they already found the cure for loneliness. it's called "Reading + An Active Imagination"
...anyway.
like many things, this had a lot of great ideas andthey already found the cure for loneliness. it's called "Reading + An Active Imagination"
...anyway.
like many things, this had a lot of great ideas and fell flat on the execution. it never really works for me when the first 200+ pages of a book are exposition and then the climax hits with 40 pages to go, and this was left feeling sloppy and rushed. this book felt like it had the concept it wanted, and the ending it knew it wanted to get to, and then it just kind of rambled in between.
reading the epilogue and finding our protagonist transformed, (view spoiler)[armed with friendships with barely mentioned characters, a terminated relationship that had showed no signs of being stopped, and a totally different career path (hide spoiler)] with none of the development it would have taken to get there, felt frustrating. also i just don't know why this book felt like it needed a love triangle, or why the roommate had to be constantly eating and made fun of for that, or (and maybe it's just me) why this had to do that sci-fi thing where you just capitalize common phrases to indicate they have taken on some sort of dystopian brand.
oh well.
bottom line: this was really promising, and i really enjoyed moments of it, but its last page and its middle pages threw me off.
(this comes to mind because this book explores the line between dream and reality, and not because i'm just thinking about childrenlife is but a dream
(this comes to mind because this book explores the line between dream and reality, and not because i'm just thinking about children's songs)
(anyway)
there were moments this was truly interesting, but for the most part it was overambitious and seemed to find the huge number of symbols, motifs, themes, and Various Things Of Literary Significance it had saddled itself with unwieldy. it didn't nail the dismount, so to speak.
this was VERY DIFFERENT from a good girl's guide to murder.
alternate title proposal: a mean girl's guide to family drama and bullying the people arouthis was VERY DIFFERENT from a good girl's guide to murder.
alternate title proposal: a mean girl's guide to family drama and bullying the people around her.
it was a lot more dramatic, a lot less realistic, and a lot more filled with secrets and cringy moments of the meanest teenage girl you've ever encountered in your fiction-reading life making adults cry. which is...not my usual demographic.
the last third or so was a lot more enjoyable of a reading experience, but it wasn't a satisfying conclusion. instead it was really info dumpy, very unrealistic feeling.
if a good girl's guide to murder is like the first few seasons of pretty little liars, this is like the last few. unrealistic, confusing, and vaguely alarming.
but still surprising and weirdly fun.
bottom line: the real plot twist is how much i didn't expect about this book.
2.5
------------------ tbr review
a good reader's guide to adding too many books to her tbr
the important thing to know about this is it's a bad book written by a good writer. the characters: flimsy. their rellike a reverse irish exit?
anyway.
the important thing to know about this is it's a bad book written by a good writer. the characters: flimsy. their relationships: inexplicable. the plot: filled with years-long gaps to the point of being incomprehensible.
but the writing itself? the dialogue? the little jokes? excellent.
the other thing to know is that it is very weird. it's a white woman who was once a backup singer in a Black group and can't get over it. that's not much to carry us through 250 pages and it never feels any more normal.
maybe it was a different time.
bottom line: sometimes books are forgotten for a reason.
i don't think i've ever read a novella addition to a series and been like "yeah, that was necessary." but that doesn't stop me from trying.
this was noi don't think i've ever read a novella addition to a series and been like "yeah, that was necessary." but that doesn't stop me from trying.
this was no exception though.
it only provided insight into how pip decided to do her senior capstone project in the first book, which is possibly the least interesting thing it could possibly be about while still technically being in any way related to the actual mystery.
it also exclusively follows the plotline of a murder mystery dinner type board game, which are not famous for being interesting and filled with shock value.
it was a quick read and not terrible but that's the nicest i can be.
bottom line: if you're like, "i'd read holly jackson writing about literally anything," this is the novella for you....more
but my favorite part of this was the food descriptions.
unfortunately, the rest was extremely repetitiveof course i want to read about magic fox girls.
but my favorite part of this was the food descriptions.
