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sometimes i wish i could shut off copyeditor mode when i read because otherwise i notice shit like "webcomic episode 4" being timestamped later in the day than "webcomic episode 5" when they're clearly chronological, and then i'm mildly annoyed. but despite "messy/anxious white MC meets magical butch of asian descent" immediately reminding me of casey mcquiston's one last stop (which i started the year with), the dialogue was definitely on the better side here. i didn't even feel like shaking any of the characters by the shoulders, which probably means the miscommunication and misunderstandings common in this genre weren't as offensive as they could've been, and i thought ellie's anxieties were portrayed fairly gracefully (though some in my book club found the constantness grating).
club gripes included loose ends, angry brown tertiary characters, inheritance tax, and only surface-level mentions of korean heritage. i was stuck around the 75-80% progression mark for weeks for some reason and i wasn't really sure what that meant, besides delaying getting into the conflict pages (or prioritizing watching exciting new episodes of television, ahem arcane).
stray note: the author commissioned some gorgeous story-related art from venessa vida kelley that had us wishing that had been the cover instead.
oh, i just don't know about this one. this was a book club read for spooky month, it didn't keep my interest enough for me to finish it before the meeting, and then book club meeting came and went, and i still took forever to finish it afterward. this was disjointed (at first i thought it was the audiobook narration and swapped to hard copy, but no, it was the choppy and overly convoluted writing), and weird shit would happen without giving me a reason to care why. so there's a racist old white lady haunting the house, and all the food is rotting on purpose, and colonialism is bad, and the MC is bi and closeted, cool. i guess we're supposed to root for the MC to make it out of there intact? was that it? if we were supposed to have takeaways about rekindling family connections among the various threads in the novel, that was not executed well.
Contains spoilers
i somehow ended up simultaneously reading two books by debut authors about bi, viet american teenage girls visiting vietnam (the other being she is a haunting) and i think maybe i shouldn't have because i started to get small details mixed up between the two titles despite the different genres. there are orchids in front of this house, hydrangeas in front of the other. this mother works long hours in a nail salon, this other mother used to sleep alone in one. loads of food references in both. whoops.
a bánh mì for two is pretty fluffy, maybe a tad saccharine; the book itself has a flowery pink fore-edge design that reflects its vibe. the story ends up basically being a series of cute dates between the MCs, with a premise vaguely tacked on. the surface-level family and culture details are generally fine, but the other ones are fairly thin: lan works her family's bánh mì stand that regularly has long lines that "wrap around the neighborhood," but vivi happens to stop by one morning (four chapters later) and it's slow enough that lan just leaves right then and there (and there's no indication má or triết are also present to hold down the fort, but it's also made a big deal that lan works hard so her mom doesn't have to, and the cart is their whole livelihood, and so on). vivi and cindy somehow end up doing their first semester of college abroad (which is already strange and unusual) but are only ever really stationed at their dorm that's right across from lan's bánh mì cart. they don't go to class, except that one time vivi can't stay out too late because she has "class in the morning" and that other time she supposedly attends courses but can't focus all day. and i have to really squint to accept that vivi ends up in a completely different location for study abroad than she told her parents because in this world, you can avoid alerting them while having them sign a bunch of paperwork, going to the embassy, getting a student visa, and using the same SIM card (i assume)/calling them from abroad without incurring roaming costs. the whole lying subplot i didn't pay too much attention to as a result. am i an overthinking party pooper? why do i do this to YA novels? should i stop reading YA, or have the last bunch i've read just been unrealistic in the name of fiction?
my biggest gripe was how the author seemed to have scenes visualized in her head, but often failed to give stage directions, so the characters became unmoored from their gorgeous surroundings. one second they're having a conversation at the café, the next they're on a motorbike with no transition. vivi fidgets with the spoon. (what spoon? the one in lan's egg coffee?) lan walks into her house sopping wet and dripping puddles everywhere after somehow riding a scooter through knee-high stormwater, then sits on some furniture and flops onto her mattress. (or you do you, i guess.) they take their shoes off on wet concrete on a rooftop and fall sideways onto a presumably dry picnic blanket(?). my editor brain would do this: instead of going straight from dialogue in the café to "i help vivi hop onto my motorbike, our fingers brushing against each other," i'd change it to "when i help vivi hop onto my motorbike, our fingers brush against each other." way less jarring, and a small hint that we've jumped forward in time. i'm not saying i need to have my hand held as a reader to imagine—just try not to give me whiplash.
