I first read this book either in my college years or shortly after. Back when I was a naïve peng ting that believed in tru wuv and Mild spoilers ahead
I first read this book either in my college years or shortly after. Back when I was a naïve peng ting that believed in tru wuv and that men were trustworthy lovers. Books like these served to reinforce the notion that love is a fixed thing. A happy ending is something you have to work for and when you're "blessed" enough to get it, you hold on.
Damn Beyoncé, the simp not the feminist, had me believing that love is all about growing together, serving your man. I should have paid more attention to her more self serving anthems. As the memes say, I gotta put me first Lucious. (If you've never watched Fox's Empire, only season 1 is worth it).
Now, it's no secret that I have little to no patience for romance. But I was telling my friend about this book and I was misremembering many details. When I saw it was available on Libby, I decided to borrow it. The narrator, Lena Stark, is extremely talented and I'll be sure to look out for more books she's done. That aren't hetero romances because yeish.
This book starts with Reese Duncan, a grumpy rancher extraordinaire who was bitterly divorced seven years ago. His ex wife, a stereotypically vindictive 90s "other woman". Her name was April. August. A month thing. After December divorced Reese she demanded a lump-sum payment rather than alimony or a share of his ranch. Reese had to sell part of his land, most of his animals and let go of his ranch workers to make the payments. He'd spent seven years working to make the ranch profitable again and decided it was time to make it a legacy. And of course because the 90s was the era of biological essentialism, he couldn't possibly adopt a child. He placed an ad for a wife who'd be his maid and brood mare. Enter Maddy.
Madelyn is the quintessential manic pixie dream girl. Tiktok tropes will have you believing that such a romance is called grumpy x sunshine. And at it's core, it is. But Maddy is an MPDG. For you kiddos, that means an insultingly upbeat woman whose sunny disposition is supposed to heal the brooding male lead's broken heart. She has therapy pussy. Maddy is recovering from the death of her mother and grandmother, which is mentioned once for... a reason. As she was bumming it in a do-nothing job at her stepbrother's company, she realises she's experiencing a bout of ennui. She spots the ad when her best friend shows her the local newspaper she'd received from back home in Montana.
Maddy answers the ad out of curiosity and Reese offers to meet and let her see the ranch. They have an undeniable connection, an adorable love for trivia and enough heat to roast a maize cob. But after the one night stay, Reese tells Maddy she's wrong for the role because she's a city girl. But really it's because he's still not over what July did to him. Maddy's heart is broken and she decides, then and there, that she's in love with him. This 28 year old virgin decides the one dude she just met, made out with ONCE and exchanged facts with ONE TIME is the love of her life. ...more
Have you met me? There are many who should fear me: cThis is the boringest book that ever boringed.
God should have the monopoly on fear.
Have you met me? There are many who should fear me: children, people who hate cats and men who hate women. Another group that should consider fearing me is boring books.
Unfortunately, I have encountered yet another book that set out to bamboozle me but even I didn't know what it was trying to lie to me about. I feel like my hands are tied. Am I reading too much into something as simple as a sad attempt at Where the Crawdads Sing fanfiction? Or was it actually just a boring book trying to be a southern gothic mystery?
The blurb of this book strung up a combination of words that usually have me running the other way. Things like "perfect for fans of Twilight" mean that it's unlikely I would ever enjoy it. But I impulsively joind a book club and this was their February book of the month. A horror novel in the month of "love"? I had to try, right?
This book is really hard to care about. It starts with the discovery of a skull in the river/swamp/lake thing and our narrator Ruth is very anxious about it. She prattles on using biblical adjectives about how much anxiety the discovery has wrought on her. Usually I'd clip some words from the prose to show what irritated me so much but I just can't be bothered. This book was that stupid and uninspiring.
Ruth has a best friend, Everett or Ever, as she calls him. If you can't tell, that's my disdain dripping on your face. Ever has a habit of slipping in and out of town and as the book starts, Ruth tells us he shows up at the beginning of summer. He's supposed to be Edward Cullen coded. And you can tell because he sounds like a stupid teenager's fantasy. As the book progresses, this matters little. At least until where I read. I don't care if he does remain loyal to his befuddling timeline. There are a few important things to learn about Ever. He used to get into barfights in high school, he was Ruth's "hero", he doesn't own a cellphone and his teeth are fanged. No, really, he has fangs. Ruth won't ever shut up about his fucking fangs.
We're supposed to care that Ruth and Ever killed a man, his skull has potentially been found. Oh no whatever will they do? I don't care. This book also thinks its readers are stupid because hinting is something as foreign to it as tolerance. Whenever a new clue is dripfed through painfully lengthened dialogue (was the author trying to meet a word count?) we can't be given a chance to figure out what's happening. We are immediately tossed into a flashback where everything is spoonfed to us.
Oh are you curious why Barry, speaker of the worst proposal known to mankind, accused Ever of breaking into Ruth's father's safe? Fear not, in the next chapter the author will hold your hand and shove your head against the display window of her bizarre patchwork of a story. At first I figured this was a straightforward murder coverup mystery, and perhaps Ruth and Ever are forced to commit even more murders and thefts to eventually escape Bottom Springs. But no. They remain in this town for reasons that aren't organic, believable, or even intelligent.