unfortunately, the rest was extremely repetitive. we have two perspectives, one of a fox girl and the other of an aging investigator, both of which sound interesting and aren't. each perspective just follows its respective protagonist as they go from the same place to the next, looking for the same thing, unchanging in themselves or in the plot. i waited for this book to pick up and it never did.
the writing was also strange—a lot of moments where something would happen, and then it would be rhetorically referred to as if it didn't. a character spots another character, and then 2 sentences later, when he starts speaking to her: "he'd managed to find me after all." like, no, he just saw you. we just talked about that. "she'd used her patron's name, hoping it would open doors. which it had." okay, why did we have to say that then. it resulted in me going back and rereading a lot of paragraphs and getting frustrated.
the ending and romance came out of nowhere, after hundreds of pages of sexual harassment, but there were parts of this i enjoyed.
i just wish there were more of them.
bottom line: more foxes, more food, less weirdness.
(2.5 / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)...more
the background: i have decided to become a genius.
to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collecmy becoming-a-genius project, part 28!
the background: i have decided to become a genius.
to accomplish this, i'm going to work my way through the collected stories of various authors, reading + reviewing 1 story every day until i get bored / lose every single follower / am struck down by a vengeful deity.
we're approaching the third anniversary of my commencement of this project and also i have not undertaken an installment of it in several months, so this is an exciting event.
DAY 1: JOHN REDDING GOES TO SEA this had the unique unbelievably depressing / know-it-all combo of an old-timey fairytale. i for one think unrelated tragedy cannot be blamed on some guy's wife being like "if you wanted to leave and travel everywhere solo style you probably shouldn't have married me." rating: 2.5
DAY 2: THE CONVERSION OF SAM eek. another very moral and didactic one.
which i guess i should have guessed from the title. rating: 2.5
DAY 3: A BIT OF OUR HARLEM feeling: hopeful. this story is all of 2 pages long and it seems like there's no way there'll be time to preach a lesson at all.
never mind. it managed. rating: 3
DAY 4: DRENCHED IN LIGHT this one was...interesting.
i love a free-spirited lowkey annoying kid as much as the next person but i don't know about the happily ever after being a potential adoption from a significantly more annoying white family. rating: 3
DAY 5: SPUNK if we have to get all Big Lesson, this is the way to do it. i'll take murderous ghosts and vengeance and gossip any day. rating: 3.5
DAY 6: MAGNOLIA FLOWER i have to say this is just not the collection i expected after their eyes were watching god at all.
this one is giving disney princess. rating: 3
DAY 7: BLACK DEATH now THIS is what i'm talking about. if we're going to cast aspersions on those who sin, at least give me some sort of dark magic sorcerer to do the punishing! rating: 3.5
DAY 8: THE BONE OF CONTENTION this one was amusing. i will give it that. rating: 3.5
DAY 9: MUTTSY well this one was just depressing. the conversion of sam without the conversion part. rating: 2.5
DAY 10: SWEAT this story contains the insult "she don't look like a thing but a hunk of liver with hair on it," and therefore i stand with it in support for all my days.
it's also a very well-deserved act of Womanly Vengeance, so that helps. rating: 3.5
DAY 11: UNDER THE BRIDGE the lesson of this story is that if you marry a much younger woman your hot son gets to fall in love with her and you can't even get that mad. rating: 3
DAY 12: POSSUM OR PIG? not a question i've had occasion to ask very often.
call me crazy, but i am not loving these stories with strange morals involving slaves "wronging" white people. stealing a pig seems pretty low on the crime scale when compared with enslavement. rating: 2.5
DAY 13: THE EATONVILLE ANTHOLOGY this was the florida equivalent of olive kitteredge. just a bunch of sad people living unhappy lives in a small town. enjoy. rating: 3
DAY 14: THE BOOK OF HARLEM a lot of these stories have been biblical in a variety of ways.
