... having been breathed out

I just finished The Orchid and the Wasp, by Caoilinn Hughes, and wholeheartedly recommend it to fans of protagonists who are queer, female, con-artists, wildly self-sabotaging, or, in the case of our main girl Gael Foess, all of the above. Gael is an out-for-number-one grade-A bullshit artist on the scale of Black Sails's John Silver, Halt and Catch Fire's Joe Macmillan, or Sneaky Pete's Marius Josipovic. Like these characters, she is an exuberant liar and storytelling aficionadx who is great fun to watch hatch a plot and work a room; like them she can be cruel and impulsive, and sometimes miscalculates to her great cost; and like them she is heartbreaking to watch as she betrays anyone and everyone who tries to get close to her—sometimes even as she's ostensibly trying to help them. Unlike John, Joe, or Marius, she's not an adult male lone-wolf but a girl-cum-young-woman with connections to her family of origin that are not only inescapable but which she (debatably) doesn't want to escape—yet which, at the same time, make it difficult for her to live in close proximity with any of her family for very long. The resulting struggles, both internal and external, are extremely compelling.

Also highly recommended for folks who like spiky, economical language with an excellent ear for the shifting cadences of different regional English-language dialects; a wide variety of memorable and well-articulated female supporting characters (Gael's American roommate and love interest Harper, and her obsessive conductor mother Sive, are particular standouts); stories about fucked-up families wherein everyone is trying, with varying degrees of success, to find some way to love each other; and porous familial boundaries that end up encompassing, in unexpected ways, folks not related by blood or marriage, as well as those who are. As a bonus, the close-to-denouement is set during the Occupy Wall Street protests—with which Gael, as a self-confessed aspiring one-percenter, has a complicated relationship—so that's a little piece of extremely short-term activist nostalgia in a world where 2011 already seems like a different political age.

From the book's opening, set in 2002, when 11-year-old Gael is already well on her way to the 21-year-old art fraud she will become:

It's our right to be virgins as often as we like, Gael told the girls surrounding her like petals round a pollen packet.

"Just imagine it, she said. "Louise, Fatima. Dierdre Concannon." She pronounced their names like accusations. She snuck the tip of her index finger into each of their mouths and made their cheeks go: pop. pop. pop. "I did mine already with this finger," she said. The girls flinched and wiped their taste buds on their pinafores. "Blood dotted the bathroom tiles but it wasn't a lot and it wasn't as sore as like... piercing your own ears without ice," she concluded ominously. "And now I don't have to obsess over it like all these morons. You should all do it tonight. We'll talk tomorrow and I'll know if you've done it or not."

Tiny hairs on their ears trembled at her inaudible breath like Juliet's. Gravely, she confessed: "Some of you will need capsules all your life. All the way to your wedding night because of being Muslim or really really Christian. Wipe your snot, Miriam. It's a fact of life. It's also helping people. Boys will think they're taking something fro you, when the capsule cracks. But you'll know better," she said. "You'll know there was nothing to take."

Gael was eleven. It was her last term of primary school. Perhaps that was why the proposition backfired. The girls were getting ready to fly off to some other wealthy, witheringly beautiful leader. But Gael wasn't disturbed by this. She no longer needed a posse. It would be tidier if they fell away than having to break them off.

"Really really Christian like your brother?" Deirdre replied. "Isn't he an altar boy?"

Gael rolled her eyes so dramatically it gave her a back-of-socket headache. "He hasn't got a hymen, Deirdre, so he's obviously irrelevant."

Deirdre and Louise's mirth was exacerbated by the fact that Miriam's tears had now formed a terra-cotta paste with the foundation she'd tried on at the bus-stop pharmacy earlier. How much would the virgin pills cost, Becca wanted to know. What would Gael price them at?

"What-ever," Gael said. "What does that matter? Pocket money is what. Everyone'll want them. Hundreds if not millions of people, Rebecca. So choose." She challenged their noncommittal natures, looking from girl to concave girl. "Well, are you or aren't you? In?"

(I'm about to post a couple more passages from the book redacted from folks' reading lists, so if you're interested hop on over to my journal. Also, apologies to donut_donut, to whom I said that this book is narrated entirely in the present tense; looking back I realize that sections are narrated in past & other sections are narrated in present.)