Dave

No one on their death bed professes to wishing they'd worked more, eh, Stevens?

Beautifully written and contemplative, this book suffers from perhaps being a tad too much in the head of the protagonist. While we're given a bittersweet plot payoff, the entire book built to that and it was to be expected.

The giant blocks of text that serve as flashbacks or detailed explanations of objects or settings tend to be more grating than beautiful the longer the book goes on. At times these reprieves can be useful to get into the mind of Stevens and how he views the world. Other times? It's belaboring a point that's loud and clear already.

I enjoyed this well enough, though.

I suppose the best way to sum this one up is that it's “fine.”

While it starts out strong, it devolves from there. The early narrative shift makes the plot twists that the plot hinge upon predictable almost from the get-go. The villain's motives aren't unveiled until far later in the story, when the villain presents themselves. If it was a character the reader had any sort of affections for it would've perhaps been more effective, but as it stands?

Meh.

There's little feel for Travis and Maggie from earlier in the story to make the reader feel any connection with either character or want any sort of catharsis. What kept me going was that it's well written and flowed really well.

Bee ended up being the star of the book, making Theo and Calla's chapters fine, but at times Call didn't seem to have much of a role in the plot and her chapters were brief and just there to keep the POV order in place. But yeah, Bee was good.

This would probably be a 2.5 if Goodreads allowed it.

When you read it, imagine Joe's voice in your head and it all makes sense.

Chaos Principle asks a lot of tough questions, all through the lens of the last detective of his kind on what remains of Earth.

Johnson immediately sets the dark tone and never relents, focusing on a grisly murder that Ansel is forced to investigate, which leads him down an existential wormhole questioning not just how own history, but modern existence itself.

Tightly plotted and written, it's absolutely worth checking out.

Last year I read ‘The Glass Hotel' and while I didn't love it, I liked it enough to decide to give ‘Station Eleven' a shot, considering it's reputation.

I don't regret reading this book, but that's not to say that I'm not critical of it. It was better than ‘The Glass Hotel,' which was a solid novel that had some nagging issues. Emily St. John Mandel's prose itself is great; existing in that territory where it's never in the way, clunky or overwrought, and in fact by all accounts good.

There were times where the very idea of reading this during an actual pandemic felt uncomfortable and prescient. Other times, it was bordering on tedious.

The bonds that tie this novel together are based around an actor from a weird little island in Canada. Yes, there was also a weird little island in Canada in ‘The Glass Hotel,' but whatever. Of course the author was raised on a weird little island in Canada, so there's that.

This actor turns into the “patient zero” in North America for a deadly pandemic, at least for this story's purposes, and somehow, everything is connected to him and his ex-wife Miranda's passion project comic book, Station Eleven. The comic is about Miranda's unease with the world, feeling uncomfortable and alone, with a lot of echoes of what happened in her life. After everything falls apart, a traveling symphony that performs Shakespeare as well becomes our anchor.

A part of what drags this down is almost a sense of predestination, where every character we follow is related back to dear Arthur, especially when it becomes clear about a quarter of the way through that's what we're witnessing.

That isn't to say there aren't moments of beauty in here, because there are. There are enough for me to bump this to four stars on here!

This book has me filled with conflicting thoughts.

First off, I haven't read Powers since Galatea 2.2, which I read in college. I remember my core takeaway from Galatea 2.2 was that Powers was a skilled wordsmith who perhaps suffered from a problem of over-inflated ego to create a book that inward and self-congratulatory. Even the photo of himself in the back of the book etched itself into my mind as “ugh, this guy.”

So when Overstory got heaped with praise, I didn't bother. Now this one happened, and I gave ole Richard Powers another chance.

I'm glad I did. Richard Powers of 1995 is a different Richard Powers than 2021, although he's still using that same black-and-white photo from ages ago. I get it, my Goodreads profile photo is from 2012. We all freeze our view of ourselves in our mind at some fixed point where we looked a certain way, I suppose.