this one chose "language and format." rating: 3
DAY 15: THE BOOK OF HARLEM oh good. it's almost exactly the same as yesterday. down to the title. rating: 2.5
DAY 16: THE BACK ROOM fun little dorian gray situation here. if dorian gray could be told in 10 pages or less. rating: 3
DAY 17: MONKEY JUNK we're having fun with biblical formatting again. rating: 3
DAY 18: THE COUNTRY IN THE WOMAN i do think that the appropriate response to seeing your husband on his fourth side piece is to slow-walk toward them with an axe like a horror movie serial killer.
the punishment fits the crime. rating: 3.5
DAY 19: THE GILDED SIX-BITS another moral. gosh these are depressing. rating: 3
DAY 20: SHE-ROCK biblical formatting alert.
this contains a truly astonishing phrase (a beverage called "coon-dick") which i was so titillated by i immediately had to google and the only results i received were about raccoon penises. so now i feel like i got pranked by zora neale hurston on a decades-long delay. rating: 2.5
DAY 21: THE FIRE AND THE CLOUD i have to say, i thought a story about a talking lizard would have a little more going on. rating: 2.5
OVERALL i was really excited to read this collection, but unfortunately not many of these felt like they came from the author of their eyes were watching god, a book i loved. these stories had sparkling moments of brilliance and ones i truly enjoyed and some that just weren't my cup of tea. it was a lot more moralistic than i expected.
it's neither a good nor bad book for me, and therefore in the exact middle it goes. rating: 2.5...more
honestly, reading this book prompted a lot of shouldn't haves.
cursed bunny is strange and fascinating and unpredia utopia? for me? you shouldn't have.
honestly, reading this book prompted a lot of shouldn't haves.
cursed bunny is strange and fascinating and unpredictable. this, by the same author, led me to expect a bizarre good time, but all of these stories — while striving for weird on the surface — were one-note and easy to anticipate.
some of them were in space, some were in the future, some were...well actually most of them were in one or the other, but all of them were about technology and society, and they had simple things to say.
after two story collections from chung, i'd be interested in a novel.
it's no shock that i did like the bookshop part. and it's probably not that much of a shock thahad me at days in a bookshop.
lost me at the other days.
it's no shock that i did like the bookshop part. and it's probably not that much of a shock that it was the entire second half of the book, which occurred after our protagonist was no longer an employee of or even a real visitor to the bookshop, focusing on the reasons why her aunt had left her father many years before, that i didn't care for as much.
and to be fair, how could i have seen that one coming? i would have seemed diagnosable if i predicted that from this title / cover combo.
it's not just that it existed at all, although anything that pulls me away from a bookshop whether literally or fictionally is my enemy. it's more that the whole plotline felt shallow and unwieldy, given too much page time and still somehow not enough exploration.
i never have that problem when i'm reading about reading.
bottom line: books about books - yes. books about inaccurate and weird emotional subplots - maybe not.
i would follow the lines of a family for 300, 400, 500 pages. i've followed them for 800+! 240 pagei love family dramas.
this one just felt too short.
i would follow the lines of a family for 300, 400, 500 pages. i've followed them for 800+! 240 pages doesn't feel like enough to see the full dimensions of their dynamics, the traces of family they carry, to develop full characters i'll remember forever.
while there are moments of this that struck me, in truth there just weren't enough moments for this to stick with me.
a lolita retelling about a white man who only dates asian women...genius.
i badly wanted to like this book, because that's brilliant and because i bouga lolita retelling about a white man who only dates asian women...genius.
i badly wanted to like this book, because that's brilliant and because i bought it in the world's most beautiful bookstore and because it's a posthumous release edited by the author's daughter, but it fell flat for me.
it starts off kinetically, with three perspectives and a kidnapping and a secret, but this book was unfinished, mid-revision when the author abandoned it, and you can tell. it follows daniel, a violinist and asian fetishist; kyoko, the daughter of the woman he spurned; and alma, the love of his life. its first pages see two characters contemplating suicide and the third taking up a murder plot.
