the dream.

EDIT: I have finally been allowed to start redoing the second bedroom. Get this: it's for our live-in butler, not Tiffany!! TiffanyxPlayer forever!!!

Expensive makeup that sucks

all hail Freckle

With high-end makeup, the packaging is almost always nicer, but the quality isn't always better. Prestige brand eyeliners are worse than drugstore brand eyeliners. I have purchased eyeliner pencils from Buxum and Urban Decay, and I hate them.

• They are too thick/wide and do not come to a point when sharpened
• they come off onto my fingers when I touch my eyes despite longevity claims
• the supposedly long-wearing eyeliners migrate to my undereyes regardless of my air conditioned climate, giving me raccoon eyes 
• despite this they are EXTREMELY difficult to remove with most makeup wipes and removers, forcing me to scrub at my delicate eye skin
• The Buxom eyeliner is a dry and thick consistency and pulls on my eyelids
• The UD pencils do glide on but irritate my eyes when I use them on the waterline. What is the purpose of a so-called 24/7 long-wearing waterproof eyeliner pencil that cannot be used on the waterline????? 

These disappointments cost $17 and $22 each, respectively. The UD pencils were in a set that was on sale, but still.

I've also used a mini size of the Marc Jacobs Highliner Gel Eye Crayon (full size $25), which was probably the worst eyeliner I've ever used. It had all of the same problems as listed above, plus it wouldn't even do a complete line on my eyelid because it was so dry and patchy. You could argue that the full size would be better quality, but mini sizes of prestige makeup items are given away as gifts with purchases in order to get you to fall in love with them and buy the full-sized product, so I don't think that argument holds up. I had the exact same issues with the terrible mini IT Cosmetics' No-Tug Waterproof Anti-Aging Gel Eyeliner ($22 full size). It definitely tugged, and that probably made my eyes age.

My Rimmel kohl/scandaleyes eyeliners, which are like $5, glide on like a dream and stay fairly well. So do Colourpop's eyeliner pencils, which are $5.50.

I've also bought a Too Faced liquid eyeliner marker, which was like $17, and it:

• was extremely watery 
• lacked almost all pigment
• dried up in the tube incredibly soon

My Physicians Formula liquid eyeliner pen, however, is like $11 and is so much better (it even has a brush tip!).

While it worked fine, I found that IT Cosmetics' "universal" brow pencil ($24 full size) was too grey and light for my dark brown eyebrows. For that, you're better off using one of Nyx or L.A. Girl or e.l.f.'s eyebrow pencils, which you can get to match your eyebrow color and only pay $3-10.

I follow beauty vloggers, and I've heard several of them rave about Ofra Cosmetics liquid lipsticks and how long-lasting they were. Ulta had a sale once, so I bought a couple.

• They did not dry down, despite being a thin formula and being given plenty of time. 
• They disappeared at the first touch of food or drink. I'm talking completely disappearing when I drank some water, no ring around the lips even. It was as if it had never been applied.
• They transferred on my fingers, cup, etc.
• They did not last, at all. 

They were $18 full price, and I bought them for $9 on sale!! I returned them. So disappointing, since the colors were gorgeous.

I was also disappointed at Stila's "stay all day" liquid lipstick ($22). I put it over lipliner and it gave me ring-around-the-lips after eating. I tried it alone and it still didn't last through food.

It was the same with Kaja's "high-pigment lip stain" ($18), which was more of a moussey liquid lipstick. I put it on and went to a potluck 15 minutes later, and it was gone. It didn't even stain my lips. It's supposed to be matte, but it wasn't really that either.

The Urban Decay Vice liquid lipstick in the shade Purgatory was patchy, drying and uncomfortable. Wet N Wild has a liquid lipstick in a similar dark metallic burgundy shade, and even if it's just as bad, it's only $5.

If it's not going to be long-lasting and will come off anyway, I recommend Colourpop's liquid lipsticks ($6 or so) or Nyx's liquid lipsticks ($5-9). Heck, Wet N Wild and e.l.f. have liquid lipsticks and they're like $5 too. There are a few drugstore brands that have actual long-wearing liquid lipsticks, such as CoverGirl and Maybelline. These come with special lip balms or clear glosses to extend the liquid lipstick's life, and are usually around $10.

Have you noticed that high-end lipsticks' bullets are shorter than drugstore lipsticks? I haven't been able to compare every single brand out there, but my Too Faced and Bésame Cosmetics lipsticks' ($17-25) bullets are shorter than my Wet N Wild and Essence lipsticks ($1-5).

