What Smack Said #23
May gray, mitigated by beach trips & books
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Happy end of May! We're getting close to the beginning of summer, but you wouldn't know it in San Diego. Everything is gray, gray, gray.
I spent a week catsitting for a friend in an apartment just a few blocks from the ocean, and let me tell you it was as wonderful as it sounds. I would get up, walk to a bakery for a croissant for breakfast, and then take a walk along the beach or nearby cliffs.
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And I read seven books. Absolute heaven.
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I read one novel, then a graphic novel as a palate cleanser, then another novel—rinse and repeat. And any one of these could have made the honorable mentions list for this month, but I think my favorites were Hotel of Secrets (historical romance in 1878 Vienna), The Girl from the Sea (contemporary queer middle grade graphic novel with witches and shapeshifters), and The Witch Boy (another contemporary queer middle grade graphic novel, this one with selkies).
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Content warnings for general descriptions of domestic abuse, PTSD, mutilated bodies, suicidal ideation, survivor's guilt, and medical abuse below.
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Remember this cover? (Probably not, I know.)
Silence for the Dead by Simone St. James was a book crawl purchase at the end of April, and I read it twice since then—just flipped back to the beginning after I finished the first time. (I'm finding that if I don't do that, I have a very hard time returning to books I want to reread just because there are so many others waiting for me.) |
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The novel takes place shortly after WWI and follows Kitty, who is on the run from her abusive father, as she fakes her credentials to get a nursing job at an isolated mental asylum in northern England. She's deeply traumatized by her abusive upbringing and the terror of constantly trying to stay one step ahead of her father. And if she doesn't mask her PTSD, she'll be fired. She'll run out of what meager resources she has left and her father will find her and drag her home. He'll kill her.
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Kitty's trauma is a result of domestic abuse. And though she never fought in WWI, she's surrounded by similarly damaged people at the Portis House asylum. One man's assignment during the war was to search for and identify body parts after a battle so that the families back home would have an arm, a leg, part of a torso, etc. to bury. But he did no actual fighting—does that mean he's weak minded?
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Of course not. But his family didn't know what to do with him. His PTSD caused unseemly behavior, so they sent him to the asylum.
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Another man is pleasant enough, but mentally vacant; he has no idea where he is or who the people around him are. The love interest suffers from survivor's guilt and checked himself in after a suicide attempt. Another man's PTSD manifests in violence, and yet another's depression led to alcoholism. On and on and on. Everyone's trauma is the result of different events, but that makes no substantive difference in the end. They all suffer under it.
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Most of the men at the asylum are there because their families simply didn't know how to cope with their behavior. The doctors, who visit once a month, reprimand the patients with instructions to buck up and put mind over matter. Sedatives are administered liberally: for panic attacks, night terrors, visible signs of depression, general agitation, and displays of anger or violence. If the men aren't acting masking the symptoms of their PTSD, their visitation privileges are revoked, which further isolates them and worsens their symptoms.
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In
Silence for the Dead, everyone's trauma is individual, but still entirely valid. The book is a window into the ways that trauma manifests, and how people cope when they have limited resources for healing at their disposal.
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Also, the ghosts of the family who lived in Portis House before it became an asylum are haunting the house and everyone in it, preying on their terror and the fact that no one trusts their own minds and sanity. That's the fun part.
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This has been What Smack Said, a monthly newsletter about books, fiction writing, and everything else. If you don't want to receive these emails, please use the link below to unsubscribe from this list. |
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