Warning: Plot secrets live here. Tread carefully.

I am about to turn sixty, and my body reminds me of this fact every single morning. Your brain tells you that you can still sprint across the busy street to catch a changing light. Then your knees stage a violent protest before your foot even leaves the curb. Aging forces a strange kind of physical surrender on a person. You accept that your internal hardware is lagging far behind your mental ambitions.

When I picked up Samantha Downing’s Too Old for This, I expected a standard psychological thriller with a high body count and a sleek protagonist. Instead, I spent the entire weekend laughing out loud at the absolute indignity of a retired criminal dealing with a slowing metabolism.

Lottie Jones buried her criminal past decades ago, trading the adrenaline of her youth for a quiet life. She successfully constructed a peaceful routine, complete with an adult son and a future daughter-in-law who requires delicate social management. Then a fumbling journalist arrives, sniffing around old secrets, and the fragile domestic structure cracks.

Lottie does not want to murder anyone else. She behaves like an eminently practical woman who views body disposal with the same enthusiasm one might reserve for cleaning out the gutters before a major storm. It is an annoying chore that disrupts her weekly schedule. Her hard-won peace is suddenly on the line.

Our protagonist fumbles constantly as she panics about her aching joints. She simply wants to protect the comfortable life she spent thirty years constructing while looking at the escalating chaos with deep exhaustion. If keeping that secret safe requires a few more bodies, she will do exactly what is necessary to retain her quiet lifestyle. There is a twisted, unassailable logic to her behavior that makes you root for her survival.

Her family dynamics add an extra layer of comedic stress to the narrative. Her adult son is trying to navigate his own life, completely oblivious to the fact that his mother is a seasoned killer. The impending marriage brings outside scrutiny directly into her kitchen, forcing her to play the role of the sweet matriarch while mentally calculating the logistics of another homicide. This juxtaposition feels brilliantly sharp. She is fighting a war on two fronts: the nosy outsiders threatening her freedom, and the natural decay of her own physical capabilities. Age, however, turns Lottie into a very efficient cleanup crew.

The catalyst for this entire disaster is a journalist who seems completely out of their depth. Crime fiction often introduces brilliant investigators who piece together clues with terrifying precision. This reporter fumbles around, dropping the ball and missing obvious signs, looking like a total amateur to anyone watching closely. You quickly realize that this person is merely a puppet in a much larger, more dangerous game. Someone else is pulling the strings from the shadows, using a clueless writer to flush Lottie out of her comfortable hiding spot.

That puppet master turns out to be the original detective from her past case. This man possesses an obsessive mind that refuses to let the mystery go, even after decades have passed. He could have enjoyed a perfectly good, peaceful retirement on a beach somewhere. Choosing to look backward instead, the former investigator threw away his own peace just to satisfy an ancient itch. His inability to stop himself creates a massive, volatile mess out of sheer stubbornness.

His obsession highlights the deep tragedy of a wasted life. While Lottie fought tooth and nail to secure her peace, this detective willingly threw his away to prove a point that nobody else cared about. He creates a volatile situation out of sheer pride. Watching his meticulous plans collide with Lottie’s rusty, panicked improvisations provides a masterclass in dark comedy. The narrative shifts from a tense cat-and-mouse game into an escalating comedy of errors where everyone is slightly incompetent. Law enforcement looks just as foolish as the criminal when pride enters the equation.

Downing excels at manipulating the narrative board until the entire structure catches fire. The final act of the book brings all the chickens home to roost in a way that feels delightfully chaotic. Rather than resolving the plot with a clean, cinematic showdown, the ending embraces the messy reality of Lottie’s physical limitations. The resolution satisfies that dark, practical logic established in the opening chapters. Mistakes are made, bodies accumulate, and the sheer absurdity of the climax leaves you breathless.

I appreciated how the story avoids making Lottie a superhuman figure. Her victory feels earned through sheer persistence. Tactical brilliance has nothing to do with it. She survives because she is willing to accept the indignities of her situation and push through them anyway. The ending leaves a lingering sense of unease mixed with amusement, proving that some secrets refuse to stay buried quietly. You realize that peace is an illusion when your past is built on a foundation of bone.

This book kept me hooked because it understands the weight of time. We cannot outrun our past choices. Our failing joints will eventually catch up with us anyway. Downing reminds us that the past is a debt that always collects interest. Lottie is the perfect guide through this ridiculous landscape, showing us that survival is just another item on the weekend to-do list.

Shelve Test: 4 – Loved.

Because sometimes a thriller doesn’t need to be elegant; it just needs to remind you that getting old is a crime in itself.

Book Details

Title: Too Old for This
Author: Samantha Downing
Published: August 12, 2025
Genre: Suspense & Thriller / Crime Fiction

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At what age does “I’m too old for this” stop being a complaint and become a survival strategy?

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Spoilers ahead. Accountability is not invited.

I picked up God of Fury because TikTok told me Nikolai was basically Ilia from Heated Rivalry. Still, I knew better, but acted like someone who reads the warning label and thinks, “That sounds like a suggestion.”

The comparison falls apart almost immediately. Both are Russian. That is where the resemblance clocks out. Ilia is disciplined, and his messiness comes from a core wound. Nikolai walks in like impulse put on shoes. He chooses escalation because he woke up.

I recalibrated expectations right there. Curiosity keeps dragging me into situations I could have avoided. I know, I know, curiosity killed the cat. But don’t forget satisfaction brought him back, so I stand by my choices!

Sir, You Are Entertaining Me.

Nikolai’s sense of humor does most of the work. I cannot stress this enough. He’s self-deprecating in a way that feels natural, not performative. He’ll say something borderline unhinged, then immediately drag himself for it, and somehow that makes it worse and better at the same time. I found myself laughing in places that should have concerned me. That feels like a personal failing, but here we are.

There’s a rhythm to his dialogue that works. He doesn’t sound like anyone else in the book. No polish. Just someone thinking out loud and committing to bad decisions in real time. That gives him presence. You don’t skim his scenes. You brace for them.

Then the book tries to describe him physically. Beautiful. No, bulky. No, chaotic. No, a tank. I tried to construct a mental image and came up with a Russian linebacker who somehow models cologne ads. I like to picture characters the way the author sees them. This reads like the author kept changing her mind mid-sentence.

And still, I enjoyed him. That’s the part that matters, even if I feel guilty about it.

Sir, My Brain Would Like a Word.

At some point, my pattern-recognition brain showed up like it pays rent here. It probably does because it carries my emotional load.

Small inconsistencies started stacking up. Emotional reactions that felt slightly ahead of themselves. Nothing catastrophic, just enough to make me pause and reread a sentence because something was off.

Then we get to the diagnosis. Nikolai is labeled with Borderline Personality Disorder, and I kept waiting for the story to build toward that. I needed a peek into his history. His patterns. How they shaped his life.

Instead, I got behavior first, label second. He’s volatile, obsessive, and violent. Therefore, diagnosis. This is where the story began to feel thin. That structure has nothing holding it up. The label existed to justify what he was already doing.

My brain does not enjoy that kind of shortcut. It wants cause and effect. Patterns that lead to something inevitable.

What it got was vibes and a medical term.

Sir, Boundaries, Sir.

Brandon sends mixed signals early on. That part is real. He reaches out, then pulls back. There’s a moment where he texts Nikolai and then tells him to leave him alone, even though Nikolai already did. I could see the setup. Confusion creates space.

Space does not equal permission.

Nikolai steps into that space like it has his name on it. He physically pushes past Brandon’s clearly set limits. The logic behind it leans on that idea that desire can be interpreted from the outside.

I don’t buy into that. No means no, even if the person using the word is a mess or just drunk out of their minds. People may hesitate, change their minds, and move at their own pace, especially when trauma is involved.

