Nico Babico
Contains spoilers
This review does not contain direct spoilers, but I do discuss the novel in depth!
☄️ At a glance:
This book is terrifying, multilayered, complex, and lingering. It is marred by sections of meandering text and a character who inserts himself into interesting sections, breaking the pacing with his rants.
🟢 What I thought was done well:
I found a lot of Zampanó's parts were intriguing and often horrifying in the way that makes events linger in your mind. The idea of writing something with the intent of making it feel like an academic study, especially of a visual medium transcribed into text, was very well done and a unique take to follow.
The actual horror elements were also done with so much thoughtfulness and intent that, as mentioned before, scenes often linger with me. I loved Zampanó's writing style and his way of describing things. The story itself is very interesting as well and it's also explained in a way that captivated me throughout the text during his section.
I thought the characters were also very complex and well described. I love how the author doesn't just present us with characters, but also has other in-universe characters discuss their intentions and complexities like a real media analysis.
I loved the ending. It concludes things nicely while cementing that feeling of lingering dread the novel had built up until that point.
♦️ What I didn't enjoy:
Truant's sections usually drove me nuts, especially when he interrupts something interesting happening to describe something completely unrelated and often uninteresting. He goes on long rants stemming off of a vaguely related word or sentence written by Zampanó and it can go on and on for
pages. Every female character Truant meets is A) ogled by him for being super hot, B) often super intelligent to, of course, complement their super hotness, and C) immediately an object of sexual desire and he has sex on paper with, I swear, 9 out of the 10 women he meets. I was genuinely hoping that by the end of the book we would find out that all of the women he apparently had sex with didn't exist and it was all a mind trick.
90% of the horror of this book originates from Zampanó while Truant mumbles in the background trying to add effects. There were a few interesting parts from his perspective but I wasn't a fan in general. I understand why Truant needs to exist for the story's sake, but I feel like if the unrelated shit he talked about was trimmed, the book would be at least 1/3 shorter. Every time he would start talking, I often had to resist the urge to skip to the next Zampanó bit.
🏠 The takeaway:
The horror of the domicile is strong here, and I enjoyed the idea of taking a place (a home) often considered to be a safe space and turning it into something terrifying, existential, and cold. But if I'm being frank, giving this book 3.5 stars is generous considering how often Truant's sections made me want to put the book down. It felt like trying to read a book while an annoying sibling is whispering varied words relating to genitalia in your ear. I hated the treatment of women in this book. While Zampanó never discusses women in an objectified way (the way Truant does), other male characters not associated with Truant often treat Karen as an object of stimulation (Holloway, Wax, several of the men she interviews about The Navidson Record are some examples that come to mind). The book didn't need any of it. The horror here is not even about misogyny, though I think that could have been an interesting lens to explore. The horror here is ████. I want more ████. I want less Truant talking about how hot woman #7 is and how despite all of these women having different names and looking different, they all melt together in my head as "woman Truant had sex with while interrupting Zampanó for the 20th time." In fact, writing this review made me realize I think this book deserves 3 starts instead of 3.5.
I fully understand that Virginia Woolf is an icon of modernist writing, but I cannot read her writing. Despite only having a reading length of about 5 hours, it felt like six months. Her style of writing is so rambly, and while I understand that being rambly is a part of the stream of consciousness model, it's done in a way where it feels unauthentic and without purpose. Jean Rhys also used stream of consciousness in Voyage in the Dark, and it worked very well, it's one of my favorite books. I can only assume that Virginia Woolf's writing just isn't for me. That being said, one of my biggest pet peeves in writing is definitely meandering around points rather than using smaller points to reach the main point, and Woolf's writing resides in the former category (from my point of view). There were bits and pieces I really enjoyed, but they were so far apart between the pages and pages I skimmed as I got bored that I can't give this book more than one star. I was initially going to give this book two stars because I thought Septimus' story was interesting, but his conclusion was so incoherent that it made me laugh.
Reading this book, and a another “cosy romance” by a different author earlier this year, has made me realize that cosy romances might not be for me. That being said, my gripes lie with the lack of things happening that feel impactful, and that's to be expected from a low-stakes cosy romance. If you enjoy cosy romances, I think you will like this a lot!
I loved the way this story developed, I also think it balanced things very well between plot and spicy scenes. I felt just as invested in the story as I was in the smut, and I genuinely enjoyed the prose so much. There are some things I didn't enjoy very much though, for example, how often the character's lips twitch. This is also a bit of a personal preference, but there are parts of the story where real world things like tv shows are referenced, and because you need outside knowledge of what these things are, it can feel corny when they were brought up (especially in succession).
