Posted on by d

Westward Women: A Book Review

Westward Women: Alice Martin

Westward Women by Alice Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Many thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

As a lover of dystopian fiction I got really excited about this book! And also, as a current North Carolinian, also excited to read something from one of our own. From the description this seemed right up my alley, especially as someone who once – and perhaps still – suffers from this westward disease, the inexplicable pull toward the what we settler colonialists have always liked to think of as an unexplored “frontier…” (full disclosure: American history is my academic focus, and I’m obsessed with “westward expansion,” which we’ve always romanticized – and which I can assure you is much, much more violent than that).

Well, I’ll tell y’all, I spent the majority of this book waiting for something to happen – it’s a slow burn, but stick with it. The author is talented. I’m pretty sure that this sleepy pace is intentional.

What held me most was the characters themselves, and perhaps that was intentional. The author is fantastic at building out a character and you spend the entire time living in their heads or observing them, trying to figure out whether this westward direction is literal or figurative or both. I am still undecided what to make of it, to be honest. That’s what pushed this from a 3.5 to a 4 for me – I’m still thinking about it.



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Posted on by d

A weird book you should read.

I Who Have Never Known Men cover

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I am grateful to Echo Books for putting this audiobook out in 2024, as this book was originally published in 1995 and didn’t get nearly the awareness it deserved back then. And I am grateful to the Greensboro Public Library for once again doing the subversive thing and adding it to their most recent audiobook acquisitions.

Given the suburban sprawl of this city, I’m in my car a lot. I need engaging audiobooks to stay sane. The story needs to be good and the narrator does, too – it’s important that the narrator ACT the characters, not just read them, or one can easily get lost in the effort required to differentiate between characters. The story and the narrator are good here.

This book is short. As an audiobook, it’s only six hours in its entirety, but it’s six hours of brilliance. I feel honored to have finally joined the small legion of people who are now aware of the genius of this author (and also the translator, who has maintained the integrity of the original French work – it can be extremely challenging to do this when the nuances of a different language can easily be lost in translation).

I’ll read this again at some point, probably in book form, to see what I missed in a listen. Without giving away too much, let’s just say that the manner in which this book is constructed means that the narrator’s experiences are also ours in a way. The hope, the desolation and loneliness, the curiosity, and the desire to know where she is, why she’s there, and whether she’ll ever encounter anyone else alive is something we also hope to discover, and which create an agonizing ache that keep us attached to the story until the very end as we experience a similar anguish as the narrator herself.

I realize that’s not the greatest description of this when this could be applicable to any good story – but I’m trying not to leave spoilers here. If you read this, you’ll understand what I mean. This takes place on a much more “meta” level than the typical desire to know the conclusion of a tale. I’m sure there’s probably a named literary device for this that I don’t know.

I’m still on the lookout for a good speculative fiction book club. If I ever find one, I’ll recommend this one in a heartbeat. It’s incredibly discussion-worthy. Again, I’m glad that someone at Echo Books had the foresight to retrieve this book from relative anonymity and bring it back out into the light for a new generation of readers and listeners.



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Posted on by d

night blooms

Photo by Fabiano Rodrigues on Pexels.com | petrichor, cyclical release | sanguine meander

here we are again. this cyclical expression of reproductive desire manifests in all sorts of strange ways. i have no desire to be out and about, but i want you to come to me. with me. in me.

my bookshelves and my seed bank are really organized but domesticity has never been my strong point. i am a person of regimen about many things but I often leave the vacuum in the middle of the living room floor. i have three dogs. i walk on land. my feet reflect that. i am grounded, rooted to the earth. I have befriended the soil and sometimes it comes inside. i have a child and a cat and a small population of spiders who reside in busier corners. Together, we keep the home and the ecosystem as balanced as we can, so leave me be, leave me to my motherhood, my books and words and spiders and dirt, plants and animals. these too, provide harvest. i want our love to be an interlude, the stuff of a troubadour’s song. i need to yearn.

there is thunder, such a joy to listen to but even so, where lightning strikes there is often fire. this rain is blessed, extra welcome during this driest time of year, yet the fear strikes, always, and today the sky filled with smoke. It made for spectacular sunsets here while two hours away, 4500 acres of grassland burned and was 0% contained. Here, midnight summer rains left crystal drops on glowing tobacco flowers which exuded the most utterly intoxicating scent (to be present for this was to understand the origins of every cliche that just happened). The tobacco plants are beginning to go to seed. I have saved some and I have scattered others. Even through this long, dark winter there is a future of infinite opportunity, just as long as it all doesn’t burn down. Now we fear the storms.

We cannot learn to fear this wet necessity, the most natural and encouraging delivery of life. Sometimes now, water here rumbles and burns and people scatter. Water, she’s been in our deepest, darkest places, washing off the leftovers and sending them on their way. She has announced her arrival with rolling booms and flashes of light and we have danced in her court. It’s a blessed and ancient ritual. If only it were simply power to respect, but it engages all our senses. Dangerous territory. We don’t always know what kind of magic we really weave when we draw down the moon.

Posted on by d

minimalism is for empty people.

i used to think that.

in new york, upon entering the moderately-dusty, book-cluttered apartment of an aging intellect, i felt at home. these people were kin. they had ingenious and creative ways of maximizing space. their collected treasures insulated one against the external noise of New York. they would eventually die peacefully, accompanied by their old cat, and then the apartment would be emptied, renovated, and rented for three times the price to someone who shopped at IKEA. it was the way of things. But for the moment, to know one of these old souls, especially one who’d let me visit as often as i liked, was a gift.

That was an interesting time in my life and in my fields of industry, i often found myself in these minimalist, ultra-hip apartments as well – the kind that when people refer to “architectural photography”, these were that. Broad and lofty, they were posh and spotless with expensive, meaningless art on the walls and hard, angular furniture, beyond all scope of possibility for me in both price and environment. i tended to hug the front door in these places. Even in heels, a power suit and a leather bikini, my hair pulled severely back for the role, i feared leaving a trail of dust and reality.

now i live in a 500 or so square foot cabin in a massive northern Californian county that has less people in all of it than the town my mother lives in. I share with my five year old daughter.

i could live minimally. i live in an “outdoor lifestyle” sort of place with woods and trees all around and technically, i should be getting rid of shit and living in the yard, or even perhaps the surrounding wilderness, where i could set up a camp for the summer and save myself $750 a month for a while. I could, I could do this if I didn’t have stuff. Simplicity is supposed to be best in all things. Your child’s brain is supposed to fare better with less, too.

My daughter and i like books though, and good ones make their way to me. someone feeds our local Humane Society’s shelves well. My daughter, she likes art, and art supplies gravitate toward her. How in the hell do you pare down art supplies for a five year old (there’s something terrifying in that, like what if I stole Picasso’s favorite medium and he just never happened)? I have a collection of musical instruments, some of which get played and some of which don’t, but are still very much a part of the family. We like clothes. We thrift them, and we like them.

There is a dog, and there is a cat.

There is stuff and dust and plants and comfort in here, and I guess this is as simple as it gets for me for now.