The book doesn’t pause for a lesson. It just lets it be true. And that quiet certainty is what makes it so powerful.

I would not have found this one on my own. It came to me the way most of my books do now, by being the next thing after something else. I loved The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, this was pitched straight at people who loved Addie LaRue, and that is the only reason it ended up on my Kindle. One book handing me the next.

The map so far: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue → Our Infinite Fates → This Is How You Lose the Time War, which I am currently reading.

This book sent my brain somewhere the author maybe didn’t intend.

The soulmate question we don’t ask

We love the idea of soulmates. Someone out there for you, connected across time and space. But here’s the question we skip: if soulmates are real and come back in different bodies, what happens when yours shows up in a body you’re not attracted to?

Say you’re a straight woman in this life. Your soulmate has been your partner across 50 lifetimes. This time, they come back as a woman. Do you recognize them? Does the soul connection override the body?

Our Infinite Fates creates a world where the answer is obvious: love doesn’t care about the container. The soul is what connects. Everything else is just the outfit it’s wearing this time.

That’s a beautiful idea. It’s also an uncomfortable one, and I think that discomfort is worth sitting with.

What it means for how we think about love

If love transcends gender and physical form, the categories we build around attraction start to look less like hard rules and more like current settings on a dial that keeps turning. You’re a soul that’s been everything, attracted to another soul that’s been everything. This lifetime you happen to be in this particular body with this particular orientation.

I’m not saying that’s how it works. I’m saying that’s the thought experiment this book creates, and it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve sat with in a while.

The souls that find their way back

There’s a passage in the book that stopped me: “Lost souls were drawn to the love still felt for them by the living. This meant that parents were often reborn as their children’s own children, and siblings who died together were reborn as twins, and various other dynamics that I’d found troubling and yet strangely resonant.”

Troubling and yet strangely resonant. That's exactly right. The idea that love is a kind of gravity, that the people who loved you hardest pull you back, is one of those ideas that sounds impossible and feels true at the same time. And the implications are wild: your child might be your mother, come back to you. Your twin might be the sibling you lost in another life.

It’s the kind of thought that makes you look at the people around you differently.

The notebook

“Whatever a soul was, it could be carried in a notebook.”

This one line carries the whole book. The poetry book at the center of the story is the proof that love leaves evidence, not in grand gestures or monuments but in words, in a notebook. It was written across lifetimes, carried from life to life, and nobody knows whose hand started it.

It makes you wonder how many remarkable books in our world’s history could have been written from exactly that kind of love and pain. Written by someone who remembered too much.

The families

In each lifetime, these characters are born as babies. To new parents. With new siblings. People who love them and will grieve them when they die before 18. Evelyn remembers all of it.

Imagine having 20 different mothers and carrying the love and loss of every single one.

As a mom of three, that detail destroyed me. My child could be living their 20th life and remember 19 other mothers before me. Devastating. But it also means the love doesn’t disappear. It accumulates.

Big joy and small joy

There’s a passage where a character says something I can’t stop thinking about: “I think I understood a long time ago that big joy and small joy are the same. It sounds trite, but it’s true.” He describes winning a major tennis tournament and bringing home a huge cash prize, and says that victory felt no different from curling up in an old armchair with a faded blanket and reading his little sister a bedtime story. No different from a perfect pot of coffee or a warm croissant fresh from the bakery.

And then: “Even when there’s no big joy, even when it feels like we’ll never leave this trench alive, there’s still the small joy. A sunset, a flask of tea. Your hand in mine.”

The older I get, the more I agree with this. The big wins feel great in the moment, but the feeling fades to the same warmth as a quiet morning with good coffee. And the small joys, when you really notice them, feel exactly as big as the trophies. Maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe when you’ve lived enough lives (or just enough years), you stop ranking joy and start collecting it.

Why evil can’t win

There’s a thread about evil trying to recruit and win by numbers. It never works. Love, even outnumbered, is stronger. Not magic. Just what it makes people capable of.

Don’t follow bad. Love more. That’s it.

Our Infinite Fates. Five stars. Read it especially if you think you know what love looks like.

Where this one is sending me next: enough people told me that if I loved Addie LaRue and I loved this, then This Is How You Lose the Time War was the next stop. I'm reading it now. I'll tell you whether they were right.

Get your own copy of Our Infinite Fates here. My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

The idea never really gets off the ground in the book. One friend imagines it for another and it stays a thought. But it lodged in me and would not leave, and I have spent weeks since planning these parties in my head. I want to walk you through them, because somewhere in the planning I found something I did not expect.

The thirty-five-year party

My oldest friend and I hit thirty-five years this year. Thirty-five. She has known me through every single version of myself, including the ones I would rather forget. She has seen my lowest moments and my most embarrassing ones, the stretches I am not proud of, the years I was barely holding it together. She is, hands down, the better friend of the two of us. She remembers the birthdays and the small anniversaries and the inside jokes, and she is the one who pushes to get us together. She will tell you it is because she does not run a business and does not have as many kids pulling her in every direction, but I will tell you the truth, which is that she is simply one of the kindest people alive.

I listened to The Villa on a quick trip to see her, actually. She was already on the road for one of her kids, which happened to bring her closer to me than she usually lives, so we each drove about seven hours and met in the middle for a few days. We did nothing special. We walked and talked and ate and drank, and it filled my cup all the way up.

So her party would be easy to plan and impossible to fake. It would be entirely about her. And here is the strange part: the guest list would be tiny. I would only invite our families. Our kids, our husbands, our siblings, our parents, our grandparents if they were still here. Because those are the only people left who have actually witnessed our friendship. Everyone we met through, the whole original group, are strangers to me now. None of them made it past the ten-year mark with either of us. She and I did, and that is the whole guest list, and it is enough.

The twenty-two-year party

Then there is the friend I met at a barbecue, the two of us holding our oldest babies, who turned out to be about four months apart. Those two grew up as best friends until we moved away and I accidentally ruined it. I had heard about this woman for years before we ever met, all of it good, and then one summer at one barbecue we finally clicked and never looked back.

Even after I moved a few hours away, we kept it alive. Dinners, drinks, vacations together. Our husbands actually like each other. Our kids are the same ages and tangled up in each other’s lives. We pick up exactly where we left off every time, like no months have passed.

Her party would be a barbecue, obviously, and it would be enormous, because she is the kind of person dozens of women claim and brag about. She has the coolest sisters I know and a family people orbit. And here is where the planning turned on me, because thinking about her big, loving guest list, I felt a flicker of something ugly. Jealousy. I would be jealous that so many of those guests have gotten to know her better than I have over the last ten years, the years since I moved. I lost a little of what made us so close, and other people filled the space. We talk about getting lake houses near each other someday when we are older. I hope we do.

The five-way party

And then there are the friends I made in the last decade, the ones who came into my life through what I can only call forced proximity. Four moms and me, all bound together because our kids are bound together. Same schools, same teams, same endless events. Our kids even threw their graduation parties together. There is no untangling us at this point, and inside that group there are the ones I am naturally closer to and the ones I am not, the way these things always go. One of them is my workout buddy, the one I have written about before, and she would almost deserve her own little party except it would inevitably just become all five of us anyway.

That one would be the biggest bash of all, because it is not really five women, it is five families fused at the school-and-sports seams. These women do not know the younger versions of me. They never met the girl my thirty-five-year friend grew up with. But they know exactly who I am right now. They know the mom wrestling with the same things they are, the kids leaving for college, the aging parents, the health that is shifting, the husbands who are wonderful and exhausting, where to go on vacation, what is happening at work. My workout buddy knows today-me down to the bone, because we say all of it out loud while we lift and walk.

The thing I found while planning

Here is what undid me, and I did not see it coming until I had all three guest lists side by side.

The two friends who have witnessed every version of me, the thirty-five years and the twenty-two, are both people I had to move away from. And the women who are closest to me now, the ones who could be at my door in ten minutes, only know the version of me standing here today.

Nobody who lives near me has seen my whole arc. The people who have are a seven-hour drive away.

I do not know what to do with that, exactly. I am not sure there is anything to do with it except notice it, and maybe love all of them a little more deliberately for the specific stretch of my life they hold. The far-away ones who remember who I was. The close ones who know who I am. The truth is I need both, and the parties I keep planning in my head are really just me trying to thank each of them for the part they witnessed.

Maybe that is the whole point of an anniversary. Not the years. The witnessing.

Sometimes the only one who will say it out loud is a book. The Villa handed me a throwaway idea about a party, and I am still standing in the middle of it, counting who would come.

Grab a copy of The Villa. My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

El-Arifi writes Cleopatra’s story as though someone who actually knew her was finally allowed to speak, and not the Roman version or the Hollywood version but the one where she is a mother and a ruler and a sister and a strategist, all at once, all the time. The footnotes throughout the book, where El-Arifi flags which pieces of history were probably exaggerated and then lets Cleopatra correct the record inside the narrative, made me question everything I thought I knew.

Here are the five things I Googled.

Sennedjem and his wife harvesting grain in the Field of Reeds, a facsimile of a painting from his tomb at Deir el-Medina (original c. 1295 to 1213 BC). The Egyptian year, Shemu included, was built around the harvest. Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

What is Shemu?

The book references Shemu frequently, and I had no idea what it was. Turns out, Shemu was the third season in the ancient Egyptian calendar: the harvest season. It ran from roughly May to September, during the period when the Nile was at its lowest before the annual flood.

Ancient Egypt did not use a four-season calendar the way we do. They had three seasons, all tied to the Nile: Akhet (the flooding), Peret (the growing/emergence), and Shemu (the harvest). Their entire agricultural cycle, and by extension their entire economy, revolved around the river. Shemu was when farmers harvested emmer wheat, barley, flax, and vegetables from the nutrient-rich soil the floods had deposited months earlier.

What struck me is how different this is from the planting-and-harvesting cycle I grew up understanding. In Egypt, you planted after the floods receded and harvested in what we would think of as late spring and summer. The Nile dictated everything.

A hakawati in an old Damascus cafe, keeping the centuries-old storytelling tradition alive on the nights of Ramadan. Photo: [photographer] via Wikimedia Commons.

What is a Hakawati?

This word appears in the book and I had to look it up. A Hakawati is an Arabic storyteller. The word comes from a fusion of two Arabic words: hekaye, meaning “the story,” and haki, meaning “to talk.”

For generations, the Hakawati was a central figure in Arabic culture. People would gather in coffeehouses, homes, or outdoor spaces, and the Hakawati would narrate stories of heroism, romance, tragedy, and comedy. These storytellers represented the collective memory and imagination of their communities. They brought historical figures to life, spun tales from the Quran, and breathed humanity into legends.

The tradition has faded with modernity, though there has been a revival in recent years. Reading about it in the context of Cleopatra’s story felt fitting. El-Arifi is doing something similar: taking a story that has been told a thousand ways by a thousand people and giving it back its original voice.

Cleopatra and Caesar (1866) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the earliest paintings to show her emerging from the carpet. The "carpet" detail itself traces back to an 18th-century translation of Plutarch more than to history. Image: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Was Cleopatra actually Caesar’s lover?

The book portrays a romantic relationship between Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, and I wanted to know how much of that was historically supported.

