Helen Rena

I read half of the book so far, and it's not bad, but there is some fat-shaming in it, and that makes me so sad--I really loved Howl's Moving Castle and had such great expectations for this book. :(

Currently free for kindle.

In this age of touch tablets and smart watches and phone cameras, National Handwriting Day might seem kind of quaint: oh yeah, that thing we used to do by gripping a writing implement tightly between our bony hand-extremities and scrawling out glyphs to our fellow humans.

But handwriting is here to stay! Thumb-typing is dandy, but paper is handy…er. (Face it: when it comes to jotting quick notes, something about thinly sliced dried tree pulp is just timeless and irresistible.) And whether it’s on a post-it, a grocery list, a cocktail napkins, or handsome leather-bound journal, the letters you shape and the way you shape them can reveal hidden facets of your personality.

Ready to unlock the secrets of your psyche? Write on:

If your handwriting is “messy” or “illegible”…

…you’re a slob. Clean up your act!

If your handwriting is excellent, Palmer-method penmanship…

…you’re a show-off. What, do you think you’re BETTER than us?

If your handwriting is made out of decorative gel frosting…

…you probably work at a bakery, I’m guessing!

If your handwriting is backwards, and in Italian…

…Congratulations, you're Leonardo Da Vinci! I loved you in The Great Gatsby!

If your handwriting looks like this…

…wait, actually, then you’re Leonardo DiCaprio. Congratulations, and sorry for occasionally mixing you up with the Renaissance polymath!

If your handwriting is a series of untranslated glyphs pressed into a clay tablet…

…you’re a member of the lost Minoan civilization of Crete. Call your nearest anthropologist and help her translate Linear A; I bet she’d really appreciate it!

If your handwriting consists of a bunch of cut-and-pasted letters…

…you’re committing blackmail. THE POLICE HAVE BEEN ALERTED. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FLEE.

If your handwriting is scribbly and in chalk…

…you’re a scientific mastermind on the brink of a discovery and/or a nervous breakdown!

If your handwriting is insanely, intricately illuminated…

…you’re a monk on the Isle of Lindisfarne! Watch out for Vikings ;)

If your handwriting is actually a series of rocks lined up on a beach to spell out letters…

…you’re probably trapped on a desert island. Bummer! (And how are you reading this blog post, BTW?)

My synopsis of Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness:” Planet Earth is in trouble. The sun goes out. Plants are dying. There’s nothing to eat. People burn everything they could for light and warmth. And then, after everyone is dead, two last women approach the last fire and look at each other…and die from laughing after they see how badly they applied make-up in all this dark.

Okay, okay, I’m joking. It’s two last men who come up to the fire. No make-up involved. Unfortunately. And I’m still not sure what the moral of this poem is. Transcendental doom and gloom? However, the poem does relay feelings of hopelessness and terror and darkness brilliantly because Lord Byron is, of course, an amazing poet. :)

I know this sounds like a bad math problem, but this is literally the plot of Sally Gardner’s Operation Bunny. Don’t believe me? Here is the book’s synopsis as per moi: a girl named Emily Vole must fight an evil fairy named Harpella,* who single-handedly wiped out the majority of the fairy population on earth. The surviving fairies detach their apparently detachable wings and live as humans in perpetual fear of Harpella finding them and stuffing their wings down their throats killing them. The brave Emily bravely fights and defeats the fairy Hitler, I mean Harpella, who, it turns out, was killing the fairies because she was mad at her husband because he had abandoned her because...okay, it didn’t say why he’d left her. Must be her name. What I don’t get, though, is why Harpella wanted to kill all the fairies instead of, let’s say, just killing her husband? This must be some hardcore fairy logic because I don’t get it.

And the bunnies? Oh, yes, Harpella turned some pesky humans into pink bunnies. Why pink? Maybe to really rub it in. The end.

*This name is so appalling I actually like it. So I’m guessing it’s harpy + Cinderella + all the patriarchal luggage these two words have acquired during their existence = a serial killer in a children’s book published in 2012. You just can’t beat this. :)

Collection of art can be found here.

The Three Musketeers is about FOUR dudes (yes, what a writer wouldn’t do for a good-sounding title?) who are having some rather vicious fun in the seventeenth-century France. They rob,* kill, and abuse people. Good clean fun, right? :)

But what is really shocking is the story of Athos’s wife, Milady de Winter. We don’t get her side of the story in The Three Musketeers, only her husband’s, and the noble Athos naturally portrays her as a liar and a thief and it’s totally okay to kill her after a mock trial that comes up at the end of the novel. Yes, the four musketeer dudes capture and try Milady, yes, just the four of them. What a fair trial! Then, after they “sentence” her to death, they pay an executioner they brought with them to behead the poor woman.

Yep.

Anyway, in the sequel to The Three Musketeers, either Twenty Years After or The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, I can’t remember which at the moment, we do learn Milady’s story as told by her own self. Yes, she admits that she was a liar and thief, but she was an orphan and would have died in the streets from starvation if she didn’t steal. Caught after she’d robbed a church, she was branded on the shoulder. Yet she somehow picked herself up and educated herself enough to pass for a noble-born and to marry Athos under false pretences. However, she didn’t mean to hurt or rob him.** Perhaps she even loved him, which he amply repaid by tying her to a tree and leaving her to die after he found out that she was a thief and had that brand on her shoulder. At the time this all was happening, the girl was SIXTEEN!!!