Physicians Formula is a drugstore brand, but its Murumuru Butter Blushes are expensive ($13). I tried the lightest shade, which was a lovely natural soft pink in the pan, and it was so pale it wouldn't show up on me. It wasn't shimmery enough to use as a highlighter, either. What a disappointment. The shimmery pink blush I bought from e.l.f., however, is $3 and looks great. To be fair, I have also bought a pale pink shimmery blush from e.l.f. before that was too pale to be a blush and not shimmery enough to be a highlighter, but the disappointment was less because I only paid $1.

Bobbi Brown's Retouching Face Pencil ($35!!), which was clearly made to be used as a highlighter, was very dry and chunky-glittery, and didn't look good on the face. Wet N Wild and e.l.f. have some very nice and cheap highlighter sticks/crayons that glow and shimmer beautifully.

It's like some lady said on the internet, at the end of the day it all goes down the drain (as you wash your face), so you might as well save your money.

Book review: Curioddity by Paul Jenkins

I bought Curioddity from the dollar store because the cover and the summary were intriguing.
Amazon summary:
Will Morgan is a creature of habit―a low-budget insurance detective who walks to and from work with the flow of one-way traffic, and for whom imagination is a thing of the distant past. When a job opportunity enters the frame in the form of the mysterious Mr. Dinsdale―curator of the ever so slightly less-than-impressive Curioddity Museum―Will reluctantly accepts the task of finding a missing box of levity (the opposite of gravity). What he soon learns, however, is that there is another world out there―a world of magic we can only see by learning to un-look at things―and in this world there are people who want to close the Curioddity museum down. With the help of his eccentric new girlfriend Lucy, Will will do everything he can to deliver on his promise to help Mr. Dinsdale keep the Curioddity Museum in business.

Sounds cool, doesn't it? I love books about finding hidden magic and museums, so I was sold. It sat on my bookshelf for a while, then in my mailbox waiting for me to grab and read it during a reference desk shift, until I finally did.

I enjoyed this book, although not quite as much as I thought. It started off boring and depressing, then sped up and because more interesting, just like Will's life. The writing style was clearly trying to be clever and funny, but came off as kind of jerky (the movement, not the adjective form of jerk or the meat), at least until the story picked up and I got caught up in it. The author has definitely read Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, and you see their influence in the most fast-paced, high stakes parts of the books. It's not as good as Adams, of course. There was a running gag that involved Will getting hit on the head with a heavy object again and again, which I did not find funny. I did find the smartphone with the sentient AI amusing, once we got past the tedious "old man yells at technology" bit we inexplicably get despite Will being 32 and not an old man.

Will's dull life is explained by his parents. His mother was a dazzling scientist who taught him about magic and wonder and conspiracy theories (idk) who died? in a physics accident. His grieving father banned all magic, wonder and science and pressured him heavily into living a stable, safe, and predictable life identical to his own. There's the usual "parent's desire for child's safety/a certain profession in order to not lose the child actually pushes child away" thing, but I won't go into it. Surprisingly, Will's mother's "death" isn't solved; perhaps Jenkins has another Curioddity book in the works? It didn't feel like a beginning of a series.

Mr. Dinsdale is the typical kinda crazy kinda wise kooky old man who has a connection with magic or whatever and teaches our hero to see the world differently etc. etc. You get it. Lucy, Will's love interest and girlfriend of all of one (1) date, is basically a manic pixie dream girl who dresses like a hippie, including wearing an oft-mentioned anklet, and says stuff like "groovy!" and "epic fail!", often in the same sentence. Both these statements date the book, and I found them cringy. Her personality basically just consists of her being bubbly and up for anything. This is unsurprising because male authors are notoriously bad at fleshing out female characters, especially love interests. They make them pretty and quirky and then stop there. Given how boring Will is, I don't understand Lucy's attraction to him, especially given his behavior. Such is the mystery of the MPDG/depressed guy's relationship. Lucy's magic/thrift shop and the Curioddity museum have some magical space-time connection that isn't really explained, despite my wishing it would be.

Anyway, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to while away an afternoon. You need a strong tolerance for ~*magic is everywhere if you know where to look*~ type stories, as well as fantasy/science fiction hybrid stories. I liked it but not enough to be sure I'll keep it, since I have such limited shelf space.

