I have been seeing everybody's posts about the heat waves striking everywhere and I send you lots of sympathy. But also, I am tired of all the "you people from warm climates like the American South know how to handle the heat, it's different," comments. Americans do not know how to handle the heat, we just know how to throw more air conditioning at the problem until the entire world burns down.
As someone who *is* acclimated to hot summers without relying on A/C, I have been sitting in my work, with me and all my coworkers in winter layers, wrapped in a fleece blanket, with my hands literally hurting from the cold as I type, reading the bit from our facilities people about don't worry, we're going to recirculate inside air instead of bringing new air from outside to save strain on the a/c (in the middle of an airborne pandemic) while being desperately jealous of those of you getting to spend time in nice old insulated brick 35 deg C buildings with ventilation and windows that open. (I go outside for lunch to enjoy the lovely 35 deg C weather and occasionally hide in the mechanical room to warm up.)
I know that's not really a consolation when you're broiling. But please try not to be jealous of the large part of the US where everyone spends half their income trying to get cooler by burning fossil fuels and will immediately melt and die if their A/C ever fails (which it probably will because the ventilation systems are also badly designed) because their buildings aren't designed for their climate even before global warming and they don't know how to live in it. Save that for countries that actually do know how to handle heat.
(I'm working on a post on ways to learn to happily live in 35 deg C summers without relying on A/C but it keeps getting longer so maybe it'll be up by next heat wave?)
(For those of you hitting 40 deg C today though yeah sorry, *nobody's* jealous of that.)
On that note I just started writing a modern Southern Gothic Locked Tomb AU based on that agonyaunt post about the guy who married his daughter's bridesmaid but all either of them actually care about is the High Victorian house, because anything that will get me writing these days is worth a start and this is definitely the time of year for southern gothic, but then I realized I was basically writing "Rebecca but what if everybody except Mr. de Winter was a lesbian and Mrs. Danvers was actually Rebecca's ghost but only the protag could see her and also she was best frenemies with Mr. de Winter's illegitimate daughter who was living out her own separate Gothic plot in the background with her new wife's family".
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that but I feel like I oughta read (or at least watch) Rebecca first, so I'll be able to catch it when I reference it involuntarily, and I don't want to read and or watch Rebecca, so me and this fic are at a stalemate.
Which got me thinking a lot about how I really like Gothic (and its subgenres) in *theory* but I actively dislike or avoid most of the classic Gothics and a lot of newer ones, as part of my ongoing attempts to try to figure out what I think about horror, and I think with Gothics maybe it comes down to:
I like the aesthetic
I like the claustrophobic, stifling, incestuous mood
I like the focus on small-scale, women's concerns, and the actual acknowledgement of class that often shows up
I like the focus on setting and personification of setting! Give me a love story about a house or a town any day!
I like the ambivalent way it tends to treat with the supernatural.
I don't like:
the misogyny (and parallel misandry, that often doesn't believe there are non-terrible men.)
the compulsory heterosexuality (or, well, I like it when it's part of the claustrophobia, but not when the story doesn't seem to realize any alternatives are even options)
the way the misogyny and misandry and compulsory heterosexuality often combine to put the heroine in a fucking awful happy ending
the frequent humorlessness
the horror elements when it leans on them
So basically I want queer as hell gothics where people are terrible people but in ways completely delinked from their gender, and also who are willing to admit that sometimes you just have to laugh. Which I guess explains why I always want it in fic but am very chary about actual published ones…
A huge amount of my fandom time lately has been with Minecraft streamers, and I haven't talked about it here because at first I felt like I didn't know enough about it and then I felt like it was *too much* to talk about, and then I figured I could at least do an enemy fic recs post about it even if it really doesn't do 'shipping' like most fandoms do. –and then Technoblade, one of the most popular content makers and also probably one of the best people in the fandom, died of cancer way, way too young, and I just didn't know what to say. It's the first time I've ever been this deep in a fandom when someone who was still actively part of telling the story died, much less an rpf-adjacent one when the real people are so centered, and since I haven't really been talking about the fandom I don't really even have people who are also in the fandom to talk about it with. I was still working through his back catalog from a year ago when he passed so even the people who are fans aren't really in the same story place I am.