This book had a lot of heart to it and yes, a Richard Powers book gave me potent emotions, which was something. Listening to an interview he did a few weeks ago with Ezra Klein (oh lord) it was clear this Richard Powers was more introspective of the one from the past that I delved into and reaffirmed my personal beliefs on. Throughout ‘Bewilderment' we're treated to the character Theo, who's clearly a stand-in for Powers, which hey, I get it. Anyway, Theo has a son, Robin, who's neurodivergent. Theo, a scientist himself, dislikes the idea of his son on mind-altering drugs, although increased incidents at school are leading them to a path with very few options.

I'm gonna stop here and just say, if spoilers bother you, there's plenty from here out.

Ah, until a doctor pal of Theo's deceased wife emerges to talk about this therapy system he's created, an iteration on something both Theo and Aly had strapped themselves into before to scan their brains. This could do the trick and solve Robin's problems by allowing him to do tasks within this machine alongside the brain scan of his mother.

Powers is still playing with the idea of technology and how it cohabitates the planet with us, for better or for worse. Theo himself is working to simulate what life on other planets could look like, with his bets on a satellite imaging system in the age of, well, let's just say it, Trump. Robin goes into this therapy and goes from having violent outbursts about how we're ruining the world, an attempt to both emulate and pay tribute to Greta Thunberg (who is in the book under a different name), who mellows out a bit and tries to find his own ways to impact the world. Only, his secret therapy isn't a secret for too long when the good doctor decides the world needs this technology, or... he needs money through licensing agreements.

Robin becomes an internet sensation because of his feel-good story and Theo feels guilt for allowing his son to become a spectacle, even if Robin sees this as a way to get a message out to more people. The conservative gov't cuts off funding to both the therapy program, puts the doctor under investigation, then cuts off funding for Theo's eyes-in-the-sky. Robin starts slipping and, ultimately, things go terribly wrong, leaving Theo alone, with his only hope being this therapy in a stripped-down version of the good doctor's office alongside scans of his deceased wife and son.

This story is... well, look. It's difficult to be an American writer of certain sensibilities without synthesizing what's been happening in the United States into your work. The COVID pandemic wasn't present, but cows contracting a neurological disorder that was set to wipe them out happened, crops were dying, it was all in the same vein of our slow-burning late stage capitalism-fueled apocalypse. As I said, this was a much more human Powers, and the story was touching, but when I start digging beneath the surface for thematic elements, a lot of it is still stuck in the past.

This book was an Oprah's Book Club book, which doesn't surprise me. It embodies modern liberal ideals and, from a comfortable distance, criticizes modern society while eschewing any sort of solution or blame. In the interview with Klein, the subject of capitalism came up many times, with Klein hemming and hawing with “I'm not an anticapitalist” nonsense based on his own brand of free market neoliberalism, while Powers seemed comfortable criticizing capitalism. Still, a lot of his views are informed from “unplugging” from his home in Silicon Valley and moving to the Smokies, where he reconnected with nature. The problem is... that's from a place of privilege that few of us can do. We can visit whatever nature we can find in our area, but uprooting and moving into the woods isn't feasible for most.

The critical eye towards technology and media is right there, with no better example than his cell phone. Theo's phone plays a prominent role throughout the story, from doomscrolling news feeds to emergency SMS messages from the president about nonsense right down to playing a pivotal role in the book's finale. Theo's phone couldn't save them. On their fated walk down to a river that Robin's deceased mother loved, Theo discovered about his telescope project being kaput via a text message chain. Then, when he needed service to call for help, it wasn't there.

Theo's continued existence is, in part, from his refusal to abandon technology and fully embrace the world like his wife and son did. The message being sent is rather grim, though, as both of them died in perhaps misguided attempts to defend or protect nature, no matter the cost. All while, Theo continues to live on, a firm believer in the ideals espoused by the people he loves, but not enough to give his life for them. His only way forward is to once again embrace technology to remember his family.

While there are obvious issues of modern society on display, a lot like modern liberalism, Powers cannot find a solution outside of “trust science” and “don't be a bad guy.” The book seems like it's on the verge of saying more than that, but ultimately ends with a message that anyone attempting positive change ends up eaten alive, while the rest of us are left pinning our hopes on incrementalist centrists.

Oh, and why do I read Goodreads reviews? I saw a few claiming this book felt “antivax” because he didn't want to give his kid psychoactive drugs and I just... why?!

