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| 0778308162
| 9780778308164
| 0778308162
| 3.37
| 81
| Aug 11, 2020
| Aug 11, 2020
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really liked it
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There are so many different moments of racial tension touched on in Last Call on Decatur Street that sung beautifully. Rosemary and Gabrielle have a l
There are so many different moments of racial tension touched on in Last Call on Decatur Street that sung beautifully. Rosemary and Gabrielle have a longstanding relationship that takes a pivotal turn one fateful night and perhaps may never recover. Rosemary’s feelings of being left out at times (when around Gabby and her family) and of not necessarily understanding where she went wrong in the relationship come off as a genuine and authentic look at community, "othering" and white privilege. Case in point: Her tolerance made me feel special, a quick affirmation of intimacy. She was doing it now. Here, Rosemary refers to Gabby’s tolerance for racial microaggressions—despite the numerous times she says something that could be offensive to Gabby throughout this book, she’s gotten used to Gabby waving or “patting” it off, but, because she doesn’t know any better, it’s never really addressed as a microaggression. Yet, Cohen did a good job of writing these scenes so that it’s obvious that she understands the nuances of these racially charged moments even if Rosemary does not. Last Call on Decatur Street was a phenomenal novel full of beautiful cultural nuances and delicate cultural motivations, situations and references that rang absolutely true. This passage seemed to sum up Rosemary’s outlook on the racial tensions in New Orleans, and I found it to be completely true to her personality and understandable from a racial standpoint: Or the Mardi Gras Indians, I was scared of them, preening and strutting, owning their streets with an aggressive beauty. I couldn’t explain that my fear was a sign of respect, my deference felt like the only gift I could offer them in the face of our brutal, messed up racial history. That was also my New Orleans, and we didn’t talk about it. Everything was unsaid but intuited, our way of doing things, a silence heavy as iron…Gaby knew my New Orleans, the million little rules we all implicitly followed. That first question we all asked each other: where’d you go to high school? That quick recognition of how everyone fit into the fabric of this dumb city, held by a million tiny knots of habit and expectation. It was very interesting to see the cultural phenomenon of double consciousness viewed from the other side of the table (from the Caucasian POV) via this relationship between these two women. Iris Martin Cohen seems to accurately portray what it must be like to not understand the unspoken nuances of being black that other blacks do understand among themselves. In that way, this book seems very accurate. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jan 21, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 0374230927
| 9780374230920
| 0374230927
| 3.70
| 11,245
| Jul 21, 2020
| Jul 21, 2020
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jan 21, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 4.19
| 363,330
| Sep 10, 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
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really liked it
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None
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1
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Oct 15, 2019
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Dec 14, 2019
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Oct 15, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0385543875
| 9780385543873
| 0385543875
| 3.25
| 26,518
| May 24, 2018
| Jan 08, 2019
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really liked it
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Sudden love, when gifted to a habitually unloved person, can induce nausea. It can become a thing you would claw and debase yourself for. It is necess
Sudden love, when gifted to a habitually unloved person, can induce nausea. It can become a thing you would claw and debase yourself for. It is necessary to wean yourself onto it, small portions. Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel, The Water Cure, is the story of three sisters living an occult existence on an island off “the mainland” one fateful summer when they have their first experience with men other than their father. There are two aesthetic items that really stood out to me about this book: the title, which is perfectly harmonious with the content, and the beautiful imagery of the cover, which accurately ties it all together. Both of these are fantastic representations of the bedrock of this book. Admittedly, The Water Cure started out rough, and I was tempted to put it down. Part one is a series of vignettes—short, broken glimpses into their world that failed to satisfy. There was not enough to fully hold on to. I found the first part of this three-part the novel to be yet another example of a narrative full of frilly words and curlicue phrases that all amounted to nothing—exposition that skirted the truth of their reality, trying to veil it or twirl around it in a way that was annoyingly (and often confusingly) evasive. I wished—no YEARNED—for Mackintosh to write head on instead of in a mass of purple prose nothingness. Luckily, I was offered some reprieve in Part Two, where the narrative style switches up a bit, though it never wanders too far from its narrative foundation of swirly prose writing. ENTER JAMES, LLEW AND GWIL. James and Llew are brothers who wash up on shore with Llew’s young son, Gwil. They seek refuge until rescuers come to bring them home from the island, and they endure extreme measures on the part of the girls’ mother who has not been around men, other than her now-deceased husband, in years. Once she deems them safe enough to inhabit their land until they are rescued, this novel starts to unwind and make a little more sense. Part two centers around Lia, the middle daughter who cuts her thighs to feel something, the sister who has not been assigned love in one of their ritualistic ceremonies— ‘Hurt Grace, or Sky will have to…’ You know I have no choice…She showed no reaction at first, but by the end she was biting viciously through the cloth. I knew it was involuntary…She let out a high noise from between her teeth, a constant pitch, like a stinging insect. It was unbearable. —It is, in part, this lack of love that drives her into the arms of Llew. But Lia has no romantic experience with men. Imagine the playfulness, the flirtation, the mixed signals and the desire that we’ve all experienced in our youths; now imagine that happening in an occult setting where men are the enemy to a girl who is starved of love. You can see how this would be a recipe for insert any number of words here. James finds me crying in the garden, where I thought nobody would look. Somehow I am a child again and nobody wants to go near me, nobody can cope with how badly I want to be held, or touched, or listened to, and there is nothing I can ever do about it. Each chapter in part two starts with an excerpt, presumably from an entry in the Welcome Book left behind by a woman who has sought out their occult home in search of refuge from the destruction of men in the past. The thing is, without context—and with the author still clinging to the evasive narrative techniques of part one—a lot of the excerpts made little sense to me and failed to move the story forward in any meaningful way, not even by adding atmosphere. Also, this novel likely would have been better off written completely in 3rd person. Lia’s chapters bothered me, because she speaks in first person using words like “surreptitiously,” though there’s never a word written about these girls, living isolated from all other civilization aside from their five-person family and the occasional female traveler, ever going to school. They learned to read on their own from books lying around the house that were eventually taken away before the third sister could even learn to read, so that just came off as weird and inaccurate. The blurb praises The Water Cure as The Handmaid’s Tale meets The Virgin Suicides. Ummmm, The Handmaid’s Tale, not so much. The Virgin Suicides, maybeeeeee. Really, it reminded me of Gather the Daughters , a novel I THOROUGHLY enjoyed, meets Lord of the Flies. If that description appeals to you, you’ll definitely want to pick up Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure. (view spoiler)[I also didn't find this book to be "dystopic" since it's not really set post-end of the world. The family is just self-isolated. (hide spoiler)] While I was put off by the evasiveness of the first part of the novel, the narrative came together much better as the novel progressed. It was a quick read that I gobbled up in 24 hours, and it managed to put its own spin on a narrative that’s been done before. For that, I thought it fitting to give this book 3.5 stars rounded up to 4. **** FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 24, 2018
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Dec 25, 2018
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Nov 19, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0812994167
| 9780812994162
| 0812994167
| 3.63
| 41,522
| Jan 15, 2019
| Jan 15, 2019
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it was amazing
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The eyelids flutter. The breathing is irregular. The muscle tone is visibly slack. With each new patient…these signs that the sleepers might be dreami
