COP, n. I am furious and heartsick from watching this nationwide police riot where cops retaliate against anyone who would stop them from killing Black people. But I am proud to witness brave citizens take to the streets to stand up to state violence and smash monuments to slavery.
Did you know that “cop,” though the etymology is uncertain, might be related to Latin capere, meaning “to seize”? This certainly feels like a more apt name for the lawless militia brutalizing Black Lives Matter protestors than “police,” from Latin politia (civil administration) and Greek polis (city).
“Pigs” strikes me as unfair to the animals, who are really pretty cute.
This week in small-r romance, I read…
The Worst Best Man (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Mia Sosa. I am late to this party, and it is a party: this book is so much fun. The Worst Best Man stars wedding planner Carolina Santos, jilted at the altar after her ex-fiancé spent a drunken night out with his brother, the best man. Three years after her cancelled wedding, Lina runs into her ex-fiancé and his brother, Max, while trying to secure a new job at the Cartwright hotel, and then she’s forced to work with Max on a marketing pitch in order to get the job that she wants. You can guess where things go from there—it’s messy and funny and wonderful. I loved Lina, who is organized and practical and trying very hard not to let anybody know that she has feelings of any kind, and the book deftly addresses the kind of judgment an Afro-Latina woman gets subjected to if she cries or raises her voice in public. Lina’s Brazilian family also plays a big role in her life and they’re one of the best parts of the book. She loves her mother and her aunts and she worries that if she doesn’t succeed in her career, she won’t be worth of the sacrifices they made as immigrant parents. And her siblings and cousins are great, especially her cousin Natalia:
“Natalia, you can’t use your wedding as an excuse for everything,” I say. “Everyone knows you’d stab someone with a stiletto simply for existing.”
“Exactly,” she says from the changing room. “That’s why I’ve always hated the term bridezilla. For one thing, it’s sexist. Women under immense pressure who speak up for what they want? Monsters. But also, it erases part of my identity. My true friends know I’m like this all the time.”
One of my favorite things this book did was to tweak the “all is lost” moment so that Lina realizes not quite all is lost—even if she can’t have Max, she’ll still have this big loving family, her friends, and the career she’s built. She’ll be sad, but she’ll make it. There’s a big, meaningful difference between “my life is not worth living without you” and “my life is pretty great, actually, but it would be better with you,” and I’m always glad to see a romance novel opt for the latter. This book has such a big heart. Content warnings: sex.
Stormsong (f/f, both cis and bi?, fantasy, historical) by CL Polk. I mentioned this book last week, before I’d even finished it, because I was so excited about it. The ending did not disappoint. This book is set in a fantasy society that is founded on an atrocity, and it was so smart and clear-eyed about the consequences of that—how the wealthy and powerful will behave, what lengths they’ll go to in order to keep their power. And it’s beautiful. Every sentence was so precise. Here’s a passage I already tweeted about, but I’m highlighting it again: “...the fire dancing in the grate, its crackling burning crowding out anything I might have heard—the whisper of Avia’s coat as she pulled her arms free, the clink of her silver cuff links landing in a wooden tray, a sigh as the stiff boiled shirt front and tall collar came away”. The tension between what Grace can hear (the fire crackling) versus what she wants to hear/imagines (Avia getting naked), plus the specificity and sensuality of the sounds (whisper, clink, sigh) is so good. Content warnings: murder, references to war, torture, institutionalization, magical human rights atrocities, emotional abuse.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince, which is young adult fantasy with a high body count and an absolutely ruthless female protagonist, and Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things, which is a beautiful volume of poetry that I will definitely be returning to in the future.
This week’s newsletter marks one year of Word Suitcase. I’ve written 53 of these things—the total word count is somewhere in the neighborhood of 110,000. (If you don’t regularly deal in word counts, that’s about 366 pages.) Word Suitcase is now longer than my doctoral dissertation and four of my five novels, though still shorter in terms of both hours spent and tears cried. (Dissertations Georg, who lives in library cage & cries over 10,000 tears each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.)
Of those many words/pages, I think the following have been my personal favorites:
Butter gremlins (September 22, 2019, re: the word “butterfly,” Baudelaire on Delacroix, Sierra Simone’s novel Feast of Sparks, writing sex scenes, Gérard de Nerval, and folklore)
Shoe against the machine (November 17, 2019, re: the word “sabotage,” a selection of romance novels, among them Alyssa Cole’s An Extraordinary Union)
the shore littered with stars (December 8, 2019, re: the word “eavesdropping,” Arkady Martine’s sci-fi novel A Memory Called Empire, translation, and a poem by Mark Strand)
Secret masterpieces (April 5, 2020, re: the word “discomfit,” the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the portraiture of Elisabeth Vigée le Brun and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece,” and a selection of romance novels)
Some of you have been reading since the beginning and some of you are new subscribers, and either way, thanks for reading! It’s my pleasure to nerd out about words and books in your inbox.
That said, I do have a novel to finish, and also some French courses (possibly online, possibly in-person, possibly both? who knows!) to plan, so Year II of Word Suitcase will be less regular than Year I. For starters, I’m taking the next two weeks off. See you all in Messidor.