alma and kyoko are at first outrageously interesting, both as characters and for what they represent, but kyoko falls out of the narrative and alma's ending is so unsatisfying. (i'd be remiss not to mention that the way kyoko's boyfriend, kornell, a black man, speaks and is characterized did not sit right with me.)
this has SO MUCH to say about asian fetishization, which as a white woman marrying an asian man i consider often from a different perspective, but it doesn't want to stick to its guns. it lets daniel weasel his way out of any broader understanding of the phenomenon, and redeem himself in a way that feels icky.
i'll definitely be looking into this author's other work, because my real complaint about this book is that it didn't feel cohesive or complete. and it wasn't!
bottom line: this had so much going for it, but not enough....more
this is one of those books i'm so excited to read it feels like it's been ordained by the universe.
let's see what happens (feat mini reviews for each this is one of those books i'm so excited to read it feels like it's been ordained by the universe.
let's see what happens (feat mini reviews for each story).
UNKNOWN BY UNKNOWN a girl gets laid off with generous severance only to be invited to house sit in a beautiful home for money and no responsibilities but walking a dog...this is my dream.
even if it did end abruptly at the most exciting part. rating: 3.5
LI FAN this is so clever and so unique and so empathetic and so well-executed. in my humble opinion.
it is also so short. rating: 4
TO GET RICH IS GLORIOUS you have to love a scammer. you HAVE to. rating: 3
FAREWELL HANK i can only hope that one day i become a creepy and controlling old lady with a nickname so pervasive no one remembers my real name anymore. rating: 2.5
CURE FOR LIFE this story would have gone craaaazy if it were written during the #MeToo era. as is: it's fine! rating: 3
KLARA friendship breakups are worse than any romantic breakup and that is the dark secret of adult life that no one tells you. rating: 3.5
A VISIT well this made me feel vaguely sad and guilty for a reason i can't quite pinpoint. a feeling to which i say: no thank you! rating: 2.5
FLIES this story contains a description of a dead rat so vivid and disgusting that it occupies a permanent section of my brain previously reserved for my siblings' names and my favorite cookie recipe.
spoiler alert, i guess. rating: 3
SHE WILL BE A SWIMMER this is one of those stories that fails at what it was trying to do and thereby does the exact opposite. unfortunately. rating: 2
PHENOTYPE if this story was a full-length novel it would be trendy on bookstagram and have, like, a 3.53 average rating.
which is a compliment. rating: 4
ME AND MY ALGO this is just the worst, i'm sorry...this is middle school creative writing prize level writing...
i can't stress enough how much i thought i would like this book. rating: 1
PERSONA DEVELOPMENT this had traces of what i thought this entire collection would be.
and a great title. rating: 3
TOMB SWEEPING never a good sign when the title story doesn't hit. rating: 2.5
CAT PERSONALITIES what are we even doing here. rating: 1.5
OTHER PEOPLE this started somewhere and made me think it was doing something and then...i don't even know what happened.
aaaand that's it! rating: 2
OVERALL at no point did it even cross my mind that i might not like this book, which a) is one of my most anticipated reads of the year, b) shares an author with a book i unexpectedly really loved, and c) has a gorgeous cover (most important).
but this felt very shallow and thoughtless where the author's debut was the opposite. bummer. rating: 2.5...more
this had roughly as much depth as an instagram post, which is fitting because its most interesting sectioi hope I'M a fan...of this book!
update: well.
this had roughly as much depth as an instagram post, which is fitting because its most interesting sections take place on the platform.
we follow an obsessive woman, cheating on her boyfriend with "the man she wants to be with," who in addition to a wife and several other unimportant affairs is entwined with "the woman she is obsessed with," which extends mostly to following her on instagram.
nothing changes over the course of this book. characters remain inconsistent without growth. there are SO many unearned style choices, which in the last 3 weeks has become my pet peeve.
i didn't hate this, and it had really promising elements, but it disappointed me. which in some ways is worse.
this was the book equivalent of the bakery case holding the magic of manifold pastries within.
