I Didn't Think I Was Cut Out for the Fairy Smut Book Club, But 700 Pages Later and I Might Be After All?

SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERS!!!!!!

There will be ALL the spoilers for A Court of Thorn and Roses here, and some bonus spoilers for A Court of Mist and Fury, since I've somehow already found myself fifteen chapters in...

While you think about whether or not you ever want to read this book for yourself and therefore do or do not want spoilers of it, here is some actual footage of me posting this book review on Goodreads:

And now, on with the show!

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Setup: I read this book because the cover was copy-pasted onto a flyer advertising the "Fairy Smut Book Club" at a college I was touring with my high schooler. Nobody else in the parent/kid tour group reacted when we walked through that hallway and passed this flyer, but I was all, "Fairy smut? What on earth is FAIRY SMUT?!? If other people know about fairy smut, then *I* should also know about fairy smut!!!" I figured, if it's good enough for some undergrads to make a whole club about, I should read it!

Later I learned that you only need four kids to start a student club at this college, AND I think all the student clubs get funding from the school, so maaaaaybe you don't have to have a super big reason to start a club there and I didn't need to feel fairy smut FOMO, but what's done is done.

All that to say that I'm willing to concede that I might not be the target market for fairy smut. But I listened to this on hoopla (having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card!) while I washed dishes and sewed some new coasters for the house, so at least I know how to pronounce all the names... but I might not know how to spell them correctly for this review, ahem.

Also, the coasters are little log cabin quilt blocks with a fussy cut bee print as the center panel. They're adorable.

Soooo... this book in general is kinda... rapey, right? Are we all getting the rapey vibe? And it's not just the scenes in which Feyre's consent is violated--the fact that I had to pluralize SCENES, because it happened more than once, is grossing me out all over again!--or the specific scene in which she was almost gang-raped by fairies at that spring sex party, but also, seriously, it was a vibe throughout the entire book. Like, that's half the "fun," ahem, of the Rhys character, right? That he's a dark, night-themed sexy boy who's always on the cusp of raping her? And he forces her to dress in "sexy," super revealing clothes that she doesn't want to dress in? And he forces her to have her "intimate areas" painted by fairy servants? And he forces her to dance I'm assuming "sexy" dances for him in public--which reminds me that the other time that she danced a "sexy" dance for Tamlin, which, yuck, SHE WAS ALSO DRUNK!--and in the morning she can't really remember what she did but she's relieved, y'all, that there's evidence that he only touched her waist and arms. Oh, and he non-consensually body-modified her.

That's rapey, right?

Also: Tamlin. Not only does he absolutely sexually assault her, because I HEARD her tell him to let go while I was trimming the batting for my coasters (I'm using stash polyester felt instead of proper batting, but I think it's working really well!) and he did not, and then she literally pushed him and I think that's when he bit her, but tbh that's not even the rapiest thing about him. So maybe it's because I listened to this book instead of reading it with my eyes, but did anybody else notice how many times Feyre says "high lord?" A high lord just spoke to her at the breakfast table! A high lord serenaded her with his fairy fiddle! A high lord wants to swim in liquified starlight with her! It's just... if she's using his status instead of his name when she thinks about him, that's because she thinks about him as his status instead of his name. And she's clearly super impressed by it, so it's definitely a factor in how she feels about him. It sets up a power dynamic between them, and crossing that power dynamic is always going to be sketchy. Like, sub in "my boss" or "my teacher" if you want to set it in the mundane world. See? It's sketchy, right? And not to mention that she's not *exactly* imprisoned inside his estate, but she IS imprisoned inside of fairy land, and if she does leave his estate then she'll get eaten so also she is kind of imprisoned inside his estate. Sub "my warden" or "my guardian" for "high lord" and it's even grosser!

All that to say that I'm not even dinging the book on stars because it's rapey, because books are allowed to be rapey if they want--it was just something I wanted to talk about. I DID personally ding the book on stars because Feyre said "high lord" into my headphones so much. It got on my nerves.