Cover notes: I like the cover, although it is definitely for a different book, one much scarier than this one. There are no isolated eyes or eye motifs in this book, and Will never wears a hat or carries an umbrella. I like the colors and font though. The book is new enough that there are no other covers to compare this one to.

Score: 4 out of 5 stars
Read in: early November
From: dollar store
Format: hardcover
Status: giving away probably

Book review: Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

Heavy spoilers throughout, I guess

October was a dry reading month. I discovered a new game app (to be reviewed later) that sucked me in and killed any desire I had to read. I had to work on Halloween night, though, and grabbed this book from the children's books section of the library where I work, so I could read it at the desk. Harriet the Spy has pretty much always been on my radar as a children's classic, but I've never read it.

Amazon summary:
Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. In her notebook, she writes down everything she knows about everyone, even her classmates and her best friends. Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before she can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she’s written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back together?

I read this in one sitting. There was plenty to like, even for an adult who's already forgotten a lot about being a child. While I journaled infrequently as a child, I nonetheless understood Harriet's impulse to write down and comment on everything that happened. There was this one part where Harriet was playing with her parents and then abruptly stopped to write down in her journal was was happening and how she was feeling, and then looked up to see her parents staring at her like she was an alien from outer space, concerned about how abnormal her reaction was. I felt that keenly, as a weird kid whose parents didn't understand her. Harriet sounds like she may have been on the spectrum, as she found it difficult to interact with others without her trusty notebook, kept such a strict schedule that Ole Golly would have to make sure she wasn't wearing the same thing every day, and she always had a tomato sandwich for lunch. She preferred writing to socializing, and did not like having to follow social convention. Here are two excellent    articles on the matter (I only read the first).

I also remember having a similar impulse to spy, although nowhere near to the extent that Harriet did. She actually snuck into a rich lady's house and hid in the dumbwaiter in order to spy on her! Her spying was rather privacy-violating and nosy, and her observation skills were combined with her age-typical lack of empathy. I was unsurprised when her classmates took her frank, often mean comments personally and shunned her. I did think the extent of their punishment went too far for what she actually did. When you pick up someone's journal with the word PRIVATE on the cover, you know you are transgressing by reading it, even/especially as an 11 year old. If you read something mean about yourself, I can see being mad at the author and maybe not talking to them for a week or so, but they actually made an anti-Harriet club (which lasted for weeks, atypical of children of that age) and had a parade of haterism in front of her outside of school! All of the adults were clueless, but I would have liked one of them to point out that when you read someone's diary or eavesdrop, you deserve whatever bad things you read or hear about yourself. To be honest, I'm shocked no one leaned over her shoulder to read what she was writing in class way before this, kids being what they are.

Besides her classmates, household, and the rich lady, Harriet spied on an older, cat-hoarding man and an Italian family who owned a grocery store. Harriet's rich WASP background showed itself in how she looked down on her working class subjects and found their lives and circumstances exotic. (To be fair, Harriet looked down on nearly everybody.) The family's portrayal was of course rife with stereotyping (like Harriet, Louise Fitzhugh came from an affluent WASPy background, and this book was published in the early 1960s). It didn't sit right with me that this little rich girl was spying on and judging a family who were going through things she would never go through or understand. Because her spying was done in secret, none of the adults in her life were able to tell her she was wrong for doing that.

I found Harriet and her nanny Ole Golly to be interesting characters with an familiar yet unique relationship dynamic. Plenty of well to do children have nannies in books, even stern or opinionated ones, but Harriet actually loved and respected Ole Golly. The book changes roughly halfway when Ole Golly falls in love and gets married, leaving Harriet. This sets the stage for the things that happen to Harriet, in my opinion. No one realizes that Harriet is grieving the loss of her actual parent, as Ole Golly was far more of a parent to her than her real parents were. I wasn't surprised at the leaving or moving away (Harriet was rather old to have a nanny), but Harriet and Ole Golly could have written to each other, and should have! Harriet handled this severe rupture to her schedule and life badly. Her class reading her notebook and judging her wouldn't have affected her so badly if she'd had Ole Golly to help her. She basically fell apart when that happened, claiming to be sick so she could stay home from school, lashing out, acting out in class, etc. Her parents, unused to actually parenting, freaked out and ineffectually tried to help her, even taking her to a child psychologist. A letter from Ole Golly arrives and sets Harriet straight and encourages her, and she starts to mend her relationships with her former best friends. The school decides to channel Harriet's compulsive writing by allowing her to take over the 6th grade newspaper, which seemed to be published daily? Harriet's spying and her observations on her subjects were outlined in the newspaper, which became very popular with her class.

