Laura

2.5 stars...this book is full of good ideas and anecdotes about inspiring schools. But it's just that - vague calls to action and anecdotes. Maybe I am not the target audience? I am a teacher and I wonder if the target audience might be school administrators or politicians, with the intention of encouraging them to throw their support behind alternative schools and schools trying new things. As a teacher, most of the anecdotes in this book deal with very alternative schools, which is interesting, but I would have loved to hear more about how these ideas could be implemented within a more typical school. In both types of schools he described (the alternative schools and the few examples of typical public schools), he gave little to no information about HOW these changes were made. There was lots of info about how the ideas were developed, and then about how it worked out, but not a lot about what that transition looked like.

I feel bad giving this book such a low rating because I do think it's a very important subject and Ken Robinson is a significant voice in pushing for school reform but this...just felt repetitive and lacking depth.

My second time reading this book. I love the way she personifies her objects, it's so charming. I think every piece of advice in this book has a lot of value even if you don't intend to follow each one literally, it still makes you think about your things in a new way and consider new possibilities for your relationship to physical space.

This book just grew and grew on me as I read it. There is something conversational about these poems, and something so fresh, open, and spacious about them. You feel like you will step away from the book and see the world with more clarity.

“Emily Dickinson in Space” (while the title sounds gimmicky) is one of the loveliest.

The title poem “Water, water” lives up to being the title. Its final line: “and just enough water to fill the lake exactly to the brim.”

And “Thought a Rarity on Paper” is beautiful.

In one of the final poems, “Your Poem,” he includes the line “buoyant ease in the shadow of mortality,” which struck me as a perfect description of the overall feeling of this collection. This is the first Billy Collins book I have read, and I would definitely pick up another one.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the advance copy of the book in exchange for a review

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2.5⭐️This reads like the author wrote a manifesto and then tried to turn it into a novel by awkwardly sticking some “characters” in it. It will randomly go into passive voice, or out of the blue start narrating from the perspective of “we.” There is barely a plot.

The characters are very flat. It's not just that they are unlikeable, which would be fine if they were interesting...it's that I just didn't care about them. So much of the dialogue is indirect/paraphrased rather than actually showing the characters saying it, to the point that in long passages where multiple characters are talking it just reads like the author sharing his own ideas (like it truly doesn't matter who is saying what).

Some of the descriptions of architecture were cool. And what the book was trying to do overall was interesting, I just didn't feel like it succeeded.

Distant future climate fiction. The writing is clear and straightforward in a way that makes the whole novel feel like a fable, which is fitting. The author's intentions are effective: what is it like to imagine a distant future for humanity, long after our current climate crisis (and in some ways into the next one). I wished that the author had explored the differences between that future world and our own more deeply. The world-building elements were interesting in their incongruity (some a return to the past, others clearly futuristic) and I would have liked to see more exploration of them. Some of the interesting world-building elements: mined plastic as a precious gem, bronze-age technology (i.e.: bronze), religious worship of natural elements like sand, the sun, the sea. A deeply entrenched caste/class system in the one city-state we see. A lack of knowledge of ancient history (of our current world, past civilizations). There was some exploration of ecosystems and animals but not a lot. I would have loved more of all of this world building.

Overall this was a very enjoyable read, which I would recommend.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin/Viking for the advanced epub in exchange for a review.

So fun and creepy...a blend of magical realism, horror, gothic, and mystery. The characters are all painfully real: sometimes loveable and sad, sometimes deeply unlikable, but very well-developed, which made this novel stand out amongst other contemporary horror/fantasy/magical realism books I've read in recent years.

Five siblings live in a crumbling manor house on the edge of a bog, to which they have an ancestral (and biological/spiritual) connection. They are all adults, with adult problems and personalities, but this story has echoes of middle-grade fiction adventures where orphans have to survive strange circumstances after the death or disappearance of their parents (i.e. Narnia, Series of Unfortunate Events, The Boxcar Children, etc etc). The story is told from the (third person) perspectives of the five main characters, as they process being thrust into the unknown after the death of their father, the patriarch, who previously kept a tight control on information and ritual. Their mother emerged from the bog before they were born, and returned there at some point when they were children, never to be seen since (like a kind of bog-selkie). The rituals that are supposed to keep the relationship between the bog and the family functioning have failed...and the siblings start to discover that the rituals, and their whole family history, might not be exactly as their father led them to believe.