I enjoyed this book a lot, though, and Powers remains an immensely skilled writer who I now have to return to later on.

2.5

I'm sort of at a loss for what to say about this book.

Essentially, this book is not about the plot. There isn't much of a plot beyond our protagonist, Piranesi, lives in a strange, pocket world of a giant, sprawling, perhaps endless mansion overrun with birds and the ocean. The only other person he has contact with is a besuited man he calls ‘the Other.'

Welcome to the first half of the book, where Piranesi details the statues, rooms, wildlife, tides and meetings with the Other. The first, say, 40% of the book is pure worldbuilding. The only issue is this world is rather empty and detached. So you're essentially just getting a feel for the mood, which is one of isolation and otherness. There's very little meat on the bones of the characters to break into, and while the house itself is a character, it's sterile outside of the few parts with wildlife.

When the story finally kicks in, it's entertaining enough, but only about half of the book contains any conflict whatsoever. It reminds me of ‘The Martian' except, where in ‘The Martian' he's trapped on Mars and trying to get out, Piranesi doesn't seem to care about being trapped in this world and doesn't want to get out. So there's no tension. What, I suppose, the author wanted to use to keep you reading was the sense of mystery around the house.

The problem? Astute readers will know what the house represents. That means there's even less tension.

As I said, though, when the actual plot starts, this is enjoyable and left me wondering what this book could've been if there was a plot that stretched the entire (short) book and not just late into the second act into the third. I'm all for experimenting with form, but there wasn't much of anything early on.

Plus, look... spoilers, I suppose. It was all just in his head the whole time is the absolute worst storytelling convention. C'mon! It was so clear from the offset that what was so strange about the house was that it probably didn't exist, only exacerbated by the whole story of The Prophet getting there by putting himself in a childlike state of mind, then Ketterley hypnotizing Matthew Rose Sorensen. Or the guy discovered in the secret room of the house that led to the prison time.

C'moooon. It was so apparent.

Very rarely do I find a writer and want to devour their entire catalogue, yet that's exactly what happened when I read Mexican Gothic.

Now, here we are, with Moreno-Garcia releasing a different kind of book into the wild.

There's this idea that once an artist establishes themselves, they need to strictly adhere to what the public knows of them or worry about upsetting or losing them. So when an author like Moreno-Garcia releases a very different book, it's a risk.

I'm glad she took this risk.

Velvet Was the Night is a neo-noir set in Mexico during the Mexican Dirty War. What was this, exactly? It was Mexico's branch of the Cold War, where the US backed the Mexican government's efforts to purge “radical” beliefs through your bog standard repression, violence and silencing. Leftist student and guerilla groups rose during these times and there were eruptions of violence stemming from subversive, government-funded groups trying to ensure leftist ideologies didn't take over their country.

If you saw the very good ‘Roma' you've seen what those looked like, but Velvet Was the Night comes from a much different perspective. Where Roma came from the view of a wealthy family and their maid during that time, this book plants the reader right in the middle of the conflict. We see two alternating POVs through the book: Elvis, a member of the government-funded group of young thugs, the Hawks, and Maite, a 30-year-old secretary who obsessively read romance comics and didn't really follow the news.

The contrasts couldn't be more stark if they tried. Maite was ignorant of what was happening, while Elvis was creating the news. Both were living as they were because of circumstance, not from conviction or belief. Yet, both end up in a tangled web surrounded by people full of conviction, and are forced to take sides.

Elvis doesn't seem to have a grasp on what these lefty students care about, just that ‘commies' are bad, and his job is to bust ‘em up, intimidate journalists and make sure nothing positive was written about the student protests, nor were there photos or any proof whatsoever. Because, look, that's how this goes, right? Remember back to Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 during the George Floyd protests? Where there was a mysterious umbrella-holding man in police tactical gear who smashed up an AutoZone attempting to start a riot, while onlookers filmed him and chased him away (into an actual precinct building)?

This is real stuff that happens. The Hawks were a real group that existed and this is what they did. Moreno-Garcia mentions in the afterward about her research, including declassified documents about the actions of the Hawks, their intent and the US govt propping them up with money, training and support.