The answer: quite a lot. Cleopatra and Caesar’s relationship began around 48 BC, when he was 52 and she was 21. Caesar had pursued Pompey to Egypt during the Roman Civil War, and Cleopatra, locked in her own power struggle against her brother Ptolemy XIII, saw an opportunity. She famously had herself smuggled into Caesar’s presence, rolled in a carpet (or possibly a linen sack, depending on the source).

In 47 BC, Cleopatra gave birth to Ptolemy XV, known as Caesarion, whom she claimed was Caesar’s son. Caesar never formally acknowledged him as his heir, but in 46 BC, Cleopatra and their son visited Rome and stayed at one of Caesar’s estates.

The relationship was both political and personal, and it lasted until Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC. What El-Arifi does with this in the novel is make it feel like more than a political alliance without losing the political dimension.

The Death of Cleopatra (1874) by Jean-André Rixens

The painting of Cleopatra and the cobra

The book references a famous artistic depiction of Cleopatra’s death, and I went looking for it. What I found was not one painting but an entire genre.

“Cleopatra with the Asp” has been painted by dozens of artists across centuries. Guido Reni painted a version in the 1620s showing Cleopatra pressing the snake to her breast. Jean-André Rixens painted a lavish version in 1874. Guercino, Michel Corneille, and countless others took on the subject.

The traditional story is that Cleopatra killed herself by allowing an asp to bite her rather than be paraded through Rome by Octavian. But here is where El-Arifi’s footnotes become so valuable: the historical evidence for this specific method of death is thin. It is one of those details that became “fact” through repetition, not through proof.

What fascinated me most is how these paintings, created centuries after her death, shaped the popular image of Cleopatra far more than any historical source did.

The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, 41 B.C. (1885) by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Cleopatra’s barge

The book also references Cleopatra on a ship, and I Googled the classical paintings of this scene. The most notable are “The Triumph of Cleopatra” (first exhibited 1821, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery) and “Cleopatra’s Barge” by Frederick Arthur Bridgman.

These paintings illustrate one of the most famous scenes in ancient history: Cleopatra sailing to Tarsus to meet Mark Antony. According to Plutarch, her barge had purple sails, silver oars, and was perfumed so heavily that people on shore could smell it before they could see it. She arrived dressed as the goddess Aphrodite.

Whether or not Plutarch’s account is accurate (and El-Arifi has thoughts about that), the image has persisted for two thousand years. It is another example of how the art and literature about Cleopatra have overshadowed the historical reality, which is exactly the tension El-Arifi explores throughout the entire novel.

The review

Format: Physical | Source: Library | Rating: 4 stars

If you like your historical fiction anchored in real research, this belongs on the shelf with Kate Quinn’s Mistress of Rome and Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra, the strong-women-of-the-ancient-world group. The love story threaded through it kept the politics from ever reading like a lecture. The only reason it’s four stars and not five is honest and a little hard to explain: I loved it the whole time I was in it, but it didn’t stay with me in the days after the way my five-star books usually do. Still, very few novels have ever sent me to my phone five separate times, and that alone tells you how alive it felt.

Grab a copy of Cleopatra.

Get it from the library if you can. If not, Bookshop.org over Amazon, always.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a "fact" from history you believed for years before finding out it was mostly myth, the thing everyone repeats that turns out to be thin on proof? Tell me in the comments.

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In the context of the book, this is about polygamy. A man with five wives, ten wives, nineteen wives. Children numbering in the dozens. The math alone is enough to make your chest tight. How do you love fifty kids? How do you even know fifty kids? One wife watches her husband move into a new home with a new favorite, and she’s left calculating whether she’ll get a visit this week or next month. The jealousy is corrosive, but it isn’t petty. It’s survival-level. These women needed their husband’s attention to have food, shelter, and standing in the community. Love wasn’t just emotional. It was currency.

And the children? The book describes fathers who couldn’t name all of their kids. Who didn’t know their ages. Who showed up for the ones who were useful and forgot about the rest. That’s what happens when you slice a pie into fifty pieces. Nobody gets enough.

I kept thinking about this after I finished the book. Not about polygamy specifically, but about the metaphor itself.

Because I don’t have nineteen partners, but I do have a finite amount of love-energy. There are the obvious slices: my kids, my husband, my closest friends. But then there are the slices I don’t always think about. The slice that goes to my parents. The slice I save for myself, when I remember to. The slice that goes to work, because let’s be honest, work takes a slice whether you offer it or not. The slice that goes to the version of myself I’m trying to become.

Some weeks the pie is generous, big and warm with plenty to go around, the kind everyone who gets a slice lingers over. Other weeks it’s one of those sad little mini pies from the two-day-old bakery shelf, the kind nobody should really buy, but you talk yourself into it anyway and just feel let down a few bites in.

And it isn’t only the size of the pie that changes week to week. It’s who I cut it for. Some weeks my husband is easier to love than my kids, and it has nothing to do with them. Maybe it’s their schedule, maybe it’s mine, maybe work already took its cut before anyone at home got served, or maybe we finally got a rare date night and I handed him a bigger piece than usual. The part nobody warns you about is that the bigger piece has to come from somewhere, and that week it came out of the kids’ servings. Other weeks it flips, and the kids get the biggest slices while my husband just waits patiently for his turn to come back around. And then there are the weeks one of my parents ends up in the hospital, and I give a mom or a dad the entire pie and come home with nothing left to serve the hungry mouths at my own table.

What struck me about The Nineteenth Wife wasn’t just that these women had to share a husband. It’s that the book forced me to look at my own pie and ask some uncomfortable questions. Who’s getting a real slice? Who’s getting the smaller pieces, the ones I cut a little thinner and then cover with extra whipped cream so nobody notices? Who’s getting just crumbs? And who have I quietly stopped serving altogether?

I think we all walk around pretending the pie is infinite, that we can keep adding people, projects, obligations, and commitments without any of it getting thinner. But it does get thinner. And the people who feel it first are usually the ones who won’t say anything. The ones who’ll tell you your baking is just as good as it ever was. The ones who would never complain that their slices keep getting smaller and more misshapen, or that you used to serve them every night and somehow slid into handing them a piece only every few dinners.

The Nineteenth Wife is about a lot of things: Mormon history, murder, religious control, women’s autonomy. But the thing that stuck with me most was a line about pie, because it made me count my slices, and I didn’t love the number I came up with.

If you’ve read The Nineteenth Wife, I’d love to know what stuck with you. And if you haven’t, maybe start by asking yourself this: how many slices is your pie cut into right now?

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Grab a copy of The Nineteenth Wife. My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

By the numbers

• Books finished: 6, all free from the library

• Google searches: 3 rabbit holes, including one on the My Lai massacre I somehow never learned about in school, and a whole tangle of misspelled Irish mermaid folklore

• Emotional essays incoming: 1

• Reading trees growing: 1 new branch this month (I, Medusa extends the Stone Blind tree)

• Stars: one 5 star, one 4.5 star, one 3.5 star, three 3 star

• Format split: 3 audiobooks, 2 ebooks, 1 physical

• Narrators: Mara Wilson (Women’s Hotel), Barrie Kreinik (The Sirens), Nicole Lewis (Such a Fun Age)

• Listening time: just under 30 hours at normal speed, about 19.7 hours at my usual 1.5x

• Days of my life: roughly a day and a half spent with a book this month

• Top genre: literary fiction

• Currently reading: A Thousand Ships (audiobook, 75%) and Six of Crows (ebook, 20%)

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

📖 Physical (Library) ⭐⭐⭐

I didn’t know much going in beyond a few social accounts recommending it, and that was probably better. Fast read, heavy topic, a teenage girl and her relationship with her teacher, handled without flinching and without letting you off easy either. I read it as a break from a much heavier WWII audiobook, and it still ended up sitting with me more than a filler read should. Landed at three stars, mostly because the ending did not resolve quite as much as I wanted.

Coming up: no article for this one, just the review. It was a palate cleanser, not a rabbit hole. (Quick note: I actually finished this one in June. June’s recap had already gone out by the time I processed the dump, so it’s living here instead.)

Women’s Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐

Picked this up because it was sitting there on Libby and I’d seen it floating around social somewhere. Slow, patient ensemble novel set in a 1960s women’s residential hotel modeled on the real Barbizon. Wasn’t blown away, but the ending caught me more off guard than I expected from a book that spent most of its runtime just introducing people to me.

Coming up: a Things I Googled article about the hygiene rules these hotels actually enforced, and a Who I Became piece about the strange split feeling of reading how limited women’s choices were then versus now.

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I only picked this up because it was popular a while back, had great reviews, and there was no wait for it at the library, so no excuse not to. It’s told in parts, and I almost bailed early because the start felt slow, but by Part II I was completely hooked, and I finished it bawling on the last night. This might end up being a top tier read for me this year. I still need to sit with it a little longer before I can say that for sure.

Coming up: a Things I Googled article, since a passage about Tom’s teenage years sent me down two different holes, whether there were ever any famous redheads before a certain era, and later the My Lai massacre, which I somehow never learned about in school.

The Sirens by Emilia Hart

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐

Several storylines were running at once with flashbacks woven through, and it kept my attention the whole way, even though I wished the ending had leaned harder into the art thread since I love artists and their whole live your passion existence. What really stuck with me was the thread connecting mermaid folklore to Ireland. I came out of it with a list of googled terms, an Irish word for mermaid, a sea lullaby the characters kept singing, and the name for an underwater world in Irish myth.

Coming up: a Things I Googled article untangling all of that Irish mermaid folklore, since half of what I searched for was spelled wrong and I need to actually get it right.

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4.5)

No reading tree connection on this one, just a book that kept showing up with good reviews and was sitting there available on Libby, so I grabbed it. It juggles several storylines at once and never lost me, and the narrator’s voice for Briar, the little girl at the center of it, was one of my favorite parts of the whole listen. It handles race in a way that felt honest without turning into a lecture, and I’m already planning to read more from Kiley Reid because of it.

Coming up: no article this time, it was just a genuinely good read.

I, Medusa by Ayana Gray

📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐ (3.5)

This one grew out of the same tree as Stone Blind, my Natalie Haynes read back in March, with a few Twitter recommendations pointing me toward it too. With a Greek mythology retelling you already know where the story ends, Medusa becomes Medusa, but you never know how or when, and this book kept me anxious to find out, just not in quite the same way Stone Blind did. It read a little young to me, almost YA in tone, though I’m not sure it was actually marketed that way. It moved fast, and overall it was a good read.

Coming up: a Reading Tree update connecting it back to Stone Blind.

What is a reading tree?

A reading tree starts with one root book and the itch it leaves behind, a topic, a place, a feeling you’re not done with yet. From there it grows branches, other books that connect to that same thread, whether it’s a direct mention in the text, the same region, or just chasing the same gut punch. It’s not a genre list and it’s not a same-author backlist. It’s a chain you can actually follow. Trees keep growing over time as I read more into the thread, and paid subscribers get the full tree, root to newest branch, plus a new one every month.

This month’s only branch was small: I, Medusa hanging off Stone Blind, both of them different angles on the same myth. Not much of a thread to pull this month, but that tracks. A slow reading month means a slow tree month too.

The one I can’t quite pick

If you’re asking me to name a favorite, I genuinely can’t. Buckeye earned every one of its five stars and wrecked me in the best way, the kind of book I’m still turning over a week later. But Such a Fun Age was the one I looked forward to picking back up every single day, in a lighter, more purely fun way. One gutted me, one delighted me. I’m not choosing.

