Ashley
Fast-paced, but still deep. A perfect criticism of classism wrapped up in one young man's quest for vengeance.
The battle scenes were well written and I didn't want to skim them to get back to the larger plot. There are several jaw dropping moments throughout the book and there is also a bit of a mystery that is revealed towards the end that I appreciated.
Highly recommend even if fantasy isn't a genre you normally read.
I love N.K. Jemisin and I love the idea of this book, but the execution fell flat for me. I think the characters being stereotypes of their neighborhoods, although it makes perfect sense for the concept, didn't help me connect with the characters and I found each one pretty obnoxious. I think that if the book had been longer, I would have been able to see more redeemable qualities in the characters and been more invested in the outcome of each of them.
I also might not like urban fantasy, which I never knew before. Combining such fantastical elements with a real world setting was difficult for me to get into. Also, all the New York insider knowledge required to understand the references was annoying to me.
Overall, the concept will stick with me and the story moved at a quick enough pace for a three star rating for me.
I love monster stories so we are already ahead. Then we have a woman protagonist struggling with her powers and whether she is good or evil, a setting primarily on a reservation that has walled itself off from the rest of the US after climate change has ruined the Earth, and a sidekick who is hot and clever, but hiding something? I didn't stand a chance.
I would love to go back and listen to the audiobook to hear how the Diné words are actually supposed to be pronounced.
The entire time I was reading this book I was trying to figure out if I enjoyed it, but I kept thinking about it when I wasn't reading it and managed to finish it in three days. When I got to the end, I was still thinking about whether I enjoyed it so I am giving it three stars. This may have been another situation where I should have read more reviews to understand what this book was before jumping into it, but for some reason I thought this was a “weird” horror novel. Maybe I thought this because everyone was reading it in October along with their spooky books and the cover gives that impression as well, but, although the behavior by one of the characters is horrific, this is not a horror novel; it is an account of the author's experience with domestic violence told in short vignettes of her life and her relationship with her abuser. With all my caveats out of the way, the structure of this book was really interesting and absolutely kept my attention. I think the made-up footnotes were interesting subtext to what the author was experiencing, if a little distracting.
There are probably better summaries of the book out there, but my summary is that this book depicts how insidious, creeping, and silent domestic violence can be, specifically in woman-woman relationships. The author also ties her individual experience to the broader lesbian community throughout history and helps dispel the myth that women can't perpetrate domestic violence.
I think this book illustrated the phrase of “You put a frog into a pot of boiling water, and it jumps right out. But if you put it in a pot of nice comfortable water and then turn on the heat, the frog will complacently let himself be boiled.” The reader is taken for a ride where the author's relationship seems lovely at the start and little by little, we are introduced to issues that continue to grow larger throughout the book and throughout their relationship until it culminates into boiling water for the author and for the reader.
I recommend the book if only to read real life depicted in an interesting format and to get some insight into what “non-traditional” abusive relationships can look like.
This is classified as horror, but for me, it fits better as straight fiction. I didn't think this was scary, but it is gruesome and there is a huge supernatural component to the entire story. Maybe that is the definition of horror.
ANYWAY, I enjoyed this book and the story of why these men are being haunted/stalked by an elk which becomes much more impactful as the story progresses. I appreciated the blending of traditional and modern perspectives on Native American culture and the reconciliation of these modern Native American men dealing with their past and how to handle not only this supernatural force, but life as a Native American in the 21st century.
This small book packs a lot into it's 118 pages. The story unfolds the way a mystery does, reads like a fantasy book, and contains the lyrical prose of contemporary fiction. I really enjoyed how the story was told; an old woman to a younger person whose job it is to collect stories and histories.
I didn't read this digitally, so here are some quotes I tabbed:
“You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small.”
“Sometimes the things we see do not make sense until many years have gone by. Sometimes it takes generations. We are taught to be content with that.”
“Being close to her was like being warmed by a bonfire, and I had been cold for a long time.”
“The Abbey at Singing Hills would say that if a record cannot be perfect, it should at least be present. Better for it to exist than for it to be perfect and only in your mind.”
“Submission but only to the truth.”
“Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves. I am not worried for her in the least.”
Rounded up to five stars. My favorite type of horror is creature/monster horror, but I think my second favorite is humans who are monstrous. This book is populated with monstrous people who commit horrible acts and just get to keep living their normal lives. I think I was shocked by what was happening in ONE TOWN for the first half of the book and then just accepted that some people are just shitty and sometimes they are drawn to a place for some reason.
I think it is a strange comparison, but it reminded me a little bit of the experience reading A Little Life. Everything is a bummer, but for some reason I want to know what happens next even though I am pretty sure it is not going to end well for anyone. This book did not make me cry, though, so there's that.
The author describes the place and the people so well and in so much detail (without going on and on), that I felt I could really picture the exact place and what everyone looked like and how they walked around in their everyday life which I think kept me interested, as well.
I recommend reading it, but I don't think this is a book for everyone. It is dark and depressing, but so well-written.
Weird, little atmospheric book. I think most people would not enjoy this story, but for the investment involved, I recommend reading it if you are interested in speculative fiction, isolated islands, and don't mind jumping from character to character. There is no real plot and it is only just over 100 pages so you are essentially getting an idea which is explored for a little bit and then quite an abrupt end! I enjoyed the writing even though there were references to a lot of Irish specific items that I had to look up.
I would say this has spooky “vibes” rather than being actually scary. I really liked the explanation of the horror, it was definitely different, but somehow believable. I wish the main character had been a little more interesting; she was a rich, headstrong young woman who thought she was in control of everything until she truly wasn't and ends up learning a life lesson about love. That just seems one-dimensional. Overall, a great read, but could use more character development for my personal taste.
I flew through this book and wanted to know what was going to happen to the boys next. The writing is pretty graphic, so if reading about wounds and blood and the like is going to make you put this book down, don't pick it up. I usually can't handle reading about these things, but because the book moves so quickly, the author doesn't linger on these scenes for too long and I was fine. The horror is definitely something you could see happening in real life which makes it that much more horrifying.
My issues were that the characters were all stereotypes. The troop leader is a single, adult man who lives alone with rumors in town that he might be gay. There is the fat, nerdy kid who you root for. There is the dumb jock whose dad is the chief of police and you want to grow out of this bullying phase. We have the angry kid whose dad is in jail. We have the normal kid with no stand-out characteristics. And very early on, we are clued into the fact that one of the boys is a socio/psychopath who likes to torture animals and is definitely going to be a problem as the boys try to survive the horror of the island.
Putting all these flat characters together just left me wanting to know how those that didn't survive the island died. I didn't really care who survived and who died, just how they did it. That was the most interesting part. I also felt like they didn't speak like 13 and 14-year old boys actually speak which didn't help my connection to the characters.
I still think this is a good book to read if you like “gross”, realistic horror, but I wish the characters had been fully developed.
I generally enjoy the worlds that Seanan Maguire puts together more than the characters themselves, but this was still a four-star book for me even though I felt the focus was on the main character rather than the world. The combination of the main character being torn between two worlds, something I became more and more invested in as the book went on, and the glimpses into a world where everything is “fair” and if it is not, there are interesting consequences, gave me a little bit of everything I wanted.
Entertaining, but disjointed.
3.5. Enjoyable and entertaining, but the through line is hard to follow. I didn't mind the license Stephen Fry took in order to make each story simple and fun, in fact, I think it was helpful, but it mostly felt like a random selection of myths put together under one title.