When the bike gang was introduced (yes, for real, a biker gang), having been red-herringed with a satanist cult a few chapters before, I was just done with the story. Ruth and Ever aren't compelling enough characters for me to care about anything they do. Ruth's father, the reverend was a caricaturised evil who did deeds that could be uncovered by a detective who asked more than a few questions, so at no point did I feel that Ruth and Ever were justified in trying to take justice in their own hands. And most egregiously, I was just bored. I skipped to the end to see what unfolds and I will forever be proud of the fact that I stopped reading on Page 150. I don't understand the audience of this book is supposed to be. There is barely any "forbidden" romance for the Twihards. The twist is stupider than the one in Crawdads and if you liked that, you will not enjoy this. It's a string of words trying to match AO3 tags pulled out of a hat. It thinks it wants to start a discussion about themes like parental abuse, fundie churches, liberation through education and exploration through fiction. But I grew so bored I couldn't be bothered to forement any thoughts about what it may have been telling me. Only read this if you have no fear of boredom....more
I think I've sat with this long enough to decide to write a full scope of my thoughts. I haven't been this frustrated by a booMild spoilers ahead.
I think I've sat with this long enough to decide to write a full scope of my thoughts. I haven't been this frustrated by a book since the disaster that was My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I know people often argue that unlikeable characters shouldn't make a reader hate a book but sometimes they just make the story unbearable. Ordinarily, unlikeable characters have a certain charm or charisma, they can be so offputting that you want to see them face their comeuppance, or actually root for them to get their shit together. A book that accomplishes this is Luster by Raven Leilani.
In this book, we follow two 14 year old girls, Fabienne and Agnes who are existing in post-World War 2 France in a forgettable village known as Saint Remy. Fabienne is a shepherd girl who helps manage their meager farm's livestock. She's also cruel, vindictive, mendacious, short-sighted, and according to her bleached shadow, creative. Agnes is a cardboard cutout of a character, a thin 2D caricature of a girl obsessed with her best friend. Fabienne is supposed to be a queenbee cult leader figure but really she was just a brat who was arrogant enough to deny her ignorance.
Out of nowhere, Fabienne decides they're going to write a book. It's a collection of short stories about babies. They convince a widower who was a failed poet and philosopher to help them publish their book. Fabienne comes up with the stories and Agnes writes them down because she's the only literate one. She also underestimates her powers of bad imagination because at one point she keeps a diary of stories where she compares a redhead's hair to a bird's nest. Shall I compare thee to a clown's crown, Agnes probably. The widower, Devaux, manages to get their book to a publisher who creates a big deal about it. Fabienne instructs that the book only have Agnes' name on it. I guess in 1952 France, they'd never heard of collaborative authors. Agnes gets a press tour and eventually, an opportunity to go to finishing school. Their book was also inexplicably a bestseller. I haven't read a lot of French fiction from that time period but the French don't strike me as a maudlin enough audience to want to read a collection of short stories by underbaked teenagers about unfortunate babies. The book tries hard to convince the reader how Fabienne is a kind of savant but I was never convinced. Their second book, that was abandoned, was about some postman that was in love with a girl and she conspires with his sister to be his first heartbreak. That did sound like something a bit more quintessentially French but again, this book refuses to even offer snippets of this fiction. We're just told that Fabienne came up with it because... reasons. She wanted Agnes to be ambitious but it has to be Fabienne-approved ambitions, which all go nowhere. Maybe it was trying to show the futility of attempting to find meaning in girlhood but I thought The Virgin Suicides did it better. This book is just stupid.
Fabienne also decides to frame Devaux of inappropriate actions because they wanted their scheme to succeed. But this is pointless because Devaux never wanted their money. Fabienne also abandons their "game" when Agnes schemes her way out of finishing school (which she could have just refused to attend when she was invited). The whole book was a study in pointlessness. It had a few lines that resonated with me as a writer but ultimately it amounts to nothing. My buddy read partner Christina enjoyed this fairly but I was completely frustrated with it. The book has nothing of import or meaning to say and as such it can't even attempt to be entertaining. Fabienne eventually marries a clown and dies in childbirth, which is completely unimaginative as her own mother also died in childbirth. Agnes ends up in the US, married to a man whom she met while working as a seamstress, having faced no consequences for ruining the lives of Devaux and all the other adults whose resources she wasted. Their fallout happens in the span of a few paragraphs and the author couldn't be bothered to explore what it meant to Agnes to lose her misplaced reason to live.
This book was frustrating, boring, nebulous, meandering, silly, pointless, incongruous and unpleasant. It felt as compelling as trying to befriend a real life goose.
Madelein L'Engle said, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it foMadelein L'Engle said, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children." If Rebbeca Kuang saw this quote, she must have mixed it up because she wrote this book as though it's meant for children who want to graduate to adult fiction.
Yellowface is an unsubtle, hammer-to-the-forehead quasi-treatise about the dangers of White Women. Those villainised hacks who never see how what they're doing is wrong. They're Karens, but they voted for Biden. No really, June Hayward says she is a Democrat, and liberal, and voted for Biden multiple times within the book. Hayward a mediocre author who is friends (and we're not really convinced why) with a Chinese American literary star Athena Liu who dies suddenly after a pancake goes down the wrong hole, and Hayward is too inept to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre.
After this, Hayward steals Liu's manuscript about Chinese laborers forcefully conscripted by the French during World War 1. The caucasity is unsurprising, trite, and racist covering all the beats we experienced every time we covered Discourse about films like The Blindside, Hidden Figures Greenbook, and books like The Help, or American Dirt.