I finished this novel in 2 days. It's not long, and I never felt like it dragged. This is one of those books that seems like it is the exact right length for the story being told. Some questions are answered, but not all.

Although I read this in July, it is definitely an autumnal read (which is perfect since its release date is October 1st). Thanks to Netgalley and Counterpoint for the advanced copy in exchange for a review.

A wild ride.

This book does so much (and successfully). It is: a satire/critique of the beauty industry and especially the online culture around skincare/anti-aging, a pager-turner thriller/mystery, a unique and original magical realism tale, a compelling narrative about grief and loss, a story of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, and in some ways also a coming-of-age story. There is just so much going on, and yet it all works.

Similarly, Mona Awad manages to make references to a vast number of stories and myths, and yet each one has something sneaky and subtle (or sometimes not-that-subtle) to add if you catch it. Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Egyptian and Greek mythology, the Snow Queen, Bluebeard, The Little Mermaid, the Wizard of Oz....among others.

As the novel progresses, wordplay and creative use of language becomes an important part of it (the reasons are a spoiler), and that aspect is done well, adding humour and meaning.

At no point while reading this did I have any idea what was going to happen next. And all I will say about the ending is that it was satisfying!

Having read Mona Awad's first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, I was not surprised to meet another socially-distant, self-absorbed, and obsessive main character in Rouge. But while I found her debut novel well-written but a bit overly bitter and abject (for my personal preference), Rouge has more poetry, wit, humour, and lightness which make for a much more captivating read. The darkness, societal critique, and satire are if anything made stronger by these contrasts.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the digital galley copy of Rouge. All opinions in this review are my own. :)

This was a surprising page turner and another good fall read

I think I would have liked this book a lot better if I had read it between 2014-2016. Although I did start it at some point then and couldn't get into it. Some of the essays are very good, and others are just things I've read before, or just not that interesting.

I'm quitting this book...it is really boring to me personally and not at all what I want from sci fi. Just writing this to help anyone out.

I like sci fi that has some connection to human feelings, personal experiences and emotions. I also love reading about alien landscapes, the sublime/mysterious feelings evoked by being somewhere completely different. This guy has been on Mars for a third of the book and he has devoted a total of 1 sentence to thinking about his family, 1 sentence to describing the landscape of Mars, and the rest is technical jargon. I know he is supposed to be this practical science man but I genuinely don't think any human person would feel this little emotion about being stuck on Mars. It feels like the author spent all his time researching the science and didn't spend any time characterization at all.

I get that it's supposed to be cool that it's a scientifically accurate sci fi book, but unless you know the science already and can appreciate it, it doesn't really improve your reading experience. Like it could be all made up and it wouldn't be a worse or better book, to a person who is not a NASA scientist.

Thank you to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster Canada, and Atria Books for the ARC of this title...full review to come closer to the publication date.

Sometimes when you read a book you can really tell the author enjoyed writing it and I like that about this book.

I am sad I didn't love this as much as Pond

2⭐️ this book was disappointingly kind of boring.

This was fine. Kinda boring...

I read this book over the course of 3 days while camping alone in the woods (the absolute perfect setting to read this book about a woman alone in the forest). What a dream of a novel - nothing and everything happens on every page. It is simultaneously mundane and wildly surreal. It also contains the most compelling description of a human being's relationships to domestic animals that I have ever read.

Highly recommend - incidentally, I found it a little bit hard to track down a copy of this book. I think it's possible that the English translation is out of print (or at least it was out of stock indefinitely everywhere I looked for it). I found it on thriftbooks. I found out about it because it is mentioned (not by name, just described) in one of the stories in Pond by Claire-Louise Bennet (the narrator describes the book she is reading, and it is this book).

I enjoyed this. While I did guess one of the twists right away, I second guessed it many times and there were plenty of red herrings that led in various directions so it stayed interesting. It did feel like it could have been a novella or short story and worked just as well.

In the end it really felt like a parable about relationships.