Free and paid

This recap is free, always will be. The reading trees are the one thing that lives behind the paywall, one new tree a month plus the full growing vault, and founding members get a personalized tree of their own once a year. Everything else, the Google rabbit holes, the Who I Became pieces, the essays, stays right here for everyone.

Tell me in the comments, did you read anything great in July? Anyone else take a real break from books this summer and not feel bad about it?

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But the male lead is an arborist, which means there are tree facts woven into every other conversation, plus more tree puns than I knew existed. So naturally I paused to look up redwood trees, and that little detour turned into a whole situation.

Redwoods at Tall Trees Grove photo by Shaina Niehans

Redwood trees can live for over 2,000 years

This is where it started, as a basic fact-check I fully meant to close out in thirty seconds, and then I just kept scrolling.

Redwoods are among the oldest living organisms on the planet, and some individual trees have been alive since before the Roman Empire. They can grow over 350 feet tall, and their bark can be more than a foot thick.

What surprised me most was how they survive. They grow these things called burls, which are basically backup systems built right into the tree. If the main trunk gets damaged, or fire comes through, or something goes catastrophically wrong, the burl can sprout a brand new tree. The redwood has a plan B going the whole time. I don’t totally know why, but reading that felt weirdly reassuring.

A tree's rings record the seasons it lived through, wide in good years and narrow in drought. Photo: via Wikimedia Commons.

Epigenetic memory in trees

Then I fell into the question of whether trees can actually “remember” stress, and the short answer seems to be maybe.

There’s emerging research suggesting that trees respond to environmental stress in ways that shape how they grow and defend themselves later on. It isn’t memory the way we usually think about it, but it does look like an inherited biological response to past conditions.

This is all still being studied and not much of it is settled science. But the idea that a tree could carry the effects of old droughts or fires in its biology, and then pass those effects on to future generations, kind of blew my mind for a Tuesday afternoon.

Male catkins releasing pollen, the spring haze a lot of cities accidentally engineered. Photo: via Wikimedia Commons

Cities plant too many male trees

And then, right after a particular scene in the book, I ended up reading about urban tree planting policies. Apparently a lot of cities preferentially plant male trees, because female trees drop fruit and seeds that cities consider messy, and male trees produce significantly more pollen. Which means allergies, everywhere, basically by design.

This one is debated, and some arborists push back on how much of the problem actually comes down to gendered planting versus other factors. But it’s a real pattern that’s been documented across multiple cities.

I came for a cute romance and left thinking about municipal tree selection committees. Not mad about it.

The review

Format: eBook | Source: Library | Rating: 3 stars

It’s a short, fast novella, charming and low-stakes in the way Abby Jimenez does well. The characters are easy to root for and it moves quickly. I didn’t realize going in that it’s the second in a series, but it reads fine on its own. It isn’t deep, and it isn’t the kind of book that’s going to stay with me, so three stars feels right. But it did its job, and apparently it turned me into someone with opinions about urban tree biology.

Grab a copy of Fall Risk.

I'll always tell you to check the library first. If you'd rather own it, this Bookshop.org link supports independent shops and helps me out a little.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a subject you now know way too much about because one book sent you down a hole? For me it's apparently urban tree planting. Tell me yours in the comments.

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But one small detail from the book has been living in my head ever since.

There’s a traveler in one of the stories who only buys paperback books. Not because of weight or cost or preference. Because when she finishes them, she leaves them on benches at train platforms for the next person to find.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And it wrecked me in a way the rest of the book couldn’t.

Why a book on a bench matters

Think about the life of that paperback.

Someone wrote it. Someone printed it. Someone put it on a shelf in a bookstore. Someone bought it, read it, maybe loved it, maybe didn’t. It ended up in a donation bin or a thrift store or a box in someone’s garage. Then this woman picks it up, reads it on a train, and sets it down on a bench for a complete stranger. She walks away. She doesn’t know who will pick it up. She doesn’t care if they love it or hate it or leave it there for the next person. She just trusts that someone will find it when they need it.

That book has lived more lives than most people I know.

And that’s what I keep coming back to. Books aren’t objects. They’re travelers. They pass through hands and lives and they carry a little bit of every person who held them. The dog-eared pages someone left behind. The cracked spine from being read in one sitting. The coffee ring on the cover. Those aren’t damage. Those are proof of life.

Sometimes the traces a reader leaves are even more personal than that. Someone underlines the line that gutted them, and years later you find yourself stopping cold on the exact same sentence. Someone fills the margins with notes, a question mark here, a little “yes” scrawled next to a paragraph, a quiet argument with the author that nobody else will ever see. Some people even write their name and the date they finished it inside the cover, so the book carries a record of everyone who has ever lived in it. When you open a copy like that, you’re not just reading the story anymore. You’re reading everyone who read it before you.

The Shelfless Reader builds a shelf

If you read my first post on here, you know the deal. I read over a hundred books a year. I don’t own a bookshelf. Almost everything I read is on Kindle or audiobook, and I’ve never felt like I was missing anything.

But I also told you I was thinking about making one exception. A small shelf. Not a library, not a wall. Just my all-time favorites, the six-star reads, the ones I want to be able to physically hand to someone.

I’ve started building it. Slowly. I thrift my five-star reads when I can find them, buying used copies at Goodwill or secondhand shops whenever I spot one. I find maybe one every three trips. It’s slow going, and that’s part of what makes it special. Every book on that future shelf will have been hunted for, not ordered.

The copy I’m secretly hoping to stumble on is one that somebody else already made their own. Underlined passages, thoughts pencilled into the margins, a name and a date written on the first page. There’s something about holding a book like that, knowing a stranger sat with the same words and left their fingerprints all over them, that feels like connecting with another reader I’ll never meet. I’d get to see the whole life the book lived before it reached me, which lines stopped someone else cold and which ones they argued with. Give me a marked-up, dog-eared copy over a pristine one any day.

I recently found The Women by Kristin Hannah at my favorite thrift store. I was browsing the book section and the worker had her restocking cart out. I spotted it on the cart before it even hit the shelf and asked if I could grab it. Hardcover, near-perfect condition, three dollars. The old lady pushing the cart just gave me this smile. Not a customer service smile. A reader’s smile. The kind that says “I know exactly why you just grabbed that.” And as I walked through the store with it in my cart, I caught more than a few glances from other shoppers who saw what I had and knew they’d missed it.

But it was meant for me. That’s how I felt about it. That copy had a life before me and it found its way to my cart at the exact right moment.

The old book lady I want to become

I have this vision of myself in thirty years. Gray hair, probably with some color in it. Cool glasses. The kind of style that makes people look twice. And I’m walking down a street having just finished a paperback, and I see someone sitting on a bench or waiting for a bus, and I just hand it to them.

“Here. I just finished this. I think you might need it.”

Maybe they read it. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they pass it on to someone else. But that book keeps moving. It went from a thrift store with a full life already behind it, to me, to a stranger, and on and on through its own journey. Just like us. We pass through each other’s lives and leave something behind, whether we know it or not.

I’ve actually been thinking about getting book stamps made. The kind you press into the front page that says something like “This book is meant to be passed on. When you’re done, give it to someone who needs it.” A little nudge to keep the journey going. Because a book sitting on a shelf you’ve already read isn’t doing its full job. A book in someone’s hands? That’s a book at work.

Books find you when you need them

I don’t think I’ve ever picked a book up off a bench from a stranger. Nothing that cinematic. But I do believe that books find you when you need them, even if the way they arrive is completely unglamorous.

Far from the Tree found me because it had no wait on Libby and Julia Whelan narrated it. That’s it. No grand recommendation, no algorithm, no curated list. Just availability and a narrator I trust. And it gave me a metaphor about training wheels that I’m still thinking about weeks later.

The Latecomer cracked open fears about my kids that I’d been carrying for years but never had the words for. I picked it up for the same boring reason: Julia Whelan, no wait.

Kristin Hannah found me because The Great Alone popped up at the right time, and within six weeks I’d torn through three of her books and discovered that historical fiction was the genre I’d been looking for my entire reading life without knowing it. ACOTAR proved I could love fantasy when I’d sworn I never would. The Tattooist of Auschwitz taught me more about WWII than school ever did and opened a door to an entire world of historical fiction I haven’t stopped walking through.

None of these were planned. None of them came from a bestseller list or a bookstagram recommendation. They just showed up. And every single one of them sent me somewhere I didn’t expect, whether that was down a Google rabbit hole at midnight, into a new genre, or straight into my own feelings about something I’d been avoiding.

That’s what I write about here. The rabbit holes, the reading trees that connect one book to the next, the moments where fiction cracks open something real. Every series on this Substack exists because a book found me and did something I wasn’t expecting.

The woman on the bench knew something

The woman in Flights who leaves paperbacks on train benches understood something simple: a book’s job isn’t finished when you close it. It’s finished when it runs out of people to reach.

I didn’t love Flights. I probably won’t ever recommend it. But that one image changed how I think about every book I touch. The thrifted copy of The Women in my cart wasn’t just a three-dollar find. It was a book in the middle of its life, passing through my hands on the way to whoever comes next. Maybe my daughter. Maybe a friend who’s never been a reader and needs the right book to start. Maybe, someday, a stranger on a bench.

I’m building a shelf, but I’m not building a museum. I’m building a lending library. A rest stop for books that are just passing through on their way to the next person who needs them.

The Shelfless Reader is getting a little less shelfless. And I think that’s exactly right.

Grab a copy of Flights. (I didn’t love it, but that one detail might be worth the trip.) My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

So I Googled it: was the Black Swan based on an actual person?

That’s how I found Josephine Baker.

Josephine Baker in the banana skirt from the 1927 Folies Bergère revue "Un Vent de Folie." The fame this image gave her later became the cover for her Resistance work. Photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Josephine Baker and the French Resistance

Baker was an American-born dancer and entertainer who became one of the most famous performers in France in the 1920s and 30s. She was also, secretly, a spy for the French Resistance during WWII.

She used her celebrity to travel to neutral countries, attend diplomatic events, and gather intelligence. She smuggled information written in invisible ink on her sheet music. She pinned notes inside her underwear. She used her fame as the cover, because nobody suspects the woman everyone’s watching.

Genevieve in the novel isn’t Josephine Baker. But the inspiration is unmistakable. A performer whose public life is spectacle and whose private life is resistance. Once I made the connection, every scene in the book where Genevieve moves th

Carrying full equipment, American assault troops move onto Utah Beach on the northern coast of France, with landing craft jamming the harbor in the background. Photo: U.S. Army, National Archives (SC189902), public domain.

Utah Beach

Later in the book, a specific location comes up repeatedly and I realized I didn’t actually know enough about it. So I Googled Utah Beach.

Utah Beach was the westernmost of the five D-Day landing beaches on June 6, 1944. It was assigned to U.S. forces, supported by airborne divisions that dropped behind enemy lines the night before.

What surprised me was that Utah Beach was actually one of the more successful landings that day. Strong currents pushed the landing craft about a mile south of the intended target, which accidentally put them in a less-defended area. Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. famously assessed the situation and decided to “start the war from right here” rather than trying to redirect to the planned landing zone.