The eyelids flutter. The breathing is irregular. The muscle tone is visibly slack. With each new patient…these signs that the sleepers might be dreaming. Karen Thompson Walker’s sophomore novel, The Dreamers, took me by storm. Excuse the cliché, but it swept me up inside of an imaginative world that was close enough to reality as to not be science fiction but close enough to an altered reality as to border dystopia. The sickness sweeping the town took on a life of its own—the true antagonist in this novel. It left behind an eerie quiet upon this Southern California town, which Walker punctuated beautifully— disconcertingly: an explosion here, a dog still on its leash wandering the silent neighborhood there, a man sleepwalking in the middle of the road who may or may not meet his end with a vehicle. I wasn’t sure that I would fall in love with this novel from the start. Yet, Walker’s un-embellished method of storytelling grew on me gradually but commendably in such a way that I hadn’t realized I’d fallen for this book until I was already hopelessly at its mercy, drawn into its altered reality completely. Mei is a freshman in college when the sleeping sickness chokes the small town she lives in. She’s suffering from typical first-year introvert blues: not fitting in, being generally ignored by the entire student body around her. Until. It starts in her dorm, on her floor, with the pretty, lip gloss smacking girls and popular boys falling prey to sleep one by one. When a panic stirs and the students are quarantined, it’s not long before they find a way to break out of captivity and scatter, running in all directions, back into the world—carrying the sleeping sickness sweeping across the town with them. I thoroughly enjoyed The Dreamers. It is a thoughtful read featuring a cast of odd-balls. The social outcasts and unconventionalists reign supreme within these pages, offering the reader an inside glimpse into a young couple’s broken marriage, a motherless household of doomsday preppers, and one man’s sorrow at the loss of his partner. I will say that I wish the book had gone further, pushed the bounds just a tad more. That is both a compliment and a critique simultaneously, the former in that I wanted to read more about these characters, and the latter in that I wish Walker had explored this avenue she started to veer on toward the end: an avenue lined in nightmares and premonitions. “Like just now,” he says. “When you came into the kitchen, I had the sensation that you were standing beside me, but that was before you walked in.” It’s like everything’s out of order, he says, like there’s something wrong with the sequence, as if the future were coming before the past. I wonder where this path could have led us, what wondrous views we could have seen from that perch. Alas, Walker took us to the edge of that cliff—far enough so that we could see what could be—but never pushed us into the arms of what was below. Some would praise her for such restraint, while others would yearn to place their feet upon that path less taken. I, myself, am on the fence, one foot hanging midair of what could have been, the other solidly placed in the reality of what the novel offered. The Dreamers moved me. I thought about this book when I was away from it and turned the pages swiftly, hungrily, when I was in its company. I recommend this novel to lovers of fiction writing, particularly dystopian fiction or narratives featuring altered realities and small towns in a panic. I liked the compactness of the book, the fact that every word, every chapter, had its place in moving the narrative forward. But, I would not have objected to being taken further into this new dimension that was presented but only tepidly explored. All in all, Karen Thompson Walker and The Dreamers earned a solid 4.5 stars rounded up to 5. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 31, 2018
|
Jan 09, 2019
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Sep 11, 2018
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 4.19
| 4,769,559
| Jun 08, 1949
| Sep 03, 2013
|
really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 07, 2018
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Oct 13, 2018
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Sep 07, 2018
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0374167893
| 9780374167899
| 0374167893
| 3.46
| 167
| Nov 20, 2018
| Nov 20, 2018
|
it was ok
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Laura Adamczyk’s Hardly Children is a collection of uncomfortable moments – stories that aim to disquiet and sometimes even hit the mark. Well, they a
Laura Adamczyk’s Hardly Children is a collection of uncomfortable moments – stories that aim to disquiet and sometimes even hit the mark. Well, they approach the mark, can see the mark, maybe even brush against the mark at their height, but never firmly hold the mark head on. You’ll feel the effects of these stories around the edges of your reader periphery. Some may love this disquieting quality in this short story collection, but I found it to be dry and evasive. I am not a believer that just because a work (or collection of works, in this case) is literary it can’t have soul as well. I firmly believe that the two can coexist, that they can complement and enhance each other. But Laura Adamczyk’s debut collection succeeded at “eerie” while never etching any significance and depth into the literary canon. There are moments here, but that’s it. “Wanted” and “Girls” get so close to the edge of a reader’s comfort level that they could have been thrilling. If. If Adamczyk had taken another step, colored the picture further out from the middle and closer to the boundary lines. If she’d really taken us there and completed the thought with gumption and confidence. “Girls” plays with the tricks our childhood memories can play on us – how we can never remember everything perfectly, especially if the event was traumatic, playing with the fact that we block out things that are too painful to remember head on. But, ultimately, this collection of stories always pulled back to what felt like nowhere before the big whammy could fully take hold. Admirably, the writing style in Hardly Children manages to be dry and vague, daring yet always just shy of spoken malice or descriptions that draw a full picture of said malice. These stories are told with innuendo, which is a great tactic, but I was never in love with this particular execution. In this collection, you’ll find a seemingly innocent hug between a child and a stranger, and you’ll detect a hint of malice around it. You’ll see three little girls who watch their father leave their mother and then have a shared experience that traumatizes them so much they can’t even agree, after the fact – years later – on what really happened that day. And you’ll find a city where children – well, “hardly children,” as the author describes, those that are too grown and “strutting” for their own good – get kidnapped, never to be seen again, and a man who suspends himself by hooks in his skin for artistic installations. The imagery in this collection brushes up against “beautiful” at times. There’s a straight-faced lyricism to it that does have its appeal, but the stories themselves are dry, empty shells of narration, often leading nowhere, making me feel nothing – worse than nothing: bored. It’s the kind of writing that has talent but no soul, ideas without the full range of narrative motion needed to execute them. That was disappointing, because the idea for this collection is intriguing. But, as we know, intrigue can only lead the horse to water; it can’t make it drink. ** I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Girroux, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Art + Deco Agency Book Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Art + Deco Publishing Agency ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 04, 2018
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Nov 09, 2018
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Aug 27, 2018
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Paperback
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| 1400031702
| 9781400031702
| 1400031702
| 4.17
| 803,046
| Sep 16, 1992
| Sep 11, 1992
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 17, 2019
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Mar 12, 2019
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Aug 27, 2018
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1787330419
| 9781787330412
| 1787330419
| 3.63
| 437,958
| Jul 10, 2018
| Jul 12, 2018
|
really liked it
|
I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the
I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation. Whew! I had a surprising reaction to this novel. Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation managed to catch me off guard and by surprise. Probably because – funny story – ironically, this book is about a character who does what I always say I’d like to do: have the ability to put my life on pause for just a few days to rest, to think, to recharge. Then press a magic button and the world resumes spinning, without me having lost a single second of my life. Wouldn’t that be wonderful! Well, here’s that idea with a twist: Little Miss Nameless Protagonist here does this for an entire year (while strung out on a myriad of different high-level drugs, all while juggling her semi-unwanted friendship with her best friend and her feelings about the death of her parents and the reality of her shitty boyfriend – really, he’s not even that). Set in the year 2000, our narrator decides to hibernate through a year of her life in an attempt to be a new person on the other side of that time. So, with the help of a zany and negligible psychiatrist who’s first and only line of doctoring is to pull out her prescription pad, our narrator dives deeper and deeper into the world of prescription drugs—and the psychological effects of them—in her quest to sleep away a year of her life. My Ambien, my Rozerem, my Ativan, my Xanax, my trazodone, my lithium. Seroquel, Lunesta. Valium. I laughed. I teared up. Finally, my heart slowed. My hands started trembling a little, or maybe they’d been trembling all along. “Thank God,” I said aloud…I counted out three lithium, two Ativan, five Ambien. That sounded like a nice mélange, a luxurious free fall into velvet blackness. And a couple of trazodone because trazodone weighed down the Ambien, so if I dreamt, I’d dream low to the ground. That would be stabilizing, I thought. And maybe one more Ativan. Ativan to me felt like fresh air. A cool breeze, slightly effervescent. This was good, I thought. A serious rest. My mouth watered. Good strong American sleep. Jacques Louis David’s neoclassical painting has been used as the cover, a reference to our protagonist’s “culture,” of which she is so proud and self-important, and her Art History background in college and before she quit the workforce. It’s a nice touch, offering layers of other meanings to this book. Within these pages you’ll find a slew of wholly unlikeable characters – well, unlikeable by the arbitrary standards we tend to think of as what makes a “nice” or “good” person. You won’t find those people here. Instead you’ll find the nameless narrator who knows she’s gorgeous and privileged and secretly loves the fact that her (bulimic, needy, whiny, having an intra-office affair with a married guy) best friend, Reva, is jealous of her. You’ll find the WASP mother of the nameless protagonist who can’t be bothered to mother but instead calls in the nanny and drinks herself to death in the end. The artiste who made his claim to fame by ejaculating on a blank canvas in various colors. And we shan’t forget the “boyfriend” who uses our protagonist for quick sexual trysts that work out to only his benefit and then shuns her for weeks or months until he’s ready for another one. She has become semi-dependent on him and this cycle of abuse, even as she hopes that it will one day stop and that he’ll choose her. Their relationship is twisted and not at all the storybook love affair you’re used to: I called Trevor again. This time when he answered, I didn’t let him say a word. “If you’re not over here fucking me in the next forty-five minutes then you can call an ambulance because I’ll be here bleeding to death and I’m not gonna slit my wrists in the tub like a normal person. If you’re not here in forty-five minutes, I’m gonna slit my throat right here on the sofa. And in the meantime, I’m going to call my lawyer and tell him I’m leaving everything in the apartment to you, especially the sofa. So you can lean on Claudia or whoever when it comes time to deal with all that. She might know a good upholsterer. I hear Moshfegh is a fan of writing about these sorts of characters – characters who need a chaser or two before they’ll go down our throats smoothly. This was my first foray into her works, and I don’t mind that. In fact, that quality is what drew me deeper into this novel once I opened the first page. Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation doesn’t shy away from the murk and unpleasantness – really, downright offensiveness – inside of us all, that we’re all capable of. In fact, her characters here seem to revel in the way their ickiness makes them better than other people while simultaneously wallowing in it until it nearly drowns them. It’s a bold and scary line for an author to walk, and to see the characters on, but that’s what we love about writers who can pull it off. We all need that shiny mirror of our own spiny imperfections staring back at us from time to time, don’t we? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is dark and obnoxious, but I loved it. Because, isn’t life that way sometimes? I love characters with bite, maybe a pinch of cruelty in them – But did I care? I didn’t think so. If Reva’s body was hanging by the neck behind the bath curtain, I might have just gone home. --I appreciate the layers of characters who aren’t bow-tied in shiny pink ribbons of perfection, happy and grinning stupidly with their perfect teeth and empty heads. I like a character who is…shall I say, more like a real person, imperfections and all. Honestly, I felt like this book was WASPy done well – and I don’t think I’ve ever I wondered if I might be dead, and I felt no sorrow, only worry over the afterlife, if it was going to be just like this, just as boring. If I’m dead, I thought, let this be the end. The silliness. At some point I got up to guzzle water from the tap in the kitchen. When I stood upright afterward, I started to go blind. The fluorescent lights were on overhead. The edges of my vision turned black. Like a cloud, the darkness came and rested in front of my eyes. I could move my eyes up and down, but the black cloud stayed fixed. Then it grew, widening. I buckled down to the kitchen floor and splayed out on the cold tile. I was going to sleep now, I hoped. I tried to surrender. But I would not sleep. My body refused. My heart shuddered. My breath caught. Maybe now is the moment, I thought: I could drop dead right now. Or now. Now. But my heart kept up its dull bang bang, thudding against my chest… But this novel’s ending is what sealed the deal for me, culminating with 9/11 shortly after our protagonist wakes from her year of sleep. The towers come down, someone she knows dies, and maybe – just maybe – that last line of the novel shows that our protagonist has finally found her humanity. I highly recommend this book to readers who like their characters straight with no chaser--to readers who don't shy away from some of the darker hues of humanity. If you're uncomfortable with that notion, definitely stay away! I was glued to this novel from start to finish, and that resonating ending easily solidified the strong 4 stars I’m offering up. **** I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Penguin, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 22, 2018
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Aug 03, 2018
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Jul 22, 2018
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1524763551
| 9781524763558
| 1524763551
| 4.17
| 61,502
| Jun 12, 2018
| Jun 12, 2018
|
really liked it
|
How were they to know the moment that would define them? It will affect his personality for his whole life, someone is saying to her, and whose fault
How were they to know the moment that would define them? It will affect his personality for his whole life, someone is saying to her, and whose fault will it be then? Mine, a voice replies, and the voice is hers…What had she done to her brother, so that she could survive, so that she could be the one who thrived? Fatima Farheen Mirza's A Place for Us has been widely celebrated since its release in mid-June. Lauded for the brilliant display of writing found within these pages equally as much as it has been coveted as Sarah Jessica Parker’s first release from her own publishing imprint, SJP for Hogarth, putting on display her own eye for literary fiction. It was a read that built upon itself in a sort of snowball effect: slow and gently vibrating beneath the surface as the foundation was laid then tumbling still gently but faster down the slope. I found myself comparing it to Everything I Never Told You in its elegance of execution and vibrant, meaningful display of first-generation families trying to navigate the complexities of American life, of a culture so unlike their own. This story is told in metaphors and blood ties. It’s told in memories, regrets, hopes and fears. It’s told in a universal language embedded in one specific culture that any reader can see embodied in their own families. Novels like this one remind us that our families are not so strange or cruel or different at their cores. We all speak the same universal language. There were so many beautiful moments in Mirza’s debut novel—a book written in vignettes of this family’s life like they jumbled together then come back into focus like a stunning glimpse through a kaleidoscope. I won’t give a synopsis here because the one provided is so fiercely accurate, but I will say that there was so much more to the estrangement of the son and brother, Amar, than I had hoped for. At the start of the novel, with no chapter titles or markers for whose POV was coming next, I couldn’t seem to get my bearings enough to plant roots in the narrative and grow with it. But, eventually, I found my way and moved with the story faster and faster as it picked up speed. The vignettes were light as a gentle breeze softly lifting a lock of hair, like whispers in your ear. And that was lovely, sure. But, admittedly, there were times when I found myself looking for something more—a climax, any hint of tangible, startling tension. And when I did find it, I couldn’t hold on to it long enough to feel fully satisfied. Perhaps that was the point of the read--Mirza's parting message to us, among others--but it left me unfulfilled. (view spoiler)[Then I realized what it was: I wanted to know what had happened to Amar, in many ways the most complex character in the novel. I wanted to know where he’d landed, if he was strung out, if he was now the head of a family of his own and how he would react if he ever called back and got the message from his father through little Abbas. Rafiq’s chapters shed so much light on a multi-faceted story, BUT how I longed for his insight to have been shorter and for revelations about Abbas to finally come to light—where did he go and what became of him when he walked away that final time? (hide spoiler)] Yet, I felt like I got an honest glimpse at a culture I’m unfamiliar with, like I was sitting at their dinner table with them. At the start I didn’t feel fully embedded in the story. But toward the end, I knew I couldn’t get up from that dinner table and walk away. All of the characters, especially the siblings at the forefront of the narrative--Hadia, Huda and Amar--are so beautifully and delicately rendered and allowed to unfold. They are complete characters--their parents Rafiq and Layla included--set in their ways and flaws and hopes and dreams in a way that grabs our hearts because we understand them; we root for them and believe we know what their next moves would be, what their truest fears are. A Place for Us is a character-driven piece with such fully imagined characters who quietly take up the page. It tied loose ends together with stunning clarity (view spoiler)[yet the most important threads of all it left unraveled, flapping in the breeze (hide spoiler)]. I truly loved how embedded in the Hyderabadi culture this novel was. I knew nothing of the culture and traditions—had never even heard the word “Hyderabadi” before—and yet I could feel the resolution with which this family lived in their faith, the effect it had on them, the generations upon generations of history that each of them carried—both in their routines handed down and in their hearts. If his father had just hit him back, cursed at him, said to Mumma look how despicable our son is, how batamiz, anything—then maybe he could have gone home again. A punishment was a mercy. It marked the end of a sentence. Without one, he could not imagine recovering from his shame. Nor could he forgive himself for giving action to the hatred he had felt for his father, wanting to hurt him the way he had been hurt by him. There were moments here where Mirza truly brought these characters into focus even from a Western standpoint, painting them at the time of 9/11—their reaction to it and the fear they carried with them not at all unlike our own. The racism they endured; the ignorance others harbored about them. Those moments stung the way they were intended to; they spoke loudly as they needed to. I will say I'm not a huge fan of the book title or the cover, but this was certainly a brilliant debut from both Fatima Farheen Mirza and this new imprint--both of which I’ll be sure to keep a lookout for in the future! 4 stars **** FOLLOW ME AT: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 11, 2018
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Jul 2018
|
Jun 07, 2018
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1250185343
| 9781250185341
| 1250185343
| 3.21
| 4,583
| Jul 10, 2018
| Jul 10, 2018
|
liked it
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Everything started going wrong after the Second Wave…They’d had the lifespan tests and predictive treatments for decades…but this was something differ