Maite, on the other hand, waits for her romance comics to be released every week and to her, these things happening were just minor annoyances. They were the things she'd read about in the paper and think “how awful” without taking a side. Multiple times throughout the book she presents the safe narrative of events presented by their government. Guerilla fighters? No, they're terrorists. Peaceful protests from students? They were violent riots and the police and military were there just to keep them in line. What's relatable about Maite is we all know a Maite or two in our lives. Perhaps you, my dear reader, are a Maite. Life is hard enough, right? So you get lost in the minutiae of your own life, in your books or shows or movies, and the things happening around you are distant and strange.

When Maite's neighbor, Lenora, introduces herself and sets the stage for Maite's adventure, it's innocent enough. She's gotta get out of town and needs someone to check in on her cat. She'll be back on Sunday, Monday at the latest. Of course it's not that simple. Lenora is a photographer and has photographic proof of the Hawks not only existing, but causing a recent riot. It's a direct contrast with what the government and president have stated, the kind of stuff that could blow everything wide open.

Maite doesn't know this, though. She just knows there's a cat she has to feed and Lenora never came back. This leads Maite down the rabbit hole, so-to-speak, of checking in with Lenora's comrades, a smarmy and handsome photographer pal, journalists and even a fling with a wanna-be freedom fighter. All of a sudden, these distant events were her life and Maite has some serious questions.

Elvis is on a different path, but is heading toward a similar destination. Their group lives in relative secrecy, everyone working under a code name and a pal who got shot at the riot in question, never comes back. The leader of the Hawks, El Mago, is the kind of guy Elvis aspires to be, although there's friction there. He loves his rock music, books and having fun, it's just that life has taught him he needs to be hard and violent to get anything he deserves.

While Maite is undergoing her personal radicalization, Elvis is following her and finding himself drawn to her. There's nothing inherently special about her, in fact, she's dreadfully normal, but her taste in music, books and the way she carries herself is magnetic to him. Watching while she cavorts around with his enemies and entangles herself further into this web, question arise the more Elvis digs. El Mago is out for himself, he's told, and the Hawks were expendable to him as long as he can get ahead. Everything they're doing is built on a bed of lies. El Mago is a true believer in their cause, or is he? Is he just a violent sadist who wants power?

Both Maite and Elvis are forced to make difficult, life-altering choices based on their moral compasses, and it's not on the side of their government.

The plotting in this novel is tight, allowing some breathing room early on before the story unravels and the world shrinks in on itself. There are inevitabilities about Maite and Elvis and their shared fate, but each have very natural awakenings and problems they deal with. What we see is that people, even the blissfully ignorant or those led down the wrong path, when faced with moral, life-or-death decisions, are going to gravitate towards what may feel alien, but feels right to them.

I can't commend Moreno-Garcia enough for taking a risk like this and I very much look forward to her next one.

How do you take a very well written book with fantastic worldbuilding and great underlying concepts and bog it down? You whiff it on the plotting.

This is a well written, well researched book where so much thought went into building a realistic world, dripping with style and grime, and everything just works, that the plot remained on the backburner the entire time.

By the time we're in the final act of the story, it was almost like the author remembered “shit, this has to be going somewhere!” So it's a mad dash back to something from earlier in the book, then clumsily linking it to the middle of the book and viola, plot! I do this thing where I read through Goodreads reviews to get a feeling for what other readers are saying about a book, and once I slog through the bold text, GIFs and whatnot, it seems like I'm not the only one who noticed this. Some are far more forgiving and claim it was the intent, but ehh.

Writers can feel intent and when a plot is being rushed or cobbled together. Beukes was so immersed in this world she created that there was a struggle to give us a reason to be here, with these characters, in this setting. There are plenty of novels where they diverge from the original path, go off on side tangents and feel like they lose the plot completely, but they're also oozing with intent.

There were many subplots presented in the book that could've been the main plot, in fact, and it would've been a stronger book. Her boyfriend's whole plot? That was super interesting! Her sketchy job plot? That was interesting, too! Her ex the tabloid journo? That was pretty interesting! Instead, it turned to a throwaway set of antagonistic characters from one of the subplots and chose that as the hill to die on.

