Tess

This was a sweet little story and I loved the main character's voice, but I think it needed to be either shorter or longer. Near the end it felt like it was kind of losing focus because there are so many side characters  for a book of this length. Most of it is kind of cozy and charming and then there's a terrible event that gets maybe 3 pages devoted to it near the end. Left me feeling a little weird.

I loved the first two books in this series, but this one unfortunately disappointed me. The massive time skips made it feel like reading a summary a lot of the time, and the book's length felt unnecessary - a lot of things happened that didn't really seem to be that important and a lot of time was wasted restating the themes in case we missed them. A lot of the characters I liked in the earlier books (especially Shae and Wen) felt diminished, relegated into uninteresting roles and this book seemed way more invested in upholding the clan structure and nuclear family as solely positive forces than the previous books.

Fascinating time travel novel with great characters, use of place and language, and mind bending meta elements. Dark and sad and funny and hopeful all at once, and full of characters I'd love to meet. Some parts were a bit confusing to me (what was up with the cat??) but if you can handle that I highly recommend it.

Absolutely nothing about this worked for me. The humour wasn't funny, the characters had no personality, the plot twist was ridiculous. A lot of it felt like it was written to be quoted on twitter.

I thought the setting was fascinating, and the way the thought processes of the characters navigating the city are handled was really well done. However the actual mystery wasn't that interesting or surprising, and I felt like the story kind of fell apart once more information about Breach was revealed.

This book has a fascinating structure, some really beautiful imagery and some striking set pieces, but it's also an overlong slog and a lot of it felt off putting. It somehow both feels timeless and extremely dated. I can definitely see the influence on other books that I've enjoyed. I'm glad I read it but I don't think I'd ever read it again.

Somehow despite the short length, this book felt just a bit too long to me - when it hit it was incisive and really made me think, but other parts felt a little pointless. Overall good if you want to be depressed about your job.

I've been wanting to read this one for a while and it did not disappoint: nasty characters in nasty situations as everything spins out of control. It got a little repetitive for me near the end and the kindle edition had some annoying OCR errors but overall highly recommended to anyone who likes weird horror.

I enjoyed a few stories in this collection (particularly Self Care, Estranged Children of Storybook Houses, and I Am A Beautiful Bug!) but the more poem-like pieces didn't really interest me and there were a lot of distracting usage errors in the kindle version.

Very preachy and unpleasant writing, a lot of mean spirited railing against straw libfems the author imagines on Instagram. The #MeToo plotline is poorly integrated and resolves in a stupid, nothing way.

I could see some of what this book was trying to accomplish, but I just didn't like it. The writing style was bland and felt self-conscious, always having to state everything directly instead of trusting the reader. The characters' relationships felt weird and the plot felt kind of half baked. It seemed like the author kept forgetting that the main character had broken fingers.

A really original and beautifully told story. The structure takes some getting used to but it's ultimately worth it.

Interesting perspective on arctic exploration from the Inuit point of view. I like that the author always names both the storyteller and the translator. Unfortunately the kindle edition had a lot of formatting issues and most of the images were removed.

This was a really interesting book, a sort of auto-fiction/historical fiction combination about telling stories and being interpreted and pathologized. I liked it a lot.

I thought this was an interesting concept, but it wound up being way too pop-history for me. Each chapter features a story about a specific woman (with varying levels of connection to alcohol culture, there were a couple extremely tenuous links that felt like “diversity hires” unfortunately) interspersed with buzzfeed listicle style writing about other things happening globally during that time period. The footnotes are not citations (there's a bibliography at the back, but specific facts aren't cited directly) they're just more unfunny “snark” and some of the chapters (especially the more modern years) feel uncomfortably preachy. Also acting like Hammurabi invented misogyny whole cloth is extremely silly.

The different types of alcohol and how they're made were interesting though.

This was an interesting portrait of a tumultuous time, but the pov character (and most of the other characters honestly) was almost unbearable to read about, and the ending felt like it kind of petered out. 

Charming vignettes in the life of a cat owner, drawn in Junji Ito's trademark horror style. Very cute and relatable.

There were some interesting points and turns of phrase but overall I found the characters' views on almost everything kind of weird and annoying. Very off putting descriptions.

As soon as it was revealed that one of the pov characters in this book has amnesia it had a long road ahead to appeal to me, and it never really got there. The reason for the amnesia seems silly once it's revealed (and the mechanism of what's causing the cycles is super unclear anyway so why do all that), the romances are superficial, and most of the characters pretty much only have one trait. It's unclear why any of them like each other enough to justify what's happening in the plot. There's a huge section in the middle devoted to a fantasy world walking around quest. Most characters sound the same and speak in a way that feels designed to be quoted. I think the basic concept could have been something cool but also reading this felt like a waste of my time.

This is a sweet middle grade book about a girl finding the courage to be herself. I liked that the romance wasn't too over the top, more about self-discovery. The voice was charming (the constant referencing of the fateful Darth Vader costume was so funny to me) and while not exactly a retelling, the parallels to Romeo and Juliet help to make the play more relatable to a younger audience. 

This was a pretty wild thriller about three kids who try to blackmail a killer after witnessing a murder. Despite the situation the kids mostly felt believable, and I had a lot of fun with it overall. A few of the twists and turns felt a bit silly but it all came together by the end.

This was an interesting book about the founding and evolution of Against Me! set against the backdrop of Laura Jane Grace's journals from those times. Very honest examination of things she's (understandably) not talked about much publicly in the past - illustrates pretty clearly that mindset of how your whole life will be fixed if you fix just one thing and then it turns out that you have multiple problems. Complaining about punks heckling her shows got a bit old though.

This was a quick read with a breezy, conversational style I liked, and the setting and most of the characters are pretty charming. 

The plot and the main character were just really, really bad. The protagonist, Maggie, hates classics and makes no effort to learn about or sell them and then is disappointed when no one buys them. She has a little bet with her boyfriend where she reads a book he recommends and he does an activity she chooses, and while he at least tries everything she doesn't take her part seriously at all and doesn't even read one of the books. She lies constantly, including in a cover letter for a job she applied for (about her availability!!! Girl if they hire you that's the one thing they need to be true!), things that affect the livelihoods of people she claims to care about (including stealing something from her boyfriend), falsifies her sales reports at work and breaks into her boss's office to blackmail him about his grandfather. No one stays mad at her for long about this, which is absurd. 

No idea how the “society” that runs the businesses in town was supposed to work, since it seemed like one guy just calling random shots and not a board or anything. No place in the history of the world would operate like this.

Also this is more pedantic but the author apparently majored in English and this bugged me: the bookstore didn't carry any books published after 1968 for Reasons (for a guy who wanted to make money the boss was really into making it hard to sell anything) and another character (who likes classics) implies that the only books by Black authors that it's possible for them to carry are slave narratives. I can buy Maggie not knowing about the Harlem Renaissance because she's stupid but Malcolm? Come on.

A darkly funny horror collection, the stories mostly feature Chinese immigrants in North America (though there are a couple of stories about men and/or set in China). I loved the concept of most of the stories but a few of them felt like they didn't really go anywhere and by the end of the collection the tone felt a little repetitive.

Favourites: Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality, Furniture, Sinking Houses

I think this was a really courageous thing to publish but the book itself is not organized very well - it's transcripts of therapy sessions and some seemingly unrelated short essays - and the psychiatrist honestly didn't seem very helpful aside from prescribing medications.