is there a theme more bittersweet and stirring than the idea that you never can go home again?
this book conveys that and about a million other strikinis there a theme more bittersweet and stirring than the idea that you never can go home again?
this book conveys that and about a million other striking things and is surreal the whole time.
this reminded me of outline: filled with a lot of intelligent dialogue and interiority, expanding on themes deeply relevant to daily life and today's society.
and wow those themes!!! the way it surreally conveys the absurdity of colonization, of the thin line between each of us and abject poverty, of family and of death and of social status and of money and of race.
bottom line: this was one of a kind and remarkable....more
it has one of the best beginnings i've ever read, and it has one of the best endings i've ever read, and all of i need this book injected in my veins.
it has one of the best beginnings i've ever read, and it has one of the best endings i've ever read, and all of the middle parts are pretty damn good too.
its explorations of family, of naming, of the permanently unhealed wound of slavery, of gender and power, and of love are unforgettable.
i hate reviewing books i love at the best of times, and for this one in particular there is just no way i can do it justice.
bottom line: please, for the love of yourself, read it....more
just kidding. that is not a problem i'm looking to solve.
morrison never holds your hand and walks you throughhelp, i can't stop reading toni morrison!
just kidding. that is not a problem i'm looking to solve.
morrison never holds your hand and walks you through it, even though sometimes you (read: i) wish she would.
this finale in the beloved trilogy has so much to say about violence and oppression, but still i somehow wish it said more.
we follow the residents of a town and of a convent as we crawl toward the act of violence that ends the life they know, but i was jarred by the act and how quickly and confusingly it was over. the writing didn't seem like the same standard i've come to know, and the ending was a strange abrupt where are they now while the credits rolled.
the vibes were off.
bottom line: my least favorite toni morrison, and i still liked it.
don't mind me, i'm just adding every short story collection i see to my tbrdon't mind me, i'm just adding every short story collection i see to my tbr...more
this one is nice and has some moments of being more than that, but it's overall disappointingly one note:i can't stop reading short story collections.
this one is nice and has some moments of being more than that, but it's overall disappointingly one note: these could run together, a series of quotidian moments and strangely abrupt endings. i enjoyed reading this at times, but it won't stick with me.
sorry.
bottom line: my favorite thing about short story collections is that you never know what's next. that wasn't true of this one....more
the background: i have decided to become a genius.
to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collecmy becoming-a-genius project, part 28!
the background: i have decided to become a genius.
to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collected stories of various authors, reading + reviewing 1 story every day until i get bored / lose every single follower / am struck down by a vengeful deity.
we're approaching the third anniversary of my commencement of this project and also i have not undertaken an installment of it in several months, so this is an exciting event.
DAY 1: JOHN REDDING GOES TO SEA this had the unique unbelievably depressing / know-it-all combo of an old-timey fairytale. i for one think unrelated tragedy cannot be blamed on some guy's wife being like "if you wanted to leave and travel everywhere solo style you probably shouldn't have married me." rating: 2.5
DAY 2: THE CONVERSION OF SAM eek. another very moral and didactic one.
which i guess i should have guessed from the title. rating: 2.5
DAY 3: A BIT OF OUR HARLEM feeling: hopeful. this story is all of 2 pages long and it seems like there's no way there'll be time to preach a lesson at all.
never mind. it managed. rating: 3
DAY 4: DRENCHED IN LIGHT this one was...interesting.
i love a free-spirited lowkey annoying kid as much as the next person but i don't know about the happily ever after being a potential adoption from a significantly more annoying white family. rating: 3
DAY 5: SPUNK if we have to get all Big Lesson, this is the way to do it. i'll take murderous ghosts and vengeance and gossip any day. rating: 3.5
DAY 6: MAGNOLIA FLOWER i have to say this is just not the collection i expected after their eyes were watching god at all.
this one is giving disney princess. rating: 3
DAY 7: BLACK DEATH now THIS is what i'm talking about. if we're going to cast aspersions on those who sin, at least give me some sort of dark magic sorcerer to do the punishing! rating: 3.5
DAY 8: THE BONE OF CONTENTION this one was amusing. i will give it that. rating: 3.5
DAY 9: MUTTSY well this one was just depressing. the conversion of sam without the conversion part. rating: 2.5
DAY 10: SWEAT this story contains the insult "she don't look like a thing but a hunk of liver with hair on it," and therefore i stand with it in support for all my days.
it's also a very well-deserved act of Womanly Vengeance, so that helps. rating: 3.5
DAY 11: UNDER THE BRIDGE the lesson of this story is that if you marry a much younger woman your hot son gets to fall in love with her and you can't even get that mad. rating: 3
DAY 12: POSSUM OR PIG? not a question i've had occasion to ask very often.
call me crazy, but i am not loving these stories with strange morals involving slaves "wronging" white people. stealing a pig seems pretty low on the crime scale when compared with enslavement. rating: 2.5
DAY 13: THE EATONVILLE ANTHOLOGY this was the florida equivalent of olive kitteredge. just a bunch of sad people living unhappy lives in a small town. enjoy. rating: 3
DAY 14: THE BOOK OF HARLEM a lot of these stories have been biblical in a variety of ways.
this one chose "language and format." rating: 3
DAY 15: THE BOOK OF HARLEM oh good. it's almost exactly the same as yesterday. down to the title. rating: 2.5
DAY 16: THE BACK ROOM fun little dorian gray situation here. if dorian gray could be told in 10 pages or less. rating: 3
DAY 17: MONKEY JUNK we're having fun with biblical formatting again. rating: 3
DAY 18: THE COUNTRY IN THE WOMAN i do think that the appropriate response to seeing your husband on his fourth side piece is to slow-walk toward them with an axe like a horror movie serial killer.