I also dinged the book for being weirdly plot-less for the first 80%, and when Feyre finally went under the mountain and started doing stuff it honestly made me even more annoyed because hey! She was always capable of doing stuff! We could have had a plot the whole time! Tamlin is apparently NEVER capable of doing stuff so it's not his fault we didn't have a plot while we were at his house, I guess. I'm trying to think of something he even DOES in the book... Okay, he came and scared the snot out of Feyre's family in Beast Mode and abducted her and did a ton of magic to ensorcell the rest of them while setting them up for life, which must have taken all the energy out of him for the rest of the book because later he makes a huge stinking deal about magicking his dining room table to a different size. Otherwise... he picnics with Feyre. He sits at the table and eats. He stands there and lets Feyre be the one to comfort that random wing-less fairy as it dies from blood loss. He gets hopped up on spring fairy magic at one of his parties and nearly rapes Feyre, and then at another party he's part of the house band. He sits on the dais with Amarantha and widens his eyes once. He sneaks her off to try to have sex with her the night before her third task, I'm only assuming so Amarantha kills them both on the spot instead of making Feyre go through the actual task. Like, half the time when Feyre is admiring how powerful or whatever he is when's he's standing there doing absolutely nothing, she's all, "His claws almost came out that time." But they didn't.

I was pretty much just listening to this book for the noise until Feyre went Under the Mountain, and then all of a sudden it got interesting! I don't know if I really liked it yet at that point--I'm still not sure if I actually liked this book at all or not--but it was surprising, and I became much more interested in the plot and unable to predict the characters' actions. I am so invested in how completely odd Rhys behaved and how he was written, for one thing. I was all, "Wait! Are Rhys and Feyre about to be A Thing? Ooh, are Rhys and Feyre and TAMLIN going to be A Thing?" I'm still not totally sure, tbh; I'm pretty sure we got some Rhys and Tamlin backstory at some point but I wasn't paying attention, so I'm not sure if Rhys and Feyre are supposed to be low-key into each other and that's why Rhys kept sticking his neck out for her, or if Rhys and Tamlin are down-low a thing and he's sticking his neck out for her to help Tamlin... or he's just supposed to be a chaos lord who's sticking his neck out for Feyre just to have something to do. Being an immortal fairy really seems like it would wear on you. I'd be bored to death after four of those Under the Mountain cocktail parties, and they've apparently been doing them every night for multiple human generations, yawn.

Okay, but until then the book was pretty uneventful and very light on graphic details, and then all of a sudden it got INSANE and I was so there for it! The worm battle was kind of stupid but Feyre was left with literally her ARM BONE STICKING OUT OF HER BODY and OMG they just left her like that! For a crazy long time! And then Rhys is all, "I'll heal you but only if you enslave yourself to me," and Feyre is dithering about how she should probably wait for Lucien to do it, but then she does the deal with Rhys and worries that it was a huge mistake, etc. So the way I'd have expected this to go is that Feyre says, "Nope, I'm loyal to a fault, that's why I'm here Under the Mountain instead of on a boat halfway across the ocean with my asshole family by now, duh, and I am of course going to wait for my pal Lucien," and then she does, and Lucien heals her.

But y'all!!!! NOOOO!!! Later, after she's done the deal with Rhys and has to do all the mostly-nude dirty dancing, she actually talks to Lucien about it, and he shames her for her decision even while in the same breath telling her that Amarantha fucked up his back torturing him and he'd only been able to stand up the previous day. AND THEN NOBODY SAYS, "SEE? IT WAS THE RIGHT CHOICE TO DO THE DEAL WITH RHYS BECAUSE OTHERWISE YOU'D HAVE DIED." Nobody mentions that AT ALL!!! I am both inordinately amused/entertained that the wrong decision *was* the right one, and irritated that nobody pointed that out to congratulate Feyre on making what it turns out was the right decision after all.

Okay, and then. And then! Obviously, the entire point of the third task should have been for Feyre to refuse it. It should have been an agonizing decision for her, of course, but in the act of refusing it, that's when the solution to the riddle should have come to her. Because the whole point should have been that she, as a human, while she doesn't have the powers that the fairies have, has the power of her humanity and that is what makes her equal to them and able to overcome Amarantha's fairy wickedness. Also, she's showing that she's no Jurien and Amarantha is obviously wrong to treat all humans like they, too, are inconstant and immoral. Because YOU GUYS. HUMANS OUGHT NOT EXECUTE INNOCENT PEOPLE IN COLD BLOOD. I'm sure that's a basic moral stance that should unite us all. If someone, anyone, any fairy tells us to, they're wrong and we shouldn't do it. If there's some magical task that instructs us to do it, the task is wrong and whoever made it is bad and we should not do it. Even if it means death, we are supposed to embrace our humanity and make the right choice.

So I was shocked--and honestly thrilled because it was so surprising--when Feyre literally murders those people just because the task told her to! OMG! I mean, she was very sad about it and she's definitely going to be traumatized for life, but I can't believe she did it! AND that it was apparently the correct move! Like, what on earth kind of amoral psychopathic fairy tale IS THIS?!? Our heroine just executed two innocents for The Greater Good like freaking Grindelwald! It would have been even more hilarious if it had been a test and she failed it, but whatever, at least the plot kept moving.