This book is not funny, it's not particularly well-written, with a literal typo in the first few pages The editor who did got fired,. The narrative is repetitive and disjointed, like puzzle pieces forced together from different boxes. There were scenes where June's narration is simply exhausting. I have to remind Athena this every single time. She has a goldfish’s memory when it comes to my problems—it takes two or three repetitions for anything to stick. First of all, Rebecca, goldfish don't have short memories. Some can keep them for years. Secondly, you already said this multiple times. We aren't "goldfish", we aren't sieves. We don't need incessant spoonfeeding about something you already said. In the opening stints, June mentions how her debut was left to languish by her editor at the pathetic imprint that was the only one that gave her a chance. It didn't need to be repeated. It also speaks to a certain lack of, perhaps, awareness by Rebecca about how publishing classifies books. When they acquire a manuscript, the books are then delineated, and different budgets are assigned to the books based on what they think will be most profitable. In the current environment, poorly written horny romantasy, AI and climate change scare stories, American POC history and struggle porn, badly written romance, and whatever book Booktok bestows its benevolent virality are the ones most likely to get publishing buzz.
Majority of the authors are very white, very North American, or very British. June's lack of awareness of how publishing works spoke more to Rebecca's ignorance or laziness. And ultimately, her scapegoating of publishing "wanting diverse stories" rings hollow. Maybe this story would have been better if June had whitewashed a literary navel-gazing story about vulnerability and identity.
Beyond the amateurish prose that suffered from sudden bursts of Thesaurus-itis, for example, on Pg. 6 Rebecca writes, It’s so fucking arbitrary. Or perhaps not arbitrary, but it hinges on factors that have nothing to do with the strength of one’s prose. then on Pg. 102 Can't we all get behind decrying antimiscegenation? June also says Athena's prose is repetitive while her monologues feel like a scratched CD. One could argue that Rebecca is trying to show how June is unaware of her lack of talent but you can't help but wonder if she is just a serviceable writer. The book takes pains to be accessible for mass audiences. Rebecca also wants to explain every little detail such as ARCs and sensitivity readers-jargon everyone who is involved in The Community would know. June even goes on a diatribe when discussing a potential movie deal and says, Accessibility matters. and when undressing the stolen manuscript that's "difficult" to read, she says, It’s distracting from the central narrative. Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore. Is this satire or Rebecca explaining why the prose is so bland and repetitive.
My suspension of disbelief was unwilling and abused by how ridiculous some of the events in publishing happen. When June mentions the Goodreads Choice Awards more times than more prestigious ones, I couldn't help but wonder if Rebecca doesn't understand literary Oscars season or if she was trying to pander to Goodreads Choice Awards voters (this book will definitely be listed under Best Fiction). The GCAs are a popularity contest. Rarely do people read all the books listed, they only vote for what they loved. Additionally, no discerning reader who wants a book about Chinese labourers in WW1 would give a fuck about GCAs.
Or is this a 4D chess Trojan horse where readers are actually being unwittingly tested as a focus group? Some people will prefer a female friendship story where race dynamics are explored (The Hate U Give), or perhaps they will want a thriller involving authors and books (Too Close To Home by Linwood Barclay), a meta narrative about who gets to tell a story (Bad Art Friend), a serial plagiariser (look up Jumi Bello), or Asian American nonfiction (Minor Feelings) and Rebecca can pick her next project. Maybe Rebecca is staging herself as the host of the round table to discuss whether authors should interact with reviews. But as we saw with Lauren Hough, the answer is still no.
There was also a glaring pattern where June kept pointing out Athena's flaws. How she was once the actual bad art friend, how Twitter Hot Take enthusiasts called her a race traitor. But we never get to delve into that because June believes no one is that deep into Chinese history or politics. Great job, Rebecca. You have shut down your critics for the lack of nuance in Asian history and characters in Babel. Athena is so offensively superficially written that I almost wished we had gotten her point of view, as a villain who wants to step on all faces to the top of the literary throne. The few snippets we get of her prose show she's a much better writer than June and her narration would have been more palatable than June's weapons of mass boredom.
There's a certain Discourse we're supposed to have from this book about Bad White Women, and how publishing serves to silence writers of colour. We also have to discuss who gets to tell certain stories. The problem is, we have spoken about this ad nauseum. So who is this book for? Outsiders who would like to know how it works? Adults who wanted a meta vivisection of this insular world but with Dark Themes?
Rebecca doesn't know. She says it's a thriller examining the idiosyncracies of publishing. It's not thrilling. And it has a myopic view of how publishing works. About good intentions that went poorly when June always set out to usurp Athena's work from the jump? It's not satire. It's a reverse Künstlerroman. Why is it necessary? The book doesn't tell you because it ends like a flaccid plateau. Not only is it boring, but it's just a meme of a clueless White Woman....more
Donna Tartt wrote, Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And before th
Beautiful things are supposed to hurt.
Donna Tartt wrote, Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And before that, Rainer Maria Rilke said, For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Micha Nemerever, despite his best efforts, is an unworthy successor to write about the extremes of the human condition.
In this story, we follow Paul and Julian. Two teenagers who talk more like 35-year-olds who peaked in high school and studied philosophy only to find out their lives were meaningless. This book suffers from wrong genre-itis. When it started, it was about Paul's life at his new school where he moved after beating another boy half to death because of his grief. His father recently died by suicide and the book handles that, rather carelessly. At no point do we get the reason why his father decided to take his own life. Ordinarily, people who are suicidal or have suicidal ideation tend to exhibit patterns of behaviour that show that existence is a heavy toll for them. But we never really get to know much about his father except that he was a father, he danced with his wife that night and the next day, locked himself in the shed and put a .38 in his mouth.
At no point do we actually explore the impact of the loss of the patriarch. The most gravitas assigned to it is Paul's sister, Audrey, claiming that he ruined everything. I couldn't even tell you if Paul missed his father. It was more about the family's behaviour and appearance following such a gruesome tragedy, rather than what it meant to them. At first, Paul is disdainful of his mother's grief, even resenting how small she seemed following the tragedy. But then soon after Paul meets Julian. A walking James Dean cosplayer with an inflated sense of self-importance.
One gets the impression that Nemerever read the much superior The Secret History, discovered Henry Winter and thought, I can do that. No, no he couldn't. At least, not successfully. TSH reigned because Tartt shows she doesn't tell. Nemerever is obsessed with handholding.
It was insulting. Furthermore, the book didn't earn the passion it wanted to exert from the reader. After Paul and Julian are a couple, Julian starts behaving reticently, and we get this from... Paul's explanations. Paul explains how this relationship feels almost one-sided. When Julian is rude to him, Paul was almost relieved to feel the sting. It meant Julian saw every weakness in him and still thought he was worth the effort of hurting.
When Julian ignores him, It frightened Paul how readily he yielded to the pain, almost as if he were so used to it that it bored him The book feels like it can be relatable for people who can't help but love the wrong person. The emotionally unavailable man. But Julian isn't emotionally unavailable or reticent. He's not even manipulative. He's just there. He constantly chastises Paul's low self-esteem or unending self-pity. It's aggravating.
Some people call this book "be gay, do crime", and I kept waiting for crime. It was one murder. One. Which is instigated by Julian because Paul gave him the silent treatment after Paul was done getting lashed out at for showing the slightest care. I screamed at the book when this happened.
The only thing that saved this book was its decadent prose. Nemerever has read a few books in his day. He can play with a turn of phrase that left me very pleased. ...petri dish of maladaptive behavior that it is... I mean, look at this, There was something mesmerizing about the way Julian moved—carelessly graceful, as if he weren’t excruciatingly conscious of every atom he displaced.
But that wasn't enough to save this book. Perhaps if it had been a murder mystery, it would have been better. I felt serious tension when the cops got involved. When Paul and Julian were attempting to run away... Such delicious unbridled suspense. But true to form, Nemerever had to shit on it for a finale that's the equivalent of a bat to the head. The ending thinks it's cute but it's just stupid. The two male leads were at best bland. The best part of the book was when they could face consequences for their attempt at murder... for something that didn't particularly make sense. (view spoiler)[ So when Julian tells Paul they should kill Paul's classmate who argued with him a few times in class, Paul says it has to be someone who can't be traced back to them. Their chosen victim, Charlie, is a Vietnam vet who enabled or excuses American atrocities in Nam. It's unsatisfying because at no point do we get any idea that these two knobheads give a shit about Vietnam. They spend the first half of the book espousing the value of morality in human experimentation, evoking Nazi Germany and other instances of human experimentation. But at no fucking point do they ever show any remorse or feeling against Nam. Nothing at all. They just choose Charlie because serendipity. And then they kill him because it had to be done. In the finale, there's a very satisfying twist when Paul's mother unravels their lies and realises they killed Charlie. Paul is kept under house arrest by the mother and is only allowed outside under supervision. He still finds a way to slip notes to Julian and together they plot an escape. On the way Paul tries to strangle Julian to death but eventually lets him go. When Paul and his family later go to check Julian's apartment, he's left a message, circling a picture of a chess move, saying that that was Paul's first move. Basically a shitty "the game is on". It was so frustrating because I cared more about them getting their comeuppance but these boys don't face any consequences. An arrest would have been better. Paul being ratted on by his mum would have been better. Paul going to prison for Julian in a last ditch effort to prove love in their inane ways would have been better, a Thelma and Louise driver over a cliff would have been better. But this asinine ending that's supposed to be a payoff to Julian's obsession with chess annoyed me so much. I haven't been this angry at a book since I tried to read The Maid. (hide spoiler)]
The book does have some self-awareness, unintended as it may be, It was pretentious and stilted, striving for something it would never reach. You're damn right you ain't reached shit....more
It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old
It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.
It would seem I am doomed to spend the rest of my life as an uncultured swine. This is a story about a woman's "slow" descent into madness. Madness! I tell you!
See I have read a fair few of the gothic shockers and my mouth has been left understandably agog. If not so, as I recently experienced with The Monkey's Paw, I was left uneasy and ill-fitting within my skin. This book left me with an overdose of meh.
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The story starts with our protagonist taken to an estate that is suspiciously affordable. While there her husband, John and their (nurse? maid?) Jennie help keep Jane indoors. A bolted bed is surrounded by a room that wants to be atmospheric.
It is as airy and comfortable a room as any one need wish... Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deep-shaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house.
Go on girl, give us nothing.
This story is considered feminist and... I'm not sure why? Sure, it does raise some questions about the lack of palliative care afforded to mentally ill patients especially women. There is a line John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is a dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. It certainly is Jane. See, your doctor, the husband, probably doesn't know much better. His dismissive attitude towards Jane and the belief that "rest", an avoidance of fancy and weight gain will bring about a reversal of what appears to be postpartum depression and psychosis.
But the reason why I have given this beloved story such a "blasphemous" rating is because the good sis here wasn't giving what she was supposed to gave. I was at a loss as to what was "unsettling" and terrifying. Her hyperfixation with the wallpaper seems to have a superficial attempt at a theme and it didn't quite land. I wasn't horrified. I was bored.
For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia–and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887. I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
There is a lot to mine from here. I'm rather having a better time of it seeing the protofeminist value of Gilman's experience and how not much has changed when it comes to the care of women in medicine.
As I continued reading her account, I also noticed a certain footmarch to the themes of capitalism.
using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again–work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service
And I can see where she would place great value in paid labour with which she could retain some power.