The recent Minecraft Youtube stuff I've actually been keeping up with is the Double Life SMP, in which somebody modded Minecraft for - you ready? soulbond AU, and fourteen streamers have voluntarily come to a world where they will be randomly paired with a partner whose life is irrevocably linked to theirs, and they are having the time of their lives with it. (And yes, they could have just played with it as a game mechanic, but they are all 100% bought into the soulbond life partner roleplay instead.) I'm behind because fourteen streamers with weekly episodes = fourteen hours of new content a week, but I'm not super behind, because it's great to put on in the background. Anyway if you feel the need to introduce fourteen hours a week of canonical soulbond rpf rpg into your fandom repertoire, it's a limited series and a really good starting point for Minecraft fandom.
Most of the people in that series aren't directly involved with Technoblade's close friend group, but a few of them have posted tributes attached to their Double Life videos anyway, and one of them really struck me, talked about how Technoblade's life should inspire you to work for your dreams and goals as much as you can, and that's a good sentiment, but I think he missed something important. What Technoblade taught me is that you should chase your dreams and goals with all you've got even if those dreams and goals are ridiculous and objectively a pointless waste of time, if it's what you want to do, do it anyway.
This is not just about the idea of being a professional Minecraft player in general, though that's really a proof-of concept of the idea. But Technoblade was already fairly successful as a youtuber in 2020 when Minecraft really started to take off again, and during that period - when most of his peers were busy putting out as much interesting content as possible, networking and cross-promoting, putting nose to the grindstone on building their brand.. Technoblade was farming digital potatoes on Hypixel for 16 hours a day, because he had decided he was going to be the top potato farmer on Hypixel. This left him no time to do any marketing or make any videos or even do any streams (because the streams would just have been him repetitively farming potatoes, and he couldn't do those streams anyway, or even explain why he wasn't doing them, because it might give away his strategy to his potato-farming rival. His singular rival, because literally only two people had ever cared about farming potatoes on Hypixel.) It's not that Technoblade didn't do the research about how to be a successful streamer, learn all the techniques and strategies to game the algorithm and hustle effectively and get his content out there, the stuff all the other successful streamers were doing - he knew all that, he just decided he'd rather farm potatoes.
Anyway it was objectively a pointless and useless and seriously time-wasting thing to do even by the standards of professional video game players, he would be the first person to admit it. But he did, and while some of his contemporaries may have gotten more subscribers or higher viewerships, nobody was more admired, and he will be always remembered as the winner of the Great Potato War. Nobody can ever take that away.
So: do the stupid pointless time-waste-y stuff you wanna do in life because you've only got the one life, and it's not wasted time if you did stuff in it. Even if the stuff is the equivalent of farming digital potatoes for sixteen hours a day.
Anyway to vaguely tie this up to the earlier topics, here's a really good Southern Gothic AU MCYT fic that wouldn't fit in an enemy recs post:
devil town (100526 words) by hoorayy Chapters: 18/18 Fandom: Dream SMP Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Eerie vibes, Angst, Toby Smith | Tubbo and Wilbur Soot and Technoblade and TommyInnit are Siblings, Mystery, Horror, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Character Death, small town horror, sbi family but they’re dysfunctional as hell, none of them are bad people though. they’re just all a bit fucked up, religious trauma, mind the tags! this is a dark story pls be aware of that when/if you read, Murder, Blood, Hallucinations, kinda. it’s complicated., Implied/Referenced Skeppy, for legal reasons that was a joke, Angst with a Happy Ending, i promise it will be okay. you’ll see, Alexis | Quackity and Toby Smith | Tubbo are Siblings Series: Part 1 of we’ll make it another night Summary: The night Tommy disappeared, it went like this: Tubbo screamed the words that became his goodbye. He can’t accept that Tommy is gone, because that would be accepting that the last words they exchanged were angry and intended to hurt. So he doesn’t accept it. He’ll search for years if he has to.
Today is the quarterfinals of the fandom brackets on fictional_fans! Down to eight fandoms, and it looks like the final four will probably be Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Yuletide. Not exactly a surprising result, and yet somehow I'm still surprised. But you still have just over an hour to vote! Anything could happen!
Today’s wardrobe stages: Realize the short-sleeve shirt I biked in with was soaked with sweat. Swap it for the spare shirt I have in the office, which happens to be long-sleeved. Shrug and decide that’s probably fine for the indoor temperature. Change into the (now dry) short-sleeved shirt to go outside for lunch. Leave it on when I get back because now I’m toasty warm. Realize I’m cold again, bundle up in wool shawl. Bike home; shirt is now soaked in sweat again. Time for PJs.