finally, i really don't know about stuffing nearly all of the book's conflict and reconciliation into the last fifty pages, complete with contrived lovers' quarrel. it was kind of a relief to have the inevitable all out in the open at last, but it felt rushed and over too soon. some pretty big life decisions get made in just a short chapter or two.
i definitely wanted to like this! too bad it was disjointed and hard to follow in parts. my notes above don't even really get into the "major" family arcs/character development. i was somewhat aware things were moving along in a certain direction but the reading experience just felt so scattered.
dnf as the first couple rotations of POVs with character backstories weren't that compelling to me. i even tried listening to the audiobook on 1.25x speed while also reading to keep me on track (at least the narrator's use of accents helped distinguish the cast a bit?), and finally gave up and very roughly skimmed the rest of the book, only slowing down for scenes where emilie and josefa got stuck in tight spaces together, inches apart, or were practicing calligraphy on each other (wow romantic).
eh, i don't know. i was thinking i'm just not in the right mood for this right now, but the last heist book i tried was portrait of a thief, which was similarly ambitious yet lacking. i guess outlining character motivations and skill sets for this kind of plot—and not relying too heavily on suspension of disbelief—is pretty difficult. i still plan on giving adiba jaigirdar's other works a try, likely after rani choudhury must die is released.
if you liked these, you'll like this: disney's mulan (1998), monstrous regiment by terry pratchett, and the legend of the condor heroes franchise (teenage me was mildly obsessed with one of the television adaptations and even accumulated most if not all of the manhua volumes, even though to this day i still haven't read either the wuxia novel or the manhua, oops). anything with a roving band of bantering adventurers in wartime, really, but especially if loyalties aren't straightforward.
this novella came up as a passing mention in book club a little while back, and now that i've read it, i'm compelled to hunt down more of zen cho's works. maybe spirits abroad, first, then black water sister? (after i make my way through my current library stack.)
stray thoughts:
- it baffles me how anyone could think this took place in tang dynasty china (per a zen cho interview in locus). even if it's got fantasy elements, it's very specifically southeast asian.
- i meant to write a bit about the english translation for the night of baba yaga and how i thought sam bett did a good job of deciding what to translate, what to put in romaji, and what to give footnotes for, but even though this wasn't translated, i had similar thoughts about the use of malay phrases (and some sentence structure quirks in dialogue) throughout. i had google in my pocket, but most meanings i could pick up from context. not all writers do this well, so i wanted to make note of it.
- it was a quick and relatively easy read, but i still kept going over the same paragraphs again and again, brain empty. not sure what to make of that.
- like my previous read, this is definitely queer but i really hesitate to drill down more or call any character this or that. i'm cringing at some goodreads reviews that assign identities to some of the cast; god forbid we have nuance or context?
my media consumption has unintentionally converged: i just recently watched both volumes of kill bill followed by its inspiration lady snowblood, and yakuza 0 is next up on my games backlog (like a dragon, the JRPG title with kasuga, is the only one i've played in the series). so that should give you an idea of the book content: a bloody action thriller, with severed limbs, tons of misogyny and gross sexual violence, but gratifying physical hand-to-hand combat. it's a short read (translated from what i assume is a light novel) and pages go by fast due to the font size and line spacing. the plot probably fits into a 30-minute tv episode; it's compact and deliberate, with not much to trim off.
i don't want to say too much here because i think the less you know the more you'll enjoy the read (if you're OK with the content warnings above), but i was definitely glad i had a library hard copy to easily flip back to earlier pages. the book jacket synopsis also doesn't allude to this format outside of one word that you'll only figure out the meaning of towards the end, but it's dual POV with a wicked cool confluence.
this has a sapphic asian author and it was probably on my radar from some preview list of upcoming queer releases, and one of the marketing blurbs on the back alludes to it being "part poignant queer love story," but i think that's overselling it. the queerness is more... nebulous, understated. it's got certain themes that will make some audiences go 👀 and i think you'll root for the protagonists like you would for sook-hee and hideko in the handmaiden, but it's a far cry from being a gay romance.