By Gilman's own admissions she never had any hallucinations. Those are embellishments applied likely for the sake of drama. And the weakest part for me. Around the middle of the story I figured out there would be some twist where she would be the monster. And like it's got the spirit but I'm not haunted. I'd probably be better served by a Gilman memoir rather than whatever this was. In fact this story led to her "specialist" changing his prescribed isolationist treatment hence saving people from "going crazy". There is a question raised where the prolonged isolation is what led to Jane's madness or if it was there all along. But I don't care. This book, if it answers the question at all, does it poorly.
Come at me with your pitchforks if you dare, unlike Jane, I'm friends with the monsters inside my head....more
it’s harder to repeat mistakes when you keep bad memories close.
If I could grade this book, I'd give it an eff for effort.
As with every
it’s harder to repeat mistakes when you keep bad memories close.
If I could grade this book, I'd give it an eff for effort.
As with every mystery/thriller, there's a question. In some of my favourite mystery TV shows I'll outline them. In The Undoing, who killed Elena? In Big Little Lies, who died at the party and why? In Sharp Objects, who is killing the young girls? In Bath Haus, what the fuck is the question.
The story starts with Oliver going to a bath house phonetically (and stupidly) named Bath Haus. Oliver slips off his not-a-wedding-ring and leaves his partner's car a few blocks over and walks into the sweaty establishment. I could feel the humidity wafting off the page. But not from the author's effort. I just have a very vivid imagination.
While there, Oliver gets the attention of a blue-eyed hot guy. What do his blue eyes have to do with anything? The author won't let you forget about them. Ice blue eyes. Ocean blue eyes. Who do you think you are? Mary Calmes? At least she writes odes to eye colour, this was just bullshit.
Kristian and Oliver are about to start having a good time when Kristian becomes a bit more... enthusiastic with his erotic asphyxiation. You'd think this would make the book intense but this scene barely lasts a few pages.
After this I was at a loss as to why I should keep reading. The book wasn't interested in any questions, really. No why did Kristian target Oliver. But we do suddenly get the information why. In a rather predictable and dour fashion because nobody was asking. Oliver never tries to investigate the attack to forfend it or something. He's the most passive survivor I've ever read. But that's not even the worst thing about him. Wanna know the worst thing about Oliver? Do you? Do you?!
Ok, here goes. His fucking metaphors.
After he receives a text from his attacker,
It’s fallen between two couch cushions where it came to rest when I threw it. Like it was a rattlesnake. If I’d held it a moment longer, I would have been bitten. Milky venom seeping inside my body from hypodermic fangs.
Holy simile.
Like the victim of a highly venomous snakebite.
Enough with the fucking snakes.
Inside, the noise doubles, triples. Ace of Base—the electronica drumbeat of a “Cruel Summer” remix pulses like a pink heartbeat.
As opposed to a yellow heartbeat? What the fuck is this supposed to mean?
As we plunge deeper into the bowels of Drinks with Tom™️ the voices grow sharper, like bedazzled kitchen knives.
Give me a fucking break.
Not only does it have such ghastly metaphors, it also has quality control issues. Now, I don't know whether this is something lost in translation and I'm missing something colloquial but Here, a birthday is the difference between no strings attached and the sex registry. Shouldn't it be sex offender* registry? nothing makes dope more bad than fentanyl. The word you're looking for is WORSE. More bad = worse. Fuck's sake.
There's also this bizarre repetitiveness that just... What the hell? fixing big things means breaking tiny things. or shit like the woman’s ability to endure heartbreak is, well, heartbreaking. Did Otessa Moshfegh edit this? There is a failure at profundity that is difficult to ignore.
When I got to 43%, my page of death, reader, this is when I realised I could not even. This was a buddy read with my friend Chris and I moaned so much about how aimless the book is I hope I haven't put her off another buddy read. It felt like a book just meandering along until it gets to the inevitable "twist" which I could predict a mile away. Ban dual fucking POV. Seriously, it ruins everything.
The book did have moments of writerly genius. Sudden bursts of great prose like shards of glass still glittering in the carpet after a vacuum went over the carnage. (see? I can write shitty metaphors too.) Perhaps this book could've benefited from brevity. There are moments that could pack a punch if the author had just left them alone instead of trying so hard for further meaning. There was nothing to extrapolate here. Stop. Just stop.
It seems fitting that I start 2022 with a book that perfectly encapsulates my 2021. Full of promise but just filler until the bad things unfold.
In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted
In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.
So begins this tale of the life and misadventures of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Jean-Basptiste was born with no smell, but he has an elevated gift of the olfactory inclination.
“And there you have it! That is a clear sign. If he were possessed by the devil, then he would have to stink.”
So gifted was he, in fact, that he could smell people coming from a distance away and his warder believed Jean-Baptiste to be psychic. Honestly, with the fates he could accomplish, I'm surprised he wasn't supernatural.
Jean-Baptiste is sold to a tanner at the age of 11 where he perfects his gift of scent. A lot happens that gets lost in all the mire I was enduring just to get to the murders. At this point, he kills one young virgin girl to preserve her scent forever. Then, he does nothing for years until he goes to work at a perfumery.
While there, he is basically a Gary Stu of the perfume makers. An inexperienced savant who can somehow concoct the perfect perfume, measurements and all, just by his fucking nose. Lord, spare me. I found this book interesting at first. If inappropriately funny. It's very immersive. I can't speak to its accuracy regarding 18th century France but unlike that heaping pile of shit Addie LaRue, I actually felt like I was in 18th century France. But what this book likes to tell you is that Jean-Baptiste has a gifted nose. He also had a supernatural power of healing.
In the course of his childhood he survived the measles, dysentery, chicken pox, cholera, a twenty-foot fall into a well, and a scalding with boiling water poured over his chest.
The book tries to say that he survives all his maladies through spite and malice. Lol ok.
