Perry
Gods, I'm reading some real doozies. Trigger warning here for emotional abuse, rape, gaslighting, cutting, and just general entitled white male assholery.
Lilja is seeing a man she's never able to straight-up call her boyfriend. He's awful and cheats on her, coerces her into sexual positions she doesn't want, convinces her she's nuts, isolates her, is rude to her friends and family, wakes her up with sex, and is a colossally horrible person. This reads like poetic prose, and you can tell it's a novel written by a poet. Not my favorite style for a novel, but this felt so very realistic that I feel like the author has lived this. It's heartbreaking and ire-inducing. There is a small glimmer of hope at the end. A tiny one. But it's not great.
Of course, I had to read this. Of course, there might be a slight religious obsession due to lowkey religious trauma. This is the story of Miriam, whose father is a preacher and healer/revival leader. He has a problem with his temper and his violence and his hubris. Fancy that. Every summer, they leave their little town for three months to go on a revival tour. The summer before the book starts, her father lost his temper and punched a pregnant girl in the stomach. So the book starts out with this year's revivals already in trouble. And it does get worse. Miriam's father gets called out for being a phony by a man, and proceeds to beat said man. Outside the tent, out of view of all the parishioners, but Miriam follows and sees. And her whole world comes crashing down.
And then she learns that she can heal.
There are going to be trigger warnings for abuse, physical, emotional, psychological, and religious; sexism; cutting; birth and discussions of stillbirths.
Miriam's story is extra. I grew up in New England in an SBC church, child of a pastor. So the whole Southern thing didn't match my childhood, nor did the abuse. But I could still relate to a lot of the things Miriam experiences, even though my spiritual realizations came much later. So yeah, this book hit close to home, despite differences. It's not an easy read, but for anyone dealing with religious trauma, even if not religious abuse, this is a should-read.
So short (less than 100 pages), so weird, and so great. Asa has a temp position in a city in Japan. Her husband gets a transfer with more money, so they move to podunk countryside Japan to live in a house owned by his parents, right next door to his parents. Asa and her husband go from communicating and eating together to something else: She, no longer employed, is going slightly stir crazy because she's alone with nothing to do and no way really to get around; he, with the only car, is at work until all hours, or else he's on his phone, completely checking out of their life together.
And then she's walking to the store one day and sees a strange animal. With no clue what it is, she decides to follow it–and falls down a hole.
Thus begins her strange Louis Carroll-y almost non-adventure, in which she meets strange neighbors and, apparently, her secret brother-in-law. She sees dozens of children playing at the river. She notices strange things about her husband's grandfather and meets the strange neighbor who always wears the same clothes. And nothing seems quite right anymore.
Are the isolation and loneliness getting to her? Or is something weirder going on?
My wife read this first and wanted to discuss it, so I read it. It takes no time at all and is a bit WTF, but it was also weird and wonderful. It sparked a great discussion of what was actually happening with the weirdness and all those old people and children other people maybe don't see. And interactions Asa has just add to the weird. The atmosphere is great. In just a short book, Oyamada-sensei has created a very confusing, lonely world for our heroine. Is it real, or is she losing it? Is something mysterious going on, or is being a woman following a man with nothing upon which to fall back a potentially bad idea?
3.5 stars.
I thought this would be a 2-star, maaaaybe a 3-star read. The translation isn't a smooth one or very literary. There are a lot of repeated words in the descriptions.
That being said, I really quite liked the simplicity and the rather depressing conclusion.
The story follows a college professor who teaches criminal psych. One day, she is informed a serial killer in solitary wants to be interviewed by her. She has no clue why; she has never met him. So she has to unravel that mystery. Simultaneously, her husband gets custody of his daughter because a fire in her home killed her grandparents, who were her guardians. The fire began mysteriously.
The plot is fairly simple, even if the emotions and psychology of the characters is more complex, so I won't reveal anything else. Suffice to say that I enjoyed it far more than I anticipated and was satisfyingly unsatisfied by the depressing ending. I'd read more.
3.5
Anna, a middle-aged British Gen X biracial woman, mother of an adult professional woman with an eating disorder and estranged wife of a white guy who cheated on her, is also dealing with her mother's recent death. Her mother leaves her their apartment, where she discovers the journal of her unknown father, an African exchange student. So she hunts him down–and he's the former president/possible dictator of a tiny nation. There is debate about whether he's a brutal dictator or a respected leader who brought prosperity to the country.