You can trace Brandon’s story. Being compared to his twin has chipped away at him. His mother’s agent using this weakness to groom him isn’t a stretch. The long-term impact is clear. He is anxious about everything and feels safe only when in control. The author shows how this plays out in his relationships. That part earns its space.

Watching his need for control get overridden repeatedly was not romantic. The story didn’t want to sit with it for too long. It quickly turns it into a funny moment or an incredibly hot scene. And that became a pattern that felt familiar in the worst possible way.

It reminded me of my early twenties. A salesman cornering me in the copy room, convinced he knew what I needed. I gave him what he needed. A knee to the groin.

Just to be clear, no still means no.

Sir, You didn’t Wait to be Asked

Then we get to the moment where Nikolai kills Brandon’s rapist. People react viscerally when a child is harmed, so they answer violence with violence. It hits fast. Right where it hurts most. A case of doing it first and asking your rational brain for forgiveness later. So satisfying. I will not pretend otherwise.

Then the scene keeps existing.

Brandon has been clear about his stance on violence. He repeats it. Holds onto it. It’s part of how he maintains control over his life. He never asks for vengeance and is still trying to wrap his head around demanding justice. And then that choice gets taken from him. Again.

Relief shows up. Gratitude gets tangled with everything else. The contradiction persists.

The book moves forward. I didn’t.

After safety, agency matters more than anything else. Justice doesn’t always serve us. Making our own choices, good or bad, empowers us.

Final Turn

I had a great time reading this book while questioning my moral compass the entire time.

Nikolai made me laugh. He also made me pause mid-page and say, “Sir, absolutely not.” Brandon’s story gave the book weight that made everything else feel more significant, even when it didn’t fully hold together.

I went in expecting one thing and got something else entirely. I argued with this book while enjoying it. That feels like the most honest version of my reading experience.

I saw the cracks. I kept stepping over them.

Shelve Test: 4 – Loved

Sometimes a book just needs one chaotic man, questionable decisions, and enough emotional damage to keep you turning the page while quietly judging yourself for loving it.

Book Details

Title: God of Fury

Author: Rina Kent

Published: December 6, 2023

Genre: Dark Romance, MM Romance, Contemporary Romance

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What does it say about us when we see the cracks and keep stepping over them?

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For permission requests, contact angelicathorne@icloud.com.

Beyond this point? Twists, turns, and zero apologies.

Heated Rivalry has been analyzed from every angle, and somehow it still felt uncomfortably personal.

I went into Heated Rivalry expecting something I could enjoy and move on from. That is usually the arrangement in romance. Read the book. Toss it in the “for someone else box.” Maybe recommend it if I feel generous.

This book interrupted that process early. Somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like a story and started feeling like recognition. Not subtle recognition either, but direct and very personal. Slightly inconvenient in a way that made me pause more than once.

Functioning Without a Map

Shane moves through the world with precision. He delivers on expectations. Performance comes naturally to him. People rely on that consistency. Sit with him for a moment longer, though, and something shifts. The connection does not quite land the way it should. People benefit from him, especially his team. They value what he brings. Full inclusion never quite happens.

That difference is easy to miss without lived context. I noticed it immediately. That version of belonging looks complete from the outside. You stand in the room and do your part. Something still feels slightly out of reach. Conversations move around you instead of settling with you. The rhythm exists, and you catch it a fraction too late to feel natural. So you keep masking because you don’t know what else to do.

No one explains any of this. Maybe no one takes the time to understand it. Silence carries weight. The absence of definition mirrors how that experience unfolds in real life. Navigation happens without an obvious reason guiding it. Adjustments become instinctive. The gap remains whether anyone names it.

The Way He Loves

Commitment happens first. Understanding follows when it can. That sequence unsettles some readers. It did not unsettle me.

When an internal social map is missing, forward motion feels like the only available option. Emotional processing happens while living the experience. It’s a race to understand before you stumble. That creates an intensity that can read as reckless or withholding from the outside. Inside, that experience feels like the Indy 500. Everything is moving faster than you can process.

Watching Shane step in fully before grasping the entire emotional landscape felt honest. Commitment without complete understanding holds a specific risk. Clarity does not always arrive in time to make that risk feel manageable. And yet, masking is exactly that, the effort to manage when you don’t understand.

The Silence Around It

The book never names Shane’s experience. No label appears. Recognition becomes the reader’s responsibility. That absence felt real.

I spent most of my life navigating a similar gap without language to explain it. Patterns become visible without permission from the text. Waiting for confirmation stops making sense. Just like in real life, late diagnosis changes how characters like this read on the page.

There is a strange irony in watching a character come to terms with one part of his identity while another remains unspoken. That detail stayed with me longer than expected.

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Control as Survival

Ilya enters with a different presence. Control defines his movement through the world. Confidence appears first. Composure follows closely behind. Distance stays intact without drawing attention to itself. But if you look closer, the structure underneath becomes visible.

Abuse teaches containment. It builds systems that keep everything from spilling out. Presentation becomes a form of protection. Control holds the entire structure together. That is not personality. That is survival operating at full capacity.

The book allows that realization to unfold without rushing it. Behavior makes sense once the foundation comes into view. Nothing about it feels exaggerated. The restraint keeps it grounded.

Depression Without Performance

Depression sits underneath that control without announcing itself. No dramatic unraveling signals its presence. No scene exists purely to highlight it. The weight remains steady and quiet.

That felt accurate. Functioning continues. Responsibilities get handled. Something heavier runs in the background. Many people don’t understand that depression does not always demand attention. The book trusts the reader to notice instead of pointing directly at it.

Recognition here was immediate. That kind of internal weight rarely performs for an audience. It shapes decisions with no need of explanation. The absence of spectacle makes it harder to dismiss.

Wanting and Withholding

Desire exists clearly for Ilya. So does the understanding of costs. That awareness accompanies every decision, spoken or not. Risk remains concrete.

Holding back becomes a logical response. Exposure threatens more than emotion. Safety, career, and identity all sit in the balance. That tension does not resolve into something clean. It stays present guiding actions.

Watching that hesitation unfold felt grounded. Wanting something does not create entitlement to it, so he doesn’t ask for it. That distinction shapes how he moves through the relationship in ways that feel consistent and real.

Coming Together

Forward motion defines Shane. Withdrawal shapes Ilya. The rhythm remains uneven in a way that makes sense. Adjustments replace resolution. Misunderstandings happen without turning into spectacle. Effort continues. Their interaction never smooths into something simple.

Time moves alongside them. Growth shows up in small shifts instead of declarations. Change happens unevenly. Self-awareness lags in ways that feel familiar.

The hockey setting supports everything without taking over. It feels lived-in. Pressure exists without exaggeration. Homophobia sits in the background as a constant force. Risk becomes understandable without explanation.

No scene held me. Instead, the feeling that lingered was that of growth stretching between late teens and early adulthood carries a particular confusion.

The story did not need to change me. That is not its job at this stage of my life. It reminded me of my twenties. It brought back my first love quietly, lingering longer than expected. Warmth runs through the narrative without drawing attention to itself.

Memory collided with the plot to mirror my life in a funhouse of late diagnosis autism and the long term impact family trauma.

Shelve Test: 5 – Cherished

At this point I’m collecting formats like an addict looking for a new dealer. Audio. Paperback. Hardback pending. A new recording by Hudson William and Connor Storrie on the list. Some books pass through your life. This one set up residency.

Book Details

Title: Heated Rivalry

Author: Rachel Reid

Published: March 25, 2019

Genre: Contemporary Romance, Sports Romance, MM Romance

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Have you ever recognized yourself in a character before you had the language to explain why?

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Thank you for reading Beneath the Weight of Water. Paid subscriptions are optional support for future chapters, illustrations, and the long work of keeping the story alive.

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Copyright © 2026 Angelica Thorne

For permission requests, contact angelicathorne@icloud.com.

I love my 1985 copy!

