WEAVE, v., and also WEAVE, v., but differently. Yeah, it’s confusing. Do you ever open the dictionary and find out you’ve been wrong about something your whole life? This rocked my world. I mean that positively, though I did have to stare slack-jawed at my screen for a while.
So anyway, we all know about the verb “weave,” meaning to form a textile by interlacing strands, which has the past tense “wove.” I thought that was it, and that sometimes people said “weaved” because of a difference in US English, or because they were regularizing it and one form was on its way out, or whatever. You know, like a shined/shone thing. And I was wrong!
There is another “weave,” sometimes historically spelled weve or waive or wave, and it means to move from side to side while advancing, with a particular connotation of avoiding obstacles, as in “to weave through traffic” or “to duck and weave.” I thought this usage of “weave” was figurative, like a strand being pulled through and around other strands. But it’s not!* It’s just a straight-up different word, with a different root, and a different past tense (weaved).
I’m gonna direct you all to a higher authority for a better explanation, this post at Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words. I will also confess that immediately after learning this, I searched through some of my recent novels to find out if I’d ever fucked this up in print and the answer is absolutely yes, I wove where I should’ve weaved.
*Okay, arguably, if enough people think the usage is figurative, then it becomes figurative. But I honestly don’t know where or how to draw that line, and I’ve been wrong about enough stuff already this newsletter.
Let’s skip to the small-r romance reviews so I can at least kind of halfway know what I’m talking about. Sometimes. Not when it comes to sports, though.
Cleat Cute (f/f, both cis and lesbian, contemporary) by Meryl Wilsner. I am decidedly not a Sports Gay, but I love them. I love sports romances, too, and their many opportunities for rivalry and physical contact and teammates taking care of each other and confronting the pressures of fame and competition. While I can’t tell you if any of the soccer stuff is accurate in this (it feels like it, but what do I know), I can tell you that this book is indeed very cute, and perhaps more importantly, very sexy. If you would like to read a romance in which two hot athletic women repeatedly have gloriously filthy sex instead of having a sustained, mature, open conversation about their feelings, have I got the book for you. That’s not an insult, by the way: I love miscommunication in romance novels. When readers complain about how the characters could have just talked to each other, I’m always like, “have you met any human beings?” We’re not great at that. Also: I think women in romance novels should be allowed to be just as emotionally dense as men, and I think they should fuck about it. That’s feminism, to me.
Letters to Half Moon Street (gay m/bi m, both cis, fantasy, historical) by Sarah Wallace. Three different people wrote to me about how I needed to read this epistolary romance. (Here’s a previous Word Suitcase on the word “epistle” and the epistolary form.) So firstly, thank you to those people, and secondly, obviously I am living my bookish life right. This is a very sweet and charming love story set in a lightly magical Regency England where people can craft small spells—making your shoes more comfortable or extending the life of a candle—and society accepts queer and trans people. (There are characters of color in the cast as well.) But, very cleverly, in order to still have all the formal courtship rules and marriage pressures of the Regency, the worldbuilding uses birth order instead of gender. Inheritance is still determined by primogeniture (albeit gender-neutral, so eldest daughters or nonbinary people can inherit estates and titles), and there are still many social strictures around reputation and class. Everyone in the supporting cast is very worried for Gavin’s reputation, given that he’s a “secondborn” and won’t inherit. Gavin’s correspondence with his sister Gerry is the heart of the book, and it is delightful. One of the pleasures of epistolary fiction is when different letter writers characterize people and events very differently. Gavin tells his sister that he is churlish and intolerable company, and she asks him why he’s being so hard on himself. Gavin tells his sister that he can’t imagine the handsome Mr. Charles Kentworthy having any interest in him, and she says so why’s he hanging around you all the time, then. “Cozy” means different things to different readers, but I think this book qualifies: it’s quiet and understated with an appreciation for domestic details, and while there is conflict, it’s caused by overbearing family members, and the closest brush with peril is an extended bedside vigil for a sick character. The story is very much about Charles waiting for Gavin to finally feel at ease, and that kind of patience and devotion is very romantic.
The Jasad Heir (m/f, both cis and het, fantasy) by Sara Hashem. I shouldn’t be “shelving” this with the romances—it’s the first of a series and decidedly does not have a Happily Ever After—but point the first, the bulk of this book is dedicated to the very complicated relationship (and yes, burgeoning romance) that the main character, secret heir to a destroyed kingdom, has with the enemy she’s forced to work with, and point the second, this is my newsletter and I do what I want. Anyway, more importantly, the fantasy setting here is Egypt-inspired (the author is Egyptian-American) and it’s fun as hell. People eat aish baladi and sesame-seed candy. They wear galabiya. The cultural details do a lot to brighten what is otherwise a grim political backdrop. I loved how many shifts in perspective there were in the retelling of the history. In the beginning it seems like a conflict of good and evil, but by the end of the book, we see that every royal family is a horrifying tangle of torture and abuse, and they are all sucking the life out of the common people, and every nation is one tiny misstep away from devastating war with its neighbors. This is exactly the kind of fucked-up setting necessary for true enemies-to-lovers romance, I think; air-conditioned cubicles sharing a half-wall just isn’t the same. Naturally, this fucked-up setting has produced a main character who is a Furious Murder Girl, just feral and violent and full to the brim with trauma. I know what you’re thinking: but does she hold a knife to the throat of the hot evil prince who captures her? Rest assured she does. But does the evil prince have silver anime hair? Also yes. Finally, are the two of them later forced to attend a fancy gala in finery, and do they each experience a moment of speechlessness when confronted with the other’s hotness? Yes and yes. These jokes are not a dismissal; I had a great time. This kept me turning pages late into the night. The romance is, as true enemies-to-lovers must be, very, very slow to unfold, and it’s extra delicious to experience it primarily through the point of view of our Furious Murder Girl, clueless as to what love looks or feels like in herself or anyone else. She doesn’t get that she’s being yearned for, but I did.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I recently became a subscriber to Jewish Currents and received, as part of my subscription, Palestinian playwright Khawla Ibraheem’s A Knock on the Roof, about a woman in Gaza facing imminent Israeli bombardment. In 2014, the Israeli army used to drop “alert bombs,” a knock on the roof to alert people to exit a building five to fifteen minutes before it was blown up. The main character of the play is a woman obsessively practicing packing a bag and running down her building’s seven flights of stairs with her six-year-old son and elderly mother in tow. It is frantic and desperate and occasionally darkly funny, but most of all gutting. It really delves into the psychological torture of living under such a threat. The play was scheduled to be performed in October 2023, but the current war broke out—one in which the “knock on the roof” practice is no longer in use. (A horrifying, grim but necessary clarification: in the last months of 2023, the Israeli military deliberately bombed alleged targets in their homes, at night, when their whole families were present, using a tracking system they named “Where’s Daddy?”—in case you wondered if the military somehow did not know they were murdering sleeping children. That linked article is well reported and—obviously—profoundly disturbing. It has photos, too.)
I also really loved the Jewish Currents newsletter’s weekly parshah commentary last week (April 5) on the subversive power of interpretation.
And on a lighter note, I’ve gone back to using RSS feeds to keep up with the internet, which has led me to peruse MetaFilter again, something I did faithfully as a teenager in the pre-social-media-algorithm 00s. It’s still one of the best places on the internet, and this post collecting linguistics papers and comedy routines about the rich and expansive vocabulary for drunkenness in English is wonderful.
That’s all for this time. I’ll be back in your inbox on April 28.