Casualties at Utah were significantly lower than at Omaha Beach. That context helped me understand why the scenes set near the end of the book carried both tension and a thread of hope at the same time. There was danger, absolutely. But there was also this sense that survival was possible if everything lined up.

Why the real history matters

Some of the details vary depending on the source, and the novel takes its own creative liberties. But the bones of it are real. Real people risked their lives in exactly the ways this story describes. Real performers used their public personas as covers. Real soldiers landed on real beaches not knowing if they’d make it past the morning.

Once I knew that, The Black Swan of Paris stopped feeling like just a story and started feeling like it was pulled from actual lives people lived.

The review

Format: Audiobook | Source: Library | Rating: 5 stars

Seventeen hours on audio and it never once dragged. The narration is a big part of why, especially the French and German accents, and Robards writes scenes you can practically see staged in front of you. I hit the halfway mark sure the book had already peaked, and I was wrong. It kept deepening instead. Underneath all the tension runs a steady current of love, both romantic and familial, and a real hope rooted in the courage of the Resistance, which is what keeps the heartache from sinking it. This was my first Karen Robards and I’m already working through her backlist. One note going in: there’s wartime violence and real emotional loss here.

Grab a copy of The Black Swan of Paris.

A note on my links: I'm a library person first, always. If you can borrow it, borrow it. But if you're going to own a copy anyway, my Bookshop.org links support indie bookstores and send a little back my way. Both can be true.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a novel that turned out to be standing on a true story, the one that sent you looking up whether it really happened? Tell me in the comments.

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Not in a sad way, exactly. More in the way you get quiet when someone is telling you something real and you know you’re supposed to just listen.

Girl at War isn’t the kind of historical fiction where you’re watching events unfold from a safe distance. You’re inside Ana’s head. You’re a kid in Zagreb when things start to go wrong, and then you’re a twenty-something in the US pretending none of it happened. And the whole time you can feel the weight of what she’s carrying because she won’t put it down.

I think what this book did to me is make me realize I’ve been reading about war from a very specific angle. Almost everything on my virtual shelves is WWII. The same theaters. The same broad strokes. I know the shape of those stories. I know what to expect from them.

This was different. I didn’t know the shape. I didn’t know the history. I didn’t even know what the correct name for the war was. And that meant I couldn’t hold the story at arm’s length the way I usually do with historical fiction. I had to sit in it.

The part that stuck with me the most is the cyclical nature of it. The book touches on this idea that in the Balkans, it’s like every fifty years there’s a new version of the same violence. Different people, different justifications, same destruction. And when you read it from inside one person’s life, you feel how unfair that is. Not in a political way. In a human way. How do you build a life when the ground under you has never been stable?

I spent a lot of time thinking about that after I finished. About what it means to read about a war you didn’t know existed until a book put you inside it. About how many more of those stories are out there.

I was somber for a few days. I wanted a second book. I wanted to know if Ana goes back to Croatia with her sister, if she patches things up with the people she shut out, if she ever stops running from the thing that shaped her. I know standalone literary fiction doesn’t work that way. But I wanted it anyway.

Who I was while I read this: quieter. More aware of the limits of my own reading history. Ready to find more stories I don’t already know the shape of.

I read Girl at War by Sara Novic on audio from the library. If you want your own copy, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

What’s the book that changed the shape of what you read after it? Not your favorite, the one that showed you a gap you didn’t know was there. Tell me in the comments. I’m trying to fill mine.

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And it is all of those things. But here’s what nobody told me: this book has some of the most honest, gut-level writing about love and marriage I’ve read in a long time. Not the romance-novel version where everything resolves in a grand gesture, but the real version, the one that makes you set the book down and sit with it for a while.

I gave it 4 stars for the plot. But the quotes about love? Those are 5-star sentences hiding in a 4-star thriller.

The Tapestry

“Marriage is made of a million beautiful and ugly moments stitched together into a shared tapestry of memories, all of which are viewed and remembered slightly differently, like two people staring at the same painting from opposite ends of a room.”

This one got me. Because it’s not just about marriage. It’s about every long relationship. You live through the same moments side by side, and you still walk away remembering different versions. Not because anyone is lying, but because you’re literally standing in different places, seeing it from different angles.

My husband likes to tell this story about a scar on his foot. It involves him standing at the bottom of our stairs, needing something, and me deciding to toss it down instead of walking it to him. He claims I added spin to the object so it was impossible to catch and nearly cut his toe clean off. I claim I just tossed it normal. Same moment, two completely different versions, and we’ve been telling them both for years.

It shows up in the bigger memories too. Over the years we’ve taken our kids to every kind of professional sporting event you can think of because each kid had a different obsession: one loved NFL, one MLB, another pro soccer and NBA. My husband remembers the games, the leading scorers, the train or bus we had to take to get there.

I remember the look on his face when one of the kids lost their mind over a play or player he’d been waiting for them to see. He was living inside the event. I was watching him be a father. Same stadium, same afternoon, and we weren’t even having the same experience.

And then there's the version that catches you off guard. My husband and I were bickering over something dumb at dinner one night, not a real fight, just overtired and snippier than usual. My youngest looked at us and said "you guys fight all the time." We both stopped because we genuinely couldn't remember the last time we'd had an actual fight. To us it was barely a moment, one of those minor ugly patches you don't even register. But to our son watching from the outside, it looks like a flaw in the whole thing. Same tapestry, completely different angles.

Beautiful Because It’s Ugly

The "beautiful and ugly" part is the title of the book, but it's also the truth of being with someone long enough. The beauty and the ugliness aren't separate chapters. They're stitched together, same tapestry, same thread. And sometimes the ugly is what makes the beautiful. The scar story is ugly (sorry, babe) but twenty years later it's one of our funniest stories. Sitting in the same stadium and not even having the same experience is ugly in a quieter way, but it's also proof that we each bring something different to this family. The overtired fights are ugly in the moment, but they're proof we're still in it, still building something, still close enough to irritate each other.

And then there’s the pottery shop. The female lead runs a studio called Beautiful Ugly, where she makes intentionally misshapen mugs and ceramics. There’s a whole conversation in the book about the name, about how something can be both at once. It’s not a throwaway detail. Feeney is layering the title into everything: the marriage, the art, the way this woman shapes something imperfect on purpose and calls it finished. The shop name does the same work as the quote above, just quieter. Beauty and ugliness aren’t opposites. They’re the same thing, held at different angles.

The Mismatch

“Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.”

Short and brutal, and one of those things you read and immediately think of three couples you know, including maybe your own.

There’s no judgment in it, just observation. And the older I get, the more I think this is one of the most accurate sentences ever written about heterosexual marriage. Not because it’s cynical, but because it names the specific mismatch that creates friction: one person waiting for change that won’t come, the other blindsided by change they didn’t expect.

My husband still has to have the last word in every conversation. He uses his loud teacher voice at home because after decades in a classroom he doesn't know how to turn it off, and it drives me insane. He eats chips in the kitchen and I have misophonia so I want to leave the room every single time. I still point these things out. I still ask. But there are other things I've let go. He's snored for years, and I used to wake him up every time because it kept me up. About five years ago I bought sleep earplugs instead, and now I only wake him when the volume gets past what the earplugs can handle. That's not fixing the problem. That's just finding a way to live next to it. And I think there's something worth sitting with in that, because when you stop bringing up the things that bother you, you're not just "letting the small stuff go." You might be giving up on them changing, which might also be giving up on each other a little bit. The little things are the big things. They just don't look like it from the outside.

But then there’s the other side of change, the kind you didn’t see coming. We were babies when we got married, straight out of college, high school sweethearts who thought they knew exactly who they were marrying. I used to travel constantly for work and put in long hours when I was home, trying to manage all the household stuff on top of running a business. My husband has been a teacher, coach, and administrator over the years, which means his summers are more relaxed than mine ever were. One summer I came home from a work trip fully braced to spend the weekend catching up on chores, and the laundry was done and the kitchen was clean. No announcement, no “look what I did.” Just handled. And I realized that had become a pattern I hadn’t noticed forming.

He didn’t change because I asked. He changed because he saw what was needed and just did it. That’s not the boy I married at twenty-two.

And I’m not the girl he married either. Somewhere around COVID I stopped traveling as much for work, realized I loved being home, and slowly became a different person socially. I used to be the one who made us new friends, who brought us into groups, who said yes to every parent gathering and neighborhood thing. Then I realized I was doing most of it out of obligation, not enjoyment, and I just stopped. My husband points it out sometimes, mostly because our social circle got a lot smaller when I stopped being the connector. We get excluded from things now because I don’t care enough to keep up, and he’s supportive of me protecting my energy even though he feels the trade-off too. Sometimes he talks me into going out anyway, and I’m almost always glad he did. I make sure to tell him that, which I think matters.

When I look at pictures of that high school boy I dated or that college kid I married (both him, by the way), I can barely imagine or remember those people. It feels like so long and so many changes ago. We’ve shed so many skins since then. I like 90% of who we are now, and the other 10% we can keep working on.

I ride in a golf cart with a book now because he loves golf and I love being outside with him, even if I rarely pick up a club. I bike with him because I eventually got an ebike for the hills after I rage-quit our first ride on a regular bike and he had to come pick me up on the side of the road at the bottom of a hill I refused to go up. That’s change I didn’t expect in myself. And the fact that he didn’t laugh at me on that roadside (okay, he probably did) and just showed up with the car is the kind of love that doesn’t make it into the highlight reel but holds the whole thing together.

The Quiet Bomb

“Is being with someone who used to love you better than being alone?”

This is the quiet bomb in the book. No dramatic setup, no big reveal, just this question sitting there on the page, waiting for you to answer it.

I think at some point in a 25-year marriage, you question whether the person sleeping across from you still loves you, or if they still love you the way you love them. And I’d be lying if I said I’ve never had moments where being alone sounded great. When he leaves cupboard doors open, trims his beard over the sink and doesn’t clean it up, leaves the toilet seat up at 2 AM. In those moments my answer to Feeney’s question is yes, absolutely, being alone sounds incredible. I’ll take a rural chicken farm with a few like-minded women and never share a bathroom again.

But then I think about what I’d actually miss. My mom has been single and living alone for many years, and I’ve watched what that kind of solitude changes in a person over time. And I think about the fact that my husband is still trying. Still trying to change the things I’ve been asking him to change for 25 years. That’s not someone who used to love me. That’s someone who’s still in it.

I don’t have a clean answer to Feeney’s question. I go back and forth. I think most people in long relationships do, even if they’d never say it out loud.

The Darkest Way to Say I Love You

“I hope you die in your sleep.”

Full quote: “I hope you die in your sleep. I’ve been thinking about it lately, death, and it’s got to be the best way to go. If you truly loved someone, that’s how you’d want them to die, and I love you more than anything. So I hope you die in your sleep.”

They said that to each other every night before bed. “I hope you die in your sleep” was their way of saying “I love you.”

This one broke me. Because it’s dark and weird and also one of the most tender things I’ve ever read. It reframes love as wanting the softest possible ending for someone. Not “I hope nothing bad ever happens to you,” because we all know that’s not realistic. But “when the bad thing comes, I hope it’s gentle.”

That’s love that has looked at mortality and decided to be gentle with it instead of afraid.