It does make sense, then, that she's turned into a High Fae herself, since she apparently gets nothing and no guidance from her humanity. Considering how poorly her family and most of that village treated her, actually, maybe she'll go all Evil Fae on them in a future book?

Okay, last thing that got on my nerves: I'm not going to try to sift back through the audiobook to check, but I swear that when Rhys and Feyre did the deal to heal her, she promised to enslave herself to him for one week a month "for the rest of her life." I was sure that part of the ending gimmick would be that because her life had ended then she was free. But nobody mentioned that, so I guess no? I could have remembered wrong, though.

No, wait, this is the last thing, but this is something I loved: We never learn what the question was that Feyre had to answer with the levers in the second task, lol!

Predictions for future books:

*We're going to learn that Feyre's mother has some sort of connection to the fairies, or some other reason for making Feyre be the one to promise to support her entire family, and not, say, her older sisters or, I don't know, her FATHER?!?

*Nesta is going to become a mercenary and there will be conflict and drama there. Because otherwise, what was the point in having that scene with the mercenary at the beginning of this book? Just to tell the news about Trouble in Fairy Land? We didn't actually DO anything with that news!

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Here lie the spoilers for the first fifteen chapters of A Court of Mist and Fury:

Are you SURE you want to keep reading? Don't spoil yourself if you think you might want to read A Court of Mist and Fury, because shockingly, it's good so far! While you think about it, here's some archived footage of how I spend my days:

Fortunately, I solved the above problem with this series, as I'm listening to it on audiobook while I sew lots of little patchwork pretties. I finished the coasters, and now I'm making blank greeting cards with patchwork fronts to give as graduation gifts. They're turning out so adorable!

Now, back to our show!

Mind you, I know nothing about the author of this series, but if I had to guess, I'd say that ACOTAR (check out how I can do the acronym title like all the real fans!) is one of her early works, and she learned a lot in the process of writing and promoting it. I wonder if she got some good feedback and applied it, or if she thought through the plot and characters with a long-term view. Because ACOMAF (I don't even know if people do acronyms for the later books or not, but I love it and I will not stop) is SO much better!

And not just better than the first book--it's SO genuinely good so far!

There's more action, yes, and although Feyre hasn't actually acted much of that action her ownself, Maas is writing in a ton of realistic trauma responses that make a lot of sense and that are also easily applied to the characters' stupid behaviors from ACOTAR. 

Like, I still don't know if we're supposed to really, genuinely think that Feyre murdering those innocent fairies for the third task was the Right Decision, but Feyre is for sure hard-core suffering from it in a way that shows that it wasn't, at least morally speaking. 

And Rhys, who was a full-on sociopath in the first book, literally told Feyre that his 50 years Under the Mountain with Amarantha had been a hostage situation for him, and he strongly implied that Amarantha had been raping him the entire time. So his awful violations of consent with Feyre, and that one bonkers torture scene where he touched her literal ARM BONE VOMIT, are still awful, buuuuuuut now they're in line with his character at that time, sort of a "hurt people hurt people"/Stockholm Syndrome/acting out one's abuse onto others sort of vibe. 

Even some irritations that I had with this very book are calming down as I get further in. I was so irritated with what a miserable bastard Tamlin was being at first, because the same thing happened in the first part of ACOTAR with Feyre's family, mainly implying that when you're not supposed to like someone, DON'T WORRY ABOUT FIGURING IT OUT BECUASE MAAS WILL TELL YOU. 

But I dunno, because now I'm pretty into what a miserable bastard Tamlin is being, AND it makes sense with his behavior in the first book, AND AND it's turning into quite a compelling domestic violence narrative that actually reads pretty realistically considering it's a fantasy novel. I still don't really love how Maas writes her secondary characters without a ton of nuance, but I would not have told you even 24 hours ago that I would be 15 chapters into the book and gushing even this much about it.

So stay tuned, I guess, because I think this book is going to see me through at least the rest of this graduation present and possibly through the Little Free Library bookmarks I'm making next!

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To Philadelphia and Back in 22 Hours

How are we already here again? Two years ago exactly, my older kid and I were on a whirlwind tour to see one last college before she made up her mind about where she was going to go to school. 

That feels so long ago, but also like it was yesterday, you know? That kid I took on her last college tour before Decision Day was still a kid. Just two years later she's still my baby, but she's no longer a child. She finished growing up there at college when I wasn't there to see it.