The second half of the novel follows Anna as she meets her father and some siblings and had some misadventures, including random sex with a man who is barely an acquaintance and a night in jail, prompted by someone she didn't expect–but who is obvious to the reader.
The ending indicates she sort of finds herself in Africa, but I don't totally buy it. That being said, I enjoyed this novel and it's sparse prose. There's some humor here and some fear and the upheaval of life. But there is hope here too. She just needs to watch out for that newly-discovered family.
Cute. Adorable. Amusing. I did wish there were more family moments for both Chloe and Red. But it was still so much fun to read. Red feels about Chloe the way I feel about my wife, basically. D'oh! Anyway, yeah. Loved it, though might love Eve's book just a little more. We'll see what happens when I finally get hold of Dani's book.
Ludicrous
I mean, it was less boring than I would have thought a car thriller would be. But I knew who the killer was in the first chapter. This was unrealistic and over the top and just plain silly. The unreliable character wasn't well-handled, and the p.o.v. of other characters just didn't really work for the narrative. And bookending it as a movie is not an excuse to let the author make absurd choices. I didn't expect that epilogue, but it tried to hard to be clever in book that was anything but. So, not great, but at least I wasn't bored.
Also...I mean, because Sagerr is kinda a one-trick pony, it was really easy to figure out the villain.
Color me sadly underwhelmed. After reading all the excitement regarding this book, I was disappointed. It didn't remind me of NH very much, and I'm from there. The entire time I read, I was thinking of any accent but the obnoxious one of my childhood. There are some farms there, sure, but it isn't actually necessarily the easiest state in which to farm, unless you're mostly a cattle farmer. The classic ‘Ayuh,' only happens once. It was small-town ambiguous.
I don't mind the strangeness, but there should have been more. This read more as a domestic thriller with absurdist overtones or something. Not horror. And all the men are terrible. The only one I liked was the drunk, Mickey.
It wasn't bad. But it was not what I was hoping. Nor was it at all scary or chilling. After everything, the ending was strangely abrupt and dramatic. But I'm glad I read it, since it's important.
This is not an easy read. It's actually quite heartbreaking. But it was very good.
The unnamed protagonist has a lazy eye and is bullied horribly. He becomes friends with a girl in his class who is also bullied. The reasons for the bullying are different. His is not a choice, but Kojima, the girl, chooses to present herself in certain ways in order to connect with her father, whom she misses, and whom her mother divorced. There is much discussion of weakness as strength, finding meaning in one's abuses, and how people view abuse. One character, a bully named Momose, is basically a psychopath. He never participates but watches from afar. When the protagonist asks him about it, his response is pretty nihilistic.
The extremes are represented by this Momose and Kojima. She seeks meaning in everything; he sees meaning in nothing. These middle schoolers have massive existential crises and manage to elucidate their thoughts in language that most kids their age wouldn't necessarily have. But that isn't a problem here. Even without the necessary vocabulary, a young teen still might feel these things.
There is a modicum of hope. Just a little, for our little hero. But he'll probably have to wait a bit.
Fast Read
It wasn't boring, though the translation seemed wooden at times. Lots of explaining and talking at length about possible suspects and outcomes, but some of the reasoning is just too improbably specific. So it was interesting, enough and, moreso, a fascinating bit of Japanese literary history.
Sophomore Novel
At first, I wasn't certain. It was fun and funny and sweet; it was not the hilarious romp RW&RB was. I guffawed through that. I knew I enjoyed OLS, but I wasn't committed to how much I would like it. And then, when I was 93% finished, my digital library loan ended. I was devastated.
And then I knew, as I was left hanging in literary limbo with a big case of the feels–I loved this book. It's a romance, but it's another book of precious, precious found family for which it is so important to have representation. Sophomore book–I love it. Now I gotta buy it.
Thank you to Berkley Books for the ARC of Playing the Palace by Paul Rudnick.
First things first. Toward the end, there are some unfinished words at the end of paragraphs, a lack of punctuation at the end of some sentences, and paragraphs are accidentally split up.
That being said: Whilst this is not as good as Red, White & Royal Blue, it is still delightful fun. It's a bit more episodic and not terribly deep, and Carter and Edgar are a weird, abrupt couple. BUT it's awfully cute and hilarious. I had a laughing fit whilst my wife was on the Switch Light playing a farm game with a friend. They were quite confused. But I have a crass sense of humor, so the scene in question just killed me. This book is all about being light and feel good and fun. And it succeeds. The characters are fairly precious, although kinda quirky in that rom-com tropey way. But they're all so likeable. Except Callum. And Carter really needs to figure himself out, because everyone (almost) adores him.
