magicasen | Reading

Yuletide works are scheduled to go live a little under five days from now, at 9pm UTC 24 December (if all goes well and there are no further pinch hits needed).

COUNTDOWN TO REVEALS

Treats

Treats in both the Madness and Main Yuletide collections are enthusiastically welcomed. You can post a treat for someone in the main collection up until 9pm UTC 24 December</>, and in the Madness collection up until 9pm UTC 25 December. There's more information about posting treats here. If you're hunting for inspiration, see also the mini-challenges tag at

yuletide, and of course, please consider treats for pinch hitters.

Pinch hits

We’re still looking for intrepid writers to take on post-deadline pinch hits. As of this post, we need writers for:

PH #184: Aveyond (Video Games), Quasimorph (Video Game), Geneforge

PH #198: even if TEMPEST 宵闇にかく語りき魔女 (Visual Novel), Flowers Series (Visual Novels), Lkyt. (Visual Novel)

As well as offers from writers, we're keen to hear (yuletideadmin@gmail.com) from anyone with tips on how to consume or review details of these canons!

Please look at our outstanding pinch hit details, and help if you can!

Beta requests

Can you help out a fellow writer by beta-reading their work? Please check the hippo-want-ads at the Discord server, or email mods if you can help with one of the following requests and we’ll get you in touch.

As of this post, beta readers are needed for the following requests (click/expand to view):

1.2K T-rated Mayor of Kingstown
15k+ E-rated Damien/Gerald Coldfire Trilogy
7k Batman Wayne Family Adventures
Racepicker and sensitivity reader for a 10k fic featuring a young Black English girl
4.7k slang and other dialogue choices right for a Gen Z Black Londoner, Rivers of London
13k Lunar Chronicles
2.8k fic for The Odd Couple (TV 1970)
4k Nicked by M.T. Anderson

We also have some less time-sensitive beta requests in the server's betas-wanted channel:
WH40k
The Witcher III/Chronicles of Narnia
The Stakeout from Inside No. 9
Daria (Cartoon)

Meanwhile, please check your work

Please check that you uploaded the right draft. Mistakes can happen to anyone, but checking that everything looks right is a crucial part of posting. Make sure your work has a title and that the summary doesn't say "tbd". Please check that all the text is there and you didn't post the version with [name?] and [thing goes here] notes. Any uploaded version must be a complete story that is readable as it is, even if you're still making edits between now and reveals. Please don't risk disappointing your recipient or requiring mods to seek a back-up pinch hit.

Please check that all required characters feature in the work. This is likely to mean all the characters your recipient tagged, not just the ones they wrote prompts for. Or, if they selected Any, a character from the tag set. They may have selected additional tags that give further guidance about which characters to include - please check that too. If your recipient selected Worldbuilding and you're not sure there's enough of it, get a second opinion - a friend, a beta. If there is any doubt about whether your story contains all the characters it needs to contain, please check with mods. Prompts alone are not automatically permission to leave characters out. The use of additional tags may still leave some grey areas.

Please review your author's notes. Yuletide stories are anonymous for one week - do not give your name or link to your personal sites or socials in your author's note. Do not promise expanded, future, or replacement gifts - your work needs to stand alone. And do not apologise for your work in your author's note, or talk about what a struggle it was to write. People often feel doubt as well as excitement when giving someone a story, but don't give your recipient your doubts as part of their gift. In your author's note, please follow the principle that if you cannot say something positive, don't say anything at all.

Please check your recipient's Do-Not-Wants. Yes, again.

Please check your story in general! You don't have to get it beta read, but please check spelling and grammar. Please make sure that it’s not a wall of text with no spacing between paragraphs - and, conversely, that there aren’t too many blank lines between paragraphs.

(And, having fully prepared for reveals - we hope that you are excited for them! We are!)