This, to me, was unsatisfactory. Ole Golly should have given Harriet more of a heads-up that she was leaving, knowing her love of routine. She should have had a proper goodbye with Harriet, instead of telling her never to cry and then jumping in a taxi. I don't see Harriet's junior tabloid being popular with her classmates, as it was all about people they didn't know, and any school worth its salt would have read it and stopped Harriet from printing only gossip.

Also, this doesn't really fit anywhere, but as a twenty-first century educator I found it unsettling that Harriet's scientist bestie wanted to blow up the school and maybe the world (people from the early sixties would have found both the school blowing up and the girl scientist silly and extremely unlikely to happen). Harriet's other bestie was a boy who was basically the single parent to a slacker writer father. The boy budgeted, did the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc. while the father "wrote" (slept) and partied. I was livid at the level of neglect this poor child lived with.

In all, I found this an interesting book that probably would have been too weird and sad for me as a child. I think it might be helpful to slightly older children who are going through bullying at school. At least one article on the internet told me that Harriet is a well-beloved character among lesbians and queer women, due to her gender nonconforming clothes and attitude (in the 1960s girls mostly wore dresses/skirts and mary janes, not hoodies, jeans and sneakers!). You can see Harriet on the cover image above. The illustrations of the cover and in the book are by Louse Fitzhugh as well; she was a lesbian. One subplot deals with dancing school, much dreaded by Harriet and her scientist bestie, and Harriet's main beefs are with the annoying girly teacher's pets in her class. Harriet's two best friends are actually gender nonconforming as well due to their hobbies and activities (science by choice, housekeeping out of necessity).

Cover notes: I liked Fitzhugh's illustrated cover best, so I used it. My copy didn't have a cover because it was a library book, and we toss hardcover books' slipcovers in my library. Any attempts to girlify or age up Harriet on her book covers should be illegal. 

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: October 31
From: library
Format: hardcover
Status: returned

Things I miss from my old apartment

not to scale rendering of the kitchen/living area. bedroom & bathroom not included.
imagine there are kitchen cabinets above the counters I've shown here

• My kitchen, which had roughly four times more counter space and kitchen cabinets as my current one, as well as a neat little nook for my trash can so it didn't stick out like a sore thumb. One side of it was a long countertop which served as a table & was fantastic for baking/cooking. I really miss that kitchen.
• My walk-in closet. It was this little cube off my bedroom that was like four or five feet square, which doesn't sound like a lot, but the use of space was so economical. There was a rack on each side, with a flat shelf on top that I put my sweaters on. I now technically have two little closets, but there's a lot of wasted space due to my house's weird shape & design choices. My current closets are too short to have a top shelf above the top racks. 
• My hall closet, which was small but fit a lot of things. It had one tall open space for a broom/mop, and the rest was partitioned off into shelves 10-12 inches apart & square. I have no storage area whatsoever in my current house. There is a metal garden shed next to my house for my use, but it's rusty and creepy and full of spiderwebs and really hard to open. 
• the turnaround time for things to be fixed. I got to know my apartment's handyman pretty well. It takes forever for my super to send somebody to fix my stuff, unless they might be in liability (aka that one time my carbon monoxide alarm needed a new battery and they thought I meant my smoke alarm). 
• My electric stove, which was sleeker and easier to clean (not to mention safer) than my current gas stove.
• the fact that I lived near families and got to see other people's holiday decorations and had children come trick or treating every Halloween. Every weeknight at 7 pm or so a child from the family who lived below me used to practice their trombone. My house is in a secluded place where I just have like 20 feet of empty land surrounding my house in two directions and 12 in another. It's pretty isolated and has kind of a neglected air, despite my best efforts. If any children go trick or treating on my street, they are too scared to approach my house. I don't miss the noise or my former neighbor's cigarette smoke or having to watch the amount of noise I made, though. 

Book review: Dream Thief by Stephen R. Lawhead

closest thing to my copy's cover

I believe this one was a thrift store find; it's been so long since I bought it I can't really remember. Summary from the back of the book since the Internet does not seem to know this edition of the book exists:

Someone was messing with Spence's head. Every morning Dr. Spencer Reston, dream-research scientist on space station Gotham, woke up exhausted. His head felt like an overripe cantaloupe ready to burst, and he had the nagging feeling that something terrible was about to happen. Only later, with all of civilization hanging in the balance, does Spence find out that he has become a vital link in a cosmic coup masterminded by a mysterious creature known as the Dream Thief. 

