The Saucy Wenches Book Club

The movies loved cold-eyed assassins and flinty lone wolves. But the world needed people who wept and fought on, saps and suckers and fools who had their hearts broken but kept loving anyway, women who knew how to work magic with nothing but water and flour, a little salt, and a will that could grind iron to dust. ~ Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat

“People can bear shock, and tragedy, and all manner of scandal, but this nothingness drives them mad.” ~ Rebecca Perry, May We Feed the King

“Because men will never respect you if you try to be like them.” Gráinne lifts her head and meets her mother’s gaze. “Then how will they respect me?” “They won’t,” Maeve says with a shrug. Then she takes her daughter’s face in her hands and brings it close. Until their noses touch and their breath mingles. “Not unless you make them.” ~ Ariel Lawhon, The Pirate Queen

“Look. I’m glad I get to know this side of you. This part of you is worth knowing. I think you don’t know that.” Simon would like to hide right now, but he can’t, so he buries his face in Charlie’s neck. “And that part of you deserves a place to belong and be looked after.” Thank you for letting me do that, is what he’s supposed to say. “And if you think I’m letting anyone else do that,” he says instead, “you’re out of your fucking mind.” ~ Cat Sebastian, Star Shipped

“We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.” ~ Colin Meloy, Wildwood

That’s how I used poetry. To understand the world. To decode, analyze, interpret, think. Gave me a huge leg up. For instance, in my government classes the professors would ask, “But does the checks and balances system really work, because if so, how do you explain Nixon?” I knew how to explain Nixon: Dante. Adultery? James Dickey. Despair? Too long to list here. ~ Bonnie Garmus, Peck & Peck