Forever Finny’s

I first picked up A Separate Peace by John Knowles as just one more assigned book. I planned on giving the teacher what she wanted and moving on. That was my usual move as a high school student. Then Finny walked in, and everything quietly fell apart.

There was a boy back then. A ballet dancer. He moved through the hallways as if gravity barely held him. Perfect posture, shoulders open, chin lifted, as he glided past us. There was something unreal about the way he carried himself, removed from the rest, even though he charmed us all, or maybe because of it.

I responded to his athleticism and charisma, but what stayed with me was the way he existed in his body without apology. He did not perform for approval. What he offered was simple presence. That felt rare even then, especially when everyone around me seemed to try so hard to be seen, liked, chosen.

I linked the ballet dancer and Finny without asking permission from either. They carried the same kind of presence. Or maybe I reshaped Finny into the dancer. Memory is slippery like that as I approach sixty.

Still, the connection never really left me. It changed shape and waited for me to catch up.

Turn back now or forever hold your peace. Spoilers ahead!

The Pattern Repeats

I picked up A Separate Peace decades later, this time with my teenage daughters. I expected them to react differently, to read the book with more distance than I had, to shrug and move on. Different generation. Same pull.

They noticed Finny immediately.

No dramatic sighs. It showed up in the way they leaned in when he was on the page, the way their tone softened when they talked about him. I didn’t need them to explain it. I had already lived it.

I sat there thinking I should have something insightful to say about that as a parent and retired academic. Something about literature, or maybe adolescence, or timeless characters. Instead, I realized I was watching the same quiet attachment form in real time.

The cover of the book I read with the girls strips the story of

its tension and specificity.

Girls’ Response

So, I started paying closer attention. Not to the plot, but to Finny. What exactly were we all reacting to?

Finny moves through the world in a way that feels easy. He doesn’t scan the room to see how he’s landing or adjust himself to fit expectations. Most teens carry self-consciousness like a second backpack. He speaks, acts, and exists without it.

At that age, you’re watching yourself from the outside, measuring, correcting, trying to get it right. Then you meet someone who doesn’t seem to be doing any of that. He just shows up as himself and keeps moving.

At first, it reads as confidence. Over time, it feels like safety. He brings no games or testing. He gives his attention freely, and that kind of attention is rare when you’re used to earning it in small, exhausting pieces.

Now I can see it more clearly. Finny offers a version of masculinity that doesn’t rely on distance or control. He makes space instead of taking it. Few boys actually get to grow into that without being taught to shut it down. That lands harder than people admit when you sit with it.

My daughters didn’t try to break this down. Neither did I at their age. You don’t analyze it. You respond to it.

The Shift

When I think about Finny now, I don’t lean toward him the way I did as a teenager. Something heavier took its place, an experience I didn’t have access to back then.

The ballet dancer I knew died in his early twenties. There’s no graceful way to place that into a conversation about a book. It doesn’t fit neatly or soften with time. Nothing about it does. It just sits there, changing the way everything around it reads.

Now Finny feels unfinished. He never gets the chance to become anything beyond what we see on the page. The same way that ballet dancer never got the chance to grow into whatever he was already starting to be. That’s the part that stayed with me.

I’m not just remembering who I was when I first read it. I’m remembering him. The ballet dancer moving through the hallway like nothing could touch him. Now I see that life has an ugly way of interrupting that kind of certainty, whether or not we are ready. We never are.

Once you experience this, you don’t get to go back to reading Finny as if he will remain untouched.

The Fall

The moment that now travels with me it’s the fall because there’s something brutal about being hurt by someone you trust. Not just the act itself, but the way it forces you to rewrite the relationship in your head. You either accept what happened and lose the person, or you soften it and stay. That choice doesn’t feel noble. It feels necessary.

Finny chooses to stay.

That moment lands differently once you’ve lived long enough to recognize it outside of books. People forgive things they shouldn’t all the time. They minimize, reframe, and convince themselves it wasn’t as bad as it felt in the moment. Not because they’re weak, but because walking away would cost more than they’re ready to pay.

Gene sits on the other side of that.

What unsettles me now isn’t that he moves the tree limb, but his resentment toward Finny. Gene’s belief that someone else’s ease must be a threat. Finny isn’t competing with him. That doesn’t matter. Gene is competing anyway.

I’ve seen that dynamic play out in real life more times than I can count. As a professor, I had students convinced I disliked them, that I was judging them, that I had already decided their place in the class. Meanwhile, I was keeping track of five sections, around two hundred and twenty-five students.

The version of me these students reacted to didn’t exist anywhere but in their heads. That didn’t make their reaction any less real. Gene lives in that space. The imagined version of reality becomes the one he acts on. Once that happens, everything else follows. That’s the part that should bother us. Because it means he’s not unusual.

Finny’s Gift

What makes Finny special isn’t just his presence. It’s the way he sees the world. He finds goodness without having to dig for it. Then he reflects it back to people as if that’s the most natural thing to do.

People like Finny move through life without building the same defenses the rest of us rely on. They trust easily and give themselves fully. It’s a beautiful way to exist. That same openness leaves them exposed in ways they can’t see coming. Their mistake is that they assume connection where others assume competition.

The instinct to protect someone like him didn’t exist when I first read the book. It does now, and it changes the way every scene lands. I find myself waiting for someone to step in, to recognize what he is and shield him. No one does.

His “specialness” moves through the world unguarded, as if that alone should be enough to keep him safe. It isn’t. He has no buffer at home or school. Unsurprisingly, he gets hurt twice.

When I raised my own kids, I tried to protect what makes them open and willing to see the good in people. At the same time, teach them how the world actually works, because that’s another kind of protection. Balancing those two things is harder than it sounds.

Give them too much protection and they don’t learn how to navigate reality. Give them too little and they get hurt in ways that stay with them.

Finny never gets the chance to figure that out.

Carrying Finny Forward

Girls will always be drawn to someone like Finny. Not because he’s safe. He isn’t. This book makes that clear in ways that are hard to ignore once you’ve lived a little longer. Still, there’s something about the way he moves through the world that feels necessary, especially at that age when everything feels uncertain and a little too loud.

Life doesn’t exactly reward openness. It tests it. Health issues that don’t resolve the way you hoped. Plans that stall. A dog that needs more care than you expected. Things pile up quietly and make it tempting to narrow your world just to get through the day. That’s where Finny shows up for me now.

Not as a person, but as a way of seeing. Look for what’s still good. Hold on to it. Reflect it back when you can. It fixes nothing and doesn’t prevent what’s coming next. But it changes how we move through it.

Shelve Test: 5 — Cherished

Because Finny started as a crush and ended as something I’m still trying to live up to.

Book Details

Title: A Separate Peace
Author: John Knowles
Published: 1959
Genre: Literary Fiction / Coming-of-Age

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Have you ever made yourself feel less to keep someone in your life?

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Thank you for reading Beneath the Weight of Water. Paid subscriptions are optional support for future chapters, illustrations, and the long work of keeping the story alive.

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Copyright © 2026 Angelica Thorne

For permission requests, contact angelicathorne@icloud.com.

Spoilers incoming. Don’t clutch your pearls later.

I did not Choose this Book. Michael Gallagher Did.

Have you ever picked a book because of a narrator’s voice and then realized you just walked into someone’s fevered dream? That was this.

I fell down the narrator rabbit hole. Michael Gallagher ranks among my favorites. So, when I saw he narrated Under Your Skin, I skipped the synopsis. The cover had me expecting a story like Dexter.

You know what they say about assuming… Holy hell, this book is twisted. That may be exactly why it works.

This dual-POV dark romance follows a mortician who entwines himself with the man who killed his mother’s killer.

I could call it noir.

I could call it hot.

I could call it disturbing.

But I cannot call it simple.