Everything started going wrong after the Second Wave…They’d had the lifespan tests and predictive treatments for decades…but this was something different. The Second Wave, it was dubbed, when a whole raft of new Medtech measures were approved for mass distribution: first-generation SmartBloodTM, an early prototype of what would later become DiamondSkinTM, the first truly functional replacements. And with the new technologies, a whole host of new Directives, aimed at keeping the Ministry’s biggest investments—lifers—safe and healthy. The Second Wave. There would be immortals by the Third. Rachel Heng’s Suicide Club reimagines a near-future America as a place where medical advancements have made immortality possible and where class lines are now redrawn by a new form of classism and ageism: the estimated length of your lifespan. Here, people are separated into groups, “lifers” and “sub-100s,” those who have the potential to live forever and those who do not. It’s a fresh and unique way to envision a new version of a system that we’re already so familiar with and to see it play out in a futurist narrative, but this novel fell flat for me in more ways than one. Lea Kirino is a “lifer” who lives life by the rules. She maintains an ultra-healthy lifestyle to upkeep her biological upgrades, has a job she’s doing well at (trading organs on a new version of Wall Street), and has the perfect lifer fiancé. But, when she sees her father, who disappeared nearly ninety years before, her entire world is turned upside down, as he unwittingly leads her to the Suicide Club—a group of individuals intent on living and dying by their own rules. The problem with this storyline, I must first point out, is that (view spoiler)[the Suicide Club doesn’t even make an appearance until around the halfway mark of this novel, not to mention Lea doesn’t get “entangled” with them until nearly three-fourths of the way through! Really, this narrative is not centered around her “involvement” with the Suicide Club until after you wade through a couple hundred pages of fluffy writing that goes nowhere and describes nothing and her own internal struggle about her situation (troubles at work, being placed on the observation list when the government thinks she’s at risk for trying to kill herself and deciding if she really wants to be with that perfect lifer fiancé of 20 years). (hide spoiler)] Heng’s Suicide Club offers up beautiful imagery, but it failed to move the story along. There are few things worse to a reader than pointless narrative that takes up space on the page simply for the sake of being pretty. I don’t know about you, but I like my narratives like I like my stilettos: pretty but still functional. But here the purple prose brimmed the pages, fluffed up like 80s hair, describing nothing that resonated or left a lasting impact. All the space of written nothingness could’ve been used to progress the actual plot. Such a wasted opportunity on the part of the author is such a source of ennui for me. I also found all the characters in Suicide Club to be un **I received an advance-read copy of this book from the publisher, Henry Holt and Co., via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.** FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 13, 2018
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Aug 18, 2018
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Jun 06, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1408889560
| 3.81
| 403,681
| Feb 08, 2018
| Feb 08, 2018
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars! Whew, what a ride! Stuart Turton’s debut novel is the kind of debut we all yearn for: explosive, energetic, engaging and truly something fre 4.5 stars! Whew, what a ride! Stuart Turton’s debut novel is the kind of debut we all yearn for: explosive, energetic, engaging and truly something fresh and new on the scene. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a brilliant, high-concept murder mystery that had the cogs in my mind turning from the very start (imagine waking up in the forest with no memory of who you are and immediately seeing a young woman murdered!). This, in fact, was the first mystery narrative in a very long time that has made me feel like I was part of the story—immersed in the environment—and the first that pulled me in to such a degree that I felt compelled to actively try to unravel the whodunnit mystery right along with the characters. Whodunnit and why! Turton’s atmospheric world is so moody and immersive you’ll feel you should be smoking a pipe with a monocle as you devour it. It was so deliciously wrapped in a sort of British noir, complete with the “party at a country estate” of so many classic murder mysteries. Described by its publisher as “Gosford Park meets Inception by way of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express,” this book lived up to the hype and description in a big way! Aiden Bishop is destined to relive the same day over and over again, in eight different bodies, until he can solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle. If he does not succeed at the end of that time, the loop restarts and he loses all of his memories of the previous loop, forcing him to start over from scratch with even the basics – who am I? What am I doing here? He realizes that he is both the hunted and the hunter, an innocent and a deceiver, in this highbrow whodunnit. Until now, I’d only witnessed my fellow guests in their handfuls, their spite spread thin across the house. To be ensnared among them all, as I am now, is something else entirely, and the further I descend into the uproar, the thicker their malice seems to become. Most of the men look to have spent the afternoon soaking in their cups and are staggering instead of dancing, snarling and starting, their conduct savage. Young women throw their heads back and laugh, their makeup running and hair coming loose as they’re passed from body to body, goading a small group of wives who’ve grouped together for safety, wary of these panting, wild-eyed creatures. Nothing like a mask to reveal somebody’s true nature…All of this is wrong. The celebration is too desperate. This is the last party before Gomorrah fell… The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was both intelligent and intellectual, well-paced and deserving of all 500 pages it took up. In a lot of ways, The Seven Deaths was unlike any novel I’ve read before. Skillfully woven together, it was the ultimate literary puzzle. The plot was complex in a baroque but fascinating sort of way, and all the threads Turton spun came together in the end—no stone left unturned, no end left loose. With so many plots converging at once, that was quite the high feat to pull off, but you’ll find it done here superbly in this debut novel. Stuart Turton offers veritable craft in the intricacy of his plotting, a kind of craft that I rarely see anymore. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a mind-bender complete with time leaps and multiple murders seen from multiple angles all on this same day that keeps repeating itself over and over again. The prose was lyrical—honestly, leaning toward flowery—but it is the intricacy of the plot and the atmosphere surrounding these characters that Turton allows to really shine here. Yes, there were moments when this novel graced the line between intricacy and confusion, but it all unraveled splendidly in the end. It was a puzzle of a read; there were moments when the pieces wouldn’t fit and you’d have to scrap it all and start over. For some, that may present as a frustrating experience, but this novel is a real treat to those who love mindbenders, murder mysteries, puzzles and logic games. If that’s you, I highly recommend this novel! Also, if the “Gosford Park/Inception/Agatha Christie" description got your heart racing, then this is the read for you! The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle grabbed me and held me from the very start, probably the most veritable page turner I’ve encountered so far this year, and that’s no easy feat. For such high praise and phenomenal plotting, I give Turton’s debut novel a very strong 4.5 stars. **** *I received an advance-read copy of the book from the publisher, Sourcebooks Landmark, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 24, 2018
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Sep 03, 2018
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Apr 01, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0571268943
| 9780571268948
| 0571268943
| 3.78
| 3,828
| Jan 07, 2017
| Jan 07, 2017
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really liked it
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Prayer was all the recommendation he heard for Nigeria these days. For every crisis, eyes were shut, knees engaged, heads pointed to Mecca and backs t
Prayer was all the recommendation he heard for Nigeria these days. For every crisis, eyes were shut, knees engaged, heads pointed to Mecca and backs turned to the matter at hand. Chibundu Onuzo’s sophomore novel, Welcome to Lagos, is a novel deeply embedded in the heart and soul of Lagos, Nigeria. This is book is not meant to be a tourist's guide to the city. It is neither positive propaganda nor demonstratively negative toward the culture or the state; it is simply a snapshot in Nigerian truth. Matter of fact but witty, emotional but not melodramatic. It is a balance that any reader can enjoy. The prose drips with the Lagosian culture and the atmosphere around the characters within these pages is busy with a sense of urgency and the fervency of life that is often overlooked in comforts of first-world life. Skillfully weaving multiple storylines together, Lagos laces together a tale where the powerful meet the poor head on, where Robin Hood-like morals still exist and where the cultures of London and Lagos blend and clash as colorfully as the gorgeous cover art that wraps this. I opened these pages not knowing what to expect as someone unfamiliar with the culture but, as I’d hoped, this novel took me by the hand and showed me the way, navigating me through the gates of wealth and under the bridges of poverty with both grace and heart. Welcome to Lagos features a cast of unlikely companions who are bound together by circumstance but wield their circumstances into the bonds of a true family. When Chike and Yemi desert the Nigerian army—a capital offense—they know that they must escape down roads less traveled until they can get as far away from the Niger Delta as possible. Along the way, they meet Fineboy, a mischievous youngster with a carefully crafted American accent who dreams of becoming a radio presenter and whose scrappy street smarts they come to depend on; Isoken, a beautiful adolescent separated from her family in the fighting who’s still traumatized and guarded from an attempted rape she suspects Fineboy of being a part of; and Oma who is fleeing from the damaging fists of her abusive husband who knows the next time he hits her could kill her. This unlikely band of characters just trying to survive finds themselves brushing up against the law in more ways than one and changing the course of history when an unlikely intruder to their home comes a-knocking. This novel is so full of the soul and ethos of Nigeria. The dialogue drips with authenticity right down to the colorful pidgin dialogue that Onuzo skillfully weaves in, authentically portraying a culture while navigating readers who are unfamiliar with such dialogue. There are several references and language switches you may not immediately grasp unless you intimately understand this world yourself, but that makes it all the more realistic and immersive in setting. The best literature