I'm going to stop there, as the rest of the 'summary' goes on to praise this book to the heavens, then calls DF "the most ambitious science fiction novel to be written by a Christian since Lewis", comparing this book to CSL's Space Trilogy. If you want to compare your Christian-flavored sci fi novel to CSL's Space Trilogy, you'd better have something to back up that claim. There are a lot of people who don't consider the Space Trilogy to be science fiction, since CSL is obviously more interested in the Biblical myth aspect of his stories than the actual science, to the point where I can't really disagree with critics who say the trilogy is just fantasy in space. However, I still really love these books and the way they combined Christian and Biblical myth with interplanetary travel and other well-worn loved sci fi tropes. Does Dream Thief live up to the Space Trilogy? Not really. Lawhead does weave Christian belief into his Mars exploration story, but not so much the dreams aspect, which is the driving force of the book. I liked the Mars aspect and what he did with that, but as cool as I found the Martian influence in certain figures in Indian mythology when I was actually reading it, it feeds into the whole "we don't believe brown people are capable of doing cool things so instead we're going to believe aliens did it" thing.

I found the pace of this book rather plodding. The Mars portion and race across the world portions were fairly well-paced, or at least not so poorly paced that I noticed the pacing, but the rest kind of dragged. It was all "bad dreams, am I losing my mind? Life on a space station, blah blah blah, that girl is cute but I don't want to fall in love with her, what is going on with me??" stuff for like half the book. Another plot point is Spence's struggle to believe in God.

The writing style was very mid to late twentieth century sci fi; even though this book was published in 1983, it felt a few decades older, to the point that the now-antiquated way of writing science fiction made me think the book was taking place in the late seventies or early eighties, even though it clearly wasn't. I would read about something having taken place x number of years ago, and I would think, "so that happened in the 1950s, maybe?" and then remember the book is set in '42 (2042? 2142? 3042? who knows) in an enormous fully functioning space station. The tone kept me from believing the story was taking place in the future, as did other things written into the book. For instance, Lawhead falls into the trap many other sci fi writers have of imagining communications technology as being way less advanced than even today. Spence's experiments' data is captured on paper scrolls (seriously) as well as being put into a computer because Spence likes doing things the old-fashioned way. Scrolls!? What is this, ancient Rome? Lawhead did get videocalls (skyping) right, though. Apparently they also eat aspic on this futuristic space station (a weird savory meat-based jelly very popular in the 1950s). Like ok.

The characters all feel like they're from some 1970s book; they're somewhat flat and trope-y. There's the all-American intelligent hero, the blonde blue-eyed babe he falls in love with, a burly giant Russian who speaks in an accent, a wise Indian guy who calls the hero Sahib for some reason even though this isn't a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel and if anything he outranks the hero and has twice as many degrees as him, etc. I just wikipedia'd Sahib and while it's definitely associated with British colonial rule, it's actually a respectful honorific. Adjani didn't start calling Spence that until they became friends, so maybe that's why. Still weird to me though. Besides the Indians Spence encounters in India, the only two characters of color are Adjani and his friend Dr. Gita, who is a fat, turbaned caricature. There are only two named women in this entire book that takes place in the future, and they are Spence's love interest and her mom. And they are totally described as looking like sisters. Yeah. Ari is also, it will not surprise you to hear, a damsel in distress. At least she's kind of smart, even though the only reason she's on the space station is because her father is the president of the space station. This is the future! It can't possibly be just one woman on that space station. It can't possibly be just one person of color on that space station. Spence shows some very twentieth century standard views on women, as do the villains, even the one that's very advanced. Oh, and they have to travel through India to stop the bad guys and it's just every horrifying, gross poverty-stricken stereotype about India that you have ever heard. Orientalism and othering abound. Would things really not have changed at all in the future? The entire period seems stuck in the past. All that stuff kept taking me out of the story.

Anyway. I sort of enjoyed it, and it definitely passed the time, but it should have been 2/3s of the length it was. I don't really like this cover; I think this one is more sci-fi-ish and interesting, as is this one, although I don't like the un-canon shape of the space station.