None of those characters were that fleshed out and while the last few chapters were exciting and well-written, there was this feel of an editor's hand (or many!) at play saying “Lauren, we need there to be a plot here.”

Trust me, I've done this before.

Since discovering Mexican Gothic I've run through all of Moreno-Garcia's catalog and, seeing this and anticipating her next book, it was a no-brainer. I'm not sure this one connected that well, though.

This one was in between. Technically a novella, it was short enough to be able to push through and told a simple, but effective story. Using genre tropes and her always on-point description, she's able to create a recognizable world within short order.

The lead character was where things suffered. This was a revenge story and the protagonist is bent on destroying her spurned lover. Everyone around her seems willing to help, but only because they're afraid of her. It creates a strange dynamic where you can understand why she's mad, but it doesn't make for enjoyable reading.

My biggest issue was with the ending. The ending redeems our characters, as endings tend to do, but our protagonist makes a decision that we, who spent the entire story understanding her motives and past through the narration, had no idea she was planning on doing. The ending was great, mind you. It redeemed the story for me, but it made the narration inconsistent, which was either a symptom of a novelist attempting to keep a story short by shearing off information or just intentionally omitting it for a surprise ending.

3.5 stars.

I enjoyed this for the most part. It was well written and engaging but took a while to get going, then struggled to stick the landing.

That's always tough, but the book faltered near the end. There were simply too many loose threads in play that needed to be tugged in and it detracted from any emotional payoff the ending had.

When a novelist has a breakthrough success, expectations are that the second book will either be a sequel or a book with nearly identical themes and style.

Morgenstern's style and prose are still here. The sense of wonder is as strong as it was in The Night Circus, but this book took a much different turn.

You'll see a lot of reviews frustrated this book wasn't Night Circus redux, or that the narrative style is nontraditional. You'll see accusations of “there's no plot!” But there clearly is.

Starless Sea is labyrinthian in a lot of ways, with Zachary Ezra Rawlins discovering a strange, secret book society based on the symbols of bees, keys and swords. There are meta narratives spun throughout, aside chapters that are a part of the books within this world that Zachary reads.

You're left to interpret much of what happens, but it was clear Zach fell into the narrative worlds he adored and lost himself along the way, unable to determine real from hyperreal. Much like Dante's trip through the underworld was punctuated by a writer he revered, Zach's trip through the Starless Sea is dominated by his strong feelings for Dorian, the writer of many of these tales.

He falls hard and fast for the mysterious Dorian, like in a fairy tale, then chases him through interwoven stories.

We're given a few glimpses into what could be seen as the “real,” which Zachary has to fight through and cast aside to find his own definition of real, or at least what he was comfortable with. There were multiple outcomes, still. Was he dead in a ditch? Had a breakdown and fell into a romance with Dorian? Or did he actually disappear into the Starless Sea to become one of these characters?

His friend Kat served as an anchor to reality, only for her herself to potentially get lost in the meta narrative, although it's not entirely clear.

There's a lot to digest here and I eagerly await Morgenstern's next work. Be prepared for this to be “not for you,” though.

I'm still ruminating on how to express my feelings on this book. Largely in part to me thoroughly enjoying it from start to finish.

There are very few books that nail atmosphere as well as this. An ethereal, surrealist circus, plopped into the middle of reality, while two rival magicians pit students against each other in a mysterious challenge against each other.

While this challenge that happens inside of the confines of this aesthetically unique and cobbled-together-through-magic circus, the core focus isn't these characters in conflict with each other, but instead in conflict with very real concepts. Their respective father figures force them into a potentially dangerous competition, removing their free will, just to settle an old score between a man and his father figure.

Lots of themes run through the veins of this novel, all woven in with a sense of wonder. You watch the characters learn, grow and become their own people with thoughts and ideas that don't align with the parameters of their challenge or the expectations placed upon them. Then there's the idea of collateral damage of the entire circus being merely a platform for this challenge, with real human beings pulled into the orbit of it and potentially tethered to the circus and the challenge without their consent.