Miscellaneous

If you're unlikely to be able to comment until the end of the anon period or later, consider letting your author know at the AFK post.
You can find beta volunteers at this post or at the Discord server.

sineala

Steady (35953 words) by Sineala
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Avengers (Comics)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Characters: Steve Rogers, Tony Stark
Additional Tags: Romance, Love Confessions, Marriage Proposal, Depression, Alcoholics Anonymous, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Drug Addiction, Past Drug Use, Post-Marvel Comic Event: Secret Empire (2017), Post-Marvel Comic Event: A.X.E.: Judgement Day (2022)
Series: Part 2 of When Trouble Came
Summary: After the events of "When Trouble Came," Steve takes Tony home with him, back to his childhood apartment where he now lives, so they can spend the night together. Conversation ensues, and it becomes very clear that they're going to be together for a lot longer than just the night.

This is the epilogue to When Trouble Came that I promised I had. I thought that this was going to be a nice little timestamp from Steve's POV, and then I realized it was 35,000 words. Whoops.

Current Mood: creative

muccamukk

Archive of Our Own: Protect Your Contact Information From Scammers.

In the last year, AO3 has seen a rise in "art commission" spambot comments. The bots leaving these comments pretend to be artists who want to make comics or illustrations for a fan's fic. After convincing their targets to contact them off AO3, they scam their targets into paying for that art. Fans have reported that after sending payment, they either received AI-generated art or nothing at all.

If you receive a scam comment from a guest, you can press the "Spam" button on the comment. This helps train our automated spam-checker to better detect this type of behavior.

If you encounter a scammer that has a registered account, or if you encounter a guest posting scam comments on someone else's work, please report them to the Policy & Abuse committee. To do so:

Select the "Thread" button on the scammer's comment. This will take you to the specific comment page.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Policy Questions & Abuse Reports.

In the "Brief summary of Terms of Service violation" field, enter "Spambot".

In the "Description of the content you are reporting" field, enter "This is a spambot, their username is USERNAME."

Reporting in this fashion helps us auto-sort your report so that it can be handled as soon as a Policy & Abuse volunteer is available. To help us address reports about these types of bots as fast as possible, please only submit one report per account, and don't include multiple accounts in the same report.

If you encounter a scam commenter on someone else's work, you can let the work creator know the commenter is likely a bot and link them to this news post.

(Thanks to JT for reminding me where the post was.)

Current Mood: pissed off

muccamukk

Fandom and Art Stuff

elasticella: sapphic stocking stuffers.
Lots of great prompts! Open for fills until 31 December, or they're all full, whichever happens last.

Street Art Utopia: The Giant Kitten.
By Oriol Arumi at Torrefarrera Street Art Festival in Torrefarrera, Cataluna, Spain

Rolling Stone: Taylor Swift’s Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack.
I read this, and was like "hmmmmmmm." Because it seemed plausible that there were bots or whatever, but also a lot of people I'd seen critiquing the album were definitely humans that I knew. But also human conversation can be driven by bots without the humans realising it. And also, I don't care enough about TS to look into the whole mess. Then I saw the following.

MedusoneDeluxe: Rolling Stone embarrasses itself to defend Taylor Swift. Again. (Video: 41 Minutes).
I love it when people actually read the research. So probably not a significant number of bots, but also the science is so sloppy it's impossible to tell.

Trans Rights Are Human Rights
The Walrus: Kids Deserve a New Gender Paradigm by Kai Cheng Thom.
Lovely, thoughtful look at how we see gender, and maybe kids have this more figured out than a lot of adults to. Older piece, but I enjoyed reading it again.

The Guardian: The WI and Girlguiding have been pressured to exclude trans women – yet the law is clear as mud by Jess O'Thompson.
The Guardian published something non-terrible about trans people in the U.K.! Do the Dance of Joy!

CTV News: Skate Canada to stop hosting events in Alberta due to sports gender law.
Solidarity! From a national sporting organisation! A MIRACLE!

Canadian Politics Stuff
The Tyee: Human Rights Tribunal on RCMP Methods Delays Decision Nearly a Year.
This is some fucking bullshit. The elders are dying of old age before they're seeing any kind of justice. I am enjoying how Amanda Follett Hosgood is so out of fucks to give on the publication ban that she's basically putting up a bright red arrow pointing to A.B.'s name, even if she can't actually say it. Which is John Furlong, incidentally. And seriously, fuck that guy.

The Globe and Mail: Leilani Muir made history suing Alberta over forced sterilization.
This is an older obit, but I dug it up for a school project, and thought it was worth sharing. Not enough people know about Canada's eugenics policies.

Times Colonist: Residential school survivor says he will protest OneBC at other campuses.
We shouldn't need our elders to be superheroes, but nonetheless many of them are.

Times Colonist: Water-contaminated fuel caused crash of Port Hardy-bound plane: TSB.
This is neither here nor there, really, but I find Transportation Safety Board investigations really interesting. Even if they take a really long time (i.e. I found this while looking for information about a more recent crash, but will probably have to wait a couple years to find out what happened to that guy).

Slightly Dated U.S.A. Politics Stuff
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American: December 6, 2025.
Beautifully ties in the events of Pearl Harbor with the politics of today.

Rebecca Solnit: Solidarity Stitches Us Together: Today, World AIDS Day, Is Also the 70th Anniversary of Rosa Parks's Historic Protest.

The fabric of this country is forever being torn apart by hate and exclusion; it is forever being stitched into, as the site says, new patterns, new connections, new relationships. Solidarity is always about connection across difference, about the way you stand with someone you have something crucial in common with but who may be different in other ways. It is a quilter's art of bringing the fragments together into a whole. It is e pluribus unum.

sineala

What I Just Finished Reading

Katie Chandler, Backhanded Compliments: A f/f tennis rivals-to-lovers romance that's also a name-on-wrist soulmate story, because I guess this is just what Real Books are like now. It's... okay? The smut was actually decent, and there was some interesting worldbuilding in here (everyone visits the archaeological museum of Naples and talks about the classical views of soulmates), but I think the author should have built up the rivalry before having them actually realize they were soulmates, because pre-existing character investment is not happening in original fiction, and it wasn't really clear to me why they couldn't just be together.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Alien vs. Captain America #2, Avengers #33 )

What I'm Reading Next

I have to read one more book this year so that I do not fail my pitiful Goodreads challenge.

lysimache says I should finish reading this novella about Pegasus written for students learning Ancient Greek, but my bookmark fell out and I don't remember where I was. Also I forgot the word for "bridle."

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

The deadline has passed, and the main collection is temporarily closed. ETA - now open again!

Congratulations to everyone who has posted! Pat yourself on the back, take a breath, and then please check wordcount, formatting, html; check that you've uploaded the correct version, and that all your text is actually there. You can get to what you've submitted from your Statistics page, or from your Works in Collections. Your story should be marked as "complete" rather than one or more of multiple chapters yet to come.

To all who didn't make it this year: it happens, and we hope you enjoy the collection reveals.

To all who are still working on beta jobs, treats, or pinch hits: thank you and good luck!

Pinch hits coming!!
Post-deadline pinch hits will be available soon at

yuletide_pinch_hits. This next round will be due at 9 AM UTC, 22 December.

See what time that is in YOUR timezone
See countdown

Beta requests
We have outstanding beta requests on the Yuletide Discord (please see the #hippo-want-ads channel), and more betas are always welcome at the Dreamwidth beta post.

There is also an Away from Keyboard post up on the participant community, for you to (optionally) let your author know if it'll be a while before you can read your gift.

If there seems to be an issue with your posted work, we'll contact you via the email address associated with your AO3 account. Please check you can access that!

muccamukk

These are probably going to be short and sweet, given I read them in late August through September. I'll hopefully catch up to where I am now by the time next term starts, and I go back to only reading stuff for school. Expect a bunch of books about gender, followed by all the romance novels I read on my off time, lol.