Dark Romance Is Not Therapy, It Is Contract Play

This book is my first Dark Romance. I intentionally stayed away from the genre because of my personal experience with generational abuse. I didn’t want to be triggered. I wasn’t.

When you read dark romance, you commit to a contract of sorts. Accepting lunacy is the first step, along with consent to psychological transgression. A clear distinction between abuse and rough, consensual sex, along with the recognition that some people enjoy sadomasochism is essential. If you do, you may find yourself seduced by it.

In Under Your Skin, the violence functions as fantasy scaffolding, not as relational harm between the protagonists. The author draws you into Levi’s orbit and shows how he has carried his trauma for most of his life, only to transfer that intensity onto Jonah. That transfer is how the connection becomes erotic.

Levi Is Not a Victim. He Is a Reader of Violence.

Levi starts broken after witnessing his mother’s murder. He buries that trauma in funeral work and in his relationship with the dead. A pattern of marks emerges across the bodies. He reads each one like a message meant for him, a pattern that pulls him toward the man who took vengeance on his behalf.

Twisted but not random. His fixation on Jonah is not fetishization for its own sake. It is a kind of narrative inevitability based on Levi’s interior life.

And here is where it gets structurally interesting. This is not a tale of a traumatized child saved by love. It is a tale of a traumatized man who finds himself reflected in danger and then claims that reflection as agency.

Levi chooses Jonah. He chooses danger and obsession, and never abdicates that choice. That is not passivity. It’s purpose.

This is a control fantasy where the protagonist gets to decide his own damn future even when the mechanics of that future are dark. Levi’s decisions carry consequences. They are his. That mattered more to me than the violence that surrounds them.

Jonah Is Possession Wrapped in Violence Who Never Crosses Into Abuse

Jonah is simply a serial killer in the genre sense. There is no pretense that he is a nuanced moral agent. He kills. He does so often. He targets bad people not because they are bad but because they are convenient. He doesn’t need justification. So he is not quite Dexter. Jonah is more honest.

Levi has no problem with this because the violence takes place in a world he has already decided is morally corrupt. The murders that underpin the plot are part of the story’s context, not relational harm.

The sexual violence in the book is consensual and negotiated. In this context, Levi never suffers at Jonah’s hands. That distinction is psychologically coherent, not accidental.

The Age Gap

The age difference made me uncomfortable. Yes, they are both consenting adults, but Levi is in his twenties, and Jonah is in his thirties. There is a world of difference in maturity and sophistication, and, more significantly, experience between the two.

Levi may be younger, influenced by trauma, and obsessed, but he is not acted upon. He acted. Jonah may be older, a serial killer, and intense, but he did not subjugate him.

That keeps the relationship from collapsing into something unpalatable. That is why I stayed and even rooted for them.

Dual POV Is Structural, Not Decorative

This book’s dual POV is vital. Being inside both minds explains the obsession on of both sides. It prevents Jonah from being a flat villain, a killer archetype. It prevents Levi from being a passive observer drawn mysteriously into danger.

You see them both choose each other. It eliminates vagueness. That creates agency.

There were only a couple of lines that felt like overblown caricature amid all the interior richness.

Everything else earned its place.

Moral Detachment Does Not Equal Emotional Engagement

Yes, the world in the book is corrupt. The police and town authorities look away. We all want to believe that this space is fantasy because the moral rules of normal society do not bind the protagonists. We don’t need fantasy to make moral detachment possible. Detachment has become a form of survival.

But let’s face it, our government has failed to protect us. Rapists go free. Children listen for the sound of guns in our schools. Racism is condoned by elected officials. Reality feels more dystopian with every passing day.

The book offers catharsis in which the bad actors get what they deserve. I settled for purposeful choice amid horror.

This Book Is About Choosing Your Own Wrongs

I walked in expecting Dexter vibes. I left with an appreciation for a genre that lets characters choose their moral transgressions and live with them. That is not universally appealing.

And maybe it is not “healthy” in the everyday sense. But it is psychologically resonant, and the book leans into that without apology.

That is what hooked me.

That same pull makes Under Your Skin fascinating beyond genre.

Shelve Test: 4 – Loved.

Agency wrapped in blood still counts as agency.

Book Details

Title: Under Your Skin

Author: Lee McCormick

Published: May 21, 2024

Genre: Dark M/M Romance, Crime Romance

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Why do you read Dark Romance?

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Thank you for reading Beneath the Weight of Water. Paid subscriptions are optional support for future chapters, illustrations, and the long work of keeping the story alive.

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For permission requests, contact angelicathorne@icloud.com.

A warm, familiar family story that knows exactly where it’s going and refuses to get lost along the way.

Sometimes a book feels less like a story than a cousin pulling up a chair to spill the family tea while drinking café de olla. You settle in without even adjusting your posture. Then you recognize the rhythm of the conversation. It lands warm, familiar, yet a bit predictable.

To begin, Big Chicas Don’t Cry never tries to surprise you. I already knew where it was going by the end of the first chapter.

The Vibe Was Family, Start to Finish

This book was always meant to feel like home. If this book walked into a party, I wouldn’t ask what it did for a living. I’d ask if it brought flan or champurrado. That’s the energy.

These four cousins feel like they’re pulled from a real family. You quickly figure out who carries the emotional load, who performs competence, who drifts, and who watches.

Mari held the weight. There’s a Mari in every Mexican family, even if she goes by a different name. Her arc has a clear structure. You can follow the line from who she was as a child to the woman she becomes when she finally steps out of what no longer fits. The emotional math checks out. When she moves, it feels earned.

The other stories feel softer. Erica, Gracie, and Selena passed through life as if everything was just a bump in the road. They come to understanding without losing much along the way, adjust, and keep going. I believed those shifts, but didn’t carry them with me after I finished the book. Growth without friction leaves no fingerprints.

Soft Hands, No Bruises

This book treats its women with care. They get to be complicated without being punished for it. The story holds them gently.

No one makes a choice that fractures the room beyond repair. No one risks exile, and the story knows it. Even pain arrives contained, easily managed. That approach creates a safe space. It also limits how far the story will go.

The Language Was There, But It Stayed Surface Level

The Spanglish works in the same way that seasoning does. It sets the tone, signals belonging, and gives texture to the dialogue. Language can carry tension. Here, it’s garnish.

The Kitchen Scene Stayed With Me

The choreography in the kitchen felt precise. Not exaggerated. Not softened. Just right. It pulled me straight into my grandmother’s kitchen during the holidays.

The cousins and tias move around each other, hands busy, conversations layered. Someone peels. Others wrap. Someone says too much in a low voice. Others pretend not to hear. This scene didn’t need plot to work. It carried its own weight. I trusted the book most in that room.

Closure Arrives Too Cleanly

The women land in places that make sense for who they are and what they’ve learned. All emotional threads are neatly tied off. Nothing lingers in a way that disrupts the reader after the final page. This story let me walk away without resistance.

Shelve Test: 3 – Enjoyed

Memory is not the same as impact. But sometimes a story doesn’t need to rearrange your insides. It just needs to remind you of what your grandmother’s kitchen smelled like on a Sunday afternoon, and then let you leave before anything burns.

Book Details

Title: Big Chicas Don’t Cry

Author: Annette Chavez Macias

Published: September 1, 2022

Genre: Women’s Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Family Drama

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Is comfort enough to make a story unforgettable?

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Spoilers ahead, because always.

On My Dark Vanessa and the problem of bleakness.

I finished My Dark Vanessa with my stomach tight. That’s not a literary critique, but a physical response. It’s the kind of feeling that tells you a book has struck something real. It raises the question: what do readers want from survivor stories?

Not what we should want or what sounds virtuous in a book club discussion. What do we actually want when we sit down with a story that drags abuse into the open and refuses to look away?

The book is honest. The problem sits someplace else.