It takes the growth of both Marco and Celia to see not just their feelings for each other, but for the wellbeing of the people around them for this growth to happen, something neither of their father figures could figure out.

Very engrossing, well-written book that I can't recommend enough.

I'm deeply conflicted about this book and if I'd recommend it to someone else or not.

Beneath the surface here, there's a story about a man deeply conflicted after the death of his family. Our unnamed protagonist, or, “the writer,” confines himself to a literal purgatory within a decaying city in an abandoned hotel overlooking this dead city.

When faced with signs of life and rebirth, he turns inward, although he's bound by his duty as the city's lone reporter to document what he sees. From a woman and child, a politician, a gardener and other signs of life in a place he'd confined himself to under the idea of withering away with it until his demise, it's difficult to not see glimmers of hope through the dried chaparral.

Whatever the catastrophe facing this city and the world at large are remain unexplained, vague and at times, eye-roll-worthy with how blunt they are, metaphorically. Even as someone who agrees humanity has irrevocably damaged the planet and we're cruising towards climate disaster while refusing to take our collective foot off the gas for long enough to consider the outcome, it felt clumsy and forced.

This was a world that couldn't see beyond what it knew and never considered anything else. An apocalypse in slow-motion that got close to saying something about how to deal with it, but seemed gun shy.

The changes and growth of the lead character are subtle, so subtle they can easily be missed, but they are there. The plot doesn't have insurmountable odds to overcome and there's no hero. That's okay. There's no great awakening in our writer, or change of heart, just, like I said, a glimmer of hope he might change while the people around him are the ones moving in the positive direction.

Nothing better than a buncha scuzzbags doing scuzzbag stuff, right?

Comics are what they are. Short snippets of a story that go by in a flash. What impressed me with this was the worldbuilding. Things were familiar enough to where I'm immediately filling in blanks about this universe and unique enough to exist on their own.

Looking forward to the rest.

Like the rest of the Murderbot stories, this was a nice, fun and short read. There wasn't a ton of narrative heavy lifting going on here, as in this was a mostly isolated story.

If you were expecting the story of Murderbot to progress this wasn't the book to do that. Murderbot gets swept up into a mysterious death on the station and helps solve the case.

There were times when the plot felt thin and a bit too breezy. While the villainous GrayCis was mentioned numerous times, their looming threat felt very distant.

A worthwhile read if you're invested in the series, but nothing new.

This book was... Sort of a slog to get through?

Some of Hammett's other books (you know the ones) are iconic and definitely worth reading. Red Harvest? I'm not so sure. He plays around with this idea of the hardboiled detective and the allure for most reviewers and advocates for the book seems to be that it's “really hardboiled,” which I guess just means insanely violent?

Detective shows up to a small city riddled with crime and corruption, gets hired by one of the people who made it that way to ‘clean it up,' and finds himself becoming the driver of endless violence and death. He worries about himself starting to enjoy it and things are only resolved in a sense that he got blackout drunk/stoned and didn't kill the woman he sorta liked?

With quite literally almost 100 years of distance from when this book was released, this trope of someone pitting the baddies against each other to survive being done a lot (better in some cases) since then, plus reading it with modern sensibilities, this book is just eh. The protagonist wasn't super likeable and served more as a vehicle to get from action scene to action scene. He served as the audiences eyes and ears for the spectacle of endless car chases, gun fights, brawls and heists.

There were what I'd call “third act issues” in this, as well, where it just felt like it dragged and whatever the actual plot was seemed muddy and lost in all of the blood. If your idea of “hardboiled” is not just an antihero, but one that doesn't seem to exist outside of his violence and nothing but nonstop destruction it's the book for you. If you're looking for the antihero and violence with something more in it, this'll probably not be the book for you.

SI's writing style continues to evolve with each work and I'm looking forward to the series attached to this story.

I feel like this story relies pretty heavily on knowing Devon already, which will make this good for newer readers and perhaps harder to penetrate for newer ones. It serves as a good glimpse into Devon's personal life and stuff before her adventures to Mars, while introducing readers to Lem.

Nerys was clearly the antagonist here and while there are definitely people in real life that suck like Nerys, the character still feels like a composite of the “well-intentioned liberal” that considers “wokeness” to be a passing trend and will follow along with a wink and a nudge and can't see people for who they really are.