Now I'm supporting my younger kid as she makes the same kind of agonizing decision, and she's simultaneously the most grown-up, confident, sophisticated human I've ever had the privilege to know and also my precious four-year-old in a thrifted velvet dress, butterfly wings strapped to her back, mashing dandelion flowers into a pretend pie in her backyard mud kitchen.

How can I let that tiny little sprite out of my sight, much less drop her off and leave her at a college 700 miles away? Wasn't it just last week that she sat on Santa's lap and told him that she wanted a kitten for Christmas?

How about we just try not to think that far ahead for a bit. Let's just think about not forgetting where in this massive Economy Lot we're leaving the damn car:

Then we'll just think about the following:

• airport security
• napping during the flight
• finding the SEPTA station at the Philadelphia International Airport and buying rail tickets for later (the station in the college town apparently doesn't have its own ticket kiosk? Because... reasons?)
• booking and riding in my very first Lyft (super smooth process, but our driver did treat us to an anti-Philadelphia screed while also spurning the highway in favor of only surface streets, making the ride take so long that the Lyft app sent me a push notification asking if I was okay or was I in peril)
• getting dropped off at the campus gates and then immediately hoofing it to the nearest Starbucks for caffeine and a breakfast wrap
• taking one sip of my chocolate cream cold brew and realizing as soon as the stimulant hit my brain that we were about to be late for the Welcome event
• hoofing it back to campus at double-speed

And then, of course, exploring this beautiful college campus and learning about the school and meeting some students and staff and watching my kid make friends with the other kids on the tour. 

This school has a literal cloister why?

The kid is more of a sucker for the Collegiate Gothic architectural style than I am. Who wouldn't want to have class inside a castle?

Just between us, and knowing what y'all know about this kid, I'm pretty sure the fact that this school is basically a poorly-disguised cult for worshipping Athena is its biggest draw for her...

Statue of Athena, at which the students leave offerings. Tell me it's not a cult.

When we were given a little free time, the kid and I OBVIOUSLY beelined straight to the library. College libraries are some of my favorite campus buildings to explore!

Check out the original statue of Athena up high where students from the rival college can't reach her, and also plaster casts taken from the genuine Parthenon metopes on display at the British Museum. I'm just gonna leave this right here.

So envious that they have a whole room of puzzles! They also have a craft club with its own permanent, dedicated studio and an art club, also with its own permanent, dedicated studio. 

I read this book in grad school!

I'm telling you, the owl iconography is INTENSE. I kind of wanted to ask how this impacted their enrollment of students from certain Native American nations, but I'd already asked soooo many weird questions that I felt I should probably leave some weird questions for other people to ask.

Tell me that this is not a shocking number of owls, though?!?

I am SO glad that I'm not seventeen years old and trying to figure out where I want to go to college. The amazing choices that she has are a blessing, a luxury, and a direct result of the hard work this kid has done and the phenomenal person she is, but it's also an awful burden to have to decide.

Let's spend the next few hours not thinking about it, and instead thinking about how to navigate the SEPTA system, especially because Jefferson Station booted us out into a shopping mall with no discernible exit, and it took us at least 20 minutes to find our way out to the street. Also, while I was standing at one of the big maps and figuring out our route, a kind stranger came over to gently point out that I was tracing the trolley line and not the rail line. Because apparently Philadelphia also has trolleys!

I'd wanted to see Chinatown, browse a couple of bookstores, walk around the Independence sites, etc., and we had plenty of time to do that, but I'd neglected to take into account that by the time we got downtown we'd have been up and at 'em for approximately 14 hours, and shockingly for me when confronted with a tourist site, I was starting to fade.

Imagine! ME!!! Forgetting to so much as take a snapshot of the Chinatown Gate as we walked under it! Unwilling to walk a few extra blocks over to the bookstore I'd Pinned! Too tired to make the extra effort to take a close-up photo of Independence Hall!

Not even the facts of my own exhausted near-tears and the kid who dances on pointe six days a week admitting that her feet hurt could stop me from paying my respects to Ben, Deborah, and Francis Franklin, though:

That was the last tourist thing we did, though. After that we trudged straight back to Jefferson Station, caught the train back to the airport, did the whole security theatre dance number one more time, and collapsed at our gate, where the kid proceeded to sleep as soundly as if she'd been in her bed back home for the remaining two hours until our flight.

I, on the other hand, finished my book (Peter Darling), started another (Beartown), and discovered that, gasp, the Philadelphia International Airport only stocks Pepsi products?!? NOOO!!! Mama needs her Diet Sprite!