I read Strange Love about a year or so ago and I loved it, it's easily still my favorite Ann Aguirre book, and in contrast this book just really let me down. About 70% of the way in I started skimming, and a chapter after that, I started skipping forward while reading a sentence every once in a while to get a vibe. I was initially thinking about giving this book two stars, but when I really stopped myself to get an idea of what I liked about this book, I realized I didn't have many if any good things to say. I just don't think it's for me. I found the love interest a bit creepy at the beginning, and once he begins to develop and work through his creepiness, I instead found him boring. The idea of a hawk shifter didn't really capture my eye, I just can't find a man who turns into a bird attractive. I don't like how late the MC's backstory is explained, it almost feels like it was shoehorned in. I think more than anything, I found this book boring. As said before, it definitely wasn't for me.
DNF.
What initially drew my interest to this book was both the title and the artwork. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was hopeful as the synopsis also interested me when I read it. Long story short, I tried very hard to get invested in this book, but I couldn't. I managed to begrudgingly finish chapter 2, but at that point I was skimming. When I finally reached chapter 3, I decided I didn't want to continue.
I think one of the biggest fault I have with a lot of sci-fi is that it's not written in a way that feels plausible to me, and this book has that same fault. We don't get a real idea of what characters look like in this world, and I feel like details related to appearance are especially pertinent when we're describing alien beings. A big reason as to why I see this as an issue is because the details we do get, I can't tell if they're meant to be taken literally or metaphorically.
For example, in the prologue we get the line: “ “Don't worry,” the guard said. “We'll catch your friend.” Her viper hands were up and ready. In them were two tiny handguns.” This line alone brings up SO many questions for me, like are her hands literal vipers? Or is it a metaphor: viper quick. In most genres, I can just assume it's metaphorical because it if were literal, it wouldn't make sense for the setting. But in sci-fi, I have no reason to think this woman doesn't LITERALLY have snakes for hands, other than that it's kind of silly and hard to take seriously when the tone is clearly trying to craft something serious. My main argument being, if it was meant to be taken as “viper quick,” why didn't it just say viper quick? Further on in the third line from that excerpt..tiny handguns? How small are they? They aren't even described, so these could be regular human guns: but why would this alien prison be stocking human firearms? On the other hand, there's a character named Michal, so maybe this is earth? The fact that I was confused in the prologue didn't bode well for me when I continued reading.
If we don't get details about characters, I just tend to default to thinking these characters are human, which doesn't make sense when earth is described as an “obscure planet” in this book. These “alien” cultures just feel American, so when they mention earth as a little nobody planet, it feels even more apparent than if they felt authentically alien and new to the reader. If it felt foreign, then of course they wouldn't know a lot about earth, they wouldn't care either. For example, the previously mentioned character who refers to earth as an “obscure” planet, also owns a varsity jacket from their university ???? That's very American, and very human. And also very lazy. It's sci-fi, you can do anything you want! Why make it feel so human? Why not have another way to show school pride? Another question is very obvious: why? If this detail brings about so much thought and pauses the reader, why even add it? The varsity jacket isn't important to the story, it just seems like it was added because that's what human (American) universities do. Which brings me into my next point: things aren't thought through. They're just added or stated without wondering the consequences of adding that information.
Another issue I have regarding plausibility is the made-up words. I feel like making up words is a major part of sci-fi and fantasy because you need to make something feel human-adjacent (i.e., it makes sense to humans reading it) but also have it feel plausible, new, and foreign. An example of how the book fails at this, is that the default swear in this universe seems to be “crisp/crisping.” A lot of sci-fi gets ragged on for making up bad swear words and this is definitely high on my list. Oh my ketchup! What the bologna!? Make it baking make sense! There's also the term maemis, which I think means mom? But why? For the longest time, I just thought it was a characters name. But then the main character's mom is referred to as Maemi and then this line happens: “They cried and hung onto their maemis or their mamas or their mems.” What the breakfast is this trying to tell me? Why would the main character's friend be referring to the main character's mom as Maemi if it means mom? “Can't let Mom know.” Doesn't that imply they're related? Or is this just another example of Americanism making their way into an “alien” culture. The MC was oogling him not that long ago, I would sure hope they aren't related!
Finally, and you can argue that this point is moot because I didn't read past chapter 2, but I found it confusing to be jumping all over the place in this book. We have the prologue follow three characters in one place (prison?), then we get the first chapter that follows our actual main character in a completely different place, and then in the second chapter, we follow ANOTHER character in another new place. When I reached chapter 3 and realized we were following more new characters, I had to stop. I think that was a part of why I couldn't get invested, outside of the other issues mentioned above.
I really wanted to like this book. I did try to keep reading to see if it might grow on me, but I reached a point where I just wasn't enjoying myself and I couldn't suspend my disbelief to really get into the story. It almost read like a parody to me, and I could tell that wasn't what the author intended.