I wore two layers and a jacket, and never even got warm enough even over lunch to take the jacket off. And then I came home and immediately got sweaty and changed into summer pajamas! And it's so nice, my feet are not cold at all.
Oh it wouldn't be original, it would be fandom AU of Goth Lesbians In Space books. And I'm sure *something* will block me.
But I poked at it a bit more today! It occurred to me I could write it first, and then read Rebecca as part of the first editing pass if I still care at that point, so that is the plan.
1. Every time there's a heatwave it seems like there are people who think every other place that has ever had heat is more prepared for it than they are, alas. I remember a friend from Seattle telling me I couldn't understand what it was like to experience mid 90s F there (which I'm pretty sure is high 30s in celsius?) because surely everyone in Australia has air-conditioning. Meanwhile, a lot of people where I live in Australia actually have neither heating in winter nor air-conditioning in summer, and back when it was getting up to 45C train tracks would buckle and public transport would shut down. It's always frustrating to hear this stuff.
3. I do like horror elements in gothic, and I don't even always mind the overbearing heterosexuality, but the humourlessness and misogyny really can be exhausting. When gothic lit is good it's very good, and when it's bad it's just blandly unpleasant.
Yep. There are some parts of the world that can handle heat okay, but they are mostly in places that are going to get hit really hard with a few more degrees of global warming, and a lot of the problem all over the world is a clock-based wage labor system that doesn't allow for people to fluidly adjust their schedules to the weather!
I wonder how many comments around "you guys are used to this kind of weather, it's different" is preemptive defensiveness to stop people dismissing the ways in which we are struggling. Every time there's an extreme weather event there's always people going "pffft it's like that every year for 3 months for us" or "we have it worse all the time". I remember a recent unusual snowstorm in a country I lived in that didn't have the infrastructure to deal with it (why would they?). Like, yeah, maybe your state gets over a meter of snow every winter and people know how to drive in these conditions, but we don't have the infrastructure to handle it here so half a metre was enough to basically stop the entire country, prevent groceries stores from being resupplied for days, etc. While US travellers stranded with us kept making fun of it because this much snow was "nothing"...
I think your conclusion is the right one though: it does suck for everyone either way!!
That's definitely the start of it - and I can understand getting defensive about people shocked that anyone would think 25 deg C is a danger zone. But I haven't seen that in my spaces for awhile, I think most people in international parts of the internet have figured out that different places have different danger scales. Now I'm seeing people pre-emptively defending themselves, but doing it in ways that make it clear they don't understand other countries' climates or cultures around climate either. (This time I was seeing a bunch of europeans saying "You don't understand! We have cold winters! Our houses are *insulated*!" Oh honey. A) insulation is also a good idea when it's hot! B) large parts of the US that have very hot summers get down to -10 deg C on a regular basis, we also deal with cold, that's not the problem.
I get that with snow, too - in my area we shut down for 2" on a regular basis and the people from snowier areas mock us until they get here and realize that 2" of snow for us is usually actually 2" of mixed snow, sleet, and freezing rain over an invisible substrate of frozen slush and black ice and they can't drive on it either. (This is completely separate from the problem where nobody in my area knows how to drive safely at all. It's complicated!)
I'm in Australia, where we have 39C and 40C and 41C and 42C days in summer,
and I have multiple complex health issues that mean that, even with aircon chewing through electricity,
I get so debilated by the heat that I can barely get out of bed to get a drink of water or go to the toilet.
I'm 100% in favour of more street trees, more garden trees, more insulation, and better house design to limit how much aircon most people need,
but even with the best design in the world, some of us are still going to need truly ridiculous amounts of airconditioning because our bodies can't thermo-regulate :(
Yeah, step one in "how to happily live in the heat" is "If you have a disability that makes thermoregulating hard, get airconditioning and rely on it as much as you can without guilt, you're who it should be for" and step two is "if you can, get a small air conditioner anyway, you never know when someone might get sick and you'll really need it".
But like you said, even then it's not great to have to rely on it that heavily or to have to burn electricity on A/C that can't keep up because your buildings and towns are so badly designed. Most A/C is designed to drop the temperature 10 deg C at most so when it hits 40 you can't rely on A/C to get things comfortable anyway, and buildings and landscapes actually designed to handle heat well can often keep at least part of the building below 30C on very hot days even without A/C at all.