I think where it felt less successful was in some of the more science-fiction-y ideas that it was trying to explore. Due to the nature of the way the story unfolded, and the twisty ending, you can't really appreciate some of the big questions the book asks until the end, and by that point the details that would make those questions most interesting are less fresh in your mind. There's also just a lack of depth to a lot of the descriptions, and some real plot holes which did slightly take away from the story. But overall I did enjoy it a lot and it kept me reading.

4.5⭐️

I really wanted to like this book more than I actually did. It has a fun creepy premise and the plot is suspenseful but the characters just had no depth and nothing to make them meaningful or relatable. The main characters are just not that interesting - they seem like they SHOULD be, but then we never see enough of their internal thoughts or anything to really make them unique. No one ever acts in a way other than exactly how we would expect based on their character, and every character could essentially be described in one sentence (and in the whole book we never go deeper than that).

The supernatural monsters are really really creepy and very well described - definitely the best part of the book. The human villains are...as flat and boring as the human heroes.

I read this book when I was maybe 11 or 12 and I remembered being really creeped out, but I didn't remember anything else about it so I picked it up again hoping for a fun Halloween read. It's definitely an easy read and the plot moves along quickly and engagingly but I would necessarily recommend it.

This audiobook was the first ARC I received after joining NetGalley so that is very exciting! Here's my review:

I will admit I am not the target audience for this book. Historical fiction is not a genre I usually gravitate towards—but I was drawn in by the title. And I really enjoyed this book! If you ARE a historical fiction reader, and especially if you happen to be from Vancouver, I think you will love this.

The first few chapters were slow for me, as I had trouble keeping track of all the characters (I think this would not have been an issue if I had been reading the paper book instead of an audiobook) and multiple plot lines. The book starts in the middle of many stories, throwing the reader right into the sisters' lives and providing backstory peppered in throughout, rather than moving chronologically and giving the context first. I liked this approach once I had a handle on who everyone was.

The characters are almost all nuanced and balanced, with even the most frustrating characters having redeeming moments, and no character being all good. The author chose to write most of the book in third person with the exception of two first person characters—one of the sisters, and a dog. I really liked the chapters told from the dog's point of view, it added a whimsical quality to an otherwise intensely realistic story. Although it took a bit of time to get into it, it was ultimately the real, honest, and messy relationships between the characters that kept me reading.

The writing style manages to incorporate a large vocabulary without ever sounding overdone or pretentious. At times it is very beautiful.

The book is centred around on multiple issues: feminism, reproductive rights, LGBTQ experiences, etc, and all are woven inextricably into the story, without ever feeling shoehorned in (I hate when books feel preachy, even if I agree with what they are preaching). The only area where I felt like more could have been said was to do with the character of Flore. She is the wealthiest of the main characters, and is also the one most involved in labour organizing, attending meetings about workers' rights etc. At one point another character (Harriet) calls out her privilege, expressing frustration that Flore doesn't seem to realize how serious it would be if Harriet was fired from her job. It would have been interesting to see more exploration of this...
The conflict between women wanting/needing access to abortion/birth control and others (mainly men) not understanding how dire this is, was well written. I also would have liked to see more of how that conflict played out politically (a few times there was mention of characters attending talks etc about these issues but we were never brought there as a reader).

If you like audiobook readers who sound very emotionally invested in the story (dynamic/not flat) you will like the audiobook.

Lastly I will say, because of all the different plot lines interwoven, I think this would make a really good mini-series or show...I could imagine it while listening. I would watch!

Thanks to Dreamscape Media and NetGalley for the ARC! I feel like a real book reviewer

this book made me dizzy. On the one hand I like the idea of pulling together many threads under a common theme (the idea of the doppelgänger) but in practice this made the book feel disjointed and chaotic in such a way that I can't hold onto a lot of the ideas in it, and it took a long time to get through.

I also agree with other reviews that the conclusion really suffers as a result of the disjointedness. Like the overall, tie-it-all-together conclusion is basically: work with other people and value community rather than difference. Great but kind of lame compared to some of the big issues in the book. This might have worked better as a collection of separate essays, each with its own proper conclusion.

