Kaia
Feminist Killjoy. Badly Behaving Bookliker. Writer and reader of all things speculative.
Currently reading
DNF: Bad Author! No Cookie! EVER!
It's fairly rare that I stop reading a book as early as I quit Natural History, but it deserved it. There I am, on the train into Copenhagen, when I get slapped in the face with this:
Frosty-assed and autistic, she was; he didn't want to touch her.
I sat in stunned silence for a while, blinking, wondering if I read that correctly. I read it again, several times. Finally, feeling like I'd been punched in the gut, I showed it to my husband.
The character in question is not, to my knowledge, autistic. Even if she was, that would be a fucked up thing to write, but she wasn't, and what the ever loving fuck? Not that I think there is a context in which that would ever be okay, but in context, it appears to be a slur.
A slur.
What the fucking fucking fuck? What ever possessed the author to think that was all right? No. No, no, no, no, no. Fuck that. Fuck this book, and fuck this author. My neurology is not an insult. This is gross and hurtful and seriously, fuck you.
This piece of shit is going back to the bookstore ASAP.
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