(And what the US does is terrible for people with disabilities in other ways, having to swap between 15C and 35C every couple of minutes will screw with you even if you're usually ok with higher temps [it's an occasional migraine trigger for me, which is part of why I feel strongly about this].)
but too-cold shopping centre or cinema aircon = neck muscles and lower back muscles start spasming painfully and I can be in agony for days
back before COVID, when I still left the house regularly, I used to take A WINTER JACKET WITH ME even in hot weather in case the train aircon was too cold!
"We found that for every increase of 10 per cent tree canopy cover, you get a 0.62-degree celsius decrease in land surface temperatures," he said. So if you take the extremes, from no canopy cover to full canopy cover, there's about a 6-degree celsius [42.8F] difference."
My suburb is losing trees far too fast for reasons including
- people want to build a second or third house in their backyard
- people don't want to be bothered [or in some cases genuinely can't afford] to spend the money on an aborist to prune the tree regularly to keep it safe.
My local council has let people remove *street trees* - which are on verges, which are PUBLIC LAND and belong to everyone, not the homeowner - for reasons including "we're elderly and can't sweep up the leaves".
My council has a free service where they will put your bins out and back for you every week if you genuinely can't take your bins out yourself due to age/Disability
so why not a free service where they'll sweep up after a street tree once a month if you genuinely can't manage it due to age/Disability and genuinely can't afford to pay someone else?
I really think there is no excuse to remove a verge street tree other than a) it's blocking visibility in a way that is dangerous for pedestrians/cyclists/drivers
b) it's genuinely in danger of dropping heavy branches on people (some Australian Eucalypts do this without warning, and those particular species of Eucalypt should NEVER have been planted right next to public footpaths)
Trees are so important! A large part of why I can do without A/C is that I live in a house that's fully shaded by large mature trees in a neighborhood that's full of them. Planners need to work with trees, builders need to learn to work around them instead of just scraping everything to subsoil, and dense communities need to learn how to treat them as community assets and not individuals' sole property.
I hope you will allow yourself to write the fic without forcing yourself to revisit Rebecca.
IMHO you should finish it first and let it sit awhile and then if you need to you can A. check out Rebecca or B. Get a beta who is a Rebecca fan to Rebecca-pick it for you.
Hurray to writing.
And I look forward to your "living with heat" post.
I'm definitely interested in your ideas about getting through the summer without AC, if it's not just 'suck it up.' I don't like being reliant on it but I'm not sure the tradeoff of feeling ill all the time + risking heatstroke for something that has a negligible effect on the overall problem is worth it (which is unfortunately the way we think of a lot of collective action problems, I know)
I am poking at it! I don't know how much will be implementable for some people. For me it's not so much the idea of one individual's contribution to global warming via a/c as it is just the idea of being that dependent on one deeply inefficient and unsustainable technology - if energy costs go up enough to actually cover the price of sustainability, or we end up in a country with rolling brownouts routinely (neither of which are as unlikely as a lot of Americans think) we'll all wish we'd planned better to minimize a/c dependence.
I mean most things in American lives are dependent on deeply inefficient and unsustainable technologies but I am interested in your thoughts on this one.
True! There's a lot of ways to work on increasing resilience. But A/C is one we really don't need to be as reliant on (and also I have a personal grudge against because it makes me miserable all sunmer, tbf..,)
So much of it is infrastructure and architecture. I went to Brasília in college in January (midsummer) and spent a lovely day lolling about in a hammock in a house designed to let the breeze blow through, cooled by shallow pools. If you live in a box meant to hold onto heat there’s only so much you can do.
What Technoblade taught me is that you should chase your dreams and goals with all you've got even if those dreams and goals are ridiculous and objectively a pointless waste of time, if it's what you want to do, do it anyway. Yeah.
I've actually seen a lot less - "you don't understand" posts this time around and a lot more "here's a bunch of tips and tricks for suviving high heat - grab which ones will help you" type posts this time around *G*
Even if there's been some confusion over how to build a swamp cooler and that we don't have easy access to styrofoam containers in the UK and that great though those coolers sound they may not be a great deal of help when humidity hits 50-60%. But all were accompanied by great advice on alternatives and hacks so again - massively helpful.