been following vel's rarepair fanart shitpost account for a while now and had to pick this up after learning it was based on the overwatch league (OWL) fandom. i think vicky starts out a bit too meek for comedic effect (she can't even tell her brother what food she hates?) but i was pleasantly surprised at the groundedness of her growth trajectory and how the backstories of/with her teammates and brother played into that (particularly opal's). also, the esports setting felt very true to my own experience both as a gamer who used to scrim OW at least twice a week and an OWL follower, and i thought the details about being a woman in competitive, team-based pvp—and gaming more generally, but i think team-based pvp, ranked systems, and competitive play do have specific toxicities to them—were well integrated across multiple characters without being heavy-handed.
definitely shelf-worthy. i think some parts could have been slightly less goofy (small scenes with eric, maybe, and some panels with anime/manga visual gags?) and stuff with virgil wrapped up a tad too quickly even though i quite liked the eventual confrontation. minor nitpicks, really, for a coming-of-age story that was really well put together.
this glorified wellesley fanfic was mildly entertaining (as someone who also went to a massachusetts historically women's college, but a generation ago, while we were still having the same conversations about gender and sexuality but a little before they were called “historically” women's colleges) but not anything mind-blowing. i was honestly ready to give up about a third of the way through because sophie and jo's juvenile (literally; felt like i was witnessing junior high schoolers, not college first-years) online feud was so exhausting to read, and it felt like it went on forever. i also listened a little bit to the audiobook and i think that didn't help my impression of sophie being mad annoying/holier-than-thou. eventually her friends tell her to get over herself and she somewhat improves, though, so thank you side characters, even if your personalities all kind of melded into one amorphous sounding board.
as for the aroace stuff: it was sometimes hard to tell what was like, a character's fear of abandonment or personal insecurity or past hangup versus part of a particular identity-related struggle, if that makes sense. not that they have to be particularly distinct from one another, but i also don't know if i was left with a particularly strong impression of aromanticism, or even why/how our protagonists liked each other intensely enough for things to fall somewhere beyond friendship. they were completely unnecessarily petty and obsessively mean online, but upon the inevitable reveal, the focus just narrowed down to “you didn't tell me your secret identity and that's why i'm mad”? huh??
ps. it doesn't exactly spoil anything, but ann zhao really went ahead and casually described the final scene in alice wu's last movie just like that, lol.
pps. i've been removed from it for quite a while now but reading this book just reminded me (not in a good way) how insular small liberal arts college subculture (and hyperlocalized queer communities) can be. i worked in a higher ed setting for a while after uni. it's just the same old stuff!
about ten years ago when i was starting to get back into reading for fun and not school, i went through this tear of a ton of pulpy sapphic romance novels. many relied on alternating-chapter dual POV nonsense to create “tension,” where each character would be super into the other, but they were so fucking bad at communicating and didn't know or couldn't tell the other person liked them, so the dual POV in this book was refreshing because wil and katie manage to actually talk to each other honestly about their feelings and desires. (maybe too honestly in some parts? i think they like, openly talk about masturbating while in a room full of older adults at a house party? after not talking for thirteen years? no one approaches them all evening, even this world-famous EGOT or almost-EGOT celeb/hometown hero, not even to just say hi?) and i like the setup: childhood friends to lovers, something secret and/or forbidden by circumstance, two people reconnecting after a 10+ year gap. i actually kept thinking of the sex scene(s)—was there more than one? i don't remember—from the otherwise shitty wlw movie called all about E; at the time i watched it, i was very into the dynamic of reunited exes having previously already established familiarity with their bodies but also bringing new things to the table (bed). like a homecoming, ayo. the rest of the movie is pretty trash though. but the book was kinda like that even though they were “just” besties in high school, so i liked that.
for me, everyone i kissed started out real strong because i was like, hey i enjoy these tropes, and the audiobook narration was fun. but once i switched from listening to the story over two 3-4 hour drives and started reading it with my eyeballs, i felt like the dialogue especially became a slog to get through. we'd be in the middle of something interesting and/or sexy, and they'd just stop to alternatingly deliver long ass monologues. it felt unnatural and broke up the flow. there's also a small bit about privilege that felt very shoehorned in, especially since we kept being reminded all book about how blonde/golden these white women are.
the morals of the story that became apparent in the denouement weren't bad at all, but ultimately i felt like it was a clunky way to get there. and we probably didn't need so much stuff in the middle to build up to it, since that mostly dragged.
