Tess
I picked this up because of the cool looking cover, after seeing it recommended as “feminist body horror” on Likewise. So if you are like me I will save you some time: it's not feminist or body horror. The cover is cool though.
The main character is a woman but she hates and/or belittles all other women (except her grandmother, who is a complete non-entity in this story) and thinks she's unique as a woman due to her misanthropy. The book makes a big deal about it being sexist that stories require women to have trauma to be villains when men can just do what they want, but then gives Maeve villain trauma. The romance is all “oh he was so much bigger than me” straight people crap.
Several quotes and entire scenes are lifted whole cloth from American Psycho but nothing interesting is done with that at all.
I really have to wonder who this book was for. I feel like it was somehow simultaneously too much and too tame, like it's not extreme horror because pretty much everything “extreme” happens off screen, but too much “extreme” content is implied for this to appeal to normies. Baffling book.
Some of the Halloween music trivia was interesting, so 2 stars.
I was excited for this book, but it was just not good. It is written in an extremely bland style where everyone's motivations and emotions are just laid out for you in a list, character relationships feel stilted and weird, and the whole thing reads very immature to me. I was genuinely shocked at the reveal that the main character is 25. The plots within plots are not interesting (I kept forgetting she was even working for the other group until someone else brought it up), and every character is exactly who they appear to be upon first meeting so none of the court intrigue is all that intriguing. A lot of plots feel like they get dropped as soon as they might complicate anything for anyone important.
The descriptions of living under occupation are visceral and feel “real” but the understanding of how empire works and what it needs to sustain itself is just not there. The way the Imperator as an institution is characterized and the description of how this empire supposedly runs are insulting to the reader.
I enjoyed parts of this, but I always want to like Grady Hendrix's books more than I end up doing. This was way too long and felt like it spent a lot of time spinning its wheels, the characters felt like they were mostly acting however it was needed to keep the plot moving, and a few plot points strained credulity even keeping in mind it's a horror novel. The anarchist puppet collective putting on a show critical of the Bush admin in the immediate post 9/11 era to third graders and then a group of people dressed as clowns with a puppet trash one of the teachers' houses and no one ever reacts to this or talks about it?? This would have been bigger than the killer clown craze in 2016.
There's a lot to like about this book but my overall experience with it was just average. Most of the storyline really worked for me (except Yessie's little field trip near the end, which just felt kind of silly and out of place) and I liked having points of view from characters in different parts of the system. However there is one character who feels SO author-voice to me, like just halting the plot for lectures directly from the author, and a couple of the points of view were written in ways that felt borderline racist (especially the way the Mexican character's accent is written out).
This book was fine, it captured the voices of the teens and (most of) the internet culture of the era really well, but I do think it fell into its own trap a bit in over focusing on the perpetrators without a lot of self awareness, and a few things about the internet culture of the time are inaccurate in a way that annoyed me (especially the assertion about ao3 because I think the truth actually adds to the book's point). The twist is so obvious from pretty much the beginning that the epilogue feels like a joke.
This book was fine, but overall it was disappointing to me. The characters all felt very one note and unrealistic (Julia's actions were at least interesting but her reasons for doing them were pretty stupid), aside from Julia's murders the gore almost all takes place off-page or is barely described (why else am I reading this?) and the prose was so overwrought and goofy. There is a part near the end where Barker wants to convey that a dead character is possessed by one of the cenobites so that character turns to Kirsty and essentially just says, “I'm a cenobite!”
I thought the concept was kind of neat but the story was just not good. If the ships are limited to imprinting on one person based on DNA then why are animals permitted on board in the first place? The ships were kind of cool but I think there were too many characters for a short story to sustain. There was one character who just announces that she's trans and then doesn't do anything else, there's a character the pov character is really judgmental of because she has allergies (??), a guy whose only character trait is old, a guy who had pet crabs, a guy I forgot about until he committed suicide, a guy who ATE SOMEONE'S PET and has tattoos or whatever and the main character, who has a comically stupid backstory and makes the worst decisions imaginable. What was the point of this?
I picked this up because I loved this author's middle grade series as a kid, and I remember liking Daughter of Witches, but this just was not that good. Very generic heroic fantasy, lots of wandering around (not surprised to find out parts of this were based on a tabletop campaign), too many deus ex machina to shake a stick at, and an out of nowhere romance. Blindingly goofy political system.
Had that annoying thing I hate in fantasy where there's a badguy race where they're all just evil for no reason. At one point it looks like you're going to get a point of view from a Lithmern character but it turns out he's a slave from a goodguy race who gets a big deal made over him and then pretty much immediately dies. Huh.
I really liked this book. The writing is really charming (which feels weird to say with this type of content) and the fairy tale atmosphere worked really well for the most part. New York and its history were well utilized. There is one plot point in the middle of the book that I thought was kind of silly (the part at Rikers - considering later discussions that was all absurdly easy and felt kind of pointless) but overall fantastic.
I feel like there's a sort of tone you expect from a novel titled “You Sexy Thing” in a series titled “Disco Space Opera” that has a GBBO comp on the cover, and this book does not have that tone. It is extremely dark and graphic, as well as staggeringly cruel to one of the characters for seemingly no reason. Most of the characters feel like cardboard cutouts (the Firefly references are a mile a minute) and traits seem to spring up as required by the narrative. Most of the characters have no initiative at all and are simply shunted here and there by the plot. It's only getting 2 stars because I thought the cooking stuff was fun and the ship at least had a personality.
I really liked that sort of listless feeling of being in your twenties that this book evokes: you're an adult but still really learning what that means, you're having this new sort of adult to adult relationship to your parents, and I feel like that feeling was captured really well. I also loved the sense of place, and the nostalgia and love for a place that was changing.
Unfortunately I felt like the relationship stuff was overall really boring, especially right at the end. All that seemed like it came out of nowhere.
I thought this was a super fun horror novel overall. It was kind of a mixture of a noir crime thriller and a more traditional horror story, and it was really at its best when it was more focused on the crime and human drama with the horror in the background. The characters and their points of view were really well done, where you could see what one character knew that others didn't and how that influenced their actions. When it really hits the fan, unfortunately, it became more unfocused and felt a little boring.
I found the writing style could get a little precious and overly stylistic at times and it was sort of weird how few characters of colour there were considering how heavily racial justice protests play into the plot, but overall I liked it and I'm looking forward to the next one.
This is a book of short stories entered in a competition where all stories are 1,000 words and must adhere to a two-word prompt: a character and an object/situation. It was interesting to see what people did with their prompts (especially people who got a bit of an odd one like “TV psychic”) and the array of genres was really wide.
However, most of the stories felt pretty forgettable and there were a few embarrassing copy errors, including a story that appears to have been printed with the wrong prompt.
Top favourites: And One Hard One by Ezra Fox, A Hook Called Starlight by Bryan Arneson
I really liked the beginning of this book, about the viciousness and infighting at a prestigious ballet academy, but as more and more plots were added it kind of fell apart for me.
Laure has a lot of pre-existing relationships that are described (the strained relationship with dad, the best friendship with Coralie) that don't really manifest on the page, and the new relationships are also really shallow. She also makes a bunch of ridiculous decisions that feel like they're supposed to make her seem cool (stealing a man's watch in public as both a scholarship student who needs to keep her rep and the only Black girl in the room? Come on) and the antagonist reveal comes with some cool imagery but no surprises.
We are told the whole time that magic has consequences but it's all pretty vague and we don't really see any. The language is overwrought and ridiculous. Terrible romance.