Trigger warnings I'd apply to this book: body horror, gore, violence, casual sexism, racism. Clean of cursing and sex.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars
Read in: September 27-29
From: thrift store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away

Book review: A Summerset Abbey by T.J. Brown

Yet another dollar store buy, surprise surprise. Amazon summary:

1913: In a sprawling manor on the outskirts of London, three young women seek to fulfill their destinies and desires amidst the unspoken rules of society in this stunning series starter that fans of Downton Abbey will love.

Rowena Buxton
Sir Philip Buxton raised three girls into beautiful and capable young women in a bohemian household that defied Edwardian tradition. Eldest sister Rowena was taught to value people, not wealth or status. But everything she believes will be tested when Sir Philip dies, and the girls must live under their uncle’s guardianship at the vast family estate, Summerset Abbey. Standing up for a beloved family member sequestered to the “underclass” in this privileged new world, and drawn into the Cunning Coterie, an exclusive social circle of aristocratic “rebels,” Rowena must decide where her true passions—and loyalties—lie.

Victoria Buxton
Frail in body but filled with an audacious spirit, Victoria secretly dreams of attending university to become a botanist like her father. But this most unladylike wish is not her only secret—Victoria has stumbled upon a family scandal that, if revealed, has the potential to change lives forever...

Prudence Tate
Prudence was lovingly brought up alongside Victoria and Rowena, and their bond is as strong as blood. But by birth she is a governess’s daughter, and to the lord of Summerset Abbey, that makes her a commoner who must take her true place in society—as lady’s maid to her beloved “sisters.” But Pru doesn’t belong in the downstairs world of the household staff any more than she belongs upstairs with the Buxton girls. And when a young lord catches her eye, she begins to wonder if she’ll ever truly carve out a place for herself at Summerset Abbey.

Totally sounds like the kind of book I like, right? Well, it was fine. The author writes well, and it sounds like she did her research. I like that she included some recommended books on the Edwardian era at the end of her author's note. If only that attention to detail had applied to that cover as well. The model looks like a 2003 formalwear model. The locale and building behind her are perfect, but literally nothing about the model is. Not her dress, not her hair, not her jewelry. I've seen much, much, much better historical accuracy on a bodice-ripper. It actually makes me a little angry. I like the font, although it's not Edwardian at all.

This was the first of a series, which of course means that nothing was really resolved. All three girls showed a frankly surprising lack of knowledge of the social mores of their own time. "Wh-what? You mean our governess's daughter can't be a guest and stay alongside with us unless she's a lady's maid? You mean she'll have to live in the servants' quarters and answer to the higher-up staff?? What madness is this???" I don't like the class differences either, but grow up. It was ridiculous how childish and stubborn the girls were about it. I wouldn't have liked that life either, but the differences between the social classes were so entrenched and separate until, like, the 1960s. 

Each girl has a love interest, of course, and two of them are unsuitable. I was suprised, though, that one of them gives up and married somebody else instead of defying convention, the way I'm used to these historical romance girls doing. There was very little lead-up, just thrown in the epilogue, which is poor writing on the author's part. 

Rowena, the oldest, was made responsible for all the matters that fell to them when their father died, but she was so weak and wishy-washy that she was too passive to fight for anything, not that her uncle would have listened to her anyway (he was in charge of everything for real). She didn't tell Victoria or Prudence anything when she should have, and it made things worse between them and led to a rift. Victoria was positively childish, demanding that her sister argue their case to their uncle even though she know how weak and passive her sister was, and that their uncle wouldn't listen to her anyway, instead of taking matters into her own hands. She's 18 but acts like a 15 or 16 year old. Prudence was the least annoying character, but everything was hard for her because she was brought up as a lady and was the governess's daughter, so there wasn't any real place for her. And of course there was the usual aunt & uncle machinations, cute but untrustworthy rich boys, hot but unsuitable working class boys, clothes and balls and parties.

Reading this book definitely made my evening shift fly by, but I wasn't very satisfied at the ending. The big mystery was made pretty obvious by all the hints the author kept dropping, but she did succeed in making me think that the perpetrator was someone other than who it actually was, so there's that. I do want to read the other books in the series; maybe I can find them online for a song.

Trigger warnings I'd apply to this book: child death mention, possible rape mention, sexual harassment mention, plane crash depiction, blood mention, era-consistent sexism, alcohol abuse/use

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: September 26
From: dollar store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away

Book review: The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker

I'm mad at myself for buying this book at the thrift store. It's described as "poignant"; of course it's going to be unspeakably sad! Here's the summary; see if you can guess why I picked it up.