I reluctantly nursed my... Starry? WTF is a STARRY?!?... and made it last until we got back to our home airport, at which point I'd forgotten that I'd even taken a photo of our parking spot. Thank goodness for the teenager, who just flat-out remembered where we parked in her head, and who loudly sang our personal mash-up of "Party Rock Anthem," "California Girls," and the entire Percy Jackson musical with me to keep me awake for the drive home. 

I want her to go to absolutely the BEST college, y'all, and also I never want her to leave my side for a second. 

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Pavophobia and Trampoline Punk: A Senior Year Trashion/Refashion Show

Once upon a time, there was a four-year-old who was super into drawing pictures of pretty outfits she'd thought up. She also like to take her mom's fabric scraps and cut and tape them into fancy clothes for her Barbies. 

One day her mom, who still got the local newspaper because it hadn't yet been sold to a conglomerate whose sole goal was to bleed its assets, saw a call for entries for the town's second annual Trashion/Refashion Show. It invited people to design their own outfits from trash and repurposed materials, and if they were accepted they'd get to model them in a runway show benefiting the local sustainable living center. It seemed like a good project for a homeschooling preschooler and her crafty mom, so the mom asked her kid if she wanted to design an outfit and help sew it and be in a real fashion show.

The kid did.

This was her design:

This is what her mom sewed:

And this is the kid getting her photo taken right before she walked the runway:

That was fourteen years ago, y'all. I don't even know how this didn't go the way of gymnastics and aerial silks and Animal Jam and horseback riding and My Little Pony and Girl Scout summer camp. But every year, leaving the theatre at the end of the Trashion/Refashion Show, the kid would be talking about what she wanted to design the next year, and then every next year when the call for entries came out, there she'd be drawing her design for me, and after the age of nine helping me sew it, and after the age of eleven sewing the whole thing, and after the age of thirteen taking over writing out and submitting her entry, too.

So somehow the years have passed until now, along with her Spring ballet recital and our Girl Scout troop's Bridging/Graduation party, this show has become another last thing for her Senior year of high school.

It's a weird feeling to be a secondary character in someone else's good old days. 

As the kids are getting properly grown up now, I've realized that these kid years are my good old days, too. So because this is also MY last Trashion/Refashion Show, or at least the last one that I'll experience this way, I asked the kid if I could go back to our roots and design and sew an outfit for her to model. She said yes, and I immediately set about discovering for myself how inadvisable it is to sew a garment for a human to wear out of a broken trampoline. 

Like, that webbing is SHARP!

This is what it looks like when the kid and I are both working on our entries on the same weekend, because we both procrastinated until the very last minute.

I ended up cutting it with the kitchen shears because I was too afraid to let any of my proper scissors near it, and tbh now I probably need a new pair of kitchen shears. The plastic threads in the cut ends of the webbing cut ME the entire time I was working with it, and they poked through all the seams and cut the kid until I covered every single inside seam with duct tape.

And there was only a certain amount of sewing I could possibly do by machine--

--before I had to just get out the hand-sewing needle and embroidery floss and resign myself to hand-stitching all the fussy parts while cutting myself up even more thoroughly.

The dog looks perturbed in the below photo, but even with all that I was happy as a clam, making a big mess in the family room in parallel with the kid making her own big mess. These ARE the good old days!

Remember that skull quilt block from November? I didn't know at the time what I was going to do with it, but I did happen to sew it from a thrifted blouse and my old wedding dress--

--which made it a refashioned item, which means that I could applique it onto the back of the trampoline webbing dress jacket. And then I cut the bodice off the wedding dress, turned it backwards so the cool fake buttons went down the front, added some spaghetti straps, and that became the dress shirt for the garment:

The trampoline webbing pants were a nightmare to sew (and a nightmare to wear, ahem, if you happen to enjoy being able to bend at the hips and knees) and I kept them super simple, but I did cut the triangle rings out of the webbing and hook them together to make a chain to add a little detail to the otherwise plain black:

And here's my Trampoline Punk!

Trampoline Punk image via Bloomington Trashion

Here's the kid's own design, Pavophobia:

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

And then one last walk down the runway together for old times' sake:

Model/Designer Walk image via Bloomington Trashion

Some of the kid's friends always come to watch her show, and afterwards I always take them all out for ice cream. Because this was also the Eclipse Weekend, though, every place was paaaaacked even at 9:30 pm on a Sunday. It was bananas! But finally we found a spot where the line at least wasn't out the door, and although they were out of waffle cones they still had one last waffle bowl left, and then a giant group left and we were all able to wedge ourselves around a little table in the back corner behind a bunch of local college students whose friends had all come to town for the eclipse:

The kids mostly talked amongst themselves but because they're nice kids and they've all known me since they were seven, they kindly included me in their conversation, as well. A year from now I'm definitely going to have to find my own friends to eat rainbow sherbet with on a certain Sunday night in mid-April, but this one last year I just enjoyed the heck out of it, like you're supposed to do in the good old days.