3.5/5 probably? it entertained me for my long drives, but then it became a chore to finish. even with the steamy stuff.
i'm writing this immediately after finishing the book, right at my no-more-renewals library due date, so i might feel differently after it's had time to settle (like what does/will dekakel onchu do after all that? is that a loose thread or not?), but right now: the story's conclusion was satisfying and hit all the right notes for me. it felt like closing a window, conclusive, final, but the universe would go on beyond it. i wasn't sure i'd like the eight antidote POV sections at first (i thought they'd fall somewhere between being very young but not in expected mannerisms, à la ender's game, and adult-writing-a-child) but they and the rotating POVs grew on me. i think a minor gripe was just that sometimes the text would progress entirely chronologically between characters and sometimes a POV switch would take you back in time to experience the same scene from another angle. and the we POVs were a bit purposefully opaque. besides some of the more blunt characters (like sixteen moonrise), i also lost track of some characters' political ties and motivations over time; there were so many different approaches to conflict and i wasn't ever 100% sure i was remembering certain details correctly. at the same time, though, that nuance was fun and the discontinuity human.
the romance was overall sweet, and i thought left off in a good, realistic way. reminded me a bit of the abyss surrounds us in terms of power dynamics, but much less harsh (that one had pirates and their prisoners and a toxic hate-love situation) while simultaneously being much more full of microaggressions that were alluded to but not addressed head-on between the characters. like even when they were fighting about it they weren't, and apologies happened through intent only. some steamy stuff happens though. a memory called empire took place over what, a week? this one, less than? hard to say, but either way my girl three seagrass was down bad.
my page 444 status update was me having my mind blown. how wide is the concept of “you”? except now i see “the world, the empire” in the status update got annihilated because it was between yskandr-voice angle brackets and goodreads didn't like it. that's hilarious.
i also read this via a combination of hardcover, ebook, and audiobook while at home and on the road. the audiobook properly served its purpose of injecting the book into my earholes, but even after i got used to the narrator i found the speech patterns chosen for mahit dzmare and three seagrass incongruous with what i imagined for them, and especially so after three seagrass is described as having a clear alto voice in chapters eleven and fifteen. via audiobook, she comes across as too high-pitched, girlish, and whiny to me, rather than the kind of steady poet, diplomat, and orator i imagined her to be. the scenes in which neither character spoke were much more tolerable.
time travel stuff is notoriously difficult to do well but i think the authors managed to craft something pretty intriguing and satisfying. this makes me want to write letters again. however, i would've rated the book higher if the time we spent with each character (outside of correspondence) weren't so... vague. like, i had a general sense of the nature of each agency, and how their agents operate, but it was more like i was letting the book's atmosphere lazily haze around me than being fully engrossed in the descriptions or actions, some of which was overly metaphorical and more alien than relatable anyway. it's probably best to just describe this as a tender exchange of letters because i don't think the rest will really stick with me if i don't summarize it in this review.
i read this via a combination of hardcover, ebook, and audiobook while at home and on the road. it was a bit tough to get rolling but once i got used to the style (and the plot stakes were higher) things pretty much cruised along through to the end. and i had a guess about something at the beginning that turned out to be right, so that was pleasing.
hmmm. i felt that the characterization in this was a bit too reliant on marginalized identity=personality without giving us much else. it was akin to how i felt about the cast in brooms.
one star for steamy sex scenes, i guess, even though i'm massively judging wendy's sense of priorities (and unhealthy, eye-rolling obsession with her ex). once the infection stuff started going, the book also began moving pretty fast, so there's that. but the underlying corporate pride (and company spokesperson) stuff seemed a bit too clowny for me even though i wanted the allegory to work.
also i keep fixating on how in a flashback, one character makes a therapy appointment for their partner against their will and drives them to the appointment without any sort of heads up whatsoever to the other person while positioning themself as a savior. that seemed pretty fucked up to me.
was juggling three books at once (this, space politics, and horny queers fighting zombies) and this was the lightest fare and the narration was fun. (and i don't even like/drink coffee) turns out this homebody really enjoyed the soft, cozy companionship and reno projects. the cast is very sweet and tender 🥹 i wanna be friends with viv and tandri and cal and thimble 🥺 also lol at all the other characters commenting on viv's obliviousness regarding a certain someone.
