The Saucy Wenches Book Club

“Come out and fight like your balls didn’t rot off decades ago!” ~ Danielle L. Jensen, A Fate Inked in Blood

She could not fathom the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes formed from clouds, crystallized fern and feather that tumble down to light on a coat sleeve, white stars melting even as they strike. How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable? You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers. ~ Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

There was something just so reassuring about books. They had beginnings and middles and ends, and if you didn’t like a part, you could skip to the next chapter. If someone died, you could stop on the last page before, and they’d live on forever. Happy endings were definite, evils defeated, and the good lasted forever. ~ Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“That is why great power must never reside in only one person. It must be shared.” Her rough voice was rougher than before. “It must be spread, among as many good women and men as can be found; not because it is kind or polite or fair, but because it is the only way to beat back against horror.” ~ Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures

“Your wings won’t hold the weight of this ice,” Andarna blatantly mocks him. “And yet yours miraculously carry the burden of your ego.” “Go find a sheep and let the adults work.” ~ Rebecca Yarros, Onyx Storm

On this autumn morning, the piazza is empty but for one being. A cat—best described as a cross between a crumpled tuxedo and a well-used toilet wand—sits vigilant. Seven unplanned litters of kittens have tested her patience and her personality, so that she has matured into the kind of cat that will take a crap on the carpet before she takes crap from anyone else. ... And she realizes something is coming. Something snarky. Sensual. A gambit. A quiet riot. The cat purrs in anticipation of anarchy. ~ Kira Jane Buxton, Tartufo

“Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you may understand the crises of our age ... Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now that I think of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books ... I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself.” ~ John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

And for the first time in her life, as she walked through that sea of death ... she might have lifted her chin a bit higher. Might have felt a mantle settle on her shoulders, a train of starlight in her wake. Might have felt something like a crown settle upon her head. Guiding her into the dark. ~ Sarah J. Maas, House of Flame and Shadow

“It was funny, she thought, how many relationships one could have with the same man, over the course of a lifetime together.” ~ Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

Do not tread that perilous, emotional path, Ms. Grey. Each of us is flawed. None of us are spared. To obsess over our flaws defies, and undermines, the very purpose of our existence. If you see only bad when you look within, you render yourself incapable of bringing good into the world. ~ Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you ; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net — what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?” ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves. ~ Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

“New things are scary.” “They don’t have to be.” “How are they not?” “Because some of my favorite things I haven’t even done yet.” ~ Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

There is much that men could learn from nature if we would only listen. ~ Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

She is so good at predicting what will happen in books, so bad at predicting what will happen in life. That is why she has always preferred books — because to be alive is so much harder. ~ Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped ‘the company.’ I’ve never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that’s the way it will be. That’s the way it always is.” ~ Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower