Jared

I don't even know what to say. I hate manga fans so much. I hate that someone turned this into a bullshit comic and that's all how idiots will get this story. I am constantly filled with rage.

I wanted to enjoy this a lot more than I did. Maybe it was just too long, but the last 100 pages were a slog to get through and I felt more like I was powering through it so I could move on to the next book instead of wanting to finish this. A lot of the stories felt really edgy and I was just pushing through the interstitials so I could get to the next one.

Story Ranking:

1. Obsolete by Mr. Whittier

2. Crippled by Agent Tattletale

3. Swan Song by The Earl of Slander

4. Exodus by Director Denial

5. Guts by Saint Gut-Free

6. Dissertation by The Missing Link

7. Ritual by The Matchmaker

8. Post-Production by Mrs. Clark

9. Evil Spirits by Miss Sneezy

10. Ambition by The Duke of Vandals

11. Foot Work by Mother Nature

12. Hotpotting by The Baroness Frostbite

13. The Nightmare Box by Mrs. Clark

14. Dog Years by Mr. Whittier

15. Punch Drunk by Reverend Godless

16. Product Placement by Chef Assassin

17. Slumming by Lady Baglady

18. Something’s Gotta Give by The Coutness Foresight

19. Cassandra by Mrs. Clark

20. Civil Twilight by Sister Vigilante

21. Poster Child by Mrs. Clark

22. Green Room by Miss America

23. Speaking Bitterness by Comrade Snarky

Usually the word "comedy" scares me when it's something written before Buster Keaton invented jokes in 1921. The Canterbury Tales is a slog to get through, The Divine Comedy is neither funny nor divine, and I was expecting this to be another slog with zero funny jokes.

So imagine my surprise when I was laughing at the words I was reading. I haven't laughed this hard at a book since I was a middle schooler reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid. This was hilarious. I was so shocked by how stupid everything was. They speak in uppity language, yet they're talking about deeply stupid topics.

I really want to see this performed live. I bet this would be an absolute hoot with a packed audience.

Times change and ultimately the worst people you know are going to thrive from it.

I really liked the difference between Yasha and Petya, both extremely irritating and purposeless men, yet Petya has a reason to keep going and Yasha's already given up. Petya seems afraid of the love he feels for Anya, while Yasha's love for Dunyasha is unreal and unrequited. He sees her as a workplace fling and disregards the love because he sees himself as above her, whereas Petya's love for Anya is genuine, he just believes that he's too far gone in a loveless world.

Varya's the goat. She's so easily ragebaited and Petya knows exactly how to push her buttons, I almost wanted to see the two of them fall in love. But ragebaiter x ragebaitee is not a common ship dynamic, especially in early 1900s Russian theatre.

I had to read this for a class. My professor absolutely adores Chekhov and I can see why. We had to read The Lady with the Dog earlier, and that was a truly beautiful short story. It made me cry by the end of it. That's probably the best short story I had to read for this class. Either that or Hills Like White Elephants, which also made me cry.

The Cherry Orchard didn't make me cry, but it's a comedy so that's expected. It didn't make me laugh either, but I'm sure these jokes would work a lot better if I saw them performed in a theatrical setting. I absolutely loved the characters, though. Especially Firs, I bet he would have had me hooting and hollering if I saw this live. That's a funny character. And his death is really funny too, I should really seek out a production of this play, because ending it with such a stupid death scene is comedy gold.

I am so endlessly impressed with how this was written. There's only six chapters and each one is from a different character's perspective. We see the same event play out five different times, and each time feels just as thrilling as when we first learned about it.

The only thing keeping this book from being perfect was the second chapter, the only chapter to not go over the inciting incident and also the only chapter that bored me to almost DNFing. But I'm endlessly glad that I powered through it and finished the rest of the novel in two days. This was seriously unbelievable.

It was written by a housewife and ex-teacher in her spare time. That's so inspirational to me, as I'm trying to become a teacher. If someone's debut novel can be this expertly written and near perfect, and it was produced in their spare time, then I can create something great too, even if it takes a decade or more.

The changing perspective was something I haven't seen outside of Weapons. I absolutely adore the idea of going over the same story multiple times, and I think the novel I'm going to write is going to use this format. It makes every single moment so tense.

This was rad as hell. I LOVE that Jekyll wasn't the main character until the last chapter, it made everything so much more intense. I bet this would have been incredible to read as a surprise and not see the big reveal coming.

Literature is so awesome. This would be perfect to teach my students if they could get used to the Victorian language and random references to random stuff they wouldn't understand.

Kristopher Triana constantly proves himself to be one of the best authors working in the horror space, and it's because he really understands how to write something that isn't remotely horror. A lot of times it seems like he desperately wants to get out of the extreme horror space, because all of his best work is just more violent crime dramas.

Shepherd of the Black Sheep works really well because of how much time we spend with Tom. The novel takes a lot of inspiration from 90s crime thrillers but puts us in the shoes of a victim instead of a cop. Tom falling down the rabbit hole feels so real because Triana cares about the characters he writes.

I don't have much to say. This was an incredibly gripping novel. I highly recommend this.

I put this book on pause for like a month only to find out i only had a chapter left. SUPER underwhelming ending.

Triana repeatedly shows himself to truly care about his characters. Even in rather by the books ghost schlock like this, he proves that he wants these people to feel real. I like how the ghost who killed himself was kinda a dick. I like that his suicide was portrayed as something that had a drastic negative effect on the people he loved. I hate art that portrays people who kill themselves as innocent.

I really hated the ending of this one. Having the ghost write "I forgive you" instead of "I'm sorry" to Phoebe was really insulting. Phoebe was a lesbian who rejected him, which was the catalyst for his suicide. That's not her fault. She didn't do anything wrong. He shouldn't "forgive" her for anything, he should apologize for killing himself.

All in all, this was a fine novella. Sometimes it's nice to have a short little 90 page book to read when you're bored.

There have only been two books that have ever made me cry (audiobooks don't count). This is one of them.

I adored how most of the story doesn't involve the incident we are all expecting. It reminds me of The Dirties in that way. Despite most of what's happening being rather sweet, we know something deeply tragic and horrible is coming up. There's an endless underlying sense of dread that makes a lot of these sweet moments feel wrong.

And that ending. I feel so lucky to have my family. That's the real magic.

I'm writing a dystopian novel and this inspired me to keep going. I really did not like the ending.

Holes connects every narrative in a deeply impressive way. While extremely predictable, I don't think the story is expecting the audience to be surprised.

Stanley Yelnats is an amazing protagonist. Not only is he a great inspiration for the audience, but he's also a character that the children reading this will greatly relate to. He's realistically written in a world that is anything but. He grounds the story in a way that makes it a lot more powerful. His inherent goodness matches that of most children, without feeling like someone written by an adult to make kids feel bad for not living up to his standards.

Holes works incredibly well as a metaphor for the inherently cruel and unjust American prison system. While I certainly wish Sachar dove further into the way race plays into the topic of incarceration, but that might have ruined the pacing. There's only so much you can talk about in a book for children.

Holes perfectly exemplifies the pointlessness of prison labor and the inherent slavery involved in it. And he manages to do so in a way that children can understand, even if it makes them uncomfortable. There's so much weight to everything that happens, especially once Zero and Stanley run away. We see children grasp with their potential deaths at the hands of a deeply cruel system that punishes them for, at best, non-violent shoplifting, and at worst, a crime they didn't commit.

Yeah, it's sad. Yeah, it's brutal. But kids need to hear this. Kids need to understand that our prison system is a modern version of slavery. Zero says he's willing to die before he digs another hole. And that mentality is far too common among prisoners. Because death is preferable to working for slave wages for God knows how long.

Children need some darkness in their stories if we're ever going to teach them about the horrors of modern society. And there are ways to do it in a heartfelt manner. Holes truly earns its happy ending, because in the pages before that, it lets readers grasp with it's darkness. Holes opens it's audience to critical thinking throughout the story, and even if the good guys win in the end, the prison system isn't ever fixed. Stanley and Zero make it out, but the rest of the kids are going back into system.

Holes understands what it's talking about. Despite jumping around four different generations, it never feels jarring. The flashbacks all feel like stories Stanley is telling himself to prevent pure boredom while doing his slave labor. That's effective flashback writing.

I am NOT a huge fan of young adult literature, I feel like I've made that pretty clear. I often feel like they approach interesting philosophical thoughts and quandaries before chickening out and talking down to their audience. And that is absolutely what happened in the last quarter of this book.

Fundamentally, this story's ending does not work. Thematically, Faith's entire journey doesn't work when her father was actually murdered. I think he *had* to have killed himself for any of this to really matter.

Faith spends the entire book trying to become her father and defend his legacy, undeservedly so. Erasmus was a horrendous father. He never loved Faith. He saw her as a tool. He used her for her intelligence, but also resented her for it. It makes so much more sense for him to lead her to the lie tree so he could finally kill himself in peace. It makes so much more sense for his suicide to be his final act of resentment, ruining his family's lives as a way to spite his daughter for being a girl.

But that's a fundamental flaw with the YA genre as a whole, especially in the modern era. Suicide is too "icky." Suicide that is directly the fault of a child is even more "icky." And positive reviews from parents and growth stunted adults is more important than genuine thought from the reader. Introspection is put aside so we can sell more copies and study this in schools.

2015 was near the end of Obama-era optimism and the start of Woke 1.0 in the general culture. And one of Woke 1.0's flaws that will hopefully be fixed in 2.0 is a general animosity towards the uncomfortable. It doesn't matter if something is improving your life, what matters is that you don't ever feel "uncomfy" by it. And that's sense of uncomfortability is what's holding this story back from being a truly powerful work of feminist literature.

Kids need to be made uncomfortable. Societal gender roles being so important that it leads a father to kill himself out of spite for his daughter is a very powerful way to prove that point. Ending your story with your main character taking away another woman's final act of pure agency is not. Agatha chose to kill herself, but that's too uncomfy.

I loved most of this book. The first 200 pages had me on the edge of my seat for a majority of it. I was absolutely gripped. And the story was edging the audience towards a tragic and though-provoking conclusion, only for our main character to instantly abandon all darkness within her and turn the book into a vastly childish and safe story about justice and "being yourself."

There's room for feel-good and inspirational stories for teens. General lessons about being true to yourself are not bad. I'm not saying that they are. I'm just saying that you can't have your cake and eat it to. You can't write a story about the darkness within someone and abandon all of that before she even reaches a turning point.

I'm hoping with the resurgence of woke and the general failure of YA fiction, we'll return to literature that challenges its audience. Of Mice and Men was written for teens. The Outsiders was written for teens. The Catcher in the Rye was written for teens. Children are allowed to be uncomfortable. We want children to think. As we get further into the age of aritificial intelligence and the absolute death of critical thinking among our youth, I PRAY that we start writing books that challenge these kids. Depressing, though-provoking, and truly challenging works.

Challenging novels can be fun. I had an unbelievable amount of fun with this book before Faith's 180 into nobility. Some books should leave you feeling icky. The fear of feeling "uncomfy" is what's holding us back from true progress. It's holding us back from thought and it's holding us back from true greatness in fiction.

This one really shook me to my core.

I always appreciate art that manipulates the mind of the audience and makes them truly self reflect and I think that's something this book does expertly. I hate to admit that I found Neil to be somewhat annoying. I found his attitude and general apathy immature and his reaction to the inciting incident to be dangerous. But that's the point. Neil is meant to break down the myth of the "perfect victim."

Contrast him with Brian, who is meant to stand in as this perfect victim. Brian is a "good" kid who was truly traumatized by the event. He tries to push it out of his mind. We don't even get full confirmation that it happened until there's less than 50 pages of the book left. Meanwhile we know exactly what happened to Neil in the first chapter.

Pedophilia is a deeply sensationalized crime. Due to this, Americans expect victims to act a certain way. We want them to be like Brian, to skirt around the conversation, to resent intimacy, to be afraid. So when a victim doesn't fit that cookie cutter profile, we find them "annoying." We react to them with authority we don't have. It's honestly sickening. I'm disgusted by how I reacted to Neil just a few days ago.

The other characters help reinforce this. Eric's experience as a gay teenager in the midwest gave him a trauma that bonded him to Neil. He might have been in love with him, but really I think he just wanted to relate to someone. It's a similar thing with Wendy. Wendy wants to relate to someone, but the way she goes about it is more harmful. She *wants* to be traumatized. That's what drags her towards Neil. She doesn't experience any hardships, yet she *wants* to have that post-trauma aesthetic.

Halfway through the book, Eric meets Brian. It's a few weeks after his last friend left and its the first time he's met one he needed. Brian has a perfect life from the outside, but Eric doesn't view him as a poser, like he does with every other straight man in this book. It's almost like some Mysterious Force brought these two together, and allowed them to help each other. Eric needed a good friend and Brian needed to find Neil and come to terms with his past. They couldn't have done it without each other.