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An Easy Alteration To an Amazon Dress

 

Remember the teenager's end of the school year ballerina murder mystery party? One of the reasons why it was so fun is that it was not just a murder mystery, but ALSO a pretend high school Homecoming dance! 

Which means pretend high school Homecoming dance clothes!

This was, quite honestly, quite a lot of the appeal of the party for my own high schooler, since she's never been to a Homecoming dance... nor does she particularly desire to go to one, frankly, but dressing up and dancing with one's friends is SO fun.

Our local Goodwills do have a terrific selection of dresses, including plenty of beautiful formal ones, but dang, have they gotten spendy! Our local locations used the Covid lockdowns as an excuse to take away the monthly storewide sales, and when they reopened it was with higher prices and no more discounts, not even Color of the Week, grr. So even though I'm very much an advocate of thrifting and upcycling, I wasn't big sad when the teenager said she'd rather buy a cheap, fast-fashion, sweatshop-manufactured dress from Amazon. If it was gross, we could just return it and hit up Goodwill, after all.

The kid picked this one--

--and actually, it was pretty nice! The velvet and lace both looked good, the neckline had a well-constructed binding, the stretch fabric gave the garment good drape without needing darts (which means I didn't have to worry about misplaced darts), and the fact that it wasn't lined really just meant that I didn't have to work too hard on my alterations.

It definitely did need alterations, though. The length of the hemline and the sleeves were good, but the shoulders were way too long for my teenager's torso, and the waist was too roomy. We probably could have sized down, but the needed alterations were so easy that I could make them in less time than it would have taken to package up the return. 

For alterations this easy, I had the teenager put the dress on inside out, then I pinned the dress to fit the way she wanted it to.

I'm so glad I bought those plastic sewing clips that everyone was raving about on Tiktok!

I pinned the waist to fit, using the pins to mark my sewing lines and thereby skipping several traditional steps. Same for the shoulders, although I unpicked the top of the sleeve first:

To take in the garment, I just had to sew along the line my clips marked:

The sleeves were already slightly puffed, so I just regathered them to make them a little puffier, then pinned them and reset them into the shoulder. 

This was SUCH a quick alteration, and it really worked to show me that it's not the quality of the fabric that makes a garment look good, but the quality of the construction. The dress, pulled on straight from the package, looked okay, but it also looked as cheap as it was. But after doing nothing more than taking in the hems to fit my teenager's specific measurements, that cheap dress looked really good! It fit great, and therefore it looked great. 

A few weeks later, at my mending group's monthly afternoon when we sit in our public library and mend clothes for patrons, I used the same technique to alter a pair of work pants for a young adult who'd just started her first real white collar job. She'd purchased some khakis from Goodwill, but didn't like how wide the legs were. I had her put them on inside out, stood her on a stool, used my handy pins to narrow them the way she wanted, and then sewed along the pins. She tried them on again, and they looked great!

I'm telling you: easiest. Alteration. EVER!

A Dozen Teenagers Went to Homecoming and Solved a Murder

At the end of the school year, I was SUPER stoked when my teenager asked me to help her host a party for her ballet classmates. Y'all know how sad I've been that my kids no longer want birthday parties with all the trimmings, and I've been missing those themed parties with decorations and food and activities and kids. 

You'd think, then, that the teenager would be thrilled to have the expertise that she'd asked for, but that kid had the nerve to proceed to shut down ALL of my excellent party ideas. DIY paint-by-numbers and tea party food in the front yard? Too much work. Bounce house? Too babyish. Drive-in movie? Too public. Paintball? Too competitive. Murder mystery?

The teenager (mostly) stopped glaring at me, and instead asked for details.

Spoiler alert: this murder mystery was the BEST party idea ever for teenagers. It wasn't expensive or difficult, and maybe it's the fact that these are kids who live for the stage, but they were SO into it! It was delightful to watch them have such a delightful time, and everything went perfectly.

I purchased the Horror at Homecoming mystery, teen version, from Night of Mystery. This particular packet has everything that teen ballerinas could possibly want in a party--not only is there a murder, and a mystery to solve, but the framing device is a school Homecoming dance, which means that the kids get to dress up... and they get to dance!