in other words, it contained many of my favorite things this was the book equivalent of the bakery case holding the magic of manifold pastries within.
in other words, it contained many of my favorite things (books about career women becoming mothers, the line between lit fic and family drama, character driven to the point of nothing driving at all), but i felt constantly separated from it, as if there was a film between the story and me.
we very much live within these characters, but i didn't feel like i really knew them. their feelings felt separate from me. and while i am one of the few defenders of the way children are written in lit fic (call me precocious!), this was ridiculous — five year olds writing perfectly spelled complete sentences, babies expressing fully developed concepts of abandonment.
there is also a catfish (as in the mtv docuseries hosted by the silver fox) (silver fox as in handsome gray-haired man, also not the animal) plotline that i do not understand. not "i don't know why it was in the book." not "i'm missing what it was trying to say." i actually straight up am incapable of comprehending what literally happened. i reread pages. i tried explanations on for size. i don't know.
i think, to my misfortune, this author just may not click for me.
bottom line: i said earlier that i don't like lockdown fiction, but that's actually one of the only aspects of this i appreciated.
2.5
------------------ tbr review
i will be honest, i have never once read lockdown fiction and been like "great, so glad i get to read about this time during which the only thing i could do was think my thoughts about this time."
a book told through museum wall labels??? this sounds like a dream...
but unfortunately the format was the coolest part.
this book's medium outshone itsa book told through museum wall labels??? this sounds like a dream...
but unfortunately the format was the coolest part.
this book's medium outshone its story. it is a very cool idea to talk about the concept of a wealthy 20th century woman as a glowing object, intended to be owned and to look pretty and nothing else, through museum labels, emphasizing the concept of the object.
but i wish it were only done partially: perhaps each chapter begins with the label, but in some way there is character development or relationship dynamics or themes of any kind. in other words, that there were something preventing this book from being dry and literal and repetitive. but alas.
i will follow this author though!
bottom line: sounded too good to be true, and was.
(2.5 / thanks to the publisher for the copy)...more
maybe, when you're a brilliant writer as it stands and you've won major awards, learning another language and refusing to write in anything but that mmaybe, when you're a brilliant writer as it stands and you've won major awards, learning another language and refusing to write in anything but that might have an effect.
possibly.
i spent more than half of this collection writing mini-reviews for each story, but i had to stop because it was negativity city and vitriol was being spewed everywhere and all of them amounted to the same thing: the best parts of this collection explore the relationship between alienation and culture, often describing the plight of immigrants within italy. but eventually even those fell into the same predictable pattern of recycled material and telling, not showing.
i have read another book by jhumpa lahiri in her post-italian-writing-declaration years and enjoyed it, but this one felt...shallow and hard to get into.
bottom line: i miss the old jhumpa.
(2.5 / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)...more
this book is peak "i don't support women's rights, i support women's wrongs."
which, on paper, isn't a bad thing, except...i thought i was picking up athis book is peak "i don't support women's rights, i support women's wrongs."
which, on paper, isn't a bad thing, except...i thought i was picking up a book that would kind of relish exploring the ways women manage to be devious and wicked. but i was wrong.
the level of gymnastics this tries to do to make serial killers, assassins, and general obsessive or greedy girlies seem redeemable and pigeonholed and ultimately actually feminist heroes...annoying! unnecessary! not every woman's choice is a product of institutionalized misogyny! that's actually patronizing!
otherwise this was very well researched and impressive. but just let women be evil!!!
why does cartoon food look so much better than real food???
that constitutes the majority of my thoughts on this.
that, and the fact that i have a love why does cartoon food look so much better than real food???
that constitutes the majority of my thoughts on this.
that, and the fact that i have a love / hate relationship with the word "supper."
this was cute and fine and i liked the art and i would like a bowl of cartoon mac and cheese, even if this book did put too much on its plate and also put blue cheese in the included and aforementioned mac and cheese recipe...
two significant crimes.
we forgive. kind of.
and probably forget about this book entirely.
bottom line: fine!
(2.5 / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)...more
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