I don't really know what to make of this book. It's infuriating because it felt like there was so much more hiding under the surface. It seemed to promise me the disgusting pleasure of popping a ripe pimple but really it was an itch that disappeared. We spend so much time following Jean-Baptiste trying to recreate the scents of innocuous objects like brass doorknobs or maggots. The whole time I had to keep asking myself, where are all the murders.
After he spends 7 years without proper food and water, subsisting on drops from a wet rock, moss, frogs and lizards, Jean Bapstiste rejoins civilisation to dandy around with some charlatan who was selling a bogus treatment. By this stage I was just annoyed. Jean does start a string of murders where he is leading up to his ultimate prize. The most beautiful Laure. A virginal beautiful daughter of a wealthy merchant who was virginal and beautiful. It is all we know about her. The book won't let you forget. The narrator, the girl's father, Jean-Baptiste won't fucking shut up about how she's such a beautiful fucking virgin. And oh my god, I was ready to tear my hair out.
The book also fails to follow Jean-Baptiste when he killed 24 girls to practise how to capture their scents and perfect how he'll get Laure's scent. No, we had to be with him in a cave when he would blow his wad because he had a wet dream about the first girl he killed. We had to follow him when he was trying to recreate the scents of inconsequential items like wood or coins. We had to follow him when he clubbed a puppy to death. But when he's actually terrorising the residents of a remote French village, literally the most interesting part of the story, we get fleeting accounts from the villagers.
The final conflict is so lackluster, it makes you wonder if Suskind had ran out of cocaine when he was writing it. The prose is lazy, the suspense dead, and the ending meaningless. This may be the worst book about a serial killer I've ever read which is funny because it damn near sapped me of my will to live....more
We've all been there. Stuck in slump for the better part of a year, loving the books we're stuck in but for whatever reason, it's just really hard to We've all been there. Stuck in slump for the better part of a year, loving the books we're stuck in but for whatever reason, it's just really hard to focus. I have been reading The Little Friend since November last year. It's a book by my favourite author, suffers from an identity crisis, has characters who are as unsavoury as a Daily Wire lineup but the book is good. So good but for whatever reason, I just struggle to concentrate. You know the tiktok song, am I too tired, am I just lazy, do I have ADHD (I actually do), is it just burnout, what the fuck is wrong with me? A lot. And we're not going to address it but I hate that it's robbed me of my ability to wade into a book and drown in it. I didn't finish reading anything in June and it's embarrassing so my friends suggested picking something easy to read that can help recalibrate my brain or something. This novel rang suitable. It's about a male nanny covered in tats with a large ginger beard. I thought I would be reading about a misunderstood giant of a man who is actually a very soft teddy bear. Preferably a himbo. That's not what I got.
Instead, what I got was a mashup of everything I hate in contemporary romance novels. Only this time, this book committed the cardinal sin: it bored me.
We meet Sloan, she gets home to her garage door half open and her nanny missing. Her six year old "precocious" twins are alive and well but her nanny has run off. I thought this would be some excellent drama. Perhaps the nanny stole out the safe and did a runner. Or she was secretly a spy for North Koreans and the NSA had closed in on her (watch The Flight Attendant). I was hoping for something good. Imagine me, eyebrows raised, snuggling further into my chair, raising the ebook closer to my eyes, "This is going to be good..." My dear reader, it wasn't. Tess had just resigned unprofessionally because, Childcare is not for me.
To be fair, the post-it breakup has a long history in pop culture and can be full of drama but this book just couldn't be arsed to give me something. Anything. Go on girl, give us nothing.
So then, in true rom com, chick lit fashion, I expected Sloan to meet the male nanny under ridiculous, contrived or rather meet cute circumstances. Perhaps they bump into each other at the club. Sloan has given the twins away to a friend or someone and been taken out dancing by her friends. While there she meets the redheaded answer to Dwayne Johnson where she proceeds to have a passionate torrid one-night-stand with him. The best orgasm she's ever had since she left her husband. After her whirlwind night out, her temporary nanny has an emergency and she has to be called in to work for extended nights. She doesn't have as much time to properly source and interview nannies, so one of her friends recommends the unconventional nanny who is usually in high demand but has become unattached recently. Lo and behold it's her one night stand, drama ensues. But no. This book has a series of recommendations happen, they google each other, meet, decide they find each other hot, work together and live happily ever after. Seriously.
I love seeing black girls being safe, happy and nerdy. I love seeing them being loved as they deserve. But I don't want to be bored reading it. And this book just couldn't put any effort into giving me any story. The only conflict arose from Sloan's ex whose unpleasant personality had to be inorganically amped up to 11 for a very anticlimactic showdown at an airport.
It made me miss the old style romances where something big and crazy would happen like a kidnapping or being taken hostage during a bank robbery. I was so bored out of my mind when the book ended I didn't even realise it. Everything is written in this mundane delivery and is told to you in the most unimaginative way possible. And there was so much to mine from, Rafe's past, Sloan being a black 28 yo wunderkind who is probably not well adjusted socially... There was also this lack of finesse or something.
God, his voice was sex on a biscuit. I would imagine that is very uncomfortable.
“Yeah, okay. I’m from Rhode Island. Providence.” Sloan needed to chill. Her voice was doing that high floating thing it did when she was nervous. There are literally words that describe this. Shrill, screeching, piercing. That quote could've just ended with, Sloan's voice was borderline shrill. I wanted to take this book and point it to better books and show it what its friends were doing.