This is a book that is almost impossible to review.

It's full of imagination and good concepts, which is evident by how influential it has been, but there's just something about this book that didn't fully click for me. The narrative jumps back-and-forth between characters through the lead character jumping heads, so-to-speak. There are a lot of “tech” concepts in the book that Gibson sort of just made up.

I remember reading in an interview that he had zero understanding of the tech involved (because this was before commercial internet, some of this stuff still existed, though) and decided to wing it. Like most good science fiction, though, he was able to project what he thought humans in the future would create and... he wasn't entirely wrong, was he? My biggest holdup is that the lead character, Case, doesn't really have much going for him. Because you're jumping between himself, a construct of himself and Molly's consciousness, the reader ends up only getting to know most of the characters on the surface level.

While Case may have some connection with Linda, it's hard to visualize it since we see so little of it and get only a broad sense of how Case feels about her. He seems more engrossed in the mysterious Molly.

Essentially, this novel gets caught up in the concepts, imagery and how cool it is while making some sacrifices when it comes to narrative clarity and creating fleshed out characters.

There's a lot to say about this book. I went from enjoying it to not enjoying before landing on very much liking it.

Throughout reading this, I couldn't separate it from the atmosphere of the Pedro Costa film, Casa de Lava, which was also about an isolated island, death and isolation. While they were both very different, they align mood-wise quite well.

I noticed a lot of western talk about the book centered on it being “Orwellian,” a term I've grown to loathe in its overuse. I'm not sure this book was about big, sweeping statements or warnings about society as much as it was about the concept and process of creating art and coping with trauma.

Focusing on the “memory police” themselves doesn't quite connect the book's main narrative with the sub-narrative of the novel the main character was writing.

The novel was a woman who was defined by her typing and relationship with her abusive, controlling typing teacher until she lost herself completely. The main narrative was a woman living on a dystopian island who's entire existence was tethered to two men; the first an old man that was a family friend and a father figure, the second her editor, who ran away from his family to live in her basement to avoid this “memory police.” The relationship is different but... Sort of isn't, too. She's disassociating from the world around her but he's the “captive” of her fading memories who seems to legitimately care for her and wants her to be what she was before, which she cannot do. He's living in a small, hidden room in her home, while the character in her book was living in a hidden room above a church without her voice.

The main character's last remaining thing is her voice after the old man is gone.

These relationships with men seem to be the binding threads to me, moreso than jackboots taking things away. R won't let her move on, the typing instructor only wanted to violate her until he found a new toy. It's easy to read the typing teacher as a part of the publishing industry, elevating a “fresh, young female voice,” controlling it until there's nothing left, then replacing her voice with another to repeat the cycle.

The role of the protag's mother can't be discounted, either. R wishes her to explore that relationship and the loss of her mother, who left behind memories meant just for her, but had to be interpreted by R. After they find the last of her mother's gifts and she gives the lemon candies to the old man, it sort of seals off a part of her history.

Yeah, like I said, lots to think about.

Really wanted to love this book but it didn't click. Smooth read and reasonably crafted, there was just this cold indifference from any of the characters, making it harder to latch onto any of them.

If I were forced to dig for thematic elements, it's ghosts of the past and our own mistakes haunting us and how the fates of all the characters were interwoven by a ponzi scheme a la Madoff.

Vincent was as close as we got to a relatable protagonist, but even then parts of her story and personality were omitted to build to what was, I'll admit, a very well-written ending.

There's a strong undercurrent of isolation and feeling adrift in here that helps keep everything together.

There's a lot about this book to love, but it feels like it's not quite there yet.

The character of Kev feels fleshed out and realized, while on the other hand Ella does not. The opening of the book, which follows Ella, is incredible, before switching to Kev. The idea behind it is to highlight Ella's powers before jumping into Kev, who is in the wrong place at the wrong time while the wrong skin color.

While the book jumps around a lot to work within the framework of seeing trauma of other characters through the eyes of both Ella and Kevin, I've seen others state it made the book difficult to read, but I didn't think that was much of an issue. After it happens a few times it becomes clear what's happening.