isn’t watered down for the masses. Sometimes, we have to go it. Short chapters made for a quick and jaunty pace. There’s very little, if any, fat to be trimmed on this story—just enough to create a trim and attractive figure, not bloated with unnecessary prose that should have been shaved away instead of sitting like a pot belly at the center of the narrative. Welcome to Lagos links the narratives of each character together, even introducing new characters with their own POV chapters late in the novel. It creates the effect of effortlessly swinging from vine to vine, each one a new chapter with voices that overlap then recede into the distance, reappear then recede again as another voice takes over. There’s something in this novel for everyone, whether you are familiar with the culture or not. This is a novel that addresses real issues head on while avoiding soapboxing and proselytizing. Rape, domestic abuse, war, corruption, poverty, class relations, family, and duty all play major parts in this narrative production in a way that is as poetic as it is gritty. “Say it out loud so it doesn’t have power over you again. My husband used to beat me. I only married him because I was afraid of being a spinster for the rest of my life. Say it.” The sense of place and scenery here is alive. You can feel the dust in the air and the boli on your tongue. Welcome to Lagos offers up beautiful prose and thoughtful innuendos while never shying away from real matters, hard glimpses in the mirror for both the characters and their country. “In your country, the descendants of the biggest thieves, are they not the ones making the decisions? Your House of Lords. Who made them so? Was it not by oppressing the poor, by swallowing all the land? Today, we are calling them ‘my Lord,’ calling them ‘Honorable.’ Your banks built on the slave trade, Lloyds, have they returned any compensation?” The characters here are vivid with voices that raise loudly above the noise of the city, their storylines woven together with care and utter believability. Many of the chapters are marked with newspaper excerpts, both tying together the storylines and highlighting the state of Nigeria, functioning as a back drop for the novel’s unfolding. That was a clever choice. It allowed Onuzo to fill in the circumstances of Lagos, the state of the country and its people, without having to pound it home ad nauseum in the narrative, allowing room for social commentary at its finest—biting and poetic. And for that Welcome to Lagos earned 4 stars and a high recommendation from me that you add it to your shelves! **** FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me **Thank you so much to the publicity department at Catapult/Counterpoint Press for reaching out to me and sending me copies of this lovely book!** P.S. If you've never been to a Chibundu Onuzo signing, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you go to one. She's hilarious and engaging, down to earth and extremely, extremely intelligent and thoughtful when she speaks. Check out my interview with her on my Instagram, and it will soon be added to my blog as well! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 2018
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May 08, 2018
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Mar 31, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0316556343
| 9780316556347
| 0316556343
| 4.23
| 1,126,057
| Apr 10, 2018
| Apr 10, 2018
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liked it
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3.5 stars
Madeline Miller’s Circe is an epic that’s sweeping the nation today. Everywhere you turn, you see that magnificent cover (honestly, that 3.5 stars Madeline Miller’s Circe is an epic that’s sweeping the nation today. Everywhere you turn, you see that magnificent cover (honestly, that cover work is DIVINE and I’ve had the MOST fun photographing it for the Bookstagram). Twitter and Instagram are as we speak packed with Circe references and Miller interviews and, within all of that, Circe has found itself wrapped in all of the fluff and buildup and publicity of a typical ultra-hyped, big-named publisher release. Let’s be serious—most of us LOVE these kinds of releases and all the hysteria involved, even if we shy away from actually reading the hyped release itself. It can be a book lover’s dream--a book with all the fanfare of a blockbuster, silver screen release. I, too, was swept up in the craze, yet another smash hit from the publisher who brought us fan favorites like Twilight and whom I once interned for in London. But, in the end, I couldn’t ride the Circe wave all the way through. Let’s get one thing clear from the very start: Madeline Miller’s follow up to The Song of Achilles is an epic in the years spanned but not necessarily in the execution. To me, it read far more like a long story than an “epic.” When I think of that four-lettered word, I think of a novel that’s monumental and moving. I think of The Odyssey and sweeping sagas like A Song of Ice and Fire, even novels that are gripping and complex, long and treacherous as a Hajj like A Little Life. But Circe did not touch me in that way. In fact, there were moments—those times when the novel resorted to recounting the tales of the mythology we all know so well rather than Circe’s life is a true saga, and Miller’s research and background in the Classics shines through in this novel and serves her well. But, there are gaps between the breadth and notoriety of the mythology she incorporated here and the skill with which the novel was actually written. There is only so far that building a modern-day epic on the backs of known names and legends could go; Miller needed to take us the rest of the way to make Circe a contemporary wonder, to make this a saga all her own. This novel didn’t quite make it across that bridge for me. Circe offered up a world full of color, a world of eternal life and leviathans, of clashing gods and witchcraft, all while tying in mythological tales that’ve been handed down for ages. Perhaps it’s only fitting, in that case, that it was overwrought with linguistic hyperbole—The sound was a piercing chaos, like a thousand dogs howling at once…She beat the cliff-side, howling her frustration. This novel was full of both drama and melodrama, only one of which is necessary for a sweeping epic. Yet, I had to appreciate the scale of story Miller told and the breadth of her knowledge in the Classics. Circe was a great story for sure, but I was never fully moved by how it was told. 3.5 stars.*** FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 12, 2018
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Apr 21, 2018
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Mar 23, 2018
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0735218722
| 9780735218727
| 0735218722
| 3.97
| 46,500
| 2017
| May 15, 2018
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really liked it
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There’s something about first love, isn’t there? she said. It’s untouchable to those who played no part in it. But it’s the measure of all that follow
There’s something about first love, isn’t there? she said. It’s untouchable to those who played no part in it. But it’s the measure of all that follows… Tin Man is a nostalgic and melancholy read filled with bitter memories and finding oneself at middle age—at any age. More so than plot, this novel offers a meandering of tender memories that all coalesce like rivers in a delta, pooling into one larger story. Quite honestly, Tin Man offers more by way of poetic descriptions of landscape and emotion than it does of actual plot at times, but that’s the beauty in this story I suppose. The simplicity of narrative—of intent—couples with the deepest and most complex emotions one can feel: love, regret, loneliness, disappointment, heartbreak (so beautifully described as the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth). Tin Man is the story of Ellis and Michael. The tale of two twelve-year-old boys who meet at an intersection in their lives where they are both motherless and running from fathers who don’t understand them, who want them to punch away their anger and to harden against the natural softness in their souls. It is the story of the years of their lives they spent together—and those they achingly spent apart. It is a story of compassion and fear, of young lives withered away and stolen by the AIDS epidemic. A story that crosses from England to France and back again. So when my father went off to his football matches, I went to Mrs. Deakin’s to read, or to make cakes with her for the church fayre. But I wanted to shout, I like football too! and I want to be with you. I want to be around men and their laughter and their ways! But in four years, I was never invited. And I retreated further into the background until I could barely be seen against the wallpaper and curtains, until I eventually disappeared, erased by the notion of what a boy with a handbag should be like. Sarah Winman managed to squeeze a lot into such a short novel, small and delicate in your hands in its pocket-sized hardback version. I had a strange relationship with Winman’s writing style. It was quiet, like a whisper, and I always felt more moved by the story than I did by her writing. That sounds strange, since one would think these two were one in the same; in many ways they are. But I always felt that it was the story pulling me back in again and again more so than the language she used to tell it. And that’s okay. Because there were moments of absolute brilliance, moments when the narrative glinted and shone like a small mirror turned toward the sun-- And Ellis remembered thinking he would never meet anyone like him again, and in that acknowledgment, he knew, was love. He could see his mother concentrating on Michael’s words, how enraptured she was…she bent down and kissed him on the head and said, Thank you. Because everything she held on to and everything she believed in came together in that unexpected moment. The simple belief that men and boys were capable of beautiful things. --and those moments were special. It was still a world of shyness and fear, and those shared moments were everything: my loneliness masquerading as sexual desire. But it was my humanness that led me to seek, that’s all. Led us all to seek. A simple need to belong somewhere. Tin Man broke my heart in so many little ways, and it was never quite put back together again. That I appreciated, actually. I was never drawn to Ellis the way I was drawn to Michael, and I will always remember Michael’s compassion, his heart, his life. 4 very strong stars. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ **Thank you to the publicity team at G.P. Putnam's Sons who reached out to me and sent 2 lovely copies of this beautiful book!** FOLLOW ME AT: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 14, 2018
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May 21, 2018