I often wanted to check out but the book is only 250 pages and was a gift from a secret santa. Everything this book promised didn't deliver. There was no flavour, no soul food. And most egregiously, I was bored. But hey, I've finished a book....more
The murder mystery is one of the longest surviving genres of all time. At a time, it was even my absolute favourite (I no longer know) genre. However,The murder mystery is one of the longest surviving genres of all time. At a time, it was even my absolute favourite (I no longer know) genre. However, lately I've felt disillusioned with modern attempts to be the next Christie and this novel is another example of why.
This book thinks it's clever, a book within a book following Susan Ryeland- an editor of Cloverleaf Books and the blandest character I have ever read about- and the main character of the book within the book called Atticus Pund. Magpie Murders is actually about Pund's final case and the last book in the series. A murder has happened in Saxby-on-Avon a sleepy English village straight out of a Christie novel and set in the 50s. It was easily my favourite part of the book. The only part I enjoyed.
The story starts with Ryeland reading the manuscript for Magpie Murders by Alan Conway, which begins with a funeral. Local busybody and shit-stirrer Mary Blakiston was found dead at the bottom of the stairs of the house where she worked, Pye Hall. She died within the house but it was locked from the inside. The doctor and gardener had to break into the house to get to her. Mary Blakiston was a poor man's Alison DiLaurentis. She knew a little too much about everyone and was fond of rubbing her illicit knowledge in her victims' faces. Perhaps that was why she was killed. Was she killed? Just when Pund is about to reveal what happened to her, going as far as namedropping the person who could be responsible, the novel within is abruptly cut short.
Now, I have nothing against cliff-hangers. I actually appreciate it when the author has a legitimate reason to withhold information from the reader. But sometimes, it's just a waste of time, energy, money, space, paper and ink. Horowitz owes a big debt to the universe for all the bullshit he had me slog through just to get to the resolution of the real Magpie Murders.
See there is a reason why that information was cut short. Ryeland didn't have the full manuscript and alas, she can't have the rest of them because the author has died of apparent suicide. Ryeland then finds herself in a murder mystery of her own that any sleuth worth their salt would scoff at. The thing I love about mysteries, besides wondering how the crime was committed, is the colourful cast of characters and the setting. One of my favourite mysteries of all time, Stranger on the Shore, is set in a Long Island estate with a wealthy family with its requisite cast of eccentrics. It rewards me with people to hate, people to love, people to root for and people to wish they drop dead. In Ryeland's part of the story, there was no such thing. If anything I just couldn't wait for the story to end.
Being in Ryeland's head is so damn BOOOORING. And my god is she just such an inspiration for ambivalence. Her life is the equivalent of bleurgh. At one point she has to choose becoming CEO of her publishing house after the presiding leader suggests he may retire and wants to hand over the reigns to her. However, her Greek lover has asked her to go with him to Greece where he wants to run a hotel Greekly. Seriously, the author won't ever let you forget Andreas is Greek. Ryeland somehow sees this as such a Problem.
Quite unexpectedly, and without really wanting it, I had come to a crossroads - or more accurately, a T-junction - in my life. I could take over as CEO of Cloverleaf Books. There were writers I wanted to work with... As I'd told Andreas the night before, I could develop the business the way I wanted. Or there was Crete. The choices were so different, the two directions so contrary, that considering the two of them side by side almost made me want to laugh... Why do these things have to happen at the same time?
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Ryeland is also rather the poor narrator. She's even aware of it, and that makes her inclusion in this novel at all even more egregious All of this makes me a poor choice of narrator/investigator. The red herrings in this book feel like a complete waste of time. They even come with a letter written about Conway by his sister which had a few nice lines, He used language as a place for us to hide. But sudden moments of writerly genius weren't enough to compensate for the hand-holding, amatuer hour narration and pure slog that was the second half of this book.
I didn't enjoy the conclusion of Ryeland's mystery and I wondered why it was even necessary. Her bits also had two more books within books with one being Conway satirizing or canonizing a Serious Writer™️ where he referred to a baby as an unlovely ball of poisonous mauve (ew) and another where a wannabe author and waiter was showing Ryeland his novel. I have no idea whether Horowitz wanted to show off his ability to write different voices in which case cool, bro.
This book leaves me with mixed feelings. I loved the Christie call-back of the Atticus Pund story but Ryeland's part of the story can go fuck itself. The cover of my copy has a blurb from the Daily Mail (of all fucking newspapers) calling it the finest crime novel of the year with a stunning twist. It certainly left me stunned as to what was stunning....more
This is just well written swill. I can't take any more of Grady. I just can't. The main character in this book honestly doesn't deserve that kiDnf 50%
This is just well written swill. I can't take any more of Grady. I just can't. The main character in this book honestly doesn't deserve that kind of writing. ...more
While it didn't have that infernal dual PoV, it failed to deliver a tantalizing romp with the potential love triangle. There was a lot of room for draWhile it didn't have that infernal dual PoV, it failed to deliver a tantalizing romp with the potential love triangle. There was a lot of room for drama to unpack such as Paul's relationship with his reformed father and Cort's closeted ex. There were literally no women in this story. It reads like a practice novel, coming off like a fawn struggling to find its footing. It doesn't succeed. But it's not the worst book I've read.
According to Wikipedia this book is a feminist retelling of Saint George and the Dragon. I should have read that and promptly ignored the book. InsteaAccording to Wikipedia this book is a feminist retelling of Saint George and the Dragon. I should have read that and promptly ignored the book. Instead I paid attention to the questionable praise that this “deserves to be as big as Game of Thrones" and even more unforgivably, “the rightful heir to GRRM’s throne”.
