PEEKABOO, interj, n. This week when I picked up my baby from daycare, one of the teachers said, “He plays a mean peekaboo.” I had to agree. This game is one of the cutest behaviors babies learn in their first year, once they figure out that things still exist even if they’re briefly out of sight. As an adult who routinely forgets bags of cilantro in the bottom of the fridge drawer, cups of tea growing cold next to my elbow, paperwork to renew my driver’s license that sits on my desk right in front of the laptop I open every morning, and many other things too far from my immediate attention to list, I remain impressed by babies mastering this skill. Maybe my child can teach me about object permanence some day.
Midway through their first year, babies can initiate the game on their own. They hide behind their hands or a piece of cloth or a toy or any nearby object. My child will do this with anything, even if it is too small to cover his face. When he reappears, I say “Peekaboo!” Naturally it didn’t take long before I asked myself where this strange word came from. (Also: how should I write it? I’ve chosen not to hyphenate it out of a baseless personal distaste for hyphens, but many people write “peek-a-boo.”)
Undefeated peekaboo champ.
I noticed that three of my baby’s grandparents sometimes said “Peep-eye!” instead of “Peekaboo!” Obviously I had to look into that. The regional breakdown of the grandparents is thus: the one who only says “Peekaboo!” is my dad, born British and became a US citizen at age 9, lived all over. The other three are US-born and grew up in Texas (my mom) and Kentucky (my in-laws). So I suspected that “peep-eye” most likely originated in the southern US, and my suspicion was confirmed by the Dictionary of American Regional English, which lists “peep-eye” as “South, South Midlands,” though here is an episode of A Way with Words where someone mentions usage by family in Boston, which fits absolutely no definition of “south.” Maybe they migrated?
Anyway, “peekaboo” itself is—appropriately—surprising and delightful. First of all, it’s way older than I would have guessed. The OED dates it back to back to the 1600s as “peekaboe,” and in its original form “bo-peep” it dates to the 1500s. (I feel sure babies have been playing the game longer than that.)
“Bo-peep,” yes, like the nursery rhyme “Little Bo-Peep,” about a shepherd who loses and then finds her sheep. “Bo-peep” also makes an appearance in the works of Shakespeare (King Lear, Act I, scene 4). I don’t know what led to the switch in order from bo/boo coming first and then peep/peek coming first, but probably it was kids playing the game repeatedly, mixing up the syllables, and then changing language, as kids do. Peep and peek are both verbs having to do with looking, especially from a hidden place. Bo or boo is, and seems to have always been, an interjection of surprise, sometimes meant to frighten. This game has many variant names in English, like beebo and peebo.
Peekaboo seems almost universally adored by babies, and also by any adults who are around babies, and rightly so. It is very endearing. So I wondered what it was called in other languages. Foolishly, I thought to myself, “Why don’t I know how to say ‘peekaboo’ in French?” Then I went looking for the answer, and like a person who was poorly concealing themself behind a piece of furniture only to pop out an instant later, it delighted me—because of course I know this word in French. It’s “coucou.” But I only knew it from people using it as a greeting, so I assumed it was a cute, whimsical version of “hello.” It is, but it’s also part of the game “jouer à faire coucou,” to play peekaboo. And “coucou” is a cuckoo bird and a cuckoo clock, a device which makes something—surprisingly or unsurprisingly—emerge from a hidden place. It turns out that a lot of languages have adopted the cuckoo metaphor/sound for peekaboo, including Portuguese, Finnish, Romanian, Russian, Esperanto, and Polish, at least if we trust this WordReference forum post (it lists many other non-cuckoo languages as well). I can now add Italian and Spanish to the “cuckoo” list, though Italian also seems to have the wonderful phrase “bubu settete.” If you speak another language, please reply and tell me how you say “peekaboo”—I would love to know.
It is always my dream that the word part of this newsletter and the book part of this newsletter will be connected by something other than the fact that I wrote both of them. Themes! Coherence! Wouldn’t that be cool? But sometimes whatever word I’ve opened eighty browser tabs about doesn’t have anything to do with the amazing collection of small-r romance novels I have recently read, and what am I gonna do, hide them from you? Take a peek.
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches (m/f, both cis and het, fantasy) by Sangu Mandanna. This is a totally charming, warmhearted romance about magic and found family that is perfect except for one thing. Here’s my caveat: it’s part of the background of the magical world that all witches are orphans. (They also all seem to be cis women—there is half a sentence indicating that there might be other possibilities, but that’s it.) A witch can grow up to have children, but if her child is also a witch, she dooms herself to an early death and also to knowing that her baby will grow up without her. It is made clear in the book that this is not the incontrovertible natural order of things, but something that was caused by a spell that backfired, which makes it seem fixable. Here is my spoiler: the curse does not get fixed. There is much discussion of making the world better by taking small steps, an approach I am all in favor of, and things seem to be heading in the direction of reducing the 100% parental mortality rate, but there is less explicit “we are for sure going to work on solving this massive ongoing trauma that affects everyone in our community” discussion than I personally would have liked.