Anyhow, I think these porcelain hog musketeers just about sum it all up. :)

P.S. Just for kicks, you can compare Milady’s story to Jean Valjean’s from Les Miserables. Jean stole too, was punished, returned to society, but couldn’t find a place in it until he started lying about his past. Which is essentially Milady’s trajectory. Only Jean’s struggle is seen as Herculean and noble and whatnot whereas Milady’s one is depicted as a dirty descent to hell.

*The four musketeers don’t steal stuff directly—they just “buy” things, promising to pay later, but never actually getting around to it. Such behavior was condoned back then because the working and middle classes were considered subhuman by the nobility, hence it was okay to abuse them.

**True, it’s her side of the story, but what would she have gained by robbing Athos and running away from him? Since he’s an aristocrat, his wealth is land-based, which is hard to carry off in the middle of a night. Plus, Milady would have lost the prestige and protection that came with the status of a married woman and a countess.

This is a collection of short stories that pokes light-hearted fun at the recent vampire craze. One story, for instance, is about a vampire hiding from a woman who wants him to turn her into a vampire. With sadness, the vampire thinks that those vampire wannabes now look more like vampires than the real ones: “They were so vampire they were vampyre.” I liked the stories; there were a lot of good jokes and interesting turns of the plot in them. Unfortunately, some stories felt confusing, and there were several typos in the book.

Yesterday I read the funniest typo ever. It said, "All he wanted was to sell used cats," and I thought how cool was that - inspiring, really - until I realized it was supposed to be "used cars." :)

Wishing you all a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Tales from Moominvalley is well, a collection of short stories. :D

BUT one of them is about Christmas. “The Fir Tree.” And if I could give more than five stars to this short story, I would. All the stars for “The Fir Tree.” :D

My synopsis: since the Moomins and most of their friends hibernate all winter, they never celebrate Christmas. In fact, they don’t even know what it is. So, when they are jolted awake by a Hemulen* in the middle of winter and told they must get up for Christmas, they are utterly confused. They try to find out what Christmas is, but everyone they ask is cranky and overwhelmed by buying presents, decorating, cooking, etc. So the Moomins decide Christmas is something scary and unpleasant and they must hide from it in a fir tree. Hilarity ensues, with a very touching ending.

P.S. The other stories in this collection are lovely too, but “The Fir Tree” is the absolute best.

Happy Holidays!

*A creature that looks like a hippo, but walks on hind legs.

Got this in the Pixel of Ink email the other day. On the book's cover there are four authors listed, but in the ad it's only Joe Darger, et al. One just can't help but wonder about their true love...

My beef with it: So, out of all the toys that are meant to be burned because of the boy’s illness, the fairy only saves the bunny. She lets the Skin Horse burn. And the wooden lion. And the china dog (okay, it’s hard to say if that would actually burn). But she saves the rabbit. And it’s because…because…I don’t know…bunnies are better than horses?

Anna Karenina starts on a kind note: a loveless arranged marriage between a young woman named Anna and her much, much older husband starts crumbling because Anna falls in love with a young man. So yes, love between people of the same age, condemnation of arranged marriages, and all that. However, divorces were very tricky to obtain in Russia at that time. Basically, you could only get one under extreme circumstances like for example, your spouse has been missing for years or he’s been sent to Siberia as a criminal, etc. And while adultery indeed was one of those rare legal grounds for divorce, there was a catch: the spouse who would admit to adultery could never remarry. Them’s the rules. Anyway, after Anna leaves her husband for her lover, her husband does not want to take the blame for adultery he didn’t commit, and Anna doesn’t want it because then she wouldn’t be able to marry her lover. Dilemma at its best. All writers collectively swoon.

Now, how does Tolstoy solve this dilemma? Easily. He labels Anna a bad mother because she doesn’t know where one of her daughter’s toys is because all good mothers know the whereabouts of every single of their kids’ toys at all times. He also paints her in really dark colors. Not only she is an adulteress, but she also takes contraceptives, so we all should just stone her. Finally, he has her friends abandon her and her young lover fall out of love with her, after which he has poor Anna throw herself under a train.

And if that’s not bad enough, there is another story going parallel to Anna’s. An aristocratic woman with five or so kids discovers that her husband cheated on her, but she forgives him, never takes contraceptives even though her health is compromised by so many pregnancies, and finally allows her husband to fritter away her money because that’s what a good woman does. Well, Tolstoy lets her live. The end.

P.S. An argument can be made that Tolstoy was a realist and that’s why he showed Anna’s lover fall out of love with her and so on. And yes, it’s true—love is flitting and friends can betray you—but Tolstoy didn’t do just that. He also demonized Anna so that readers wouldn’t pity her or root for her. Which was just really low on Tolstoy’s part, especially since Tolstoy himself cheated on his wife repeatedly.