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A book I loved most when it was engaging with and playing with the tropes of noir, especially when we sometimes see a glimpse of the perspective of other characters who may or may not be manipulating us through these tropes.
I found this book a challenging read - as a reader and viewer, I tend to be get overwhelmed when there are social situations where characters are lying or obscuring information, so I had to stop and come back frequently.
The mystery was satisfying, and, although grim, I enjoyed the way adults can misunderstand youth and the way a story of what a relationship should be like obscure reality.
a beautiful & emergent series of vignettes on love, parenting, generational saga's and becoming one's self(or selves). I hadn't realized it was a novel until then end.
I enjoyed the way the narrative felt poetic like someone telling you a story, bits, pieces and ideas at a time, perhaps over a year or two of coffee dates.
an intimate & enclosed setting - a cave system, a monster, and a caver with just her handler on the other end
this horror novel kept me reading it in one sitting and then kept me up with the afterfear of a scary story.
Sometimes the story is as slow and repetitive as wandering through an ever-deepening cave system, and then it surprises with fear and unease made manifest.
the gay tension is also delicious
A lovely bit of queer shapeshifting horror, the nature of stories, the desire to be heard as shared across kinds of beings. an exploration of we come to understand (or not) our genders and other multiplicities. some compelling eroticism and some compelling grotesque horror - the monsters both human and shapeshifter are monstrous.
as a heads up - there is gore, sexual assault (one incident, as a major part of the narrative
s exploration of gender), and shapeshifters eating humans with some detail. the book indulges in being gross.
I am still thinking about it - particularly the atypical and intimate relationships between 2 sets of characters in the text.
2.5 stars!
Lots of interesting research on exercise! As someone who just returned a regular fitness routine it was nice to feel like how I was feeling better mapped to research! although there are no citations?
things to know & which are annoying/troubling while reading this book:
- lots of details about horrific though informative experiments conducted on mice
-the author makes a quite few weird comments about gender that reveal a kind of boring and narrow worldview (she can't imagine that some men might wear heels for instance! )
-I think she generally doesn't have an understanding of the world that includes bodies and lives like mine and many of my friends. For instance, those who work jobs that are not sedentary don't get mentioned in this book. The assumed & universal reader is older, cisgender, worried about their weight and age, and works in an office.
-she's not funny but there are a lot of jokes, generally they didn't land for me because they were boring ways of thinking about the world, about movement, and about people & their bodies
-no citations or critical interpretation of the research discussed, I think a popular exercise science book should engage more complexly with research evaluation!
key takeaways:
-running! probably not bad for your knees
-beware over-hydration
-listen to your body re: sleep, food, water
-it truly is great for you to do literally any movement at all for like twenty minutes everyday
-static stretching is probably a fake idea
-aging is complex and neat, movement/fitness is intertwined with it
-the real world and the bodies in it are more complex, more interesting, and varied than the world of people writing about exercise and the research done about exercise
I do love some exercise myth busting.
the feeling: interwoven genres, over the top but it works, bottle episode, gay tension, kismesis-itude, horror but fun, like a campfire, leaves you feeling, a tease
