The Chronicle of Charlotte

  It’s often been said that love is an unpredictable force, driving two people together for no apparent reason. While this is a beautiful sentiment, it’s rarely true. In fact, love is very predictable and comes down to a single factor. Familiarity .  Both Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov feature young girls forced to face horrifying conditions in their childhood relationships. Yet when the time comes to choose their own loves, they stick to the same type of people they were tortured by in childhood. So why do we accept familiar love, even when it prevents us from reaching the life we truly want? One possible explanation is the comfort of the familiar. The truth is that the unknown is universally more terrifying than what is known. You can see it in every horror movie. As the protagonist approaches a closed door, the audience sucks in a breath - fearing what they may find behind it - but as soon as it's opened and the killer is revealed th...

  We’d all heard the stories about the mysterious Marsh Girl.  Born from the mud, with hair dark as the space between the stars. Eyes like rotted tree bark. Teeth filed into sharp points - to help her catch her prey. Sharp black nails stuffed full of dirt and dark reeking blood. There were rumors that she had once had a family, but they’d been driven away in fear when they saw what she was becoming. Others claimed she’d used her claws incapacitate them and cooked them one by one over a spit. At this point there were so many stories told about her it was impossible to determine which was real, and which was fiction. The only thing Micheal knew for sure was that she was different - strange… dangerous.  And that was enough for him to stay well away from her swamp. Not long ago, a tradition had been started. Every year, a group of boys would test their bravery by traveling deep into the marsh and touching the witch’s house. Michael had been dreading the day it would finally b...

  One of the most impactful parts of reading is when you stumble across a line that you immediately connect with. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone , by Lori Gottlieb was full of quotes like that but my favorite is this: “If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” Though the reason this quote stuck out to me is obvious and not very deep, it stuck with me for an entirely different reason. Essentially, Gottlieb was pointing out that often people get too caught up in unimportant details that prevent them from going after what they truly want.  Too often we find ourselves justifying things saying, “well if only ____, then I could be happy”, or “we’d still be together”, or “I would’ve passed that test”.  I have found myself thinking along these lines far too often. It’s easy to get caught up in things out of our control and use them to make excuses for our own inaction or mistakes. This impossible desire for change is even reflected in the characters we read about. Nea, from S...