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, narrated by Jefferson White
I had only the vaguest memories of the account of Haymitch's games from Catching Fire, or anything else from Catching Fire, for that matter. I never did read the other prequel. If Haymitch is one of your favourite characters, and you just want backstory on all the olds who show up later in the original series, this is solid fun. Collins did a good job of thinking through where everyone came from, and how they got like they are when Katniss meets them. Effee showing up is especially fun. We also get confirmation of several queer characters (which I assume she wasn't allowed to do in 2008), and an interesting note about the Capital banning generative A.I..

I enjoyed all the themes of the amount of groundwork needed to put into a revolution, and how the lives of the people in this story eventually led to the events of the first books. Especially how the characters themselves feel like they've failed and wasted everything, but the reader can tell how it's more a process of (horribly) figuring out what works and what doesn't.

At the same time, it didn't feel like a story of only moving pieces into place for the "real story" that will start later. It certainly doesn't read as a stand alone novel, but it does stand up as being about these characters in this moment. Haymitch is such a sweet kid when we first meet him, and is a bit more of a dynamic lead than Katniss (i.e., he actually likes people and wants to talk to them), and given the pile of characters we meet for the first time (because these games have twice the number of tributes), each of the new people get enough development for the reader to become least somewhat invested in what happens to them (spoiler alert: it's the Hunger Games, so...).

I always found the games themselves the least interesting part of the earlier books, which is largely true here as well, but the story still moves along pretty fast. They probably would've been more interesting if I remembered what the story was supposed to be, as Collins puts a lot into the contrasts and surprises. The post-games section did draaaaaaaaaaaaag though. Especially the recap of the games we'd just read about, and the part that was set up as this huge poetic tragedy. I think if you're like... 14, you'd be weeping through the end, but I found it overdone, and thought her editor should've made her stop.

Still, I'm happy to have read it.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
I hadn't read these in fifteen years, so I thought I'd swing back through to remember what we were supposed to know about all the characters we met in the prequel. Enjoyed it. Games still dragged.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
So most of the characters from Haymitch's book actually show up here, it turns out. So I read this one. Enjoyed this too, though found the games section dragged a bit. The love triangle continues obnoxious, and I did myself the favour of not reading Mockingjay again.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
I've been hearing bits of this quoted since it came out, and it's quite good. I think the target is more people involved in public life, but it was still good to listen to, these being the times that were given to us. I know it's his area, but I wish there had been more examples from autocracies other than 1930s Germany, for the sake of variety, if nothing else (there were a handful of comparisons from the Soviet bloc, but it was very Nazi centric).

I think it's on YouTube for free, if anyone wants to listen. I'll probably go back to it later, so that I take more on board.

Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians by Austen Hartke
Solid primer if you're interested in the a gender-diverse approach to Christian theology. Hartke talks to a variety of other trans and non-binary Christians, especially those involved in ministry, about their relationship with God and the Bible. Each chapter focuses on a few lines of scripture, which are largely clobber verses, and discusses how they can be seen as trans affirming. It's really beautifully expressed, and thoughtfully takes on some difficult parts of the Bible. Hartke does talk about how frustrating it is to feel like he has to spend so much time justifying himself and talking about the clobber verses, when he just wants to talk about religious gender euphoria. He's since put out a second edition, which might refine that approach, but I haven't looked at that yet. I really appreciated this edition is an intro, however, and helped me put together a church service for Trans Day of Remembrance.

scaramouche

I needed a palate cleanser of something light after my last two reads, so from the back of my unread drawer came out Liza Picard's Elizabeth's London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London. My Tudor-reading phase was a while back so the book's high page count was a bit tiring, but I did enjoy revisiting the era.