When Truly Plaice's mother was pregnant, the town of Aberdeen joined together in betting how record-breakingly huge the baby boy would ultimately be. The girl who proved to be Truly paid the price of her enormity; her father blamed her for her mother's death in childbirth and was totally ill-equipped to raise either this giant child or her polar opposite sister Serena Jane, the epitome of feminine perfection. When he, too, relinquishes his increasingly tenuous grip on life, Truly and Serena Jane are separated--Serena Jane to live a life of privilege and Truly to live on the outskirts of town, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation at the hands of her peers.

Serena Jane's beauty proves to be her greatest blessing and her biggest curse, for it makes her the obsession of classmate Bob Bob Morgan, the youngest in a line of doctors for generations. Though they have long been the pillars of the community, the earliest Morgan married the town witch, Tabitha Dyerson, and the location of her fabled shadow book--containing mysterious secrets for healing and darker powers--has been the subject of town gossip ever since. Bob Bob Morgan, one of Truly's biggest tormentors, does the unthinkable to claim the prize of Serena Jane, and changes the destiny of all Aberdeen forever.

It is only when Truly finds her calling--the ability to heal illness with herbs and naturopathic techniques,hidden within the folds of Robert Morgan's family quilt, that she begins to regain control over her life and herself. Unearthed family secrets, however, will lead to the kind of betrayal that eventually break the Morgan family apart forever, but Truly's reckoning with her own demons allows for both an uprooting of Aberdeen County, and the possibility of love in unexpected places.

If you guessed it was the wise woman healing with herbs stuff, you were right. I was also somewhat intrigued by the main character's medical condition, which is a pituitary-caused gigantism. It's the opposite of what I have, almost, but I haven't heard of many books where pituitary conditions are discussed. Anyway, everyone is horrible to Truly, everyone close to her dies or goes away, and the entire thing was super depressing. The worst character who does the worst thing never really gets his comeuppance, apart from getting leukemia and dying a painful, wretched death, which happens to everyone anyway regardless of how nice they are (the death, not the leukemia). The second worst character got a lukewarm comeuppance, nothing like what she deserved. I'm mad that Truly never stood up for herself, but I guess with the upbringing she had it's understandable. I'm also mad at one of the deaths. There was soooooooo much fatshaming and fatbashing. Even though you get dates and the Vietnam war namedropped, the whole thing still feels like it takes place in the thirties or forties. I'm glad that the one LGBT+ character got a happy ending, even if his childhood sucked. Not nearly enough witch and healing stuff. Good writing though. Would not recommend unless you love depressing stories set in close-minded small towns in middle or southeastern America.

Trigger warnings I'd apply to this book: semi-graphic rape depiction/description, child abuse (physical and emotional), neglect, multiple suicides, fatphobia, ableism, cruelty, controlling relationships, alcoholism (at least one character), a character has PTSD, era-consistent homophobia, implied transphobia, era-consistent sexism

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: September 24-25
From: thrift store
Format: hardcover, with handy attached ribbon bookmark
Status: giving away

Book review: The Twistrose Key by Tone Almhjell

I picked up this book from the dollar store, surprisingly enough.* The blurb on the back of The Twistrose Key spoke of everything I like: a Chosen Child uses a mysterious key to slip through a door to another world that is filled with anthropomorphic friendly animals and mythological creatures, and because of a prophecy must go on a quest to perform some important task and save that world. It was inevitable that I would love this book, and I did.

The allusions to other beloved children's fantasy books are plentiful and obvious, but handled so well that they do not detract from the story. Chosen ones and mysterious keys to magical doors that lead to fantasy worlds are so plentiful I don't have to give you any examples. The frozen land of Sylver with its talking animals is obviously Narnia, while the Snow Queen and Puss in Boots make appearances. There are more references, but I won't list them all so you can be surprised when you read it.

There is danger, sorrow, loss, and depth to this book. Lin is devastated to lose her pet vole, Rufus, when she already has to live far away from her extended family and friends in a city and building she does not like. She is overjoyed to be reunited with him in Sylver, but when her task is completed she must return to her world again and leave Rufus behind. There's more sad stuff I won't share because I don't want to spoil the book for you. When I read about Sylver being a sort of heaven for deceased childhood pets, I immediately thought of Sammy, the large gentle boxer we had that I "rode" as a small child, and my tears made it hard to read as I imagined going to Sylver myself and seeing him. If you've ever lost a pet, especially one you had as a child, this is going to hit you right in the feels.

