Audely Bensen Writes

As is growing more and more common, I picked up When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill on the recommendation of a writing group friend. I spotted it in the same Barnes and Noble sale as when I bought How High We Go in the Dark.  This might be one of my favorite reads of 2023 so far. The book follows Alex Green from childhood to early adulthood in the 60s and 70s as she navigates family, friendship, love, and her place in the world. Plus dragons.  This book perfectly captured the rage of the last few years, the way a family can hurt you while trying to love you, and provides a knowing wink at the way fighting against an ingrained culture can feel entirely futile. And on top of that, it is just so, so beautiful.  One thing that I was really impressed by with this story was the choice to set it in the 60s. If I had tried to write this story, I would have set it now; however, I think by putting this just at the point in time that the modern tradwife movement seems to want...

A friend from work who reads literary-leaning sci-fi recommended How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. I'd been meaning to read it, and then happened to spot it while accidentally wandering Barnes and Noble when a sale was on.  When I started reading this, I happened to also be in the middle of Meader, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison. It ended up being a great paired reading, as How High We Go in the Dark definitely has a non-typical structure. Being able to read this book while reading a book about structure was a bit of a gift.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I can't imagine the amount of time the author must have spent thinking about world building in order to establish a slightly varied world in each chapter. The tone reminded me of  other literary-leaning books (specifically of pandemic books, like Mike Chen's A Beginning At the End or Station Eleven), I was waiting to hop back to point of views that we'd seen already, and that never happened. Again, th...