I don't know why, but I just wasn't a fan of this book at all. I might have just had high expectations because I recently read Voyage in the Dark and loved it. I found the narrative in this book to be a bit hard for me to follow, and I often got characters confused with each other. I also found a lot of the descriptions confusing, as in I had trouble tracking what was happening, to who, and where we were. It's by no means a terrible book, I just don't think it's for me.
4.5 stars. I actually really loved this book, this might be the first classic I've read that I think is warranted in being a classic and still being read in current times. Brontë develops concepts very well and her descriptions of visuals are unique and keenly understood. She also uses a lot of the senses and I really love when authors put a focus on more than just the visual.
I would give this book a 3.5, almost 4 stars. I loved the poetry (which is a surprise to me as I'm generally not a poetry person), and Harjo's life story is rich and captivating.
My main conflict with the book is the way it's structured. The story is told in a non-linear way, so often I will get intrigued, then we will switch to years behind or ahead, then switch again, and it feels hard for me to keep track of what is going on.
If you enjoy non-linear stories, this will definitely pique your interest, however if you find non-linear stories hard to keep track of, reading this book may be a bit difficult.
I wasn't particularly a fan of this book. There's some real dissonance here (not in a good way), most section that take place in Vietnam draw me in and I get so intrigued by the story at hand. But every time we return to the present, and anything “GertrudeStein” related, I immediately lose interest and I start speed reading until my eyes were just skimming the page, jumping across whole paragraphs if nothing catches my eye or it gets repetitive, which is often, especially the last few chapters. There's also something strange about reading a novel that employs the likenesses of real people that kind of rubs me the wrong way. It feels almost fanfiction-y, if that makes sense.
There were also several sections of the book where I was confused by the narrative hopping. We go from being deep in the main character's head, stream of consciousness style, into whole chapters where we no longer feel like we're in the main character's perspective, and instead we're following the story in retrospective from a seemingly omniscient narrator that knows things Bình shouldn't know. I really love stream of conscious-styled writing, hell Voyage in the Dark was my favourite book last year, and yet this book doesn't feel like it does it justice. It feels too scattered and unnatural. One idea is started very very briefly at the beginning of a chapter, only for the main character to drift into barely related ideas that last pages and pages, possibly even chapters, and when we finally return to the original thought, I feel so disconnected from where we started that I'm lost. And yet, at the same time, things are repeated chapters and chapters apart, making me feel like I'm going crazy because I can't remember if it sounds familiar because I really did read it before or if it's just a deja vu thing. But I went back flipping through the pages, and surely enough, things WERE repeated.
Finally, the dialogue. There isn't much dialogue–and I count that as a blessing because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to finish this book. The author's favourite dialogue inserts are definitely “What?” and “Oh.” They are scattered across nearly all dialogue, sometimes almost back to back, and the worst part is that in all cases, these could have been removed and you wouldn't have ever notice. They do not need to exist so repetitively in this book. Especially because BOTH of these can easily be varied: “Oh...” “Oh!” “Oh?”
There's also no progression. Bình does not change, he begins this book as a victim, and he ends this book as a victim. There's no growing, there's no revelation, there's no considering what to change. It's just a circle. We spin back and forth between Bình thinking back about his life in Vietnam, and then his current life in France with “GertrudeStein.” This book begins with GertrudeStein and ends with GertrudeStein. An ouroboros of a book if I'd ever seen one.
Finally, and this was the last straw. There are many instances of strange, and kind of gross, sentences across this book. The one I remember most vividly (probably because it was within the last few chapters of the book), were the main character reminiscing about his mother's “salty nipples” that he used to suck on when he was a baby. Yes, her salty nipples. I think that sounds like about the right place to end this review.
This book was such a let down for me. I loved the televised version that used this story as one of the source materials, and I NEVER say this, but the t.v show is leagues better than the original horror classic.
Eleanore, Theodora, and Luke all speak the same for the first 70% of the book. It's this weird whimsical speech that reminds me of Alice in Wonderland except the way Alice spoke made sense because she was 10-12, and in a nonsensical land. This whimsical nature of the dialogue is so so annoying because it clashes so severely with the setting of Hill House. This was magnified when I realized that the main character (and I'm assuming the other two as well) are not 20-ish like I first thought. No, Eleanore is THIRTY TWO???????????
Further, the horror was just not as horrific as I expected. I've read good horror, I've read things that keep me up at night. This is no where near one of them. Also, the ending was just....it cemented the idea that this story was just so lack luster. The more I read classics, the more I hate them.
I did finish the book, and honestly I feel so conflicted. While I enjoyed the book, I found that the storytelling was very...strange. Several points in the book, there are scenes where the storytelling become erratic and hard to follow. This becomes especially apparent when it's an action scene. There is rarely just one event happening to describe, it's two or more happening co-currently, which makes the confusing writing even harder to follow when we switch from perspective to perspective. Some writers invoke an imagine in the mind when their writing is read; for me, Lockwood's writing does not do this. Instead, I find myself struggling to make an image in my head to follow the story, causing me to sometimes backtrack since I feel as if I missed something.