This book was also clearly written for an audience who already agree with Naomi Klein on most things, and sometimes veered into kind of smugness which was annoying to read, even when I agreed with her.

That being said, I like the exploration of how so much in the world/society can be related back to the idea of the doppelgänger/doubling. The web of connections she spins out from that central idea is fascinating. The parts where she talks about specific examples of doubling/doppelgängers (whether in real life or in fiction) were some of the most interesting. The concepts of the Mirror Word and Shadow Lands were also useful.

I wrote down several quotes from this book...I think it is worth reading...But the overall feeling I had at the end was “finally...” and “that was unnecessarily long,” so it can't get more than 3 or 3.5⭐️

If you read this in your head in Werner Herzog's voice, that's fun.

This is a crazy story.

This was fine. The fragmented, “poetic” (I guess?) writing style would probably have really annoyed me had I continued reading it in print, but I switched to the audiobook - highly recommend doing audiobook if you're going to read this book. But I also think there are other survival/post-apocalyptic books that do the same thing but better.

I think what the author was trying to do was combine nature/outdoors writing with the post-apocalyptic survival genre, which as a concept is what drew me to this book. I did like that aspect, but I felt it could have worked better. Unfortunately, even after I switched to the audiobook, the fragmented, repetitive, run-on writing style made a lot of the descriptive passages really unmemorable and took away their impact.

Also, this is not a criticism of the book but an observation: what a bleak outlook on the world, that in the end people will just all murder each other. The only group of people who were able to live comfortably with more than 3 others without killing each other/killing anyone they saw were some Mennonites. Maybe the author kind of wanted to write a zombie book (killing anyone who approaches would make a little more sense if everyone were trying to eat your brains) but he felt like that wouldn't be taken as seriously so he switched it to humans. Fair enough.

And (this is a criticism) the evidence of the main character's moral “difficulty” with killing people seemed weirdly perfunctory. I don't know. This whole book felt like an unintended exposure of the author's ideas about masculinity.

Last thing, and this is a spoiler: For the first half of the book I really expected Bangley to be a figment of Hig's imagination, or to really just be Hig disassociating, Fight-Club-style. I was kind of disappointed when that was not the case, although maybe that would have been too obvious...

Thank you to Tor and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is an entrancing dark fairy tale novella. The protagonist, a practical woman in her late 30s, is sent into a horrifying and dangerous forest on a quest, and an adventure ensues. I really enjoyed the writing; at times it reads like nature writing, with sensory descriptions of the forest that made you feel that you were right there in the midst of it. The horror/fantasy elements reminded me at times of Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, at times of Princess Mononoke, and at times of Over the Garden Wall (if it was much darker). An excellent fall read.

Like the previous book I have read by this author (The Annual Migration of Clouds), this book does a lot in few pages. They also both had somewhat open-ended conclusions, so I come away from this one with the same feeling I had with the previous book: it feels like a window into a world about which I would love to read more stories.

4.5 stars.

Halfway through reading this I actually remembered what happens in the Trojan War in the Iliad...and without spoilers I will say I was shocked by how well and vividly that story is retold and added to here, without really changing the main events that much (ok maybe that is a spoiler...).

This is a book that just got better as it went along, the final few chapters really deliver. At first I felt a bit uncertain about Patroclus' characterization as quite passive/hesitant (although I do think he subtly had a lot of character), but looking at this story as a myth, it was like he was a cross between a chorus and a character (at least until the last quarter of the book, when he is fully active/autonomous). It also emphasized the idea of Achilles' as a chosen one vs. Patroclus as a normal guy, and allowed for hints of Achilles ignorance as he didn't fully understand that difference between them. I do think a little more specificity in Patroclus' character would have made me like the book even better.

Achilles' characterization was interesting because through the first half of the novel it seemed the author was shying away from portraying him as arrogant/prideful. At first his desire for fame/honour is praised/excused by the authorial tone...but then it really powerfully leads to his downfall at the end, as in the Iliad. I also like how at the same time as Achilles became less sympathetic, Patroclus' character came into his own and became more decisive and specific (and began making choices not directly related to Achilles, such as working as a healer or his friendship with Briseis. That made the shift to him being the “best of the Myrmidons” feel logical.