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Mar 22, 2018
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1501172328
| 9781501172328
| 1501172328
| 3.42
| 300
| unknown
| May 29, 2018
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liked it
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See my EXCLUSIVE interview with the author HERE! Malcolm Hansen Chats With Me About His Debut Novel Malcolm Hansen’s debut novel They Come in All Colo See my EXCLUSIVE interview with the author HERE! Malcolm Hansen Chats With Me About His Debut Novel Malcolm Hansen’s debut novel They Come in All Colors is a satirical narrative worthy of Paul Beatty’s stamp of approval. By that I mean it’s obvious that this book was either inspired or nurtured in some way by the Man Booker Prize-winning Beatty, if not both, and his style is so evident here that there were times this novel could have been written by the same hand. (He is even thanked in Color’s acknowledgements.) For those of you who follow my reviews, you’ll recall that I couldn’t stand Beatty’s award-winning The Sellout and marked it DNF, but just because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree doesn’t mean it may not taste different. They Come in All Colors is the story of one boy’s realization that the color of his skin does make a difference one long summer when the Freedom Riders come to his small town and the status quo around him is thrown into upheaval. Meet Huey, the smart-mouthed eight-year-old son of a white peanut farmer and a “mulatto’’ woman. Because of his Caucasian features and his close relationship with his father, Huey has always been allowed to pass as white, but when racial tensions erupt, resulting in protests, sit-ins, riots and the violent death of someone close to his family, the facts of life are very quickly called into question between this couple who cannot legally wed in the South and their son who finds himself banned from the “white” swimming pool and called n*gger for the first time. One of the more effective devices used within these pages is satire. In fact, really, the entire premise of the novel is satirical, but I appreciated Hansen’s wielding of it here and found it to be far more useful and self-evident than Beatty displayed in The Sellout. Here, that humorous device had more meaning and thus resonated louder and longer for me. Case in point, Huey encounters the most ridiculous conversations with his parents as they both try to explain to him why he isn’t colored though his mother is black. They tell him he’s white with a tan – an ironic notion in and of itself in 1960s South Georgia: Huey, listen to me. Your mother’s what’s known in the scientific community as a phenotypic anomaly. Okay? Someone of unknown morphology. A racial enigma—something so new they don’t have a name for it yet. You watch Wild Kingdom, right? Well, it’s like a newly discovered animal that they haven’t figured out where to put it in the classification system yet. Okay? So it’s pointless to even bother asking. Because—well—the truth is that if people can’t agree, we might never know... At the end of the day, you’re just going to have to accept that even if she is what you think she might be—which she isn’t—her being one wouldn’t make you one. Okay? You’re just going to have to accept that you’re different. That’s all there is to it. (view spoiler)[They also lie to him about the tragic death of their family friend and field hand, whose family has worked for the Fairchilds for three generations, when he is violently beaten to death for his part in being a leading figure in the riots when the Freedom Riders come to town. His parents both insist that he simply fell from a ladder by accident though Huey questions this rendition of events several times. (hide spoiler)] Though the start of this book was far too similar in tone to The Sellout, which means it too almost got DNFd, I pushed through a bit further and found that Hansen showed real dexterity with the metaphors and analogies that abound in this narrative. The imagery of the South is realistic and comes off nearly as oppressive within these pages as it did in real life. One of the better metaphors comes when Huey tries to set his pet cat free after the violence in his town starts to come to a head; he makes a very clear parallel, though he himself does not know or understand it, between the release from the bondage of slavery just a few short generations before and his releasing of his pet into the wild: Having surrendered Snowflake to the bitter wild, I decided that I wanted her back. I knew in my heart that she wasn’t ready to be set free but I’d done it anyway. I could see that she wasn’t sure what to do with all that freedom, that it was too much for her little brain to comprehend. All that freedom being dumped on her all at once like that. I should probably have tested it out by giving her teaspoon-sized doses of freedom first. Perhaps let her run free in the den to start. What had I been thinking? Then, of course, there are the lovely and impactful nuggets of truth as Huey’s self-realization of his and his family’s status in the world around them continues snowballing – as he realizes that schools are segregated and that he is the “last person in town to discover the truth” about who he is. They come faster and harder in the second half of the novel as pretenses begin to be stripped away and the threshold for denial becomes shallower and shallower: When I asked Mom who in his right mind would choose to be the descendant of a slave if given a choice, she gave me a contemptuous look. You don’t have a choice. Don’t be silly. Of course I do. We all have choices. Everything is a choice. She called me, of all things, a disgrace to my race. I asked what she was referring to, precisely. Only the week before, she was peddling the idea of the whole concept of race as a sham concocted by a few eighteenth-century white men with powdered hair to more conveniently consolidate power, and now here I was, not having even had time to shit out the food I’d been eating at the time, come to find out that I was betraying it. While we’re on the topic of the second half of They Come in All Colors, now’s as good a time as any to say that the latter fourth or so of the novel offered too many holes in the narrative for me to forgive and inspired more questions for me than satisfying answers. AND while we’re on the topic of my pet peeves with this book, now’s also as good a time as any to point out the added GLARING problem that there were no quotation marks used in this novel whatsoever. Normally, this narrative tool wouldn’t be a problem, but combined with the ramblingly verbose chunks of dialogue and the use of long chapters and thick, hulking narrative blocks on every page, traditional formatting of dialogue would have been a welcome reprieve to break up the pages and make this novel seem like a faster read. By the time I got to the middle of They Come in All Colors I was honestly halfway exhausted from wading through the waters of prose and checking the page count to see how close I was to the end. (spoiler: To my dismay, I was nowhere close to it.) Yet, this novel did more good for me than it did harm. It called into question not only the lies we tell ourselves to cope but the lies adults tell children and parents tell their offspring to maintain their innocence. What good is the façade - what’s the point of holding onto a false innocence just a few weeks or months or short years longer - if the inevitable realization only hits harder and is more damaging than having understood it from the start? Because then a child must also cope with the fact that not only has their existence been a lie in some shape, form or fashion but that the adults around them are imperfect beings – who lie and cannot always be trusted to tell the truth. In Western civilization, we raise our kids with lies as a fundamental part of their upbringing – tooth fairies and Santa Clauses and excuses for the way the world is. I’ve never thought that was a productive or practical tool of parenting, and Hansen definitely manages to expose the detriment of shielding and coddling kids from what the real world holds. For that, I applauded him. While the ending of the novel was too abrupt for me to find a ton of fulfillment in it, I did appreciate the nuggets of truth that Huey grows aware enough to impart on the reader - I was being mocked and maligned on a daily basis for having the gall to use the color of my skin to gain advantage where it concerned getting into Claremont, and here people like Zuk pulled shit like that all the time and weren’t even aware of it, much less feeling pangs of guilt about it. - and that his mother, Peola, finally finds the strength to impart on him after nearly a decade of insisting to him that he was white: I’m going to tell you this once, sweetheart, and then I’m never going to tell it to you again. So listen well. Any person you know who has not had a family member enslaved is at a two-hundred-fifty-year advantage over you. Okay? Not the other way around. You must understand that one simple fact. You have ancestors—blood relatives, real people, connected to you by blood and history—who were enslaved, who had their families, language, labor, freedom, possessions, and identity taken from them by force and used to the advantage of everyone you see around you right here, right now. That is, everyone but us. So do not ever let anyone talk to you like you’re some goddamned drain on society. Ever! That would be like scorning the man who has built your house for not owning one himself. That’s just wrong. The only thing you oughta be worried about asking any of them is what the hell they have to show for the last two hundred fifty years of their advantage. And I don’t care if for those two hundred fifty years their ancestors were in Europe or Asia or Russia or on Mars or wherever, because I can guarantee you that they were not in chains. For these dazzling moments of truth and forthrightness, I forgave many of the novel’s other sins. I recommend this novel to lovers of Paul Beatty’s work. You can think of Hansen as Paul Beatty lite. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 04, 2018
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Jun 09, 2018
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Feb 27, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 3.93
| 89,464
| Dec 31, 1961
| Feb 01, 2001
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it was amazing
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Rightfully a classic and will forever be one of my favorites. Damn, that's good writing! The Navi Review | Twitter | Bookstagram Rightfully a classic and will forever be one of my favorites. Damn, that's good writing! The Navi Review | Twitter | Bookstagram ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 20, 2018
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Mar 24, 2018
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Feb 20, 2018
