flyby book rec: wtf did i just read

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So uhhh oh it was millicentthecat who recommended me Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes because the writing style reminded them of mine and I got it from the library as an ebook and read it today, but i was fairly distracted and it did not immediately suck me in at first, but as I was doing other stuff I kept getting pulled back to it because I’d be ruminating absentmindedly on it and be like wait a minute what the fuck did I just read

so it’s a space opera kind of, I guess, but it features a kind of ragtag group of misfits in space kinda dealie [bonus: they’re Space Latinxs, too! at least the MC and her family are], close POV on the main char, some great mild unreliable-narrator stuff, and the whole thing is very… I have to reread it, quickly, tomorrow, because it’s hard for me to say how much of it was that I was distracted and how much is intrinsic to the book. I was certain that I’d been misled and it was book 1 of a series about halfway through because I thought the book was about to end on a cliffhanger because surely that was a whole-ass book already, but no! no, it kept going through the plot twist, and now it’s a Whole Thing, and some of it’s the disorientation of ebooks, you’re never quite sure how much is left of the book, and some of it’s that i really do think the author crammed a trilogy’s worth of plot into a single volume of normal length.

So I won’t comment on that, save to say it seemed very fast-paced to me, not in a bad way, and I’ll have to revisit it to be sure. 

But I did want to share that the main character’s love interest has scales and palps and communicates emotions by scent, so like, A+ for being set in space and actually doing something with the premise. (It was hotter than you’d expect, for being fade-to-black!)

As to whether the author’s got a similar writing style to me, I don’t know if I see it or not, but I did enjoy it and mostly found the style fairly transparent, which is also more or less what i aspire to. So! Maybe if I could ever get my shit together about plotting, I’d be able to compare myself to Valdes, I’m not sure!

If you like Adventures In Space, I’m gonna go ahead and give this one a rec.

The title is so forgettable, though. I mean, i guess it’s more succinct than Space Cubans Kick Some Ass And Teach Aliens About Metaphors, though. 

There’s also a deeply, deeply affecting, if brief, moment where as the main character is hastily catching a friend up on all that’s been going on, the friend stops her and says basically “Girl, that is fucked up that that happened to you and I am sorry and you didn’t deserve that”, and it was like a punch to the gut because the POV character had been so thoroughly internally convinced the fucked up thing was somehow her fault, and it’s a symptom of how fast-paced the book is that just having a single sentence of pause for contemplation seemed like so much, even though they moved right the fuck on– anyway. It was fast but not spare, you know? Breezy but not light. Anyway, I gotta read it a second time before I pass final judgement on the pacing but that’s how it struck me.

yoooooo

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oh lake-effect snow. i woke up late, around 7, and let the cat out, thinking she wouldn’t go, but she did, so i stood there at the open door and looked outside at the bare concrete and looked at the weather app on my phone which told me it was 22 and “a nice day”, ha the sun’s not even really up yet, what a dumb app. 

left the door cracked, went to make coffee, cat came back in and i pushed the door shut. went to sit on the couch, as normal, looked at instagram on my phone. 

My coworker’s wife had a picture of herself in a fur-lined hood and her eyes rolled sideways and had captioned it “lake-effect snow” and I laughed; they live in South Buffalo and always get hit worse than us in the northtowns. Just the way the lake shore is shaped, it tends not to hit us. Resolved to text my coworker and ask if he was gonna make it in; some of our work can be done remotely and if I’m there in person to set it up, even more can be, so it’s not a big deal if he doesn’t make it. 

Got up to get dressed and glanced out the window and did a double-take. Three inches of snow on the ground, on my car, falling so fast I can’t see across the street. When the fuck did that happen!!!! I let the cat out onto bare pavement 20 minutes ago!!!

Anyway I hurried my ass up and got dressed and went in to work, windshield wipers flying to try to keep an open field of view, traffic slow and careful but crazy because even as two plows went by on my two-mile drive the lines on the road are totally buried. 

I’ve made it in and am settled in now, and if I have to I’ll walk home and leave my car here, because holy shit, it is snowing hard. The joy of lake effect is that you may know when it might start but you never know when it might stop, it’s a kind of ongoing thing that keeps happening as long as the wind stays that direction. It’s got to be at a particular angle to hit us in this neighborhood, but clearly, it’s doing that right now, so. 

Oh here’s a good explainer [http://thevane.gawker.com/the-mechanics-behind-lake-effect-snow-natures-greatest-1659711094] (RIP Gawker) of lake effect snow, written around an event that trapped my coworker in his house and left me the only one able to report to work, ELL OH ELL, and here’s a gif from it if you don’t want to read but just want to see: 

(This is the whole Great Lakes, the dark blue are them and the brown is the land. I live on lake Erie which is the second-to-rightmost there, and I’m at the “BUF” plus sign in the lower right, and you can see how that’s right at the upper edge of one of the aqua bands? yeah the snow usually misses me just like that. Not today, though!)