This issue of erratic and hard to follow writing becomes more and more apparent as the book goes on, until the last 100-ish pages where I'm on and off confused. A great example of this is the whole section with the manta ray being moved to the sea. I felt like we were following so many different points of view, it was disorientating. Sometimes, we would flash back to the progress of the manta ray being moved, mixed in with two or three of the POVs.
“You think you know who and what I am, but you have no idea. You would weep if I told you. I am older than the stars and colder than the space between them.”
I tend to avoid leaving a perfect five star review, however this book far impressed me beyond my expectations, and left an everlasting impression on me. It drew me in, I was so enveloped by the story and the characters. The setting is so interesting, it feels strangely familiar yet just barely distant from reality; just how Clara sees the town. There are elements of fiction, horror, mystery, truly I adored this book. I had so many questions, and once the answers were revealed, I wasn't let down. The writing is so incredibly strong that Scorza will be on my radar for new releases. I will even be going back and reading some of his other works.
The pacing was amazing, I tend to always look at the percentage at the corner of my Kindle, but I only checked it twice, and it was out of curiosity, not annoyance. I devoured this book like a hungry dog given its first taste of fresh meat in months of drought and famine. And I never do that. I've decided to buy a hard copy of this book, and this is only the second book I've read in the last 3 years that I've felt the urge buy a physical copy of as I prefer my Kindle. Please, just go read it! You won't regret it.
I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review :)
This entry draws a nice contrast between the sub/dom dynamic of Ila and Idris' relationship (in this novella), with the soft and soothing aftercare that follows after a scene. It's touching and romantic, but also hot and steamy– that being said, this entry is a non-stop steam train so if you're looking for a book that has smut AND plot, and interchanges between the two, this novella is not be for you.
The emphasis on consent is extremely hot, and is integrated into the writing skilfully; bonus points for having it feeling in character for Idris (just makes me love him even more as a character tbh)! I also love Ila and Idris' relationship, it's explored so well and I find their dynamic super charming. Stone's writing is captivating, and the way she describes things easily draws an image in the mind, making it rare to ever get stuck trying to imagine a specific pose/action, dragging you back to reality.
There are a few hitches, but half of them are due to formatting, which is a common problem as it ultimately depends on the device the reader is using to access the work, and the other half are just me nitpicking (I'm studying to become an editor and it's hard to enjoy writing the same way I used to). The hitches don't ruin the experience of the book at all.
Side note: I devoured this novella in under 24 hours because I was so invested in their relationship I read until late that night and passed out, then woke up the next day to immediately read more :')
Overall, a very lovely novella and a great read if you're looking for a non-stop spicy experience!
TW: E.D.
If I had a choice I would have DNF'd but I couldn't because it was for a class.
While this book is readable, I would much rather have not read it.
The introduction pulled me in– I was immediately intrigued, then it moved away from the intriguing parts to focus on eating disorders (which at this point I really wanted to put the book down, not because I have any history with E.Ds but because I really would rather not read a book that meanders around vomiting for pages and pages), and then poop (which again, I would just rather not read about for 15+ pages), just to go even further into admitting family secrets that no sane person would ever admit publicly, which just thinking about makes me physically cringe.
After the poop talk, the book never really recovers for me. It's always lingering in the background, and somehow, almost every chapter returns to poop, or at least mentions it. Even parts that did seem interesting to me, were ruined by the strange almost purple prose that gives an air of faux sophistication.
DNF. The writing lacks focus and the author tends to meander around concepts instead of getting to the point. I only made it to Chapter 12 (30%) before I had had enough; I was speed reading and actively flipping pages as soon as I sensed a rant coming along. It felt like nothing was happening.
There is an example of this in the first chapter at the very end that ruined the chapter for me. There is such a large gap from important statement to important statement that I had to read backwards because I thought I missed something; I did. Bash's scolding of the women, as if they “couldn't be slower if you were picking up stones with one arm” was interrupted by a rant repetitively describing the women's shock to his statement, only then followed up by the reveal of why they were shocked. I thought she got maimed by something, until I read backwards to read his statement again. I thought the shock was because she had two arms and then she suddenly DIDN'T have two arms. This ranting problem is an issue that plagues the book.
Side note, I didn't really like the use of an amputee character as a mini reveal like that, but I can see that it wasn't done with harmful intentions.
I love alien sci-fi romances, and I'm sad I didn't enjoy this book, however I'm glad others are able to appreciate it even if I'm unable to.
I look forward to seeing what Amanda Milo publishes next! :)