My husband and I don’t have anything like that. I’ve always loved the “ditto” from Ghost, but it never caught on with us. We’re just regular “love you, goodnight” people. But reading this made me wonder if we’re missing something by not having our own version of it. So I actually want to ask: do you and your person have a weird or special way of saying I love you or goodnight? What is it?

The Warning

“People rarely know what they have until they lose it. They spend their lives searching for a better one, wanting more, needing more, blind to the fact that they already had it all. I think sometimes it’s only when something gets taken from a person that they appreciate what they had.”

This isn’t a new idea. We’ve all heard “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” But Feeney writes it with a specificity that makes it land differently. “Searching for a better one,” not a better life but a better person, a better version of the relationship. Always looking for the upgrade, missing what’s already in your hands.

I can’t speak to this one from experience, and I hope I never have to. But I read it and felt it in my chest anyway, which is maybe the point. You don’t have to have lost someone to understand the warning in it.

Why Does This Matter in a Thriller?

Because the best thrillers aren’t just about plot twists. They’re about people being human in extreme circumstances. And Feeney uses the mystery framework to sneak in observations about love and loss that would feel heavy-handed in a literary novel but land perfectly inside a page-turner.

You don’t expect a thriller to make you think about your own marriage. That’s exactly why it works.

Beautiful Ugly. 4 stars for the story, but these quotes are worth the whole book.

Every quote here is from Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney. If you want it, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

What’s the memory you and your person remember completely differently? The scar story, the stadium afternoon, the fight your kid swears happened. Tell me your version in the comments, then go ask them for theirs. I’d bet it doesn’t match.

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The first time, I was going to combine fashion and reading. The idea was to share the outfits I wore based on the mood of whatever book I was in that week. Not cosplay, not dressing up as characters. More like: when you’re deep in a book, you kind of live in its world for a while, and whether you realize it or not, it comes through in how you dress, where you go for coffee, what you make for dinner. I thought that was interesting enough to share.

The catch was I didn’t want to show my face. So every video had me holding the book that inspired the outfit in front of it, and each one took forever to make. I was filming three or four outfit changes, making a mess of my bedroom, editing clips together, all while working a full-time job. The worst part wasn’t the time. It was that I was shrinking the books down to fit a format that had nothing to do with what I actually wanted to say about them. I wanted to talk about what a book made me think or feel or become, and instead I was showing you what I wore the week I was reading it.

So I stopped.

The second time, I had the idea I’m still most excited about: Things I Googled While Reading. Because that’s what I do. I read a romance novel and end up down a rabbit hole about the history of a town in Italy. I read a dystopian thriller and spend an hour researching the science behind it. People who don’t read much think that’s weird. “It’s just a romance book, why would you Google anything?” But that’s how my brain works, and I don’t think I’m the only one.

So I tried to build content around that, and I ran straight into the same problem. I didn’t want to be on camera. I tried holding a book over my face, which was awkward, then I tried putting a sticky smiley face over my face in the editing software, which was somehow worse. I made about ten videos and never posted a single one.

It wasn’t that they weren’t good. It was that the format didn’t feel like me. I was trying to say something real about how books change the way you think, and I was doing it from behind a cartoon sticker. The whole thing felt forced.

So I stopped again.

The problem was never the ideas

Here’s what I’ve figured out after three attempts and a lot of frustration. The problem was never my ideas. The problem was that every path I could see for sharing them required me to be the content, not my words or my thoughts about the books but me. My face, my voice, my house, my whole aesthetic.

And I just don’t want to do that.

I don’t want to film talking head reels. I don’t want my living room to have to be “content ready.” I don’t want strangers judging my house or my hair or whether my bookshelf is photogenic enough. (I don’t even have a bookshelf. That’s kind of the whole point of the name.)

This isn’t insecurity, it’s a boundary. My house is my safe space, and my face is not my brand. I think a lot of people feel this way but don’t say it, because the internet has made it seem like the only way to build an audience is to put yourself on camera and perform.

Show your face, says the algorithm

Let’s talk about that for a second, because it isn’t just a feeling, it’s structural.

Social media algorithms reward video, and specifically they reward face-on-camera video. Every piece of creator advice out there says the same thing: show your face more, be relatable, let people see the real you. If you follow that advice, it works. I’m not arguing that.

What I’m arguing is that “show your face” shouldn’t be the only viable path, because when it is, it filters out an entire population of people who have something worth sharing and will never share it because the format feels wrong.

Think about how many people you know who are incredible thinkers, readers, writers, artists, but would never in a million years post a video of themselves talking to a camera. Not because they have nothing to say, but because that’s not how they want to say it.

I know painters who spend more time setting up camera angles to film their process than they spend actually painting. I saw a creator post the other day, “If it looks like this took a long time to make, it did,” and she was talking about the reel, not the art. That’s where we are. The documentation of the creative process has become more work than the creative process itself.

And for what? So the algorithm picks it up and you get a few thousand views from people who watch for three seconds and scroll?

I’m not anti-video, and I’m not anti-social media. I consume both, happily. Some of my favorite creators are people who are magnetic on camera, and I love watching them. I just don’t want to be them, and I don’t think I should have to be in order to share what I care about.

Where the words are the product

That’s why I’m here on Substack, writing.

Because on Substack, the writing is the product. Not my face, not my house, not a carefully curated background, just the words. You’re reading this right now and you have no idea what I look like, what my living room looks like, or whether I got dressed today. It doesn’t matter. What matters is whether these words are making you feel something or think about something differently. That’s it.

I write about books here, but this one sits closer to the center of why The Shelfless Reader exists than almost anything else I'll post. I spelled out the bigger why in my manifesto, and this is the lived version of it. I tried three times to build a book account, and I failed twice because I kept trying to squeeze myself into formats that required me to perform instead of write. The third time, I stopped trying to be a content creator and just started being a writer.

I think there’s a whole world of people out there like me, people who are happy to consume social media but have zero desire to be on the other side of the screen. People who have thoughts worth sharing, recommendations worth making, stories worth telling, but the gap between “I have something to say” and “I have to film myself saying it” feels uncrossable.

It doesn’t have to be.

If this sounds like you

You can build something real with words. You can have personality without showing your face. You can create a brand that’s about what you say, not what you look like. You can reach people, move people, build a community of people who care about the same things you do, and you can do all of it without ever recording a single talking head reel.

I’m not saying it’s easy, and I’m not even saying I’ve figured it out yet. I’m literally two posts in. But I know this feels different than the first two attempts, because this time the format matches the thing I actually want to do: read books, think about books, write about books, and share that with anyone who wants to come along.

If you’ve been sitting on an idea, a blog, a newsletter, a creative project, but you haven’t started because you can’t stomach the idea of being “on” all the time, this is me telling you that you don’t have to be. Find the format that fits your voice, not someone else’s, and start there.

The world doesn’t need another face on a screen. It needs more people who are willing to say something real, in whatever way feels true to them.

What about you? If you’re sitting on an idea or a project you haven’t started because you don’t want to be on camera, hit the comment button and tell me what it is. I want to know what the world is missing because the format scared someone off.

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“Birth of Athena,” black-figure amphora, c. 550 BC. Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

How Athena was born from Zeus’ head

Stone Blind mentions this almost casually, like of course you already know Athena sprung fully formed from her father’s skull. I did not already know this. I knew Athena was Zeus’ daughter, but the specifics? Zeus swallowed Athena’s mother Metis (a Titan goddess of wisdom) because of a prophecy that her children would be more powerful than him. Classic Zeus move. Later, he developed a splitting headache, and Hephaestus (the god of the forge) cracked open his skull with an axe. Out came Athena, fully grown, in full armor.

The part that stuck with me: Zeus literally consumed the mother to claim the child. And then the mythology credits him as Athena’s sole parent. Metis gets erased. Knowing this makes Athena’s role in Medusa’s story hit differently. She’s a goddess who was herself born from an act of patriarchal consumption, and then she punishes another woman for being victimized by a god. The cycle is right there.

Athena with owl, detail from terracotta lekythos by the Brygos Painter, c. 490 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Athena’s owl

I knew owls were on ancient Athenian coins and that they symbolized wisdom. What I didn't know was that the Little Owl is literally named after Athena (Athene noctua) and was considered her sacred companion, representing the ability to see in darkness. The owl shows up in countless sculptures and became one of the most recognized symbols in Western civilization.

What I found interesting is that the owl-as-wisdom symbol isn’t just decorative. In some tellings, the owl gave Athena the ability to see the whole truth, even the parts hidden in shadow. Which makes it even more pointed that Athena, goddess of wisdom, chose not to see the truth of what happened to Medusa.

Stheno and Euryale chasing Perseus, detail from the Eleusis Amphora by the Polyphemus Painter, c. 650 BC. Archaeological Museum of Eleusis.

Medusa’s sisters and the connection to sea mythology

This is the rabbit hole that really got me. In Stone Blind, Medusa’s sisters Stheno and Euryale are the other two Gorgons. All three were sea creatures in the oldest versions of the myth, connected to a broader network of ocean mythology including the Graeae (the three gray sisters who shared one eye and one tooth) and various other sea-creature figures.

I started wondering: did The Little Mermaid or other ocean mythology stories in modern media take any inspiration from the Gorgon family tree? The connections are murky but fascinating. The Gorgons were daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, ancient sea deities. Phorcys and Ceto also parented the Graeae, the sea serpent Ladon, and Echidna (mother of many Greek monsters). So the Gorgons sit in this massive family tree of ocean-dwelling mythological creatures that predates almost every mermaid story we know.

Hans Christian Andersen’s original Little Mermaid draws more from Scandinavian folklore than Greek myth, but the broader tradition of dangerous, beautiful, powerful ocean women? That thread runs all the way back to figures like the Gorgons and the Sirens. The sea has always been the place where mythology puts its most threatening feminine figures. Medusa’s family tree is one of the oldest branches. I need to dig into this more.

The review

Format: Audiobook | Source: Library | Rating: 4 stars

What Haynes pulls off is making you feel for Medusa from the very start, so that by the time the famous part of the story arrives, you read it as a wrong done to a person rather than a monster getting what it deserved. Along the way you get attached to some of the other gods and goddesses and grow to genuinely dislike others, which is half the fun. The narration carried it for me, strong with urgency and sarcasm and distinct character voices, and I devoured the whole thing because I needed to see how it landed even though I already knew where it was going.

Grab your own copy of Stone Blind

Library first, always. But if you're buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links back indie bookstores and a sliver comes to me. No pressure.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a myth or story you grew up thinking you knew, then found out the real version was darker or stranger than the one you were told? Tell me in the comments.

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I felt that scene in my chest, because I have a switch like that, and the people who love me can see it every time.

The voice I built on purpose

There is a running joke in my house. My husband and kids say I have a work voice. They can hear it land the second I answer a work call or join a work Zoom, this brighter, smoother, warmer version of me that they find frankly hilarious because it sounds so fake to them. And honestly, it probably is fake. It is a persona I built a long time ago, back when I decided who I needed to be in public in order to grow my business. I picked her, and I have kept her forward facing in that business ever since. If I talked to a sales lead the way I talk to my own kids on the days they are testing every last nerve I have, I would never close a thing.