The novel moves between Vanessa as a teenager and Vanessa as an adult. You see the beginning and the aftermath at the same time. That matters because grooming is never just a past event. The abuse ends, but the story the abuser installs keeps running.

Russell nails that.

Vanessa is not naïve in the way people like to accuse victims of being naïve. She’s a lonely teenage girl who wants to be wanted and is eager for adult approval.

Predators recognize vulnerability from a mile away. So unsurprisingly, Strane gives her a story: You’re special. You’re not like the others. This is love. You chose it.

Vanessa holds onto the story because the alternative is unbearable. It means admitting her body and her mind were not hers in the way she needed them to be.

The book also refuses the “perfect victim” performance. Vanessa doesn’t turn into a clear-eyed advocate with a clean arc. She doesn’t become righteous, inspirational, or even an ally of other victims. Instead, she’s defensive, angry, and unreliable. She protects him.

That part of the book is brutal. It’s also accurate.

Some people never get the triumphant version of survival. People stay stuck. Others only begin to name what happened decades later. For others, it never gets named at all.

Russell understands that and writes it without apology. That’s why the book works.

It’s also why the ending hit me like a wall.

The ending withholds oxygen.

Here’s what I mean by bleak. I don’t need rescue stories, but I need a door.

I’m a survivor of child abuse.

I’ve done years of therapy. Some things changed while others didn’t. Trauma still informs my reactions. Anxiety still lives in my body. Certain memories still hurt to touch, even during safe moments in a good life.

And yet, my life did not end at trauma.

I didn’t get a fairy-tale ending. What I built instead was harder and more honest. It’s a life I shaped myself, one where the abuse is part of the past but not the definition of who I am. The scars are still there. They just don’t get to tell the whole story.

So what did I want?

I wasn’t looking for a transformation montage, a victory speech, or even closure when I read My Dark Vanessa.

What I needed was a door. Not because I can’t tolerate darkness. I just refuse the idea that darkness is the ending in survivor narratives.

Trauma can shape a life without defining it. So I wanted something that said: what happened is not the only thing that will ever happen.

The book doesn’t give that. It gives realism in a way that feels like foreclosure. Vanessa’s trauma wasn’t integrated into her life. It seemed fused to it.

A survivor story can be honest without trapping the character in eternal ruin. A story can say, “This happened,” without implying, “This is all that will ever be.”

That’s the line I struggled with here.

Hope can live in honesty.

My Dark Vanessa gives the ugly truth of abuse in full view.

The book did what it set out to do. It just left me needing to breathe.

Survivor stories owe me honesty but don’t owe me hope.

The real answer is that I’m allowed to want it anyway. I suspect other survivors do too.

The shelf test. I gave it a 4 out of 5.

I loved it but can’t cherish it. The story isn’t weak. It’s heavy in a way that doesn’t let up. I would never want to step into Vanessa’s world again.

Book Details

Title: My Dark Vanessa

Author: Kate Elizabeth Russell

Published: March 10, 2020

Genre: Literary Fiction, Psychological Fiction, Contemporary Fiction

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Does honesty need to leave room for hope?

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Spoilers ahead, because that’s just how I roll…

I knew early on that this was a writer in control. There is a scene where Noemí lies in bed at High Place and the walls seem to breathe. The house presses in, the air thick with rot and something older. It is lush and claustrophobic without tipping into parody. I was salivating.

Spoilers incoming. Don’t clutch your pearls later.

Gothic Literature

This is a novel that understands Gothic architecture, Gothic lineage, and Gothic rot. It understands colonialism as fungus and eugenics as entitlement dressed up as science. The Doyle family is not subtle, and that is correct. They are pale, damp inheritance made flesh.

I respect what this book is doing, but I wanted to feel trapped, injustice settling in my throat. In Dracula and Frankenstein, both Gothic classics, the horror stains everything. It is not just the monster. It is the cost of wanting power, of wanting mastery, of wanting to outrun death. In this novel, the rot is visible, but it mostly stays in the walls.

Noemí as Mary Sue

Noemí resists from the start. The house unsettles her, but it does not seduce her. She resists Virgil’s insinuations. Florence’s cold discipline does not impress her. Even when the mold seeps into her dreams, her core remains intact.

Her resistance is treated as a fixed trait. She is strong because she is strong. That kind of strength leaves me cold. I am more interested in the moment it bends, in the fracture that proves it is real.

Designated Strength

When Virgil corners her and insists she belongs to the house, the scene is disturbing. He wants her body as a vessel, her mind as soil. It is colonial logic in miniature. Ownership disguised as destiny. But Noemí’s defiance feels preloaded. She never misjudges him, never buys into the romance of the place, never makes a choice that costs her something lasting. Strength is more interesting when it misfires.

Compare that to Francis. Francis wavers. Francis is lonely enough to rationalize rot. His loyalty to the Doyles has curdled into self-preservation. He is weak in believable ways. When he bonds with Noemí, I believe the trauma. I believe two people breathing the same poisoned air and finding each other.

Precision Over Ruin

Noemí is vitality. Francis is decay with a conscience. They will balance each other. On paper, it works. On the page, it feels underdeveloped, forced.

The novel’s critique of colonialism and inherited power is sharp. Fungus as metaphor is almost too clean. The Doyles literally feed on land and blood. They refuse to dilute their lineage and call it superiority. It is just fear of extinction. That part sings.

The revelation that the patriarch’s consciousness persists through the mold, that generations were sacrificed to keep one white man alive, is grotesque and thematically precise. Colonialism as parasitism. Eugenics as cannibalism. A house that survives by consuming the young and brown.

I admire the clarity. What I needed was psychological causality that left bruises.

Noemí burns the house. She escapes and rescues Francis. Evil collapses under its own rot. Structurally, the novel is disciplined. Its symbolism is purposeful. Every message lands exactly where it intends to.

But when the smoke clears, I did not feel that anything irreversible had happened inside Noemí.

Yes, she has endured horror. She has seen the underside of aristocratic fantasy. Her sense of self does not fracture or darken. It does not compromise. She emerges intact.

I needed the cost to stretch past the final page.

Gothic Novels

Gothic heroines often face peril but maintain moral steadfastness. I understand the lineage Moreno-Garcia is working within. This is a deliberate reclamation of the genre.

Noemí becomes the brown socialite who will not be devoured, the colonized body that refuses absorption. There is power in that choice. But power without damage can start to feel like demonstration.

At times I felt like I was watching an elegant presentation of ideas. Colonialism bad. Eugenics monstrous. Patriarchy suffocating. All true. All effectively rendered.

I just wanted Gothic mess. Fear. Regret. A choice that stains.

I will add one petty note because I am human. In the audiobook, Noemí’s name was mispronounced. Repeatedly. I switched to the print edition. It did not change my feelings, but it did confirm that irritation can compound. Even Gothic atmospheres have limits.

Where it faltered for me was not in craft. It was in emotional abrasion. I needed her resistance to misjudge someone, her loyalty to cost her something lasting, one choice that felt like survival at the expense of what she loved.

Instead, I got a heroine who withstands corruption without internal corrosion.

Shelve Test: 2. For someone else: Not a flaw. Just a reader mismatch.

This is a well-written book, but it was not a good read for me. I admired it more than I felt it. And admiration in fiction is rarely enough to keep me haunted.

Book Details

Title: Mexican Gothic

Author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Published: June 30, 2020

Genre: Gothic Horror, Historical Fiction

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Can a story impress you without haunting you?

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I’m getting specific from here on out.

The internet is arguing about whether listening counts as reading. I am not. Accessibility, pleasure, and why the story living in your head matters more than how it got there.

Audiobooks Count. The Format Police Can Sit Down.

Every so often, the internet remembers that audiobooks exist and decides we need another public trial over whether listening “counts” as reading.

We do this dance like clockwork. Someone posts a smug little take about audiobooks being lazy. Someone else points out disability access. Then everyone throws around words like “real readers,” as if we are guarding the gates of Alexandria with a tote bag and a Goodreads account.