I've seen a lot more recognition of differences and how to deal with them (and as someone with floor to ceiling windows the tip to cover them in cardboard with tinfoil facing outward is one I'm definitely hanging onto for next time the temps rocket)!
I think people are definitely learning more about both how to handle heatwaves and how to talk to people from other countries over the last five years or so!
Swamp coolers aren't very useful unless you're in a desert, afaik, yeah. (60% is *low* humidity around here, though, so they may be a little more worth it in your area.) Covering windows when the sun is on them is definitely a good plan, though. You don't have to go all out with the tinfoil, though, blinds or curtains do a lot!
Uuugh. It's usually been just me complaining, but we got a new, even worse, system last year, and now all the coworkers are bringing blankets to work in the heatwave D:
It's not so much length as figuring out how to organize - I want to start by talking about A, but I need to cover B first, but before I talk about B I need to establish C, but A needs to come before C....
If I sit down and mess around with it for awhile I'll probably figure something out.
Omg read Shirley Jackson if you haven’t already. Haunting at Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Sundial all have the claustrophobic focus on place. Misogyny exists in her books but because it exists in the world—her writing observes and comments on it. It doesn’t think it’s a happy ending. (Hangsaman is also a fantastic horror novel but I don’t think it’s trying to be. It’s a woman coming of age in the fifties at a woman’s college—so, horror novel.)
OK the reason I have not read much Shirley Jackson - and I realize this is a stupid reasin, but see above about clinging to the pointless stuff anyway - is that I spent a large part of my childhood thinking The Haunting of Hill House and The House of Dies Drear were the same book - if you look at the first edition covers on Wikipedia I feel I am justified - and thus am always slighly disappointed to be reminded it is *not* a groundbreaking use of Gothic tropes by an African-American author exploring Black history in America.
Meanwhile I also can't tell apart We Have Always Lived In The Castle, I Capture The Castle, and The Man In The High Castle, and am thus convinced it's a charmingly Austenesque coming-of-age tale about sisters who live in a castle with their dysfunctional guardians in an alternate England where Hitler won the war, and on being greeted with the real thing, again, disappointment.
(I also always have to think twice to te the difference between The Lottery and The Most Dangerous Game.)
No other single author gives me that much trouble, so I have to assume she is targeting me, specifically.
Rose Lerner's The Wife in the Attic is sort of a mixed rec because I enjoyed it very much but don't think it quite sticks the landing, but it's very much positioning itself in the 'queer as hell Gothics where the people are terrible people and do occasionally laugh about it' space (and is pretty good on class, too.)
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agonyaunt post about the guy who married his daughter's bridesmaid but all either of them actually care about is the High Victorian house, because anything that will get me writing these days is worth a start and this is definitely the time of year for southern gothic, but then I realized I was basically writing "Rebecca but what if everybody except Mr. de Winter was a lesbian and Mrs. Danvers was actually Rebecca's ghost but only the protag could see her and also she was best frenemies with Mr. de Winter's illegitimate daughter who was living out her own separate Gothic plot in the background with her new wife's family".
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Realize the short-sleeve shirt I biked in with was soaked with sweat. Swap it for the spare shirt I have in the office, which happens to be long-sleeved. Shrug and decide that’s probably fine for the indoor temperature. Change into the (now dry) short-sleeved shirt to go outside for lunch. Leave it on when I get back because now I’m toasty warm. Realize I’m cold again, bundle up in wool shawl. Bike home; shirt is now soaked in sweat again. Time for PJs.
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But I poked at it a bit more today! It occurred to me I could write it first, and then read Rebecca as part of the first editing pass if I still care at that point, so that is the plan.
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3. I do like horror elements in gothic, and I don't even always mind the overbearing heterosexuality, but the humourlessness and misogyny really can be exhausting. When gothic lit is good it's very good, and when it's bad it's just blandly unpleasant.
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I think your conclusion is the right one though: it does suck for everyone either way!!
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I get that with snow, too - in my area we shut down for 2" on a regular basis and the people from snowier areas mock us until they get here and realize that 2" of snow for us is usually actually 2" of mixed snow, sleet, and freezing rain over an invisible substrate of frozen slush and black ice and they can't drive on it either. (This is completely separate from the problem where nobody in my area knows how to drive safely at all. It's complicated!)