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Paperback
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| 0735213186
| 9780735213180
| 0735213186
| 3.71
| 209,522
| 2018
| Jan 09, 2018
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really liked it
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See my exclusive interview with Chloe Benjamin about her novel The Immortalists here! “There are two major theories about how to stop aging…” “…It sound See my exclusive interview with Chloe Benjamin about her novel The Immortalists here! “There are two major theories about how to stop aging…” “…It sounds like you’re saying we can choose to live. Or we can choose to survive.” Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists is a thoughtfully executed novel written in simple, yet often poetic, prose that allowed the characters’ voices at their most forceful to shine on their own past the narrative itself. More than that, it is a novel crafted around a question we all ask ourselves more often than we’d care to admit: “Is it more important to truly live or to survive? To dare to dream at our grandest or to play it safe?” And, if you knew the exact day on which you’d die, would you live your life any differently than you would without that hateful knowledge? In their youth, the Gold siblings follow a rumor to the home of a Gypsy fortune teller who gives them the knowledge they seek: the exact dates of their deaths. These prophecies propel them forward for the rest of their lives, influencing their decisions, changing the courses of their lives and plunging the question into the forefront of their minds forever: Was the fortune teller right, and, if so, can they change the course of their own fates? It’s an intriguing idea, we must all admit. A scary one. A downright chilling one. And the leitmotif Benjamin poses to her reader manifests itself throughout the novel with compelling force, from the exploration of God and country’s place within our existence, to what the prophecy of one’s own death does to such beliefs. Do we cling to such notions and ingrained dogmas all the way to the end, cowering under them safely like warm, childhood blankets, or using them to fortify us in our resolve and everyday decisions—or, do we slough off and away such religious and secular beliefs and become our own reason for living, our own life force, whether to our own detriment or benefit? The Immortalists bounds along a timeline spanning five decades, trotting through the start of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco— “You weren’t terrified?” “No, not then…When doctors said we should be celibate, it didn’t feel like they were telling us to choose between sex and death. It felt like they were asking us to choose between death and life. And no one who worked that hard to live life authentically, to have sex authentically, was willing to give it up.” ¬–toward Las Vegas in the 80s and into the early years of this century, tackling tough questions, such as the logistics behind increasing the human lifespan—and the politics of attempting such a thing. For readers who enjoy novels of sweeping timelines, they’re sure to find a treat in Benjamin’s latest novel. The period settings weren’t quite as immersive as I’d hoped—the societal and technological differences in backdrop between the decades were noted but not submerging in a way that allowed me to really feel I was moving from decade to decade with true authenticity. However, what I did take from this book were lessons to carry with me, delivered by poignant phrasing that outshone the actual stories of the four siblings’ lives. And that resonated loudly enough to forgive such specifics. I had an interesting relationship with this novel as I continued my reader’s affair with it. I could not relate specifically to any one of the characters in this book. I would not have been friends with any of them in real life, and I did feel that some of the plotlines were predictable. BUT, I learned a lesson from every single one of the siblings that I took with me until the end, and each of those moments of recognition were special. What do you want?...and if [she] answered him honestly she would have said this: To go back to the beginning. She would tell her thirteen-year-old self not to visit the woman. To her twenty-five-year old self: Find Simon, forgive him…She’d tell herself she would die, she would die, they all would…She’d tell herself that what she really wanted was not to live forever, but to stop worrying…” This is a novel with a strong core and a big heart, with a moral and a central theme to tie all the threads together. Chloe Benjamin’s second novel continued her thus-far-established trend of exploring existential questions in our everyday lives, creating a brand for her that is sure to glimmer and shine, attracting new readers from far and wide. 4 stars **** *I received a copy of this novel from the publisher, G.P. Putnam's Sons, via Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me Exclusive CHLOE BENJAMIN INTERVIEW: Magic Meets Humanity, Resilience Meets Reality – Chloe Benjamin Tackles the Ultimate Life Question: How We Handle Mortality ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 14, 2017
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Dec 24, 2017
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Sep 13, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0802127355
| 9780802127358
| 0802127355
| 4.02
| 33,129
| Feb 13, 2018
| Feb 13, 2018
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liked it
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It’s not easy to persuade a human to end their life – they’re very attached to it, even when it makes them miserable, and Ada was no different. But it
It’s not easy to persuade a human to end their life – they’re very attached to it, even when it makes them miserable, and Ada was no different. But it’s not the decision to cross back that’s difficult; it’s the crossing itself. Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater is a novel of layers that do not always nicely overlap; in fact, the pieces often seem to not fit together at all. It is a novel born from trauma and emotional paroxysms, a read that erupts with them throughout. You have to peel back the layers to get to what Emezi has laid underneath, to find the gems, to find the hidden well of pain and sentiment offered here, and that may not be a satisfying journey for many readers. Freshwater is the story of Ada, a young Nigerian woman with a fractured self, or multiple personalities, due to the gods who have mistakenly taken root in her body and mind. It is a dark novel portraying the malevolence within us – that darkness at the very deepest depths of us that we hope to never have to witness of ourselves or in others. It is a novel that portrays the psychological effects of such darkness and emotional violence. When Ada comes into adulthood and leaves her splintered home for a new existence in a Virginia college, a traumatic sexual experience further shatters her mind and her multiple personalities are born. Ada fights a battle between herself, her other selves and her God she left behind, a battle to regain her equilibrium that veers her onto a dangerous course of self-destructive behavior. A path of bloodshed, tears and an equal dose of sexual trauma and exploration. Ada fights with herself, realizing something is wrong. She wants a change but her other personalities refuse to let her go. Let me tell you now, I loved her because in the moment of her devastation, the moment she lost her mind, that girl reached for me so hard that she went completely mad, and I loved her because when I flooded through, she spread herself open and took me in without hesitation, bawling and broken, she absorbed me fiercely, all the way; she denied me nothing. I loved her because she gave me a name. Freshwater was a novel that took a lot of patience for me to read. If you’re a reader who clings to continuity, who needs progressive character development to follow the path a protagonist’s life, or a reader who is in the least bit squeamish, this will likely prove to be a difficult read for you. Not an unworthy read – but a difficult one. The narrative leapt back and forth in time with new personalities and overlapping stories already told being retold differently. This book was a collage, a kaleidoscope, a reflection of a splintered self. Given the subject matter, the shattered quality of the narrative is understandable but at times arduous to read. It was hard for me to fully connect with Freshwater when the moments of truth, heartbreak and the demise of entire relationships in Ada’s life were narrated, not fully shown in action. Emezi’s debut novel is more about the relationship between Ada and her other selves –internally—than it is about her outward experiences in the world. (view spoiler)[(For example, though we follow her through college and beyond, I have no idea what career she worked or if she even held a job at all. There was little to no mention of these small intricacies that paint a broader picture of the narrative for the reader.) This was not always a convincing examination or an immersive portrayal of the events in Ada’s life. Whole story lines just ended, never to be resolved. (hide spoiler)] It wasn’t enough for me, though some parts of the novel were absolutely gripping, and there were some lovely lines scattered throughout. He wanted to pretend he was somehow better than he knew he was; he wasn’t ready to throw himself into sin. Humans find it easier to just lie and lie to themselves. However, in those neglected moments (which is probably why the book is relatively short) the novel loses its soul and misses opportunities. Other qualms: The quote headings at the start of each chapter made no sense to me in the context of the story. Often, they made no sense to me at all though I got the feeling that they were Nigerian sayings. And I had too many WTF moments here because of the haphazard way life events and realizations were thrown into the narrative, no build-up, just dumped. I found myself reading whole passages and thinking, Where did this come from – outta thin air? That was the main issue I had with this novel: there was no real character development aside from Ada and Ewan, just a series of narrations and events. I also never understood the title of the book. There was a reference to it at the end of the novel, but I found it to be too cryptic and unclear, so I still have no idea what it was trying to convey, why it was the namesake of the book. Because of this, I had the noteworthy experience of loving and hating Freshwater. There were moments where I couldn’t wait to turn the page and others where I skimmed past the incoherence of the We. Because of that, Freshwater’s dazzling and dreadful moments condensed down into a grade of 3 stars overall. *** *I received an advance-read copy of the book from the publisher, Grove Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 02, 2018