The book itself is a mix about the place that is London (in modern terms, the city of London and a bit of Greater London) with all its buildings, streets, river traffic and resources, and its people with all their habits, occupations, clothes, food, medical options, social obligations and so on. The description of various familiar areas and what they used to be like (all those open fields!) is fun for navigating by the mind's eye, and of the details of people I think for me the most interesting was their dietary habits, where they ate more different things than you'd think and also in the Elizabethan era there was a push to eat more fish, and no longer because of the old religion but in order to support the local fishing industry. Also, about how apprenticeships work, that's almost your whole life! And the systemic discrimination of outsiders in order to protect local businesses. If you're writing fiction set in the era, it's such a useful resource, as it's both useful and readable, and Picard's few editorializing choices are thoughtful (IMO).

On a meta level, I was curious about some of Picard's comments and assumptions on what was common knowledge, so I looked her up and she was 76 when she published this book in 2003! She passed away a few years ago, but she was born in 1927, which totally explains some of her comments like:

[The Waterbearers' Company] members walked the streets of London with tall conical containers on their backs holding about three gallons -- exactly the shape of an old-fashioned coke hod, for anyone who remembers coke-burning domestic stoves.

I had no idea what she was talking about and had to search "coke hod", then "coke hod kitchen", then coke "hod" kitchen before finding what she meant, i.e. coal hods. Though this would also be a regional thing as much as an age thing.

Current Mood: cold

muccamukk

Which included a bunch of American Political movies, watches/rewatches of said being inspired in part by current events.

Dave and Independence Day: When the East Wing got it, in memory of the White House, and a time when we expected presidents to be non-terrible, or at least rational. Also, Nenya hadn't seen them.

Good Night and Good Luck: Following Keith Olbermann turning out to be the real villain in the Olivia Nuzzi scandal, and me remembering that even when I agreed with his takes (circa the Bush administration), I thought he had a hell of a lot of nerve to use that sign off. Also, Nenya hadn't seen it. Also, I couldn't find a good quality copy of the 1986 biopic I grew up watching (though I see there's a passible one on YouTube).

A Few Good Men: Because a man made a lot of art that mattered to a lot of people, and that should still mean something. Also, I'd never seen it.

sineala

When Trouble Came (87848 words) by Sineala
Chapters: 16/16
Fandom: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Avengers (Comics)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Characters: Steve Rogers, Tony Stark
Additional Tags: Fix-It, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Pining, Depression, Getting Together, Romance, Love Confessions, Suicidal Thoughts, Alcoholics Anonymous, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Drug Addiction, Past Drug Use, Past Child Abuse, Post-Marvel Comic Event: Secret Empire (2017), Post-Marvel Comics Event: AXE Judgment Day (2022), Comic: Avengers Vol. 8 (2018)
Summary: After the defeat of the Progenitor, Tony is surprised to find that Steve has changed his mind and would now like to take him up on his offer to relax in the hot springs. Steve, more depressed than Tony has ever seen him, would like to compare notes on their respective judgments and find out how Tony's been doing in his newly-sober life. He'd also like to reveal a few long-held secrets about his feelings for Tony -- and there's more than one surprise here.

Remember me? I used to write fic! This is mostly unedited, but also it's been sitting here for about three years and I mostly just wanted it off my hard drive. Thanks to Blossom for cheerleading this while I was writing it.

This is about 90,000 words of meta disguised as fic, about Judgment Day and about how much I hate Cantwell's Iron Man run. Steve and Tony spend this entire story conversing in the Avengers Mountain hot springs. Then they fuck. That is the actual plot. There is also a short epilogue from Steve's POV, coming soon. They go to a different room for that one.

(When I say "short," I mean "35,000 words.")

Current Mood: creative

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

The assignments that you received when signing up, and pinch hits #1-96, are due at 9pm UTC 17 December (see countdown). It's nearly here. For most people, it'll be Wednesday. Please check the links!

When you post your story, please make sure...

It is at least 1,000 of your own original words and marked as complete. You can update and edit your story after the deadline, but any version you upload must be a complete story that could be read in that state, with a beginning, middle, and end, and no placeholder text.

