Spiny things
ECHINACEA, n. Today my beloved was planting purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, a plant native to North America, sometimes used in medicine, that looks like this:
Several purple coneflowers. Photo by Mark Teachey on Unsplash.
Echinacea, a word that no longer looks real to me after the number of times I have typed it into Google, comes from the Greek ekhinos, which apparently means both “hedgehog” and “sea urchin.” You know, spiny things. The flowers, as you have no doubt astutely noted, have a spiny-looking bit in the middle, not unlike a hedgehog. The internet tells me some people call Echinacea purpurea “hedgehog coneflower,” which I didn’t know but would like to adopt.
A hedgehog in the grass. Photo by Dušan veverkolog on Unsplash.
“Ekhinos” might also give us the word “echidna,” an animal native to Australia and New Guinea that is very hedgehog-like. (Spiny.) The internet tells me there was also a monster in Greek myth named Echidna, and it’s possible the animal is named after her, although she was part-woman part-snake, and did not, as far as I can tell, look anything like this:
An echidna in some grass. Photo by Meg Jerrard on Unsplash.
Knuckles, a character from Sonic the Hedgehog, is, to my knowledge, the world’s most famous fictional echidna.
Knuckles, an anthropomorphized red cartoon echidna. Image from Wikipedia.
This week in small-r romance, there weren’t any hedgehogs, but there were magic talking badgers (called “gnoles”) and some very prickly characters:
Pansies (gay cis m/queer cis? m, contemporary) by Alexis Hall. Okay. I reread the first three entries in this series (Glitterland, Waiting for the Flood, For Real) over the past couple of weeks and decided that they were all so good that it was finally time to read the fourth book. I had been afraid to read Pansies because one of the characters used to bully the other, and that is a trope I vehemently dislike, especially in realistic, contemporary settings. But Alexis Hall is such a good writer that I trusted him, and wow was my trust warranted. This is a very emotional, and sometimes difficult book, but it’s also very tender in the best of ways. It also has a romcom-worthy “oh nooo” scene where one character promises to rehang the other character’s shower curtain rod and instead destroys the whole bathroom, but as always, all is well in the end. Content warnings: bullying, homophobia including homophobic violence, sex.
Swordheart (m/f, both cishet, fantasy) by T. Kingfisher. This was my first T. Kingfisher novel but it is already not my last, because I picked up Paladin’s Grace immediately after (as in I finished Swordheart at 12:43am and was reading Paladin’s Grace by 12:44am). I just love fantasy so much—you know, where a lovable band of unlikely allies wander around on a quest and have to run from strange creatures, and there are talking animals and a magic sword, and also there’s queerness and some people fall in love—and this has everything I like, including a great nonbinary character, plus it’s funny, but the funny stuff doesn’t make the tense, scary parts any less tense. Good shit. Content warnings: violence, murder, some elements of gore, some acephobic remarks in dialogue.