The biggest, glaring issue here is a real lack of defined characters beyond Kev. Ella feels so strong early on and crumples under the weight of Kevin, his incarceration and his experiences.

There's a lot of parts of this book that are intentional and done incredibly well, which only highlights the parts that feel unfinished. This book has a lot to say about being black in America, the school-to-prison-pipeline, policing, criminal justice and much more. The ending was good but could have been much more effective if there was more to cling onto or more of a feeling for Kev or Ella. The characters spend so much time jumping around into the memories of others that we, the readers, can't ever get grounded enough or invested beyond parts of Kevin's journey.

A short, rather meditative novel that had a lot going for it.

This book is rich with metaphor, making it hard to put down. It's sort of about a beekeeper in Northern Africa dealing with a very topical invasion from murder hornets, but there's a lot more going on than just that.

The Ardent Swarm is about change, as scary and big of a topic as that is. Everyone is promising change to the people in his small village, but that change has little impact on them. When their dictator was overthrown they didn't even know it as their village is without electricity or many modern amenities. Both political parties come into town to promise they'll get to elect a new leader, only for the ultra-conservative, fundamentalist faction to breeze into town bearing gifts including food, water and clean clothes. Not just a little, but a lot.

The catch? Their idea for the world is hardline and wishes to halt progress.

That's where the bees come into play. A swarm of murder hornets is introduced and Sidi must cope with this new, unwelcomed and deadly intrusion. The reader gets an inside view of how the fundamentalists operate and wish to lie, cheat and steal their way into unquestionable power that fights the tides of change. Of course, the leaders aren't living the life they claim to, either, which we find out from a rather... colorful scene in the desert with honey, asses and wads of cash.

Ultimately, it's about the people in Sidi's community and his family helping him and learning about a swarm in Japan that can deal with murder hornets but forming a bubble around the hornets and superheating them to death. After all his work to rid himself of the murder hornets, he finds himself needing to embrace the chaos they sow to fend off murderous fundamentalist soldiers.

This is one of those books that's hard to summarize.

There's not much meat on the bones when it comes to story or characters. There's not much that changes or really pulls you in. For some readers, the idea of reading a page or two description of a strange, remote city will be enough to stoke their imaginations.

The book is Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in a conversation. Khan has tasked Polo with visiting his empire and reporting back his findings, even though he has an atlas with each city meticulously detailed via images already. Polo perhaps never leaves or goes to these places, instead tells tales of far away lands that may or may not exist. A good number of them have women's names.

That's it. There's no conflict, very little dialogue and only really the two characters. While short, this book took me a while to read. The first 50 or so pages flew by, then the rest crawled by. In a way, it reminded me of the first time I read Moby-Dick in college. That whole middle section about the whale? I skimmed and skipped my way through it to finish the book in time, knowing full well it had its purpose. For a lot of this book I found myself skimming, knowing I could always return to it later and perhaps will take more away from it when I'm in a mood to read meticulous descriptions of strange details.

Not to say the descriptions aren't great. A particular favorite of mine was the city suspended by a net, everything strung up and hanging, knowing eventually the net would break and the city would be gone.

There's a lot of artistry in this book, even if there isn't much story. There's a lot of metaphor to be gleaned from it as well. Khan, a conqueror who rules over a vast kingdom that he'll never get to see or know, to the point where Polo admits to most of his descriptions just being of his home city he misses dearly, or that he's making everything up to appease Khan. Still, Khan holds out hope. Polo is a captive who wishes to see these far off lands and can't, while Khan is a conqueror who supposedly has all of these things at his disposal but will never visit them.

There are times, especially in the chapters with women's names, where it seems abundantly clear it's very much about a woman. The woman he can't penetrate deeper into the heart of and only knows the exteriors of. Gee, wonder what that's about. There's also talk about death, from cities of the dead, cities with dualities or that are broken up into two, Khan and Polo muse if they're alive or dead and there's even a chess board that has irregularities that Polo is able to explain to a curious Khan.

Like I said, there's a lot to unpack in this dense little tome about the world, human nature, love and more, you just have to be in the right mood for it.