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Feb 10, 2018
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Sep 13, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0802126553
| 9780802126559
| 0802126553
| 3.74
| 1,504
| Mar 13, 2018
| Mar 13, 2018
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really liked it
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A solid 4 stars! O sing of the American student body, glorious and young. We are the future!...Everyone on a university campus is equally young. We are A solid 4 stars! O sing of the American student body, glorious and young. We are the future!...Everyone on a university campus is equally young. We are all the same social class…We all wear the same clothes and listen to the same music…We are all giddy and hyperventilating in the superoxygenated atmosphere of attention and information and privilege and power. We all thought we were different but we weren’t. We all thought we were resisting something but we weren’t. We all thought that life would be like this forever but it wouldn’t. We were going to spend the rest of our lives trying and failing to re-create this feeling of urgency, of specialness, of being smack at the epicenter of everything important and real happening in the world. For the rest of our lives we would yearn for this feeling of exigency and belonging and fullness and passion. From here on in, it would be nostalgia. Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word pulsates with the tangible feel of a truly undergraduate experience – in many ways, my experience anyway. From the scraping of coins together for packets of Ramen noodles to the dogged debates in the library over Starbucks on the merits of feminist ideology and the next paper due. All of the key players are present here: the “butch” ultra-feminist, the foreigner, the erudite professor whom all the smart girls look up to and yearn to be like, the frat boys, the rich kids, the students holding down part-time jobs and the free-spirited girls who make kissy-faces at taxi drivers then call them assholes and walk away; they’re all here. If you lived this undergraduate experience, you’ll feel at home here, wrapped in a Snuggie of, yeah, “nostalgia.” You’ll understand the references and won’t be shocked at how often the words “smoke” or “condom” or “rights” come up. The above quote is a fantastic summation of this novel in all the best ways. The Red Word is about a year in the lives of a group of undergraduate women, and the catastrophes they catalyzed, exacerbated and lived within their “superoxygenated atmosphere of attention and information and privilege and power.” At the center of this story is Karen, a Canadian student on an American Ivy League campus her sophomore year. When Karen moves into “Raghurst,” a student house where a group of lesbian radical feminists live, and simultaneously starts dating a frat boy from GBC (better known as “Gang Bang Central” on campus), it is the spark that ignites the subsequent events; she is straddling a dangerous line between two houses who go to war over women’s rights versus patriarchal “brotherhood” – a war of the greater society as a whole. It’s about their year of learning, of trauma, of sexual exploration and viewing the world around them through their stanch lens of feminism. "Frat boys like to share. You have to watch your back." Far beyond just being an ode to campus life, The Red Word explores the crevices of rape culture on college campuses and in society as a whole. It reaches into the nooks and crannies of words like “consent” and “consensual” and shows it all to us through the eyes of a group of young women so far from home, so close and yet so far from finding themselves. Sarah Henstra’s debut is intelligently done, intellectual, and very often witty. It is biting and often cringe-worthy, both theoretically and physically. But keep watching; keep reading. Never look away from this mirror. This novel puts the reader right in the midst of the Crog-wearing, Iliad-quoting erudites of a women-centric viewpoint (They’d hate me for saying that, wouldn’t they?), right in the middle of their bloom of self-awareness. It did tend toward melodrama in areas, but doesn’t the college experience itself? Toward the end I was thinking, If I see one more melodramatic, theatrical proclamation, I’ll scream. (Oh Dyann, how you would splinter the spears and batter the bright shields! Stay, oh stay with me.) And yet, the subject matter here was so worthy of exploration. Frat culture and pack mentalities. The ethics of “victim blaming” – *spoken in an existential cadence If a girl goes into a frat party and gets herself drunk, does she deserve to be gang raped? (view spoiler)[And if, after being raped, she goes back into that frat and parties to drunkenness again, does she deserve to be blamed? (hide spoiler)] * The politics of single parenthood for the woman – is she weak for “succumbing” to her circumstances, being “trampled by patriarchy,” for letting her parents pull her out of school, for embarking on single-parenthood of an unwanted baby? Or, is there another worthy argument at play here as well? You be the judge. The Red Word was a fantastic debut novel from Henstra, which I would highly recommend to anyone, particularly college-aged females. If there was ever a novel to sit around and discuss ad nauseam, it's this one. It raised brave questions and turned the *I received an advance-read copy of the book from the publisher, Grove Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. FOLLOW ME HERE: Goodreads | Twitter | Instagram | Get a Copy of My Book | Book Editing, Author Coaching, Submit Your Book to Me ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 2018
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Mar 09, 2018
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Sep 13, 2017
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Paperback
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.37
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really liked it
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not set
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Jan 21, 2020
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| 3.70
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it was amazing
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not set
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Jan 21, 2020
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| 4.19
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really liked it
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Dec 14, 2019
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Oct 15, 2019
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| 3.25
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really liked it
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Dec 25, 2018
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Nov 19, 2018
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| 3.63
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it was amazing
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Jan 09, 2019
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Sep 11, 2018
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| 4.19
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really liked it
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Oct 13, 2018
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Sep 07, 2018
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| 3.46
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it was ok
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Nov 09, 2018
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Aug 27, 2018
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Mar 12, 2019
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Aug 27, 2018
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| 3.63
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really liked it
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Aug 03, 2018
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Jul 22, 2018
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| 4.17
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really liked it
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Jul 2018
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Jun 07, 2018
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| 3.21
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liked it
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Aug 18, 2018
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Jun 06, 2018
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| 3.81
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it was amazing
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Sep 03, 2018
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Apr 01, 2018
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| 3.78
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really liked it
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May 08, 2018
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Mar 31, 2018
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| 4.23
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liked it
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Apr 21, 2018
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Mar 23, 2018
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| 3.97
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really liked it
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May 21, 2018
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Mar 22, 2018
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| 3.42
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liked it
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Jun 09, 2018
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Feb 27, 2018
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| 3.93
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it was amazing
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Mar 24, 2018
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Feb 20, 2018
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| 3.71
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really liked it
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Dec 24, 2017
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Sep 13, 2017
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| 4.02
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liked it
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Feb 10, 2018
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Sep 13, 2017
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| 3.74
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really liked it
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Mar 09, 2018
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Sep 13, 2017
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