The question already comes loaded. It assumes paper sits at the top of the intellectual food chain while every other format has to show identification at the door. It also pretends the debate centers on learning, when much of it comes down to status: who performs literacy in the most socially approved way.

I have limited patience for that performance.

A story gets into your head, or it doesn’t. It stays with you, or it evaporates by Thursday. That matters more than whether your eyes or ears carried it there.

What the Research Actually Covers

Research on reading retention often favors paper. Physical books give readers spatial cues. You remember where something sat on a page and control speed without fiddling with playback. Your hands take part, and that physical experience strengthens recall.

As a visual learner, I get this completely. I retain information best when I can see it, mark it, flip back, and locate it again. Paper gives my brain a map. Screens often make everything feel strangely placeless, like information floating across a window.

That research matters most in academic and professional contexts. Studying for an exam. Learning technical material. Processing dense arguments, building citations, and pulling concepts apart and putting them back together without losing your mind in the margins.

Narrative fiction works differently. Most people do not read novels so they can pass a quiz on chapter fourteen. They read for immersion, character, tension, atmosphere, and emotional residue. They read because a story can sneak under the ribs and rearrange how they breathe.

Once we pretend all reading serves the same purpose, the entire argument wobbles.

Brains Do Not All Process the Same Way

I taught for years in higher education. My field wasn’t literature, yet classrooms teach you quickly that format purity serves the system more than the student.

Some students learn best by reading. Others need to hear information. Some need to move while processing. Others need print, audio, captions, repetition, color coding, or a minor miracle involving caffeine and silence. The human brain did not come off a factory line with one approved setting.

I’m a visual learner. One of my twins processes spoken information faster and more accurately than text. The other is a kinesthetic learner. We are a neurodivergent household, so we learned long ago to stop worshipping one method like it descended from heaven wearing a cardigan.

The audiobook debate collapses the moment you account for real bodies with different brains.

Dyslexia exists. Visual impairments exist. ADHD affects attention regulation. Chronic pain and fatigue can make holding a book difficult. Some people work long hours, commute, care for children, manage illness, or live inside schedules that chew up quiet time and spit out lint.

The Idealized Reader

When someone says audiobooks don’t count, they often reveal who they imagine the default reader to be. That imagined reader feels awfully convenient.

People love dragging academic retention into this debate because it sounds serious. Fine. Bring the research. Use it where it belongs.

A student trying to master anatomy may need paper, notes, diagrams, and repetition. A lawyer reviewing a brief probably needs text. A historian working through primary sources needs precision. Nobody sensible argues all formats serve every task equally.

Pleasure Reading Is Not a Pop Quiz

Pleasure reading asks a different question: did the story land? If you listen to a novel while driving to work and still think about the characters weeks later, the story landed. If you remember the ending, the ache, the line that made you pause, the book did its job. Your ears did not somehow smuggle contraband literature into your brain.

Audiobooks also preserve performance in a way paper cannot. A skilled narrator can sharpen humor, deepen dread, and bring rhythm forward. Some books thrive aloud. Memoirs especially gain force when the author reads their own life back to you. Someone who argues voice has no literary value has apparently never experienced a good narrator emotionally attack them in traffic.

Rude of the narrator, frankly. I had errands.

Accessibility Should End the Argument

Accessibility should never require a defense this long, yet here we are, because people keep acting like comfort and access cheapen the experience.

Audiobooks allow people to read when paper creates barriers. That alone should settle the matter. A format that opens the door does not weaken literature. It brings more people inside.

The snobbery around audiobooks often hides behind concern for attention spans or intellectual seriousness. I don’t buy it. People skim paper books. Others zone out during audio. Some readers absorb every sentence. Others retain vibes, two-character names, and the emotional impact of a final chapter that ruined their afternoon.

You can experience every format deeply or use it lazily.

The real issue sits underneath the debate: some people want “reader” to remain an identity with rules attached. They want the word to signal discipline, taste, and effort performed in a recognizable way. Audio disrupts that because it lets people read while folding laundry, commuting, painting, knitting, cleaning, walking, or surviving the daily nonsense buffet.

Apparently, joy must sit upright in a chair to count.

My Real Problem With Digital Formats

I have concerns about digital reading. Those concerns lie with ownership, access, and corporate control.

When companies can alter, restrict, remove, or control access to purchased digital libraries, readers lose power. A physical book on my shelf remains mine unless a raccoon breaks in and develops literary opinions. An ebook or audiobook tied to a platform depends on terms, accounts, licenses, and whatever fresh policy nonsense arrives later.

That makes me uneasy.

I stopped buying ebooks for that reason. Digital libraries feel too much like rented ground. Convenient ground, yes. Dangerous ground too, especially for people who rely on digital formats because paper does not work for their bodies, brains, or lives.

Here’s the annoying part: I still use audiobooks. Of course I do. I knit, crochet, paint, and embroider. Audio lets me stay inside a story while my hands work. Sometimes pragmatism beats ideological purity, which is deeply inconvenient for people who enjoy sounding consistent at dinner parties.

I contain contradictions. So does everyone with a library card and bills.

What Actually Matters

A book reaches you through paper, audio, ebook, large print, braille, screen reader, or whatever tool lets the story cross over. The method matters when it affects access, comfort, retention, or ownership. It should never become a purity test.

The obsession with “real reading” wastes time. Worse, it shames people out of claiming stories that belong to them: a tired parent listening during dishes counts, dyslexic readers using audio count, commuters finishing three novels a month count, and a person with chronic pain listening from bed counts.

The story entered their minds. That is the event.

Literary gatekeeping always dresses itself up as standards. Usually, it just wants a velvet rope.

Read with your eyes. Listen with your ears. Switch formats halfway through if your life requires it. Borrow, stream, buy, annotate, replay, abandon, return. Build a reading life that actually works.

The format police can keep their clipboards. The rest of us have books to finish.

Thank you for reading.

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Does the format matter or just the story that stays with you?

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Spoilers ahead—because obviously.

I picked Mala Hierba because my daughter loves plays, and because Tanya Saracho writes women in a way that refuses easy virtue.

Power doesn’t always mean escape. Sometimes it means staying, choosing, and refusing to apologize.

I’m not really into plays. I read Mala Hierba because my daughter at NYU loves Tanya Saracho’s work. I stayed with it because I’m trying to understand how women’s stories are told, especially by Mexican American women.

Then I realized that I came in sideways, through Vida on Starz, which Saracho also created. And that’s how this happened: me, reading a play I probably wouldn’t have picked for myself, in a reading format I don’t prefer, only to realize halfway through that I knew this woman.

Not in the “relatable” way. In the “twenty-year-old me is in this room and she has no idea how many versions of herself she’ll have to kill to survive” kind of way.

The Plot Isn’t the Point

Set in the Rio Grande Valley, most of the story unfolds in the master bedroom, velvet and glass, with a panic button hidden near the bed. Both sanctuary and cage.

Mala Hierba centers on Liliana, the beautiful, trophy wife of a border magnate (read: narco). We find out Liliana’s marriage is violent, but she stays because she supports many people with her silence: her ill parents, her sister’s education, and even Yuya, the elderly housekeeper who raised her.

Liliana is preparing for her husband’s birthday party when Maritza, her ex-girlfriend, shows up. A butch artist from Chicago, a reminder of who Liliana used to be, and maybe still is.

Maritza offers an escape. But escape is never free.

Liliana has a choice to make.

The Ending Everyone Saw Coming… Except Me

So Maritza tries to convince Liliana to leave. She pushes. Hard. And Liliana snaps.

She kills her.

Blunt force trauma, head bashed in. It’s a shocking moment, and somehow… not shocking at all.

What surprised me was what Liliana did after.

She went home.