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and I have multiple complex health issues that mean that, even with aircon chewing through electricity,
I get so debilated by the heat that I can barely get out of bed to get a drink of water or go to the toilet.
I'm 100% in favour of more street trees, more garden trees, more insulation, and better house design to limit how much aircon most people need,
but even with the best design in the world, some of us are still going to need truly ridiculous amounts of airconditioning because our bodies can't thermo-regulate :(
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But like you said, even then it's not great to have to rely on it that heavily or to have to burn electricity on A/C that can't keep up because your buildings and towns are so badly designed. Most A/C is designed to drop the temperature 10 deg C at most so when it hits 40 you can't rely on A/C to get things comfortable anyway, and buildings and landscapes actually designed to handle heat well can often keep at least part of the building below 30C on very hot days even without A/C at all.
(And what the US does is terrible for people with disabilities in other ways, having to swap between 15C and 35C every couple of minutes will screw with you even if you're usually ok with higher temps [it's an occasional migraine trigger for me, which is part of why I feel strongly about this].)
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too hot = can't brain or walk or stand up
but too-cold shopping centre or cinema aircon = neck muscles and lower back muscles start spasming painfully and I can be in agony for days
back before COVID, when I still left the house regularly, I used to take A WINTER JACKET WITH ME even in hot weather in case the train aircon was too cold!
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"We found that for every increase of 10 per cent tree canopy cover, you get a 0.62-degree celsius decrease in land surface temperatures," he said. So if you take the extremes, from no canopy cover to full canopy cover, there's about a 6-degree celsius [42.8F] difference."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-17/tree-canopy-in-perth-how-hot-is-your-neighbourhood/9857710?nw=0
My suburb is losing trees far too fast for reasons including
- people want to build a second or third house in their backyard
- people don't want to be bothered [or in some cases genuinely can't afford] to spend the money on an aborist to prune the tree regularly to keep it safe.
My local council has let people remove *street trees* - which are on verges, which are PUBLIC LAND and belong to everyone, not the homeowner - for reasons including "we're elderly and can't sweep up the leaves".
My council has a free service where they will put your bins out and back for you every week if you genuinely can't take your bins out yourself due to age/Disability
so why not a free service where they'll sweep up after a street tree once a month if you genuinely can't manage it due to age/Disability and genuinely can't afford to pay someone else?
I really think there is no excuse to remove a verge street tree other than
a) it's blocking visibility in a way that is dangerous for pedestrians/cyclists/drivers
b) it's genuinely in danger of dropping heavy branches on people (some Australian Eucalypts do this without warning, and those particular species of Eucalypt should NEVER have been planted right next to public footpaths)
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IMHO you should finish it first and let it sit awhile and then if you need to you can A. check out Rebecca or B. Get a beta who is a Rebecca fan to Rebecca-pick it for you.
Hurray to writing.
And I look forward to your "living with heat" post.
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Yeah.
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Even if there's been some confusion over how to build a swamp cooler and that we don't have easy access to styrofoam containers in the UK and that great though those coolers sound they may not be a great deal of help when humidity hits 50-60%. But all were accompanied by great advice on alternatives and hacks so again - massively helpful.
I've seen a lot more recognition of differences and how to deal with them (and as someone with floor to ceiling windows the tip to cover them in cardboard with tinfoil facing outward is one I'm definitely hanging onto for next time the temps rocket)!
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Swamp coolers aren't very useful unless you're in a desert, afaik, yeah. (60% is *low* humidity around here, though, so they may be a little more worth it in your area.) Covering windows when the sun is on them is definitely a good plan, though. You don't have to go all out with the tinfoil, though, blinds or curtains do a lot!
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2) The guy! With the bridesmaid! And the gothic house! What the actual fuck.
3) If you find good queer gothics, I would be interested in recs.
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If I sit down and mess around with it for awhile I'll probably figure something out.
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Meanwhile I also can't tell apart We Have Always Lived In The Castle, I Capture The Castle, and The Man In The High Castle, and am thus convinced it's a charmingly Austenesque coming-of-age tale about sisters who live in a castle with their dysfunctional guardians in an alternate England where Hitler won the war, and on being greeted with the real thing, again, disappointment.
(I also always have to think twice to te the difference between The Lottery and The Most Dangerous Game.)
No other single author gives me that much trouble, so I have to assume she is targeting me, specifically.
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