For years I ran that persona at full power on the road. I would be wrung out, physically and mentally, from the travel and the selling and from being a mom and a wife on top of all of it, and none of it mattered. The second I walked into the building or stepped behind my booth, I turned her on whether I had it in me or not. Full smile. Bright and peppy. Always positive, always on, always reaching out first.

The days were long in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has not done it. Breakfast in the hotel lobby at seven, where customers are already milling around and you are already on, already chatting them up before you have finished your coffee. The convention floor by eight and there until six. Then dinner and drinks with a group of customers you did not choose, where the whole game becomes praying you land a seat next to someone who will not drain the last of the social battery you have left, and they almost always do. If my head hit the pillow by eleven I was lucky, and then I got up and did it again for two or three more days before rushing home, where there was no recovery and no recharging, because home meant going straight back into mom mode and then doing the entire thing over again the next week.

I want to be clear about something, because it is the real point. The persona was never the problem. She is good at her job. The problem is that she was never actually me.

I am not bubbly. I am not extroverted. I am not naturally upbeat or chatty or on. I am someone who grinds, who wants to grow the thing, who likes making money as much as the next person. But the public face of all of that was a costume, and the older I got, the heavier the costume got to wear.

For most of those years I traveled with one of my staff, the same woman more often than not, brought along for the extra hands when the sales inquiries and the customer load got heavy. We got close. Close enough that we could each clock the exact moment the other one switched from her real self to her work self, the smile going up, the charm clicking into place, exactly like the two friends in the book. The difference between us is that she is still out there doing it, still turning it on, and she genuinely loves it. There is no burnout coming for her, knock on wood, because it is not a costume for her. It is just who she gets to be. Watching her is how I finally understood that the persona was never the villain. It just was never mine.

The night the switch stopped working

I should tell you about the night the switch stopped working.

It was one of the last conventions I traveled to. End of a long event, day two or three, when the social tank is already running on fumes. I got wrangled into a dinner with about twenty customers and prospects, and I drew the worst possible seat, dead center of the table. If you have never sat there, it is its own kind of trap. Nobody talks to you directly, but you are surrounded on every side, so you have to stay on, constantly, tracking five conversations at once, which is brutal when there is nothing left in you.

And I got this feeling in my chest that I needed to leave. Not wanted. Needed. I could not do it for one more minute. I could not smile through ‘Jim’ telling the same story I had already heard him tell three other times that same weekend, even though the people he was telling it to now were hearing it fresh. I faked a call from one of my kids and stepped outside for air. I gave myself the whole pep talk. Ten years of this, I am a pro, I can walk back in there and finish strong. So I did. I walked back through all of them, sat down, and lasted about two minutes before I faked a second call from home, got up, drove out of the parking lot to my hotel, and went to bed feeling completely numb.

Nobody thought a thing of it. I had blamed kid stuff, and I am a woman, so kid stuff is a get-out-of-jail-free card nobody questions. The next day, one or two people asked if everything was okay, if they had seen me slip out. Everyone else carried on as if I had never been there at all.

And that was the lightbulb. Not a triumphant one. A quiet, almost lonely one, sitting in my car in a dark parking lot. I didn’t have to be there. I could keep the business running and growing from behind the scenes, and I could start spending some of that energy on being me instead of performing her.

Where else was I doing this?

Here is the part I didn’t see coming. The permission I gave myself in that parking lot didn’t stay parked at work. Once I watched the whole event carry on without me, once I saw that the building didn’t fall down just because I went to bed, I started asking where else I was throwing that switch for no reason. The answer was basically everywhere.

So these days the switch gets harder to flip at all, and I have mostly stopped trying for anything that isn’t work. The extended family gathering that leaves me hollow for the rest of the day. The friend of a friend who wants to start a thing. The same-school, same-team mom angling for a deep, soul-baring talk when we don’t actually know each other. I used to fake my way through all of it because that is what you do, and now I mostly don’t, or I show up as myself and leave when I’m done.

If that makes people read me as cold, or decide I have a resting bitch face, or call me difficult, then we were probably never going to be close anyway.

The book never tells us how the woman doing the switching really feels about it. We watch her flip from herself to the public version and back, but the story closes the door before we learn whether it ever costs her anything. Maybe she is like my old coworker and it never will. Or maybe she is the version of me who never got stuck in the wrong seat at the wrong dinner, still turning it on, still assuming that is just the price of the life she built.

Take me as I am. The real one. The one who left the dinner.

The scene that started this is in The Villa by Rachel Hawkins. If you want it, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

Do you have a work voice? Hit the comment button and tell me what yours sounds like, and whether the people who love you can hear it the second it switches on.

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A three-star read that still sent me down three separate Google holes. I came in with Fourth Wing expectations, and what hooked me wasn’t the romance so much as the ballet world underneath it, which was so specific it kept pulling me out of the story and onto the internet.

I had to pause the audiobook because: wait. There are different kinds of pointe shoes?

I was on pointe for five years. And in my brain there was just one shoe. And it destroyed my feet. That was the whole experience.

So naturally, I Googled it.

There are different kinds of pointe shoes

The same shoe in four vamp heights. I genuinely did not know this was a choice you got to make. Image via Só Dança (sodanca.com).

Turns out, there’s a whole world I missed.

Different shanks: flexible, medium, or hard, depending on how strong your arch is. Different box shapes for different foot types: tapered, square, wide. There’s something called the vamp (the top of the shoe), which can be U-cut with a drawstring or V-cut for a more tapered look.

Some shoes have a low-profile box, some have a high one. And the construction varies too: traditional pointe shoes are made with paste and burlap that break down over time, but there are modern ones now made with polymer materials that actually last longer.

I just sat there like, oh. That explains a lot actually. Maybe my feet didn’t have to suffer quite that much.

The road back from an Achilles rupture runs 12-plus months, not two weeks. Graphic via 416 Physiotherapy (416physio.ca).

Achilles tear rehab timelines

Then something happens in the book (minor spoiler territory) and suddenly I’m Googling Achilles tear rehab timelines. PT requirements. How long recovery actually takes for a dancer.

The answer is: a long time. Full ruptures often mean 6 to 12 months minimum before return to activity, and for a professional dancer, the timeline can stretch even longer because the demands on that tendon are so specific. Some dancers never return to the same level.

Knowing that made the stakes in the book feel much more real. This isn’t a “rest for two weeks and come back” injury. This is a potential career-ender.

Sara Faulkner, the first woman to complete Coast Guard rescue swimmer training. Photo via aborderlife.medium.com.

What it takes to be a rescue swimmer

And somehow that led me to rescue swimmers. The male lead’s job in the book. The swim tests are genuinely unreal.

Coast Guard rescue swimmer candidates go through one of the most demanding training programs in the military. The attrition rate is extremely high. You have to be comfortable being uncomfortable in water in ways that most people would panic through.

I am a terrible swimmer. So reading about this was humbling to say the least.

Why this all matters

None of this makes me an expert on anything. It’s just curiosity. But once I knew the real stakes behind both characters’ worlds (ballet and rescue swimming), the story felt grounded in a way it hadn’t before. The injuries meant something. The training meant something. The fear of losing it all meant something specific.

The review

Format: Audiobook | Source: Library | Rating: 3 stars

The story weaves past and present with a quiet thread of mystery running underneath, and that mystery is mostly what kept me turning pages. The male lead is patient and caring and refreshingly blunt about how he feels, which I liked. Two honest notes though. The intimate scenes were awkward to sit through on audio, and I think I’d have liked the whole book more on the page than in my ears. Good, not great. But the world it’s set in was worth every tab I opened.

Borrow it if you can. Buy it if you must. And if you're buying, my Bookshop.org link keeps it with the indies.

Grab a copy of Variation.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a job or world from a novel that sent you straight to Google because you had to know if it was really like that?

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By the numbers

• 7 books, all free from the library

• 12 Google searches, from Lilith to the Siege of Sarajevo to a well in Italy named after an Irish saint

• 4 emotional essays incoming

• 3 reading trees growing

• 6 four-star reads and 1 three-star

• 5 on audio, 2 in print, 3 of them narrated by Julia Whelan

• 39.3 hours in my headphones at 1.5x speed, which would be 58 hours and 54 minutes at normal speed

• 1.9 days of my life spent inside a book this month

• Top genre: historical fiction, obviously

• Currently reading: Buckeye (Patrick Ryan) at 20 percent and The Sirens (Emillia Hart) at 66 percent

  I do this every month: every book I read, every Google hole it sent me down, and what each one is turning into. Subscribe and the next one lands in your inbox, free.

The Villa by Rachel Hawkins

Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

One book that handed me three essays and a research rabbit hole, so it punches above its rating. Childhood best friends at an Italian villa with a buried 1974 murder, told through song lyrics and podcast transcripts, all about ambition and friendship and who gets to own a woman’s work. Julia Whelan narrates, which is an automatic yes for me now. Closer to a 4.75 than a 4 for me.

Coming up: the busiest book of my month. A Things I Googled, plus three essays, one on friendship anniversaries, one on women’s horror and travel safety, and one on the work voice my family makes fun of.

The Astral Library by Kate Quinn

Physical (Library) ⭐⭐⭐

Kate Quinn’s first swing at magical realism: a hidden library where books are doors you can live inside and time in the real world stops while you’re gone. Alix moves through Austen, Sherlock, and Gatsby in a love letter to libraries and readers. The concept and the bookish charm carried it for me, but the emotional middle stayed a little distant, so it landed at a fond three stars rather than the gut-punch I get from her historical fiction. Still sent me down four Google holes, which tells you how much fun it is to read.

Coming up: a Things I Googled from those four holes, and a custom essay called Bookmark Your Life.

Pretty as a Picture by Elizabeth Little

Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I came for Julia Whelan and left attached to Marissa Dahl, a film editor who narrates her own life in movie scenes because that is genuinely how she works out what she is feeling. She is an introvert who says the wrong thing, knows it, and has stopped caring, right down to a bedtime routine of small specific rituals. I felt so seen by her it was almost uncomfortable. The murder mystery on a chaotic island film shoot is fun, but the voice is the whole thing. I knocked it out in two days over a long drive and a rained-out weekend. First Elizabeth Little for me, and not the last.

Coming up: nothing formal yet, but Marissa is living in my head rent free, so do not be surprised if she turns into an essay.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation by Rosemary Sullivan

Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Narrated by Julia Whelan, who was honestly part of why I picked it up. This reads like a true crime podcast about who betrayed the Frank family. A team including a retired FBI agent uses modern technology and old records to investigate a question that has been open for decades. The part that stuck with me most is the possibility that Otto Frank knew who was responsible and chose silence to protect that person’s family. Quick listen, well paced, and a great companion to any Anne Frank fiction.

Coming up: no piece of its own, but it’s another branch on the Anne Frank reading tree that started with When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman. That tree is still growing.

Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris

Physical (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I read this because Girl at War made me want to understand wars I was never taught, and this one took me inside the Siege of Sarajevo. It is quiet and human and gorgeous, one painter staying behind in a city that keeps closing around her. The title is the ash of a million library books raining down over the city after the National Library was shelled, and I have not stopped thinking about it.

Coming up: a piece from the Bosnian War rabbit hole it pulled me into, and a new branch on the Girl at War reading tree about the wars I was never taught.