Excuse me?

There, she finds that her husband has apparently cut off his own daughter, Fabiola. So Liliana does what women in our culture are trained to do: she steps in.

She finds the child she was never allowed to have.

She decides to raise her. Yes, a twenty-something raising another twenty-something.

Not with kindness, but with direction.

She will take care of her. Tells her to go back to school. Take her freedom.

Liliana takes control, not in rebellion, but in reclamation.

And just like that, Liliana isn’t the trophy wife anymore. She’s the matriarch.

Mexican Culture Is Not a Straight Line

This play explores patriarchy, yes. But not in the way outsiders expect. Mexican womanhood isn’t a single lane. It’s full of contradictions. Marianismo coexists with dark humor and reverence with rebellion. The Virgin and La Malinche are the truth in the same breath.

Liliana is not just a victim of her husband’s power. She’s also a strategist in a system that rewards her silence. She knows exactly what she’s doing and what it costs.

She Didn’t Lose. She Chose.

You could argue she gave in to cultural norms. That she went back to a violent man and killed the woman who offered her freedom.

But I don’t think that’s the story Saracho is telling.

She doesn’t perform guilt for anyone.

She sees the game, sees the players, and takes her place at the head of the table.

Maybe that’s not liberation.

But it’s not powerlessness either.

Lost in Translation

The play’s title is taken from the Mexican idiom “Mala hierba nunca muere.” Most English translations call it “a bad seed never dies.”

Mala hierba means weeds. Unwanted, walked on, ripped out, and sprayed with chemicals. They’re supposed to die.

But–

They’re resilient. Come back time after time. Bending, wilting, but never dying.

That’s every woman I know who has smiled through control, smiled through silence, smiled through the hollow praise of being called strong.

That’s Liliana.

Shelve Test: 5 – Cherished.

Because sometimes power doesn’t mean breaking free. It means taking your own damn throne.

Next week: something lighter. Or not. Depends how pissed off I still am.

Book Details

Title: Mala Hierba

Author: Tanya Saracho

Published: May 18, 2017

Genre: Drama, Play

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Would you choose freedom over duty?

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Spoilers ahead—because context is everything.

A debut fantasy goes viral; readers feel burned, and the internet demands blood.

The Disappointment

So, I have been hearing a lot about the Audra Winter debacle. People are tearing her book apart, and honestly, most of the critiques I have seen are fair. If the writing is rough, it is rough. If the editing is sloppy, it is sloppy. Readers are allowed to say that. They are allowed to be disappointed.

The Hype and the Shock

Audra marketed her book hard. She built hype and got a lot of attention. Good for her. Her marketing worked better than her manuscript. That is not a moral crime; that is a mismatch of skills.

Some people are acting like she tricked them out of a college fund.

Audra’s self-published fantasy is a debut by a twenty-something. Her novel was always a gamble. You opened your wallet because the videos were shiny, not because you ran a background check on her prose.

And yes, some readers wanted refunds. I understand the frustration, but a book is not a kitchen appliance that you return to Amazon.

The Rollercoaster

Every time we pick up a book, we are taking a chance. You are buying an experience. Sometimes you get swept away. Other times, you get whiplash. And sometimes you wonder if the writer has ever met another person.

That is the joy and the chaos of reading.

Audra’s Novel is just a Book

You saw potential.

You bought curiosity.

And, be honest, you fell for the hype. We have all been played by a pretty cover or a loud video.

Sometimes, hype wanders off and reality does not bother to show up.

The real story is not Audra Winter

It is the audience that treats reading like a guaranteed service. Books don’t owe you perfection. You took a risk, and this time, the gamble did not pay off.

Should Audra keep writing? Sure.

Get an editor? Definitely.

Rethink her timeline? Probably.

But she finished a book, and that puts her ahead of most of the people shouting into the social void.

What We Forget

Some beloved authors started out messy, mocked, and published disasters before they wrote anything worth keeping. Growth takes time. Not every writer blooms in public, but when they do, it is because they stayed in the ring.

So here is where I land on Audra Winter.

The criticism is earned.

Not the outrage.

Every book is a roll of the dice. She rolled hers. Readers rolled theirs.

Sometimes, you get a masterpiece.

And sometimes, you get a cautionary tale.

Either way, enjoy the roller coaster ride that is reading fiction.

Book Details

Title: The Age of Scorpius

Author: Audra Winter

Published: June 27, 2025

Genre: Young Adult Fantasy, High Fantasy

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When does criticism become cruelty?

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Disagreement is welcome. That is half the fun.

Spoilers ahead, because that’s just how I roll…

A darkly funny thriller about a murderous sister becomes a story of loyalty pushed past reason. In My Sister, the Serial Killer, beauty is evidence, silence is consent, and love turns dangerous.

Sisterhood, beauty, and the quiet ways loyalty rots into complicity

Why did I pick up My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite?

Was it because the Barnes & Noble assistant, who reads an average of 200 books a year, recommended it? Does the girl have time to breathe?

Or was it the cover, which stood out in a sea of flowers and cutesy cartoon trends? Maybe that had a little something to do with it.

But mostly, I chose it because of my twin daughters.

One has no filter and loves to throw around phrases like: I’m going to kill you! I’m going to kill them! They deserve to die!

Meanwhile, her sister is always running after her, trying to get her to tone it down, because no one knows that she’s autistic (yeah, blame it on Tylenol) and just take her words seriously.

The reality? This same girl has to call her RA to get rid of bugs in her dorm room because she refuses to step on them. But there you have it.

Back to My Sister, The Serial Killer: Sisters Raised Under the Same Roof, Damaged in Different Ways

The sisters have internalized their father’s misogynistic abuse in very different ways.

Korede, the eldest, has become hyper-responsible for her younger sister, constantly suppressing her own desires and well-being for the sake of the family. Not surprisingly, as a natural caregiver and nurturer, she becomes a nurse.

At the hospital, she works alongside Tade, a doctor who sees her only as a friend. Why? Because Korede has absorbed the image her family has painted for her. She’s too plain, too skinny, too smart, etc.

Ayoola, on the other hand, is beautiful. We know because, well, because everyone tells us so. Constantly.

More importantly, she’s learned to weaponize that beauty as a way of punishing their now-dead father. She can’t imagine a man seeing her as anything more than a commodity, just like he did. Every murder she commits is reframed as self-defense against “controlling men.”

Her twisted form of agency is what ultimately drives the story toward its climax.

The Moment Everything Shifts

Ayoola is emotionally detached from the murders. Until she finds out Korede has a thing for Tade.

Now, you can interpret Ayoola’s conquest of Tade in a few different ways:

She doesn’t want anyone getting between her and her sister.

Maybe she takes Tade just to rub it in Korede’s face.

Or she wants to protect her sister.

Maybe you can come up with more. Share in the comments below.

Personally, I went with option 3: she does it to protect her sister.

Ayoola’s deep distrust of men leads her to warn Korede that Tade will never truly appreciate her because he’s like all the rest: just interested in shiny objects. And, of course, Tade proves her right by immediately falling for Ayoola’s self-effacing, frivolous image instead of valuing the friendship, support, and selflessness Korede offered.

That betrayal is silent. Never acknowledged. Which makes it worse.

The Story Takes a Wrong Turn

The story gets a little silly. Korede has spent her entire life choosing Ayoola over their father, over conventional morality, even over basic survival. But now we’re supposed to believe she’s seriously considering saving Tade at Ayoola’s expense.

Korede does everything she can to warn Tade that he’s in danger. She tells him about some of the men Ayoola’s killed. Or… does she? Because if Korede really wanted to save him, she could have gone to the police. But she doesn’t. After all, the girl’s not a martyr.

Tade? Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t believe Korede. Why? Because Ayoola is just that good-looking. And let’s be real: the sex must be great if he’s willing to ignore the warnings of a trusted colleague, friend, and the sister of the woman who may or may not have murdered multiple men.

