Upside Ann

 Remember how I commented that I was disappointed NOT TO BE BLOWN AWAY by The Atlas Six?? (Hmmm maybe that was my comment on The Antidote?  Well, spoiler alert.) And, yet it ended in a bit of a cliffhanger and got all exciting near the end... so I read book two.  Yep. No. However, I can always find a few quotes to enjoy. There was no villain.  Atlas Blakely might have wanted Callum dead, but that didn't make him the bad guy.  Tristan might have betrayed Callum, but he wasn't the bad guy, either.  This was just the world.  You trusted people, you loved them, you offered them the dignity of your time and the intimacy of your thoughts and the frailty of your hope and they either accepted it and cared for it or the rejected it and destroyed it and in the end, none of it was up to you.  This is just what you got.  Heartbreak was inevitable.  Disappointment assured. Maybe that was my problem with these books.  Maybe I need...

 My mother died March 24, 2024.  I'm having a hard time processing that, I guess.  It is only starting to hurt.  When I was little ("like a number approaching infinity, say, 6") and not so little, but younger (30), I could not imagine a world without my mother.  To consider such a place and time was unbearably painful.  Yet, here I am.  And, often, it saddens and confuses me to say, I don't feel anything.  More, when the loss was new, I am ashamed that I felt relief.  I was her caretaker.  I wasn't all that great at it.  She told me so regularly.  She told me I was a disappointment.  She told me I lacked compassion.  She was sad and lonely and she wanted me to split my soul open and share everything with her.  She wanted me to satify her needs for connection and give her the opportunity to mother me in my distress.  "Ann.  Why are you so unhappy?"  I think I tried at least a few couple times, but i...

 I am here to depsit the first time I drank a strawberry soda.  Mountains of ice and underneath a greiny pink slush, a taste like what I imagined kissing to be.  The fizz rose to my brain and I heard God and God said: order a second strawberry soda, Bertie.  I never want the memory of that first drink to fade.  When I'm an old man and all my senses have dulled, I want to taste my twelfth summer again-- The Antidote is a prairie witch.  Maybe you are like me and haven't run into a prairie witch before.  Maybe after the WWII they all retired.  But a prairie witch is a person who absorbs the memories of her clients into herself and stores them.  The client is thereby freed of the memory but can collect it back at any later time- so long as he retains the receipt with the identifying number.  Sometimes people want to bank special memories to relive later (see above) but, more often, they want to forget something horrible, painful, and, parti...

 I was REALLY hoping this would blow me away like the first Olivie Blake book I read: Masters of Death   .  I think that dream probably hurt my appreciation.  I found it hard to get into at first but by the end, I was aware that I needed to read book 2.   The characters all possess pretty amazing magical abilities.  Two can manipulate the physical world, one can read/enter minds, one can read/manipulate emotion, one can see energies.  I most enjoyed the naturalist.  Plants communicate with her.  They LOVE her.  She is TIRED of them.  "She wanted literature, and, more important, the freedom it brought to think of something that did not gaze at her with the blank neediness of chlorophyll,"  "She had mentioned once that certain types of English lawns had a tendency to be excessively entitled."  I guess I expected more independence from organisms that can synthesize their own glucose....