This book was so good! I'm definitely going to get my hands on everything Tone Almhjell writes. English isn't even her first language and she writes so, so well. I think The Twistrose Key is the first in a series, and I am so excited to read the rest!

Cover notes: This is a good cover, and it is my least favorite part of the book, which lets you know how good the book is. Rufus and Lin's proportions are not drawn correctly; Rufus is said to be about five feet tall in Sylver, and Lin is 11 years old, so she should be rather shorter. The artist drew Rufus to be less than three feet high, perhaps thinking of Narnia. I don't think the sled is drawn correctly either. There are four animals drawn at each corner of the cover image: a fox, a wolf, an owl, and a rat. The four animal families in Silver are canines, felines, birds, and rodents, so the artist should have drawn a cat instead of a wolf (a fox shows up in the story but wolves don't). There is another cover for the hardcover version that just has a big Twistrose key on the cover with the same animal corners, and I rather prefer it.

Trigger warnings I'd apply to this book: blood, child endangerment, violence (PG), kidnapping, many parts can scare children

Score: 5 out of 5 stars
Read in: September 11
From: dollar store
Format: paperback 
Status: absolutely keeping

*surprising that this book was so high quality; obviously I buy books from the dollar store all the time

August 2019 books

August was also a lean reading month.

I read Thimble Summer when I was in elementary school, and I loved it. 1930s rural Middle America just seemed so exotic to me. It was on sale at Barnes & Noble for less than $4, so I bought it. It still holds up, although of course I no longer have the wide-eyed wonder of a child. I'm still kind of in awe that Garnet pulled off hitchhiking to a big city many miles away. I'd be too scared to do that even as an adult (but of course times are different now). There is of course a bit of time-period-usual racism and cultural appropriation, but it'll fly over most kids' heads. Everyone in the book is white, except for the Native Americans briefly mentioned in a flashback story of settler days told by someone's grandmother. Anyway, this is an award-winning classic for a reason. I recommend it for kids; I think they'll like it even today. 4/5 stars, keeping.


I read another nostalgia-based book towards the end of the month. Everything I Need to Know About Love I Learned From a Little Golden Book is an absolute mouthful of a sentence, but it was still a light, short, and fun read. Musings on mostly romantic love are paired with actual illustrations from real Little Golden Books. I read and loved Little Golden Books a lot growing up, so I enjoyed this book. However, I'm not sure I'll actually keep it. I rearranged my books on Labor Day and put books aside to give away, and I still have 4 medium stacks of books that don't fit in my 4 downstairs bookshelves (!). 3.5 out of 5 stars, tentatively keeping.

Latinx representation

Study finds films lag significantly in Latino representation

Latina women in films are all maids, immigrants (undocumented or not), gang girls or cholas, spicy and tempestuous, Jennifer Lopez, or all of the above. I'm trying to think of a Latina in movies I could relate to. America Ferrera has come close; she played Carmen in Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but her story was not my story. I have yet to watch Real Women Have Curves, but it's on my list.

Representation matters. Ask me why I, a white, blue-eyed, brown-haired girl, never really saw any character I identified with. (Maybe I would feel differently if I had watched Gilmore Girls. Alexis Bledel is a white Argentinian with blue eyes and brown hair and her character loved books. But her character was white.) Ask me why I saw America Ferrera's awkward bespectacled face as Ugly Betty and immediately placed the TV show in the #1 slot in my heart. Ask me why her Mexican apron-wearing, cooking dad and prettier, more popular sister felt so familiar. Ask me why I latched on to Jane the Virgin, with her love of books and dreams of being a writer and the specter of religion haunting her desires. When Jane and her mom and her abuela sang feliz cumpleaños to her son, harmonizing, I burst into tears. My family does that. I had never seen anything on television so close to my personal experiences. I feel uncomfortable when, in TV shows and movies, second and third generation Latinx Americans speak in English to their parents and grandparents while they speak to them in Spanish. I do that to my dad without knowing, and it makes me feel guilty.

Depending on your interpretation, Latinxs have been here since before the United States claimed its independence. J.Lo goes to the gym every day, but she cannot carry us all on her shoulders. Nor should she.