This book really feels like it was written to promote a website and series of worksheets.

I first heard of Brenda Shaughnessy's work on a poetry podcast... some indeterminate amount of time before the pandemic. I filed her away as a poet to get to at some point, and then didn't until my current madcap poetry binge, and was pleased to find that I had stumbled into checking out yet another volume of queer verse. The pieces I like best are the ones about girlhood and adolescence, especially "Is There Something I Should Know?" which has the following line that stopped me short:

"But if I suffered sharply, I could scarcely trace it soft:"

And, I mean, wow, right? That thumps along so satisfying, so Dickinson-esque. It feels good in ear and mouth. It's smooth and round and contained, despite the colon that draws you deeper into the long poem in which it's nestled. That's a line to use as a social media bio, write on the cover of your notebook, tattoo on your heart if not your skin.

I think this is a collection I can try to tag along with and take something from.

An unusual poetry collection, not quite a verse novel but more a collage of voices, set in a dystopian future in which cephalopods come to land and subjugate humanity. I like Shaughnessy's wordplay that risks sounding like groan-inducing punning but avoids doing so, unfolding multiple meanings and inviting the reader to pause and unpack what is being said. But I occasionally struggled to maintain a sense of the narrative thread and the identity of the speakers.

ACAB, except for Larry.

A solid recommendation from my colleague Elizabeth. Truly Devious follows true crime aficionado Stevie as she is accepted to Ellingham Academy, a prestigious (and free! what a dream) school founded on the guiding principle that learning is a game, and the site of unsolved crimes that occurred in the 1930s... crimes that Stevie is determined to solve, despite decades of fruitless sleuthing by professionals.

Between the alternating timelines/narratives and the dark academia atmosphere (my catnip), this book had me from the very beginning, despite the fact that it's the first in a series and spends a lot of time laying the groundwork. But right when I thought, "hmm, I like this, but nothing much is happening, really," someone turned up dead, and the plot ratcheted up to a conclusion that leaves, well, two subsequent books' worth of information to be desired. (And, I hear, yet another on the way.)

Aside from the setting (which is fantastic--did I mention the lavish old houses? the creepy statuary? the secret tunnels??), Stevie is by far my favorite thing about Truly Devious. I admire her tenacity, intelligence, and frank outlook on life, and I think that her struggles with anxiety are presented well, both in terms of realism and the way they add to her characterization, feeding into her interest in true crime and her desire to seek answers and certainty. I also think that enrolling in a fancy school for the sole purpose of researching her special interest, about which she has read multiple books and 8,000+ pages of transcripts, is high-key autistic behavior. Whether or not she was intended to be, I headcanon her as at least spectrum-adjacent.

Eager to continue this series.

This book is so queer, and so wonderful, and so seemingly tailored specifically for me--like, my girlfriend kept asking the tongue-in-cheek question of whether I might have written it myself, in the future, and sent it back in time, somehow--that I'm not even equipped to review it properly. It was a pure joy for me to read, so I'm not even that upset that it took me forever to get through. It was kind of nice spending a month with these characters. I would probably spend more time with them, and do so happily. (I'd rather like to do that in the form of Netflix adapting this into a show. You know, just putting that out into the universe.)

I found it difficult to engage fully with this book because the narrator herself is so disengaged from the scene she inhabits, or at least, she speaks to the reader as though she is. I spent 300 pages with characters who never felt like more than vague acquaintances, wondering about an experimental science that was never really explained. This book is an incredibly slow burn that builds to an unsettling conclusion, but turning the final page feels somewhat anticlimactic... But I would absolutely watch a film adaptation, if it granted the story some objectivity that the book lacks as a result of being filtered through the narrator’s skewed perspective. I want little glimpses of how people perceive her, and how the house really is, earlier in the narrative to contrast with her ideas of reality.

Maybe I’ll appreciate this more the longer I think about it.

A gorgeous piece of weird fiction pasted together from paintings, seashells, prescription bottles, wolf teeth, and typewriter ribbons.