Goodreads | Amazon US | B&N | Blackwell’s | Bookshop “I love women talking to each other. I love women reading each other, through letters and journals and flowers, offering up the stories of themselves to each other’s tender scrutiny. I love women being friends and being lovers, in all of their shapes, across the breadth and depth of their lives.” i am a huge amal el-mohtar fan, so when i found out she was getting a story collection published i knew it was going to be everything. i truly loved this so much and was just so impressed by the flow of the entire collection. i also loved the themes and throughlines from glass and the meaning of fragility, to wizards and the wars the create, to wood and the act of being carved, to flowers with and without thorns, to witches the magic of storytelling, to birds/owls and the things they see, to tea and the comfort that can come with a cup, to letters and the way we can communicate in so many different ways. okay, that was a bit of a gush, but truly these stories really ebbed and flowed from one to another and i loved everything the reading experience. ━━♡ SEASONS OF GLASS AND IRON ★★★★ “Why shouldn’t shoes help their wearers travel? Perhaps, she thinks, what’s strange is the shoes women are made to wear: shoes of glass; shoes of paper; shoes of iron heated red-hot; shoes to dance to death in.” two women with glass and iron under their feet, experiencing different kinds of abuse for survival, but realize they can share their magic with each other because they both choose it. this was just perfect and i loved reading every word. wonderful way to start this collection and truly an amazing titular story. cw/tw: abuse, talk of abuse in past, talk of injury ━━♡ THE GREEN BOOK ★★★ you all know i adore unique storytelling and epistolary narrated tales, and this really has that, but with such an eerie feeling sinister vibe. i feel like this was an amazing tease to what i wish was a full-length story about a magical book, a girl whose wishes didn’t matter, and a sisterhood with secrets. cw/tw: blood ━━♡ MADELEINE ★★★★ “She wonders at how change comes in like a thief in the night, dismantling our sense of self one bolt and screw at a time until all that’s left of the person we think we are is a broken door hanging off a rusty hinge, waiting for us to walk through.” this one might have impacted me harder, because i am currently back in michigan while reading this, in part to help my family with my grandfather who has alzheimers. grieving loved ones, grieving life, grieving change you didn’t ask for, its all can feel so unnavigable. but having someone to figure things out with, to believe in light with, to hold hope with – it makes living feel traversable. cw/tw: alzheimer’s, talk of loss of mother, grief, talk of loss of father, one sentence cancer mention, loneliness ━━♡ THE LONELY SEA IN THE SKY ★★★ we are inside the journal of a planetary geologist who is disassociating, while others are discovering teleportation from diamonds on neptune.. the cost of things, sometimes so unnecessary, can be so very high. cw/tw: discussions of mental health, disassociation, suicide ideation ━━☆ SONG FOR AN ANCIENT CITY a beautiful poem of yearning ━━♡ AND THEIR LIPS RANG WITH THE SUN ★★★★ chosen at birth to be taught a ritual that you will eventually pass down while losing your voice. this is the story of one sun woman who chose a different life and i loved it a lot. cw/tw: blood, pregnancy ━━♡ A TALE OF ASH IN SEVEN BIRDS ★★★★ “We fall as cinders, scattered on the wind. We fall as leaves, a bruising brightness—and lightly on foreign shores, foreign ports, foreign parts. Our shapes unseamed, our mouths untongued, we swallow our burning into new bodies. We break space around our hearts, keep our memories nestled in the hollows of bones built from the outside in.” i really loved this one, reading about seven different types of birds and the horro...
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