CANIF, n. If you’re on social media these days—and if you’re not, if you’re existing in some kind of posting-free spiritual hermitage, I’m impressed—then you’ve probably seen discussion of Wordle, a game in which you guess a five-letter word. I don’t usually like games or puzzles of any kind, even word-related ones that you might think I would enjoy given the content of this newsletter, but Wordle only lasts a few minutes so it doesn’t exhaust my limited attention span.
Because I love stressing myself out, I’ve been playing Wordle in French. Every day I open the tab and think “today is the day I will be revealed as a fraud who doesn’t speak French.” So far that has only been true on one day—the word was “bosco,” which means “quartermaster” in English, a word I have very little daily use for despite my abiding love of televisual masterpiece Black Sails.
Anyway, this is a long introduction to say that one of the recent French Wordle answers was “canif,” which means “pocketknife,” and when I told my beloved this, he said, “That sounds like how the French knight in Monty Python would say ‘knife.’”
Readers, I am here to tell you he was absolutely right.
“Canif” did indeed arrive in French from Middle English “knif.” Take from this what you will about the accuracy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Here’s what I’ve read in small-r romance lately:
Longshadow (cis lesbian f/trans ? f, historical, fantasy) by Olivia Atwater. Set in a version of nineteenth-century London inhabited by both human magicians and the fae, these books just have such a distinctive feel—the main point-of-view character in this one is Abigail, who was born in a workhouse, spirited off to Faerie, rescued and adopted by the Lord Sorcier and his wife, and is now trying to figure out her place in the human world (and just why she is so bored by all the men offering to dance with her at balls). In the midst of investigating a series of mysterious deaths, Abigail meets a young woman dressed like a laundress who knows way, way too much about the fae and the possibly-linked-to-the-fae deaths—and who is far more alluring than she should be. A super slow-burn romance with memorable characters. Content guidance: murder, grief.
The Missing Page (m/m, both cis and gay, historical) by Cat Sebastian. I don’t read much mystery as a genre so I have only a vague notion of what people mean when they say “cozy mystery,” except I’m sure this must be it: two people in love trying desperately to take care of each other, oh, and also there’s a bleak country house and a family mystery to solve, but really, are you okay? What’s magic about Cat Sebastian novels is that they’re so gentle and comforting and yet somehow still tense and compelling. Also: so wonderfully queer. Reading this made me want to revisit Hither, Page, which was coincidentally one of the books I reviewed in the first-ever issue of this newsletter. Content guidance: discussion of suicide and institutionalization, murder, grief, mentions of pregnancy, sex.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I’m also reading Shelley Parker-Chan’s queer epic fantasy reimagining of the founding of the Ming Dynasty, She Who Became the Sun. The prose is jaw-dropping. I haven’t finished yet, but I feel like it’s gonna break my heart.