I sped through this book happily. I enjoyed it immensely. It isn't perfect, and it's very like RW&RB; but if you want an HEA with lots of humor and adorability, this is a great read. I laughed A LOT.
If you know anything about this book, you know what made my curiosity get the better of me.
Beyond that, not much happens. Lou is a lonely, dysfunctional archivist in Toronto and has to go north to a really remote, rural, islandy area of Canada to go through the possibly historical house of weird English gentry immigrants. She farts around and catalogues the stuff in the house. And has sex with the old family bear.
She's not particularly nice or sympathetic, and she takes advantage of the bear's docility. She mightn't be the first? I'm not sure, but there's another character obsessed with the poor bear.
It's short. That's the best thing about it.
I have half the book to go. I've read three other things whilst trying to slog through this one. I'm not encouraged by the reviews. Like, so far, um...these characters aren't Millennials. Unless this is a period piece, and I just missed that somehow, these people are too young to be Millennial. So...uh, critics, she's not the voice of a generation. I don't know the background of author or novel at this point, and I'm not finished. So we'll see.
I confess, I would have put this book off indefinitely, but Thomas MacGregor was reading it onset, so I HAD to read it then.
So. Finally finished it.
No.
I was toying with reading her next book, but I think I'd be too annoyed. Bobbi, Melissa, and Nick weren't very engaging, and Frances was awful. They could all be awful. But I cannot deal with them being boring, which Frances especially was. This book name-drops academic things to seem scholarly. We're told Frances is a Communist, but she really seems aimless and pretentious. And the whole thing was rather shallow. It kept telling me rather than showing me. Too much passive description is boring.
I will say kudos on non-traditional relationships, but everyone was a dolt. And Nick had no business have an affair with a 21-year old. I will also say kudos for dealing with endometriosis, although Frances' case was handled rather anticlimactically, as were her self-image issues and her cutting.
Frances says she has no personality. She didn't; nor does this book.
I shouldn't have liked this as much as I did, I reckon. But like it I did.
Yes, I was baffled by the Bunnies, because their interests were more in line with things I like, their clothes were quirkier than I would expect such students would have. But they were awful rich people. But one seemed punkish, and another seemed Gothic Lolita, and that was just a weird choice. It didn't feel realistic.
THAT being said. This book was too much fun. I chuckled grimly to myself multiple times. I felt for Samantha's loneliness. I actually kinda figured out what was going on with her and Ava, but the outcome of it all was still a surprise.
Yes, this is litfic. And I normally hate litfic. It's boring and pretentious. But every once in a while, I come a cross a litfic book that is just so delightful I cannot hate it. I find myself really enjoying it. And this was the one for the spring.
Thank you to the author, from whom I received the ebook a copy in exchange for a fair review.
I read this in no time at all. It was a good sample, but I wanted more. I wanted more of the characters and more of the virus and more of the drama of existing during an epidemic. It seemed to be vaguely zombie-ish, but we never got enough information or scenes with the zombies. And we get the aftermath of events, but not really many of the events.
Basically, the story follows a crew of motley survivors as they make a found family and survive the apocalypse. They begin in a town, find two teens to add to their group, and travel up a mountain to the family cabin of their leader, who is the most explored character.
Basically, I wanted more. This whetted my appetite for some creepy virus horror. I think there's some really good stuff here that could be expanded, and I would love to read the expansion. One of my very favorite parts occurred on the journey up the mountain to safety. The survivors find a car buried in the snow. There is someone in the car, but that person is infected and has glowing blue eyes.
I wanted more of this. This was cool. The groundwork is there, it just needs to be fleshed out.
3.5 stars.
On the whole, I enjoy this. Though, there were several times that I found Thora and Santi tedious. When the book becomes just talking, talking, talking. Not too many ways around that, in a book like this. But it was still good. But some lives are so brief, filled with so much talking, occasionally I found myself disconnected from the characters. Except the cat.
I love winter isolation stories. When I expect horror or gothic thrills. This took a fantastic location and potentially creepy premise and just...scrapped all over it. Farfetched, dull, uninspired. The characters were boring or absurd. The prose itself was wholly unoriginal. Don't lie to me and tell me this is gothic. It's just another mediocre thriller.
To quote Cogsworth: “Dusty, dull, very boring.”