First of all, GRRM doesn’t deserve a throne. Bitch aint getting shit until he finishes ASOIAF. Secondly, I should have known better considering what I know of Priories. Third, this book is just boring. It definitely didn’t need to be 800+ pages. Also the comparison to GOT may have done the book a disservice as I went in with very high expectations. And I know that's illadvised but like... You'd think a book compared to one of the biggest fantasy franchises ever would have enough substance to live up to the comparison, you know!?
What is it even about?
EAST Tane the Irritating. She is strong willed. She is chosen. Bells gong signifying the day she is to start her How To Train Your Dragon cosplaying. But something has to stand in the way of our hero. Because all chosen ones have to have dilemmas. A fugitive from Inys has sneaked into Seiiki and if he is found they could close the gates and delay (not stop) delay Tane’s party. She rounds up her bff to hide him. Her bff, the expendable plot device also known as Susa, decides to hide the fugitive with the exiled man, my beloved Niclays, in a nearby island. And thus begin a series of events that unfortunately just never end.
WEST Sabran the Stupid reigns from her iron paper throne. Her line, the house of Baratheon Berethnet, has held on to the throne through sheer will of a duped people. Each generation gives birth to a woman who, with her blood, manages to keep the threat of The Nameless One (Voldermort-Balerion) buried under Dreadmount. Sabran, however, needs to marry soon and give birth to a daughter. Because feminist retelling and her being basically a child incubator is what keeps The Nameless One buried. ...more
Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with this book in exchange for an honest review.
TW: Book contains bullying and homophobia
This is2.5 stars.
Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with this book in exchange for an honest review.
TW: Book contains bullying and homophobia
This is the most average book I have ever read. From the over-explained scenes about making spaghetti. How much water is needed. How much boiling the water needed. I got the impression that a specific word count was the goal and because this was a bare bones story that had a lot of filler before it started lab partnering.
Elliot is a young man battling depression, denial and bullying... lmao no. This book didn't have the guts to explore that. Elliot is just a young man. He thinks he is boring. He can cook, he has a badass best friend, a twin sister wunderkind and soon, a lab partner that he falls in love with. Elliot does have three bullies that torment him but they also were cardboard cutout stereotypical bullies from every generic American high school movie ever made. Jordan wasn't special either.
The one character that I was intrigued by is Cole. He is one of Elliot's bullies but he had "a secret". He seemed more complex and more meaty as a story than Elliot. This is only the second Wattpad book I've ever read and I won't lie, it will be the last....more
I expected to enjoy this a lot more and I'm sad I didn't. The story follows a terrorist threat to Atlanta or New York. According to intel given to theI expected to enjoy this a lot more and I'm sad I didn't. The story follows a terrorist threat to Atlanta or New York. According to intel given to the FBI, organized crime boss Gordie Burns could be using his company to smuggle in a wanted al Qaeda terrorist.
This somehow became- boring. I don't know where I lost it but Ric's chauvinism and the mm-lite made for rather dull reading. I'd have appreciated more heat and more stakes. Perhaps I was spoiled by Brockmann's older (and in my opinion, her best) book: Out of Control. I was glad to finally see the origins for Jules and Robin but frankly, I wish they'd taken a front seat to the melodrama of Ric and Annie.
It's the perfect book for some low-stakes mindless action ending with a discount version of the boat scene from Face/Off....more
The fuck do people get off calling this a thriller? This was NOT thrilling. This, good people, is what we call a melodrama. It started off promising tThe fuck do people get off calling this a thriller? This was NOT thrilling. This, good people, is what we call a melodrama. It started off promising then got caught up in itself. Too much Shakespeare. Too much Meredith. Not enough murder. Not nearly enough death, blood and gore as I had expected. There is more "thrill" in Pretty Little Liars. I feel like I wasted my time....more
The quality of storytelling in this is a far cry from the brilliance of Power Play to the point where IThank you to my Secret Santa for this gift.
The quality of storytelling in this is a far cry from the brilliance of Power Play to the point where I genuinely kept checking if the author was the same. Riddled with cliches, this book is a perfect instigator of trope fatigue. I think fans will enjoy this more than book 1, (which I actually enjoyed way more).
My first disappointing read of 2021. Ah well. C'est la vie....more
This book was very meh. It started out promisingly. A young wallflower, Callie, stumbles into a dashing rogue who makes her feel daring although briefThis book was very meh. It started out promisingly. A young wallflower, Callie, stumbles into a dashing rogue who makes her feel daring although briefly. Fast forward ten years later, she ends up bored at a ball and sneaks off to hide in her brother's man cave. Or whatever the equivalent of a man cave is in regency romance.
Her brother tempts her to take scotch and she decides nah, too much too soon. While leaving, she accidentally eavesdrops on her younger sister and the new husband-to-be who are discussing her miserable spinster situation. The oblivious brother-in-law calls her passive and all those years of boredom and being overlooked overwhelm our dear sweet MC.
She then writes down 9 rules she will have to break so as to feel adventurous and whatnot. The things were a boring combination of what ladies shouldn't do and what men take for granted. Like gamblling and riding a horse astride.
It was all just so tedious. Callie would be in one part defiant and in the next spineless. Sometimes it felt exhausting rooting for her. Her mother was presented to be some kind of obstacle but that challenge is never really faced. In some instances, it's like they forgot the existence of the list.
The story grew even more disappointing when it trickled down to romance tropes. Callie got some kind of spiritual makeover when she finaly realised that yeah she's the gorgeous woman she never thought she was; Callie is a reactive flushing wanton virgin who makes the rake believe in love again; the eventual chaotic conflict that makes the main couple break up and they get back together due to either nosy or well-meaning friends orchestrating events to getting them together.
While I wasn't looking for anything groundbreaking, I wasn't entertained enough to make up for it....more
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