The Glass Ocean by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White

Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Comfort-zone historical fiction with a love story braided through the danger, split between the doomed Lusitania in 1915 and a present-day writer chasing a family secret. Solid and cozy, a little predictable in the modern half, and I will admit I was halfway in before I clocked that the Lusitania sank in WWI, not WWII. Just ok on audio, so I would point you toward print.

Coming up: something short, still taking shape.

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I DNF’d Tom Lake and almost wrote Patchett off, then Threads talked me into trying The Dutch House on audio for the Tom Hanks narration, and it made me a convert. Danny and Maeve are a brother and sister locked out of their childhood mansion by their stepmother, circling that house for decades. Patchett turns the house into a character and makes ordinary family resentment feel epic. A warm, aching four stars.

Coming up: no piece of its own, but it kicked off a whole Patchett reading tree, and Tom Lake is next, so that thread is just beginning.

What is a reading tree?

It’s my favorite thing I make, and I haven’t actually published one yet, so here’s the short version. A reading tree is the chain of how one book pulls me into the next. Girl at War made me want to understand wars I was never taught, which led me to Black Butterflies, which sent me down the Bosnian War. That’s a tree, and it keeps growing as I read. I’m building these into a series for paid subscribers, and the first ones land soon. So when I say a tree is growing, that’s the thread I’m following.

The thread running through it all

Three of these books quietly grew reading trees this month: the Anne Frank tree that started with When We Flew Away and a brand new Patchett tree that begins with The Dutch House. That’s the part I love most, watching one book pull me straight into the next.

If you make me pick a favorite, I can’t, but The Villa, Black Butterflies, and Pretty as a Picture are the three still living in my head.

Tell me what you read in June. I want the one that wrecked you and the one you couldn’t finish.

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I picked up Girl at War because Julia Whelan narrated it. That’s it. That was the whole reason. I’ve been going through her audiobooks and this one popped up and I thought, sure, why not.

I didn’t even know what it was about.

Turns out it’s about the Croatian War of Independence, which is part of a larger set of conflicts I’d vaguely heard called “the Yugoslav Wars,” and I realized within the first few chapters that I knew almost nothing about any of it.

So I started googling.

What even were the Yugoslav Wars?

Okay so Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics in southeastern Europe that held together under Tito from after WWII until the early ‘90s. When it started falling apart, it fell apart violently. Croatia declared independence in 1991 and what followed was brutal. We’re talking ethnic cleansing, siege warfare, civilians targeted. The war in Croatia lasted until 1995, but the broader Yugoslav Wars stretched across multiple countries and conflicts through the decade.

I’ve probably read fifty WWII historical fiction novels. I’d never once picked up a book about this. And this was happening in the ‘90s. While I was alive. While I was old enough to have been paying attention.

The Vukovar water tower, heavily damaged during the Croatian War of Independence (1991-1995). Photo by Seiya123

The cyclical violence thing

There's a line of thinking in the book about how the Balkans seem to cycle through conflict every fifty years or so. Different faces, different names, same patterns. I went down a rabbit hole on this and it's... a lot. The region has been a fault line between empires, religions, and ethnic groups for centuries. The Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both World Wars, and then the breakup of Yugoslavia. It doesn't excuse anything, but it gives you context for why Ana's story feels so heavy. She's not just carrying her own trauma. She's carrying generations of it.

Damaged roofs in Sustjepan, a village near Dubrovnik, December 1991. Photo by Bracodbk

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West

This book comes up in Girl at War because Ana is a literature student and her professor gives her books about the Balkans. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is Rebecca West's account of traveling through Yugoslavia in the 1930s, right before WWII. It's supposedly this massive, sweeping look at the culture and history of the region. Published in 1941. It's on my reading list now.

Sara Novic’s other books

After finishing Girl at War I immediately went to look at what else Sara Novic has written. True Biz (2022) is about a school for the deaf and has really strong reviews. She's also an advocate for disability rights and Deaf culture. Totally different subject matter from Girl at War but I'm interested.

The thing I keep thinking about

I keep coming back to how much historical fiction exists about wars I know nothing about. I've been living in this WWII bubble and there are entire conflicts, entire countries' worth of stories, that I've never touched. This book cracked that open for me, and that's the part that earned the fifth star. It didn't just tell me a good story. It showed me a hole in how I read. I'm planning to put together a reading list of historical fiction set in the Balkans and beyond for anyone else who's been stuck in the same bubble.

The review

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Julia Whelan) | Source: Library | Rating: 5 stars

Structurally it moves between Ana’s childhood during the war and her life years later as a college student in the US, with flashbacks filling in what she can’t yet say out loud. Underneath the plot it’s about buried trauma, grief, and the lies we tell ourselves to keep functioning, and how all of that eventually comes unwound. It’s somber, and I was completely inside it the whole time, needing to know what happened next. My one complaint is that I wanted a book two. I finished it still wondering about Ana, her sister, and the people she left behind.

Grab a copy of Girl at War

How I think about buying books: the library is always the right answer if it's an option for you. But some books you just want to keep. If this is one of those, my Bookshop.org link supports independent bookstores and tosses a few cents to me.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what’s the war you know almost nothing about, the one your reading has somehow skipped right over? Tell me in the comments. I’m building that Balkans list next, and I’ll build the one after it from whatever you name.

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Joaquin, one of three biological siblings separated as children, is talking about a bike he got as a little kid. He didn’t know how to ride it, so his foster dad put training wheels on. Normal enough. But even after Joaquin learned to ride, he didn’t want the training wheels taken off. Because training wheels always catch you. No matter what. And he had spent his whole life in foster care, never sure that anyone would be there to catch him. So he wanted those wheels to stay.

I paused the audiobook when I heard that. Not because it was a big dramatic scene or a climactic reveal. It was quiet. Almost offhand. But it stopped me cold, because I realized I could map my entire life onto that metaphor. Every stage, every hard season, every version of myself that needed steadying. There were always training wheels. Sometimes they were people. Sometimes they were habits or routines. Sometimes they were just me, white-knuckling it alone and pretending that counted.

And sometimes the wheels got taken off before I was ready.

The ones I didn’t know I needed

My maternal grandparents were training wheels I didn’t fully appreciate until they were gone.

I only saw them during summers and holidays and the occasional special event, so they weren’t part of my everyday life. But they were always, always there. They called. They showed up to piano and dance recitals. They made every Christmas feel like something out of a movie. Their home was this place where everything felt orderly and safe and warm in a way that my regular life didn’t always feel.

I remember one time sitting on my grandpa’s lap and just breaking down. Something had happened with my parents, something I was too young to process and too old to ignore, and I just fell apart. He didn’t try to fix it. He didn’t give me a speech. He just held me and told me things would be okay. He just radiated love. And somehow that was everything.

They brought order with them wherever they went. That sounds like a small thing, but when you’re a kid and parts of your world feel chaotic, the person who shows up and makes everything feel steady is doing more than they’ll ever know. I didn’t think of them as training wheels at the time. I just thought of them as my favorite grandparents. But they were the reason I didn’t tip over during some of the shakiest parts of growing up.

The ones I had to become

When I started my business, there were no training wheels waiting for me. I had to build them myself, in real time, while already pedaling.

My husband was supportive. I want to be clear about that because it matters. He believed in what I was building and he never made me feel crazy for trying. But support from the outside and being in it with you are two different things. He wasn’t the one fighting for leads every day, staying up late chasing deadlines, trying to keep current customers happy while finding new ones. That was just me. I was my own training wheels, my own safety net, and my own pep talk at two in the morning when I wasn’t sure any of it was going to work.

There’s a specific kind of loneliness to that. I remember being in my home office on the other side of the wall while my kids and husband ate dinner together. I could hear them laughing and talking, and I was fifteen feet away, missing it. Not because I didn’t want to be there but because I was terrified that if I didn’t meet a deadline or finish a project or keep growing the business, something bad would happen. The irony is that the bad thing was already happening: I was trading my kids’ childhoods for work. I was missing the games and the school events and hearing about them after, always from the other side of some wall I’d built myself.

Being your own training wheels is something people romanticize. The grind, the hustle, the “she built it all herself” narrative. And sure, there’s something real about the toughness it gives you. But I think it’s also just sad. Not a knock on anyone in my life. Just a true thing. When you’re the only thing keeping yourself upright, there’s no room to wobble. And everybody needs room to wobble sometimes.

The ones she won’t let me be

My oldest daughter is the toughest person I know. And it is both the thing I’m proudest of and the thing that breaks my heart the most.

She is strong in the way that makes you need to stand up straighter just being around her. She has been through the drama of high school, where teenage girls are cruel in ways that still shock me even though I lived through it myself. She has navigated boys coming in and out of the picture. She’s played college athletics and faced horrible leadership from adults who should have known better, dealt with a devastating injury, and pushed through things that would have flattened most people.

And through all of it, she’s maybe let me catch her once or twice but quickly realized it and recovered.

She doesn’t shut me out. That’s the thing, she lets me be there. She lets me stand right next to the bike. But she won’t let me touch the handlebars. She won’t lean into the training wheels even when she’s wobbling, because she is so determined to stay upright on her own.

I watch her and I want to scream “just let me catch you, just this once.” Not because she can’t handle it - she clearly can. But because there is nothing wrong with letting someone else hold you steady when the road gets rough. You don’t have to be constantly wrecking and tipping over for training wheels to matter. Sometimes you just need them for the one or two big spills. The ones that would hurt a lot less if you’d let somebody soften the landing. You don’t have to carry all that weight yourself and stay so tense and perfectly balanced, training wheels are sometimes there for a reason.

But she’s not wired that way. And I love her for exactly who she is, even when who she is makes me want to wrap her in bubble wrap and tell her the world doesn’t always deserve her toughness - the people sending big gusts in her direction and making her wobble, don’t always deserve her ability to stay upright and peddle on.

The one that never left

And then there’s the training wheel I’ve had the longest.

I’ve never been great at friendships. That’s not self-pity, it’s just the truth. I was always easy to forget, easy to walk away from when someone more fun or more outgoing came along. I’m introverted and sensitive. I wasn’t the one organizing the group hangouts or keeping the group chat alive because I’d rather have been home and alone (probably reading). And so people drifted, the way they do when you’re not loud enough to hold their attention.

But there’s this one friend. We met around junior high. We’ve lived several states apart for basically our entire lives. But, we were in each other’s weddings, she’s one of my boys’ Godmothers, and we still get together now, in our late forties, and it still feels like no time has passed.

She’s the wobbly training wheel on one side of the bike. The one that’s been there so long the treads are worn smooth. The wheel that’s starting to look more square than round from all the times the bike sat still for a while, or hit the brakes too hard, or caught me on a big spill. She didn’t have a matching wheel on the other side because she was only one person in what could have been, maybe should have been, a whole network of friends. But she was the lone survivor. And honestly, she probably worked harder than I did to make sure we stayed in each other’s lives, because she’s a better person than me in that way.

A handwritten letter when I needed one, always signed with LYLAS (Love You Like A Sister). An phone call or email or text that came at the right time. An Instagram meme DM’d that said “I’m still here” without having to say it. She’s the one wheel that never came off the bike. And I don’t think I’ve told her enough what that means.

The thing nobody tells you about training wheels

Here’s what Joaquin’s story unlocked for me, the part I’m still sitting with:

Training wheels don’t get a say in when they come off. And neither do you.