the punishment fits the crime. rating: 3.5
DAY 19: THE GILDED SIX-BITS another moral. gosh these are depressing. rating: 3
DAY 20: SHE-ROCK biblical formatting alert.
this contains a truly astonishing phrase (a beverage called "coon-dick") which i was so titillated by i immediately had to google and the only results i received were about raccoon penises. so now i feel like i got pranked by zora neale hurston on a decades-long delay. rating: 2.5
DAY 21: THE FIRE AND THE CLOUD i have to say, i thought a story about a talking lizard would have a little more going on. rating: 2.5
OVERALL i was really excited to read this collection, but unfortunately not many of these felt like they came from the author of their eyes were watching god, a book i loved. these stories had sparkling moments of brilliance and ones i truly enjoyed and some that just weren't my cup of tea. it was a lot more moralistic than i expected.
it's neither a good nor bad book for me, and therefore in the exact middle it goes. rating: 2.5...more
i grew to really care about these characters, a compliment i can give best by saying i'm a multiple perspectivefamily drama family drama family drama!
i grew to really care about these characters, a compliment i can give best by saying i'm a multiple perspective hater and yet enjoyed reading from each of this book's three points of view.
unfortunately, this swap — from mother to son to grandmother — left a few gaps that felt inexplicable. we leave one character having abandoned one parent and embraced the other, and return to the opposite with no explanation. things i thought we'd find resolved by character development — the mother's reliance on the son, the son's unwillingness to love, the grandmother's ambition and stubbornness, relationships to power and to wealth, the grandfather and father themselves — we similarly find either magically fixed or unchanged by the end. the story's central theme, revolving around genetics and race and money and class and what makes us who we are, similarly stuttered out.
while i liked a lot about this, i thought it didn't register the whole point of family dramas. i knew these characters in some ways, but i didn't know the bonds between them.
and as a family drama stan, i can't get over that!
bottom line: a lot to like but not the stuff i wanted to.
this book only has two flaws: it has 930 characters and all of them fall under the same family tree and 78% of their names stai love a cool girl book.
this book only has two flaws: it has 930 characters and all of them fall under the same family tree and 78% of their names start with G and two of them are greta and it is genuinely impossible to keep them straight even if you dramatically flip back to the beginning multiple times;
and it has two perspectives and they're identical, as in the characters have nearly the same voice, but in a way that's a pro for me bc i don't like books with multiple povs. so logic follows that if you absolutely must have more than one point of view, you can at least do the respectful thing (for me, specifically) and make them in alternate chapters that sound exactly the same.
otherwise this is perfect: so funny, no plot, just vibes, memorable characters, filled with jokes and generational humor and pop culture references without being annoying.
of course i didn't love when the book's final pages descended into tons of points of view, because i don't like that at the best of times and also i couldn't remember anyone's relationship to one another, but i would have read the first 200 pages of this book for 930 pages.
i never expected to get Living With A Beloved Sibling And Knowing That It Will End Soon Because You're Both In Love And Wanting That And Not Wanting That And Being Heartbroken And Happy At Once representation, so. what a treat to receive it.
for this, i give it a proverbial kiss on the forehead and 4.5 stars.
i so appreciate that her stories were published and we get to read from an incredible voice, even if she was gone far may diane oliver rest in peace.
i so appreciate that her stories were published and we get to read from an incredible voice, even if she was gone far too soon. these stories brilliantly explore race in america, and capture a searing image of a bygone era that is not in the distant past.
bottom line: i'm grateful these stories are finally being shared.
just a few pages into this i already felt like i couldn't catch my breath.
i read two jesmyn ward books in one month, and this one was so excellent i fjust a few pages into this i already felt like i couldn't catch my breath.
i read two jesmyn ward books in one month, and this one was so excellent i felt like i had to go back and lower the rating of the other one. the evocative, emotional, propulsive way she writes is so one of a kind.
this book doesn't have the magic aspect of the others i've read by her, and i think it's stronger for it. in its place is an unforgettable love and bond between the characters, who are full and rich. this book is hard to read and even harder not to.
this is about a young woman who hates the future...representation is so important.
unfortunately it turns out i can't relate that much to "dumb."
it is this is about a young woman who hates the future...representation is so important.
unfortunately it turns out i can't relate that much to "dumb."
it is very hard to read a whole book without sympathizing with its main character once.
this is actually not because the character in question spends this entire book sleeping with a married man, and a large portion of it sleeping with a man married to a pregnant wife, and a slightly smaller portion of it sleeping with a man married to the mother of a newborn. i have sympathized with characters who have done worse. although not by much.
it's because this character is SO unfeeling, so shallow, and so cruel in the worst way — the way that comes from just not caring about the interior lives of others. i don't know if this character has no interior life or is just uninterested in showing it to us, but it is not on page. not even implied.
i liked the writing of this at first, but eventually the constant slang and pop culture and devil-may-care mentality got old. it reminded me of greta and valdin at first, and then bad greta and valdin, and then no greta and valdin at all.
time passes in this book without reference, feelings grow without reason, and the plot just bumbles on.
boats against the current.
bottom line: a frustrating read, and not in the ways it intends to be.
well. one of my most anticipated books of the year, from the author of one of the most exciting debuts in recent years, is about my favorite topic (siwell. one of my most anticipated books of the year, from the author of one of the most exciting debuts in recent years, is about my favorite topic (sisters) has the prettiest cover i’ve ever seen in my life (look at it) and is now in my possession.
i’m not sure what happens now but it might be spontaneous combustion.
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