You're supposed to be able to host the game AND keep the identity of the murderer a surprise even from yourself, but since I was hosting this for the kids, it was very helpful to be able to read through the entire packet and familiarize myself with all the secrets. Because I know all the kids attending, I could also rig the game a little to play to their various strengths--some kids enjoy being the center of attention and some don't, some wouldn't mind having to read stuff out loud and some would, and most importantly, none of the sibling sets would appreciate having their character mired in a love triangle with their sibling's character. Yuck!

The murder mystery packet is a LOT to sort through, and you have to have a firm guest list before you can really start, so my teenager had to actually pass out the invitations a month before the party. We gave kids about ten days to RSVP, then I made my teenager spend a few days nagging the holdouts for answers, and only then did I assign characters to kids and make the "official" invitation packets for her to pass out to the guests. Each invitation packet had the invitation, some murder mystery basics, that kid's character sheet, and a school newspaper with important info. To that, I added a couple of notes that the guests should plan to arrive within ten minutes of the party's start time, and that if they realized they couldn't make it, they should contact my kid ASAP. And then I proceeded to have a couple of months' worth of anxiety dreams about the murderer or victim, neither of whom would know how important their character was ahead of time, simply not showing up to the party!

There were no no-shows, hallelujah, but I had my college student on hand at the party as a swing, just in case. And there was a kid who ended up giving a last-minute yes, but fortunately I had a spare character to give her. Whew!

The only materials that you *have* to have to run the party are a million printouts, including a couple of sticker sheets for name tags, and envelopes. But we wanted the party to look as much like the cliche version of a school dance as possible--and I've really missed party planning!--so we might have gone somewhat ham, as the teen ballerinas say. We bought a bunch of serving ware and photo backdrop crap from Dollar Tree, I got out all my stash scrapbook paper to make all the kids' envelopes and accessories look mitchy-matchy and fancy, and my partner did a ton of design work to turn the print-out photos of "evidence" into real-live actual pieces of evidence that looked awesome.

And it turns out that Burger King does not care how many crowns you take from their store. We got enough for each kid, and my college student and I spray painted them all gold.

The plan for the party's pacing is so smart, with each guest receiving a sealed set of "objectives" when they arrive, and then another set after the murder. The objectives include certain things to say or do to certain other guests, and certain ways to respond if a guest says or does some certain thing to you. I LOVED this, because it got the kids immersed in the game right away, got them acting and interacting, and gave them plenty to do in between the dancing and snacking and chatting.

But it made me anxious about timing, because some of the objectives are important to the plot, so I felt like I needed a way to know when people had completed them, which wasn't something included in the game. 

My kids still have one instant camera and several packs of instant film left from that hot minute in their childhoods when they were obsessed with instant photos. We've actually made regular use of the camera and film throughout their years homeschooling, but I decided that I would not be sad to have the rest of that film used up, so I crafted a Homecoming decoration to go next to the photo backdrop:

I found a foam board in the closet, and used scrapbook paper and twine to decorate it for Homecoming. I added another set of character name tags to the board, and left enough room for an instant photo above each tag. The idea was that when a kid had completed all of the objectives that she was able to complete in the first round, she should take her Homecoming photo and add it to the board. As an added bonus, this board, with all the cute pictures of all the guests, made an absolutely adorable souvenir for my teenager to take home afterwards.

After the murder, I'd planned to reskin the board to highlight the victim and label everyone else as suspects, but in the excitement of the murder and the kids trying to solve the mystery I completely forgot! 

Regardless, the kids all used the instant camera a ton, and they all took home plenty of cute instant photos of themselves and their buddies. Totally worth bringing it!

I wasn't completely opposed to hosting the party at home, but since it *was* meant to be a school dance, we thought it would be cool to host it somewhere that had more of a school dance look, so we rented the gymnasium in one of our local community centers for an evening. Because it was a city space it was rentable for a terrific price, and we had a full kitchen available, bathrooms that we didn't have to clean, a ton of room, tables and chairs, a speaker system, and just enough of what I'm assuming were volleyball or badminton net posts standing in a corner that my partner could set up the twinkly lit dance floor of my dreams:

We even made a custom Mayhem High Homecoming dance playlist, because that's the best part of party prep!

Here's a secret: the kids loved the songs and did a ton of dancing, but just between us, all of the work to think out how to mark out a dance floor and getting my partner up and down a ladder to set up the twinkle lights for the dance floor and compiling a playlist and figuring out the speaker system was actually just so *I* could dance:

Actual footage of me dancing, taken by my dancing partner who is also dancing...

My partner needs to take me clubbing a LOT more often than he does.