And the book just ends with one of my all time favorite quotes, "It was a light that shone over our faces, our wounds and scars. It was a light so brilliant and white it could have been beamed from heaven, and Brian and I could have been angels, basking in it. But it wasn’t, and we weren’t." This line is said by Neil as he finally fully grasps what happened to him that summer. We shine an unnecessarily bright light on victims. We expect them to be perfect, to be traumatized the way we want them to be. We tell them to be angels. But they aren't.

A large reason this books works is because of the restraint it has.

This book perfectly highlights why I think Kristopher Triana rises so far above his peers. None of them could write a novella like this.

Triana always said he preferred writing thrillers to extreme horror and we really see how that shines here. What makes Triana’s writing so special is that the violence has true weight to it. Never does it feel over the top or exploitative.

The entire book up until the ending was tense. I was only gonna read a single chapter last night but I stayed up an extra hour to finish it because of how tense it was.

I didn’t like the ending. It felt like a bit of a cop out. It’s probably the only Triana story I’ve read where the ending was the worst part, but if anything that just highlights how great the rest of the book is.

I really do enjoy when Triana shies away from extreme horror and writes disturbing stories that aren’t scary. My two 5-star reads from him are psychological thrillers.

it was a plane read that I couldn’t finish before the plane landed. Finished it a few days later.

Way too much quirk for the sake of quirk, but the writing style was deeply admirable. The last 50 or so pages of the book absolutely make up for the slog that was the rest of it.

I wish the author dived more into the surrealism and less into the mundane. Big fan of the cover art, though.

This was one of the books I read in my search for something to teach my future high school English class. And while I prefer The Catcher in the Rye, I think this is a better fit than Never Let Me Go.

This book teaches the power of service and genuine kindness without being condescending to the audience. It’s powerful AND entertaining, which is important for high schoolers.

It’s definitely not perfect. The ending sucks and all the writing around Audrey is hard to read at best and deeply misogynistic at worst. But it might be useful to talk about the flaws of the book with my students.

Potential parent issues: underage drinking, sex talk about Audrey, contemplating murder, and kissing a dog.

Overall, this is the best book I found for the school year. I’m keeping The Catcher In The Rye for summer reading.

Shane is so much more than a mythical tale of a gunslinging western hero. Shane is about the importance of everyone in our lives.

We’re inclined to overlook those around us when we’re living in mundanity. Often, it takes a big change for us to really appreciate our community.

Shane was a figure of hope for this small settlement. After he leaves, Joe almost considers leaving, but Marian convinces him to stay. Because Shane is within all of us.

We need to be that inspiration. Our community is important and we need to go out of our way to keep it.

Some weird racism aside, this book was really progressive. It’s about a small town fighting against a corporation using violence to take their land. And I think it’s important for us to know that we can fight back.

We can all be Shane.

The musings of Edmund Cox are not interesting to me in the slightest. The rest of the characters are pretty cool tho.

I really didn’t think Triana could top Gone to See the River Man but this book is so rich in symbolism and commentary.

Triana really understands how misogyny is rooted in everything in America and how it manifests itself into men. The ending left me absolutely disgusted.

I’ll probably relisten to this one some day because the way it toys with who you root for is unparalleled.

I really didn’t expect any of Triana’s books to be bad. but here we are.

I respect it for trying to do something different, but at the end of the day, it’s still a slasher, the one of, if not the, worst subgenre to come from horror.

Ex-Boogeyman acknowledges tropes and the worst of the genre, but doesn’t ever subvert them. Once Jonathan makes it to the rafting center, the rest of the book becomes unbearable slasherslop.

There are moments near the end where it toys with good ideas but it never fully dives into them. honestly, the book would have a lot more interesting if Jonathan never started killing people.

Triana is good at writing kids. There’s a 12 year old girl character here who felt real and reminded me of my sister. So good on that.

Idk you can skip this one. It’s incredibly lame and generic.

I finally switched my major back to English Education, so now I need to read some books that I could potentially teach in class in the future. And I definitely think that this is a good novel to teach.

I think a large reason this book works is because of how much time we spend we spend at Hailsham. Honestly, I think the first two parts of the book are a lot stronger than the last part. Growing up, I was always more interesting in the slice of life introductions of novels than the rest of the story, so I really appreciated how much of this was just stories about Kathy's life.

I cried at the end of this book. It really is beautiful. Idk it's hard to write about novels because I spend so much time with them and I don't know what to say.

i couldn’t take a lick of this seriously. it’s like a Jim Hosking film but with zero jokes. very strange book.

Hardcover deleted my review and I don’t have a backup. So i’m gonna say this is a lot of fun. It’s also really sad. Good balance. Triana the goat.