community: snowflake_challenge Challenge #2

[matsushima]

Pets of Fandom: Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

This is Tiamat!I adopted her in 2022 after my beloved Turtle died. My brother saw an ad on Craigslist for a black cat with "healing powers." We called and asked to meet her and the grandmother she belonged to said she was named after St. Theodora and had healed her heart condition but didn't get along with other cats.

There are many St. Theodoras, but she was most likely named after Theodora of Thessaloniki. However, I like to think she was named after Theodora of Alexandria, who lived as a man for most of her adult life - and whose feast day (11 September) is the day I adopted Tiamat.

Tiamat is named after the dragon in Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher but her full name is Theodora Kismet. (The grandmotherly old woman I adopted her from pronounced Theodora as Teodora, not Theodora.)

It's difficult to photograph but Tiamat isn't actually a true black cat -she's a very toasted Siamese mix. Her fur is dark, dark, dark brown with black points on her nose, tail, and paws. (You can sorta see what I mean in this photo.)

annotation: The Reappearance of Rachel Price

[matsushima]

Sorry to double post but…
I DNF'd my first book of 2026. I'm a pretty impatient reader and I DNF quickly if a book isn't working for me.
I borrowed The Reappearance of Rachel Price because my students are really into the Good Girl's Guide series. All of those were checked out but I figured I could get a feel for Holly Jackson as a writer and have something to talk about with my middle school students.
… but the writing is so bad? like, did Jackson have an editor? I know I'm pretty, uhm, creative with my use of grammar and punctuation and I write some really long-ass sentences with lots of parentheses and digressions but I do it on purpose. This felt rushed, like a first draft - and I say that because it felt like a lot of my first drafts: so many comma splices.
I am guilty of a comma splice. (It must be heritable: when I talked about this book with my mom - also a reader, also a writer - she said she was, too.) I also know that about myself and check for it when I'm editing my work. This book was littered with them: They didn't always need to speak, that said enough, a language of their own (Ch12). and They weren't silent stares, paired with excitable whispers, and Rachel was a name that carried across a distance, that hard crunch in the middle (Ch15).
Come onnnnn, what is this??? Does Holly Jackson have an editor or has she already hit the Anne Rice level of fame that you don't need one any more and they just let you publish whatever? Did the publisher rush to get this book out or does she always write like this?
I'm not really inclined to find out. (I was curious enough to search around and find out what happened. I feel weird saying it about a book I didn't finish, but: called it - at least one of the twists.)
… that would be a snappy place to stop this but I also wanted to add that Jackson does not trust the reader at all. My mom asked "Is it a YA?" and it is - but that's no excuse! (I was quick to defend YA to my mom. Genuine Fraud does not hold your hand like this.) Again, I noticed this because I over write in my early drafts and I get comments like "trust the reader" a lot in the margins.

P.S. I added a reading: annotations: dnf'd tag.