It is not posted as a draft. If your work is still in Draft status on AO3 at the deadline, it will not count as fulfilling the assignment, as no one but you can access it. To check if your work is a draft, go to your assignments. If you see a work title and the 'Fulfill' button, your work is a draft and you have not yet fulfilled the assignment. You can also check your drafts at the 'Drafts' sidebar link from your main AO3 page. Fully-posted works can be viewed from your Stats page and from Works in Collections. You can also reach out to mods to check!

It features *all* requested characters or follows exceptions specified in the additional tags ("My gift must feature..."). Please see this post for a reminder of how the additional tags work. Regarding Worldbuilding: if your recipient has not selected characters beyond that tag, whether to flesh out the world using original characters or canon characters is up to you. If they have vetoed specific characters, obey those DNWs.

It does not contain Do Not Wants. Please check that your story does not contain any of the Do Not Wants (DNWs) listed in your recipient's Optional Details. If you have any doubt about the meaning of your recipient’s DNWs, please contact the mods.

Its title and other metadata are not placeholders. Please don't call your work Placeholder Title or Yuletide 2025 Work - upload a title that reflects the unique work. You don't need to write a summary or append detailed tags, but please make sure that if you do include that information, the information is real.

Other important notes

Stay anonymous! Yuletide is a secret exchange. Don't give away publicly what you're writing or who you're writing it for. Don't add your work to an existing series on AO3, or a personal works collection. Don't identify yourself in your author's notes by, for example, linking to your tumblr or dreamwidth.

No AI! This is a creative writing challenge - do not use ChatGPT, Claude, or any other similar generative text tool to write any part of your story, summary, or notes.

Please don’t use author’s notes to apologise for your story, to go into detail about the difficulties you had writing it, or to promise a fix or a continuation.

Please check your story immediately after posting to ensure it is showing up okay.

muccamukk

Eighty years before this year, WWII ended.

Eighty years before WWII ended, the American Civil War ended.

So we are as far away from (or as close to) WWII, as the people in WWII were from (or to) the Civil War.

IDK, it's interesting to think about. Something Elizabeth Samet has written about, a bit, too.

I only wrote a very short version of that fic where Steve Rogers was a civil war vet, who was frozen until Tony from Iron Man Noir found him, but I was always fond of that idea.

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

The DEADLINE is getting closer and closer!

At deadline time - 9pm UTC on 17 December - your Yuletide assignment must be posted (published, not a draft!) to the Yuletide collection as a complete work.

Before then, we need your help, Yuletide! We have an outstanding pinch hit (#121) for the fandoms:
SMPLive
Roughhouse SMP
Mirai SMP - XYouly
Highcraft (Web Series)

See details here. Please email us at yuletideadmin@gmail.com if you can help, and spread the word if you have friends who might be interested. This pinch hit is due at 9pm UTC on 19 December.

More pinch hits will be advertised at

yuletide_pinch_hits, especially after 9pm UTC on the 17th.

Additionally, we love beta reader volunteers! You can connect with writers at this post by filling out a Google form, or you can join the Discord and keep an eye out for beta requests advertised by members with the Hippo role.

Good luck to everyone facing down the deadline!

muccamukk

Watch on YouTube

Lyrics in the description.

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

The default deadline has passed! Defaults after this date will require a New Year’s Resolution fic before you can sign up again. See more info about defaulting at our FAQ.

Original assignments and pinch hits #1-96 are due in a little over 6 days, at:

9pm UTC, 17 December
See when that is in YOUR timezone
See countdown

This is an international exchange, and deadlines are given in UTC/GMT. This deadline is also at a DIFFERENT TIME OF DAY to deadlines we've used in recent years. Please click the links and check when the deadline is for you. We appreciate it!

Good luck to all writing, and especial thanks to everyone tackling pinch hits! Check out

yuletide_pinch_hits for requests currently in need of writers.

morbane posting in

yuletide

Yuletide is coming! If everything goes well, we will reveal works in the main collection at 9pm UTC on 24 December, two weeks from now. Madness works are revealed a day later.

