The Saucy Wenches Book Club

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
This fangirl friday we have a guest wench writing about a book that she loves and can always read. Some of you have read it, some of you have watched the mini-series, and some of you are possible fans. So join Rian after the jump and read all about it. But, BE WARNED, there will be spoilers!!

"Wearen't human." "Yes. We. Are." His voice turns fierce. "I don't give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us.”
– The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth #1), N.K. Jemisin

"Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one." Henry James "The Turn of the Screw"

Click through to see what we're reading this week! 

“The contamination at the sites … has continued to grow, despite our best efforts.”

“What kind of contamination?” Although he thought he knew.

“The kind that cleanses everything. The kind you can’t see until it’s too late.”

“There’s nothing you can do?”

A rasping laugh escaped her, like she was trying to cough something up. “What are we going to do, John? Are we going to combat it by starting a mining operating there? Pollute those places to hell and back? Put traces of heavy metals in the water supply?”

~ Jeff VanderMeer, Authority (Southern Reach #2)

I don't want boring, common ways of being bad. I want ways that rattle me to my bones, that send me to my knees in repentance, I want to be the kind of bad that leaves me wrung out with bite marks blooming purple on my body. I want to go to the brink of not knowing myself, I want someone to take me there and hold me by the neck and make me stare at an entire reckless realm of possibility. 

American Queen
~~Sierra Simone