I’m grateful that I knew before reading Very Secret Society that the curse does not get solved. I read a review that mentioned it, so I’m passing along that warning here. Having that information allowed me to enjoy what is otherwise one of the best romances I’ve read in months.
Anyway, I’m sorry to spend so much time talking about the one thing that troubled me because I really did love this. It’s beautifully written. There’s a sunshiney, potion-brewing, social-media-star Desi witch and a stubborn, grumpy Irish librarian with three adopted feral witch daughters, one of whom is adorably murderous. They live in a lovely house by the sea with a doting, motherly housekeeper, a gay, octogenarian Shakespeare actor, his quiet, reasonable, gardener husband, and the world’s best-behaved, wisest golden retriever. The cast of supporting witch characters is fantastically inclusive, too. I really loved the found family at the center of this story and I rooted for their happy ending, plus there’s excellent “one character keeps a bedside vigil while the other character recovers” content in this, and the world always needs more of that. Mika, the main character, is so heartwrenchingly lonely and she tries so hard and I wanted everything for her. So I do recommend it. Just, you know, be advised. Content warnings from the author.
[This paragraph used to be a review of a novella by Freydís Moon, who has been revealed to be serial imposter Taylor B. Barton/Taylor Brooke/Brooklyn Ray/other names, and is not Latinx. I am embarrassed to have promoted their work and unhappy to have been deceived.]
(Happily, my reading of this novella coincided with the March 20-27 #TransRightsReadathon, a decentralized movement to uplift trans books and raise money for trans organizations. I didn’t fundraise, but I did start a monthly donation to Transhealth, a trans-led and trans-focused clinic that is local to me.)
Chef’s Kiss (bi cis f/sapphic nonbinary, contemporary) by TJ Alexander. In a #TransRightsReadathon miracle, my library hold on this book arrived much sooner than I thought it would. As soon as I read the first page, it jumped the line of ten other books I was in the middle of and I finished it in a few days, reading in two-minute fragments while my baby was briefly entertained by something safe. Chef’s Kiss is a compelling slow burn driven by the absolutely delicious “we are coworkers who must be professional with each other” repression and the megawatt charisma of cheerful, helpful, sweep-you-off-your-feet strong and sexy nonbinary Ray and their sizzling chemistry with prim perfectionist pastry chef Simone. This book uses a single point-of-view to great effect, as Simone resolutely misinterprets every lingering glance of Ray’s until you, the reader, are shouting THEY WANT TO KISS YOU, DODO at her on every page. Writing a romance that trades on this kind of frustration is a tightrope act, but this one is executed perfectly, which I attribute partly to the characterization—I loved these people and wanted to hang out with them in all their obliviousness—and partly to the plot. Chef’s Kiss is set at a failing food magazine that makes a desperate pivot to video. Ray and Simone become YouTube sensations, but the upper management people at the magazine want Ray’s star power without their nonbinary gender, so the work environment becomes hostile and transphobic. I love a romance where the bigots get their comeuppance, the main characters stand up for each other, and the workers unionize. There’s a fair amount of sort of “Gender 101” stuff in this, as Simone, who is cis, learns about transness, but it has such a satisfying culmination, and the scenes where Simone cares for Ray after their top surgery are so achingly sweet. Content warnings from the author.
Passion Over Power (m/f, both cis and bi, contemporary) by Karmen Lee. I’ve only recently realized that I love second-chance romances, which I think is appropriate for a trope that so often focuses on people who didn’t figure out love the first time around. What a treat to discover that this Black romance set in Atlanta stars a romance writer and an executive—they happen to be, respectively, a young woman and her older brother’s best friend—who had a one-night stand years ago and then both got scared and wildly misinterpreted each other’s feelings. McKenzie (the writer) and Jameson (the exec) remain in touch because of the whole brother’s-best-friend deal, but things have been tense and awkward ever since. In classic, amazing romance character fashion, they get back together by making a sex pact: all fucking, no feelings, in service to McKenzie’s fiction-writing career. They’re not falling in love, they’re doing research. Very, very sexy research. Is there anything better than that? Throw in a powerful family dynasty, overseen by a patriarch who’s hostile to his son’s bisexuality and wants to force him to marry a scion of another wealthy family, and things get even more complicated. Jameson is absolutely gone on McKenzie and has been for years now, and he has had it with his father’s interference in his life. But extricating himself is a messy, emotional process, especially as his father gets a terminal cancer diagnosis. Luckily McKenzie is there to support him through it. Turns out she’s pretty good at feelings, too.
One last note: I have a novel coming out in a couple of weeks and Jenny Hamilton wrote a lovely article about it at Tor.com.
I’ll be back in your inbox in mid-May!