So, you guys. The parties that we host always go pretty well, mostly because all of my kids' friends are wonderful people, always thoughtful and polite and participative and sensitive to making sure everyone around them is having a nice time. But this was the BEST party we have ever hosted, the absolute funnest party ever, and again, all because of these kids. Teenagers are a whole other species, you might be aware, and you can never quite tell how they're going to respond. If these kids had been mortified about the idea of acting, and didn't want to dress up and pretend that they were at a Homecoming dance, and thought the idea of solving a murder was boring and didn't want to try to figure it out, this would have been the worst possible party. 

But instead, it was the BEST party! All the kids were totally in character, acting their sweet hearts out. They came ready to attend the Mayhem High Homecoming dance, and danced and ate snacks and cheered for the Homecoming King and Queen and gossiped and stabbed each other in the back and danced and blackmailed each other, all in character, all seeming to have a marvelous time:

The kid whose first round objective informed her that she was the murder victim played her part up to the murder like a freaking rock star, then fell down dead right when she was supposed to, to much shrieking and mourning:

She played the second act in the role of her ghost, and earned the prize for having the most money left at the end of the game primarily by guilting people into donating to her funeral, I'm given to understand.

Because I knew all the secrets, I watched the face of the kid who was the murderer as she opened the envelope that revealed that secret to her, and damn, that kid's face did not change expression at ALL. I wish I had half that poker face! She then proceeded to play out the second act by dropping so many red herrings and false clues that only one kid successfully pinned her as the murderer by the end of the game.

All the other kids played their parts like champs, so in character that it turns out many of them had made up backstories and thought up extra details and fleshed out story arcs--it absolutely worked to completely confuse the "official" plot of the mystery to such an extent that I'm not surprised that only one kid ended up guessing the real murderer, but OMG they seemed to be having the BEST time.

In the end, everyone got to fill out a ballot to accuse the murderer, state how much money they had left, and vote for their favorite characters in a couple of categories. We revealed the murderer with much fanfare, and gave out prizes for correct guesses, most money, best costume, and best acting. For party favors, everyone got a Homecoming crown (thank you, Burger King!) and we set up a candy buffet for kids to fill take-home baggies on the way out. 

If you're running a similar party for teenagers, here are my tips:

• Have extra materials on hand for kids who didn't do their homework. I printed extra character sheets and school newspapers and brought them to the party, because party guest prep work turned out to be everywhere on the spectrum between "my parents quizzed me on my character for a week!" to "I lost all my stuff the same day I got it." When a kid said they didn't remember their character, it was easy to just hand them the second copy of their materials without making a big deal of it.
• Have extra characters on hand. This is important to figure out in advance, because Night of Mystery, at least, has you purchase the game for a specific quantity of characters, both a minimum and a maximum. It was a bit tricky to buy a pack that had wiggle room, but not being able to accommodate a last-minute RSVP or unexpected kid showing up would have fueled my nightmares for the rest of my life. I had a couple of extra characters on hand that I could easily add to the game if an extra kid or two showed up to the party, and we were able to assign a character to a kid who gave a last-minute RSVP without fuss. 
• Have a fun framing device. A school Homecoming dance was perfect for the kinds of activities this group of kids likes, and it gave them space to also enjoy being at a party.
• Build in plenty of extra time. I wasn't really sure how long it would take the kids to complete all the parts of the murder mystery, so I set the party to last a full hour longer than my longest estimate, figuring the kids could use the extra time to just have fun together. That was perfect because it took the kids a LOT longer to complete the second act of the game, in particular--they got so invested in their backstories and character interpersonal drama and various shenanigans that they got VERY distracted from actually collecting the evidence, but since I'd built in all that extra time I could just let them enjoy themselves. The game finished with half an hour left before the end of the party, which was kind of perfect--the kids ran around the gym and took tons of instant photos and had a blast talking through the game while Matt and I got a bit of a head start on cleaning up.

This is the first party I've held at an alternate location since my college kid's first birthday party, and dang, if I had all those years of kid birthday parties to do over again, I might never have had a birthday party at home at all! Packing up all the crap to take with us did take a while, but we didn't have to deep clean the house and make the yard look nice. It was a little stressful to set up the entire party in the hour we'd allotted ourselves, but I wasn't setting up for the entire week before the party, either. It was also a little stressful to clean up on time and pack the car back up, but then I didn't spend the entire evening and next day cleaning my house all over again and washing a million dishes and taking out the garbage. 

Imagine: a Homecoming dance, a murder mystery, two dozen cupcakes, several pounds of candy, eleven happy party guests and one happy host, me on the dance floor, and I didn't even have to mop my floors.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!