Beauty and sex trump reason.

The Ending

And sure enough, in the climax, Ayoola tries to kill Tade and fails. Korede runs in to help, but help whom?

Korede backs up Ayoola’s explanation.

Ayoola was the one bleeding. And she’s a beautiful, defenseless woman. So she is believed for the same reasons Tade believed her.

Tade gets fired. And Korede? She starts to step into her power at work.

The internet experts tell me that Korede is on a subverted or failed redemption arc because she never truly breaks free from her sister.

I disagree.

I think Korede’s story embodies a corruption arc, because she commits to a destructive lie: Ayoola comes first.

Korede does not fail to escape. She chooses not to.

Korede keeps choosing her sister over everyone else, even Tade.

You could argue that’s not entirely true, because she does try to warn him about Ayoola’s murderous tendencies. But does she, really? She shows him no proof. And when Tade ends up leaving the hospital under investigation for assaulting Ayoola, Korede doesn’t seem all that broken up about it.

Maybe, in the end, she’s been persuaded by Ayoola’s worldview. Men aren’t looking for substance, just the next shiny object.

If you’ve read the book and disagree with my interpretation, good for you! Drop your thoughts in the comments.

And remember.

Reading for fun isn’t about being right…

It’s about enjoying the ride.

Shelve Test: 4 – Loved.

Because sometimes loyalty isn’t a virtue. It’s just trauma with good aim and bleach in the trunk.

Book Details

Title: My Sister, the Serial Killer

Author: Oyinkan Braithwaite

Published: November 20, 2018

Genre: Literary Fiction, Thriller, Crime Fiction

Thank you for reading.

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When does loyalty become betrayal?

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Reading for joy does not require credentials, rubrics, or permission.

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I am just a reader who wants books to feel alive, not like homework. This piece is about reading levels, internet megaphones, and why my only metric is whether a book earns its place on the shelf.

Lately, I’ve been watching videos where people explain the correct way to critique books. I admire the confidence.

Most readers do not have the training to critique literature, myself included. I may have a PhD, but it is in public health. I can break down disease, not Shakespeare.

Then there are book reviews, a whole different circus.

And to understand that circus, we need to look at reading levels.

Half of adults in the United States read below a sixth-grade level. The rest land anywhere from sixth grade to college level.

I realized something was changing when women in my book groups, all with bachelor’s degrees, started requesting shorter books and “no big words.” That was the moment I knew the reading community had shifted.

And this shift shows up everywhere in reviews.

Many people reviewing books are struggling with the text itself. Not with symbolism or character arcs, but with basic comprehension. Readers are missing key pieces, get frustrated, and blame the author. Then the internet hands them a megaphone.

If you want proof, scroll through the reviews on Amazon or Goodreads for classic novels. You will find one-star ratings for timeless art because the vocabulary was “too hard” or the sentences “too long.”

My personal favorite was a one-star review because the print was too light.

Did the reviewer read the book?

If you are used to short sentences, constant stimulation, and captions doing half the heavy lifting, you will struggle with nuance. That doesn’t make the book pretentious. It means your reading muscles need a warm-up.

Now for the important question.

Should reading for pleasure feel like homework?

No.

Reading for pleasure does not require charts, color coding, or a graduate seminar.

When I read, I want to feel alive. I want to step into a world that isn’t mine. I want to read at night with two dogs snoring near my feet.

That is the entire goal.

Do I critique books? No.

Do I review them? I tried.

I wanted to be fair to the author, but I also wanted to share my reading experience honestly. I realized that wasn’t really possible.

So I keep it simple.

Welcome to The Shelve Test

Every book either earns a spot or gets sent on its merry way.

The Shelve Test

5 means cherished.

4 means loved.

3 means enjoyed.

2 means for someone else.

When I share my thoughts on a book, I talk about what I enjoyed and what I did not. That is it.

No elaborate scoring systems.

No dissertations.

Just honesty.

And since the house is quiet and the dogs do not talk back, I am sending these thoughts into the void.

If you want to share my thoughts while Muffin snores in the background and Matteo occasionally decides Hannibal Lecter is at my door, stick around.

Thank you for reading.

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Thank you for reading Beneath the Weight of Water. Paid subscriptions are optional support for future chapters, illustrations, and the long work of keeping the story alive.

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For permission requests, contact angelicathorne@icloud.com.

I read because I love books. I complain because I respect them.

I did not become a grumpy reader by accident. I got here by loving books long enough to watch reading turn into a performance.

Hi. I am The Grumpy Reader.

I did not wake up one day and decide to be grumpy. I arrived here honestly, through years of reading, thinking, parenting, surviving, and watching book culture slowly turn into a performance I did not audition for.

Books were the first things that ever made sense to me. Everything else followed much later, and some of it never fully did.

I read loudly, honestly, and without pretending. I am not here to sell an aesthetic or protect feelings. I am here to talk about books like they matter.

My life, as a high-functioning autistic woman with an INTJ personality, has often felt like living inside a social optical illusion. Most days I feel like the only sober person in a room full of drunks, while somehow being treated like the drunk in a room full of sober people. It is a vibe. A confusing one.

Books cut through that noise.

It started with Mrs. Beck at Marston Junior High handing me Johnny Tremain. She had no idea what she was unleashing. A week later, I fell into Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I still cannot pronounce it. I still pretend I can.

Historical fiction grabbed me and never let go. But I was not picky. I moved from Princess Daisy and Flowers in the Attic to Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina like it was a balanced diet. Classics, smut, Russian despair. If it was nearby, I read it. I did not count pages. I did not track streaks. I read until my mother yelled at me to go to sleep.

At some point, characters stopped being abstract and became messy friends.

If a character makes a dumb decision, I pause the book and tell them they are embarrassing themselves. If they are brave, I hype them up like a personal cheer squad. If they irritate me, I mentally pack their bags and send them on their way.

I expect effort, accountability, and at least one functioning brain cell.

Characters have no idea they are in a parasocial relationship with a woman who is deeply invested and entirely unimpressed.

Then Life Happened

Love. Loss. Jobs. A doctoral program, not in literature but in public health. Reading and writing research papers for years has a special way of draining joy.

Then marriage, twins, and the era of breastfeeding through the night like a sleep-deprived dairy cow. This is when audiobooks entered the chat. I listened to the Dexter series at three in the morning while keeping two tiny humans alive.

Don’t judge me! The twins turned out fine. Mostly.

Reading became something I stole in small pockets. My kids did everything. Sports. Theater. Dance. Music. You start making choices. Books or presence. Then we homeschooled, and I found my way back through children’s books and YA. It was not what I used to read, but it was reading.

That mattered.

Fast-forward eighteen years.

The kids are in college. The house is quiet. Too quiet.

I thought I would slide back into reading the way I always had. Apparently, reading culture had other plans.

But apparently… that’s not how reading works anymore.

Now people collect books and never open them. They sort them by color. They talk about tropes like they are filing taxes. They attack strangers online because someone did not like the same plot twist. They confuse authors with characters. They defend banned books while trying to censor dialogue.

The entire thing spirals into noise. Somewhere in there, the joy disappeared.

So I am taking it back. I read the way I always read. Loudly. Honestly. With feeling. With two dogs sleeping nearby.

With no pressure to perform or pretend.

I am The Grumpy Reader. Not because I dislike books, but because I love them enough to tell the truth.

If you are tired of the performance, the aesthetic, the arguments, and the noise, take a seat.

Let’s talk about books like Grumpy People.

Thank you for reading.

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When was the last time a book felt real to you?

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Thank you for reading Beneath the Weight of Water. Paid subscriptions are optional support for future chapters, illustrations, and the long work of keeping the story alive.

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Copyright © 2026 Angelica Thorne

For permission requests, contact angelicathorne@icloud.com.