(Default deadline is 9pm UTC on the 10th; posting deadline is 9pm UTC on the 17th.)

In Yuletide, it's important to leave a comment on your gift (or gifts) to thank your author.

If you think you'll be delayed in commenting until late in the anonymous period (ending 1 January) or maybe not even until well into the new year, you can use this post to OPTIONALLY let your author(s) know about that delay ahead of time. You don't need to give a reason, but an approximate time indication may be helpful. Please include your AO3 name.

Thanks everyone! Good luck with writing, and please consider the beta post or

yuletide_pinch_hits if you have capacity for beta jobs or pinch hits!

scaramouche

I decided to check out the graphic novel Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees based on a rec by the same peeps who'd recced Nice House on the Lake, which I really enjoyed.

Beneath the Trees was recced with a description (paraphrased): it's a horror mystery set in a world of Sylvanian family-like anthropomorphic talking animals. The main character, Samantha Strong, is a brown bear and a serial killer who takes care to only murder victims outside her small town, i.e. don't shit where you eat, that kind of thing. But when another serial killer starts doing Hannibal Lecter-like murder displays in Sam's town, she has to get on the case and find the killer before the police look too closely and catch her instead.

I loved the weird little world of the novel, because although it's populated by talking animals, there are also regular animals, like there are pet dogs, wild bears and raccoons, and the sapient population still eats meat. Among the sapient animals there are families of the same species, but there are also interspecies couples (one prominent couple is a pig and an owl) though I don't recall if any of the interspecies couples have children. The world is never explained and honestly that works better for the story.

The art is also quite lovely like, it has watercolour softness of certain kinds of children's books about talking animals, but not hyperstylized cartoonyness that would be more the norm when a story is about the deliberate clash between its visual style and the gory subject material.

I definitely enjoyed the story overall, and I'm so glad it's a properly completed story, but it's a day later and I'm not thinking about it anymore, which is not what happens with stories I really like. So there's something missing somewhere, and I think it's because the story's pretty straightforward and what it says on the tin, and there's not as much digging into Sam's headspace as a serial killer and ( spoilers ) I think it just didn't go just slightly deeper/eerier, so the story doesn't haunt me as much as it could have, though I still enjoyed the read for what it is.

Current Mood: okay

muccamukk

Thirty-six years ago today, a lone gunman murdered fourteen women at Polytechnique Montréal, before taking his own life.

The names of the women were:

Geneviève Bergeron
Hélène Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Maryse Laganière
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michèle Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz

CBC: Montreal to honour 14 victims of Polytechnique massacre at ceremony.

Globe & Mail: Progress on combatting intimate-partner violence stalling under new government, advocates fear.

Profile

magicasen

October 2023

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15	16	17	18	19	20	21
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Page Summary

yuletidemods in yuletide_admin - Reveals approaching! Help us get there!
sineala - FIC: Steady (Avengers, Steve/Tony, M)
muccamukk - Since I just had to dig this up:
muccamukk - Links Links Links
sineala - Wednesday Reading Meme
yuletidemods in yuletide_admin - 2025 Deadline Has Passed - What Next
muccamukk - Reading Wednesday, the Dog Days of Summer Edition
scaramouche - Book Log: Elizabeth's London
muccamukk - Finally Updated My Media Tracker
sineala - FIC: When Trouble Came (Avengers, Steve/Tony, E)
yuletidemods in yuletide_admin - (Less Than) 48 Hours to Deadline
muccamukk - Random perspectives in time
yuletidemods in yuletide_admin - Posting; Pinch Hit; Betas
muccamukk - Billy Bragg, keeping on keeping on
yuletidemods in yuletide_admin - Default deadline passed (and deadline change reminder)
morbane in yuletide - 2025 Away from Keyboard post
scaramouche - Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees
muccamukk - Thirty Six Years

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Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

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