My grandparents didn’t choose to leave. I didn’t choose to lose them. I would have kept those wheels on my entire life if I could have, because I loved them beyond measure and they made the world feel safe. But they died, and the training wheels were removed without my agreement, without my will, without anyone asking if I was ready to ride without them. I wasn’t. You just do it anyway. I wish for them back, for even just an hour, every single day.

And then there are the wheels like my friend, the ones that are beat up and worn down and maybe don’t spin as smoothly as they used to, but they are still bolted on. Still there. Still catching you on the wobbles even after decades of road.

I think we spend a lot of time talking about independence. About learning to ride without the training wheels. About being strong enough to balance on your own. And that’s fine. I’ve done it. I’ve been my own wheels more times than I can count. But Joaquin didn’t want his training wheels off because he knew something most of us take too long to learn: there is nothing weak about wanting something there to catch you. The weakness is pretending you don’t need it.

So what are your training wheels? The people, the habits, the one friend who never left, the version of yourself that showed up when no one else did? Are they still there? Did you choose to take them off, or did someone else make that call for you?

I’m still figuring out my own answers. But I know this much: some of my training wheels were taken too soon, some of them I had to become myself, one of them won’t let me help no matter how much I want to, and one of them has been wobbling along beside me for thirty-five years with no intention of quitting.

I’ll take the wobbly wheel. Every time.

The line that started this is in Far from the Tree by Robin Benway. If you want the book, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

Tell me about your wobbly wheel. The one that’s beat up and worn smooth and still bolted on after all these years. Who is it? And does that person know what they are to you? The comment button is right here:

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I started typing things like “history of not believing women” and “where does hysterical come from” and ended up somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

1. The word “hysterical” is worse than I thought

The word hysteria comes from the Greek “hystera.” It means uterus.

I had to read that twice.

Ancient Greek physicians, Hippocrates included, believed that when a woman’s uterus physically wandered through her body, it caused emotional instability, anxiety, irrational behavior. The prescribed cure was pregnancy. Put the uterus back to “work.”

Hippocrates, engraved by Paulus Pontius after Peter Paul Rubens, 1638. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

That’s not ancient trivia. That etymology is still in the word every time someone uses “hysterical” to shut down a woman who’s upset, angry, or saying something inconvenient. I’d used that word my whole life without knowing what it literally meant.

2. The rest cure

By the 1800s, “hysteria” had become a catch-all diagnosis for women who were anxious, depressed, angry, exhausted, or just difficult. And the treatment was something called the rest cure, developed by a doctor named Silas Weir Mitchell.

Total bed rest. No reading. No writing. No visitors. No intellectual stimulation. Force-fed. Sometimes for months.

The logic was that women’s brains couldn’t handle the strain of thought. Thinking was making them sick. So the cure was to remove them from the world entirely.

I kept looking for some version of this that felt exaggerated or fringe. It wasn’t. This was mainstream medicine.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, c. 1900. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Yellow Wallpaper

This is where the rabbit hole turned into something I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Before she got married, Gilman studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. She was a painter, designed greeting cards, taught art. She was building a creative life.

Then she married, had a baby, and developed severe postpartum depression. Her doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell, prescribed the rest cure. He told her to live as domestic a life as possible and to never touch a pen, brush, or pencil again. An artist told to stop creating. A thinker told to stop thinking.

She almost lost her mind. So she wrote a short story about it.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) is about a woman confined to bed rest who slowly descends into hallucination and obsession with the wallpaper in her room. It reads like horror. It is horror.

You know that trend where people try to “rawdog” a flight? Just sit there. No phone, no book, no music, nothing. People film themselves doing it for an hour like it’s an accomplishment. Now imagine that hour is your entire life. No end date. No one asking if you’re okay. Just you and the walls and the slow understanding that this is what they think will fix you. That’s the rest cure. That’s what Gilman lived.

She sent a copy of the story to Dr. Mitchell after it was published. The story goes that he changed his treatment approach afterward, though whether that’s true or just a satisfying ending is debated.

The Yellow Wallpaper comes up in Mad Honey, and I went and read the whole thing that night. It’s free online (Project Gutenberg) and takes about twenty minutes. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

4. Why this came from Mad Honey

Mad Honey never directly lays out this history. But the book kept circling this question: whose version of events gets taken seriously? Whose pain is real and whose is performance? Whose story gets to be the truth?

That’s the same question that runs through the entire history of “hysteria.” The language changes. The mechanisms update. But the pattern of deciding that a woman’s account of her own experience isn’t credible? That hasn’t gone anywhere.

I picked up a Jodi Picoult novel and ended up tracing a line from ancient Greek medicine to 19th-century psychiatric abuse to a short story I should have read years ago. Books do this to me.

Has a book ever made you see a pattern you’d been living inside without recognizing it? Tell me which one.

Grab a copy of Mad Honey here.

And then it happened to me.

I became a woman who counts her words.

Not metaphorically. Literally. After listening, I started tracking how many words I was using — on work calls, talking to my kids when they got home from school, telling my husband about my day, chatting with my friend during our morning workout. I tried to keep count for just one hour. One hour. And 100 words was gone before I’d even said anything that mattered.

I’m an introvert. I’m the person who gets talked out by the end of a workday and doesn’t want to say another word to anyone by dinner. And even I cannot fathom being limited to 100 words a day. What do you spend them on? Your kids? Your job? Your marriage? What if you're having a terrible day and all you want to do is scream? Does the counter clock that as twenty words because you screamed for thirty seconds?

I became a woman who thought, even for a second, that it might be nice to stop.

And this one is harder to admit. Because there are these moments in the book like when the women can’t work, can’t get the mail, can’t really do anything but cook and clean and take care of kids, where a tiny, exhausted part of me thought: what if that was just... one day? One day where nobody expected me to run a business and be a great mom and handle the doctor appointment booking or school calls and work out and be a good wife and a good friend and a good daughter and still somehow take care of myself.

But the book won’t let you sit in that fantasy. Because the bracelet is there. The counter is there. And the cost of that “simple” life is your voice. Your daughter’s voice. And the brain of every little girl who should be learning sixty thousand words and is stuck at six thousand because the government decided she didn’t need them.

I became a woman who regrets not voting.

There's a scene where the main character reflects on the fact that she didn't vote. When all of this was happening around her, the slow creep of laws, the gradual erosion of rights, she didn't think it was important enough for her to show up.

I put the book down. Because I’ve been there. Maybe I shouldn’t admit that, but I have. There have been moments where I genuinely thought one voice couldn’t possibly matter. That my showing up or not showing up wouldn’t change anything.

This book sits you down and makes you feel, all the way through your body, how wrong that is. Not in a preachy way. Not in a lecture. Just in the way the story unfolds. How it shows you, through flashbacks, that none of this happened overnight. It crept. And the people who could have stopped it were busy thinking their one voice didn't count.

I became a woman who needs you to read this book.

Vox didn’t just make me angry. It made me angry in a way that felt personal. The kind of angry where you're not yelling at the book. You're yelling at yourself. At the world. At how close some of it feels to something that could actually happen.

Christina Dalcher wrote a story that could have been one thing, a dystopia about silenced women, and made it so much more. The main character has real problems beyond the hundred-word rule. The twists are genuinely surprising. The ending earns itself.

And Julia Whelan narrating it? She made me feel every single word. All hundred of them.

Vox by Christina Dalcher. Five stars. Listen on audio. And then go count your words for a day. I dare you.

I listened to Vox on audio, narrated by Julia Whelan. If you want your own copy, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

If you only got 100 words today, who would you spend them on? Your kids, your partner, your boss, the stranger who cut the line at pickup? Tell me in the comments. I know mine, and it’s not who I’d want it to be.

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Here’s where my brain went.

1. Do authors actually steal other authors’ work?

There’s a plot point in this book (mild spoiler, but it’s hard to talk about my rabbit holes without it) where a character passes off someone else’s writing as their own. My first thought was: does this actually happen?

Turns out, yes. More than you’d think.

The most famous recent case is probably Cristiane Serruya, a romance author who was caught in 2019 plagiarizing from dozens of other writers. We're not talking about borrowing themes or being 'inspired by.' She was lifting entire passages. Nora Roberts was one of the authors she copied from, and Roberts did not let it slide quietly.

Then there’s Q.R. Markham (a pen name), whose 2011 spy novel Assassin of Secrets turned out to be a patchwork quilt of stolen passages from James Bond novels, John le Carre, and others. The book was pulled from shelves within days of publication. He’d literally stitched together sentences from other people’s books and called it his own.

The more I dug, the more cases I found. Some were clear-cut theft. Others lived in that gray area where “influence” and “borrowing” start to blur. Which brought me to my next search...

2. Are authors using AI to write their books?

This one spiraled. I started Googling whether AI ghostwriting is becoming a thing in publishing, and the answer is: it already is, and it’s messy.

Amazon had to cap the number of self-published books an author could upload per day because people were using ChatGPT to churn out entire novels and flooding Kindle Unlimited. Some authors reported finding AI-generated books published under names suspiciously similar to theirs, clearly designed to siphon off sales.

Then there’s the philosophical question that I couldn’t stop turning over: if there are only so many stories to tell, and AI is trained on all of them, does “original” even mean anything anymore? I don’t have an answer. But the question felt different after reading a book where a character literally steals someone else’s words to try to salvage a dwindling career. Feeney probably didn’t write this as a commentary on AI in publishing, but the timing made it hit that way.

3. Is the island in the book a real place?

The island in Beautiful Ugly is described as this remote, windswept Scottish island you can only reach by ferry. Standing stones. Dramatic cliffs. The kind of place that feels ancient and alive. I needed to know if it was real.

The short answer: it’s fictional, but it’s clearly inspired by real Scottish islands. The descriptions remind me most of the Outer Hebrides, particularly Lewis and Harris, which is home to the Callanish Standing Stones -- a stone circle that predates Stonehenge. You can only get there by ferry from Ullapool or by a small plane, and the landscape is exactly the kind of stark, beautiful, edge-of-the-world terrain Feeney describes.

Callanish Standing Stones, Isle of Lewis, Scotland. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

There’s also the Isle of Skye, which has the Fairy Pools, the Old Man of Storr, and that same mythic quality. And smaller islands like St. Kilda, which was evacuated in 1930 and is now uninhabited -- just ruins and seabirds. The idea of a community choosing to live on a remote island, cut off by choice, felt very St. Kilda to me, except these women chose to stay rather than leave.

I spent about an hour looking at ferry schedules and Airbnb listings on Lewis. So that happened.

4. The idea that wouldn’t leave: can the same story belong to more than one person?

This wasn’t a single Google search so much as a thread I kept pulling. The plagiarism angle, the AI angle, and even Feeney’s fictional island all circled back to the same question: who owns a story?

There's a concept in folklore studies called 'polygenesis.' It's the idea that similar stories arise independently in different cultures because humans share the same fears, desires, and experiences. Flood myths appear in Mesopotamian, Hindu, Greek, and Indigenous traditions, not because anyone copied anyone else, but because floods are terrifying and universal.

So maybe the question isn’t whether someone stole your story. Maybe it’s whether any story was ever just yours to begin with.

I don’t know. But I like that a thriller I mostly read as a palate cleanser sent me here.

Grab a copy of Beautiful Ugly