most of this was consumed while driving. i listened to the last chapter or two or three on fast speed while mowing the lawn, and halfway through my yard, the book ended what felt like weirdly and abruptly in an unsatisfying way. i'd consider this an “i only finished because i'm a damn completionist” book. i didn't so much dislike it as i was disappointed by it. i guess i don't read that many mysteries but since i wasn't really invested in the mystery itself or the protagonist inserting herself into strangers' lives in the role of delulu detective, i had to force myself to continue. MC was sapphic with no real impact on the story and zero payoff, the chineseness references made me cringe (see status updates), and the dialogue felt just a tad off-kilter throughout, like it was approximated by bots (how apt given the plot). the setting was mildly dystopian wrt consumer data, machine learning, and algorithms, but it was also like the dialogue in its uncanny valleyness: just a bit too off from reality and therefore weird and not that believable.
i really wanted something juicy to happen between the MC and her blonde assassin boss and i think the author knew that.
this was another one of those “oh shit, i'm out of renewals and it's due back at the library in a week, better get cracking” kind of reads.
while i do love me some tamaki collabs, i put off reading this (in general, not just during my loan period) because its jacket synopsis didn't grab me, and an initial quick flip of the pages didn't do much to dissuade me from thinking this was a messy late teens/early twenties type of book. which it is, but it takes place in 2009, so it's like my generation's chaos, right? (give or take a small handful of years.) like, i know these characters, i know these archetypes, i've probably had or been around very similar conversations and wreaked similar havoc—nostalgia mode activated.
i originally found the ending a bit underwhelming, as we're conditioned to want justice and a neat resolution, but i think how it played out was true to life. i loooved jillian tamaki's illustrations throughout, and the use of flickr references of NYC back then. the uses of flashback were really well done, from recounting conversations early on (retelling a line or two from another character) to visual transformations on the page in the final chapter or so. and dialogue from mariko tamaki was subtle and deftly youthful without being juvenile and was also so very new york.
overall, really well done, even (especially?) the bitch from a long line of bitches that i wanna sucker punch.
giving this five stars because it is very much a title i would acquire for my otherwise very minimal hard copy collection, i'm excited to bundle up and walk to my little village library and read its sequel, and because i didn't think i would like a space politics book if it weren't for the personalities and sass in a second language. makes me want to rewatch the expanse (which i watched all of) and altered carbon (which i watched most of one season of). and also, the buffy episode with willow and tara's first onscreen kiss, because there is very much a sort of “mad reaching-out for comfort” (440), tender desperation throughout the book that i quite enjoyed.
i was a tad intimidated by the page count before i started (this was part of a book swap where the picks were meant to be on the shorter side) but it moved pretty quickly. this was a relatively “easy” read, but the high school setting stressed me out and so did one of the major plot points even though there was a content warning for it at the beginning so i theoretically should have been prepared.
i tend to want to look up every word i don't recognize when reading, a holdover of terrible academic study habits, so i deliberately relaxed my eyes and let the stories wash over me and i think it worked out.
this collection was... interesting. the melding of folklore, cautionary tales, and body horror in the opening pages made me think i was in for a spooky ride, which isn't generally my thing, but fear and terror simmered much more gently than maybe i wanted in the end? also hell, reading about nonstop vaginal bleeding while on my period was hilarious timing.
i want to say something real smart about sexuality throughout being stripped of any and all e(x/r)oticism and fleshy bellies and compulsory motherhood and insincere narrators and girls with their hands in their underwear (“groping around like a physician giving a pelvic exam,” 53) but i'm too dumb for that so all goodreads gets from me is word salad. you're welcome.
this was generally queer fun and i didn't have to think too hard, which i appreciated, because i'm going to have to turn on my megabrain to tackle the titles i've lined up next. i found myself not really questioning the setup or logistics aside from when does august actually go to class, which i think is a net positive for the book? i actually thought it'd be a much hornier read but i guess there was a mystery (or two) to solve and there's only so much you can do with fucking on the subway.
i mostly read this around the midnight hour on select nights, except for the final push, which took place late weekday morning after i'd remote worked for a bit. kinda fit the late-night Q train rides in the story.
this is on the shelf at the little queer, witchy library inside the like magic exhibit at mass moca, alongside titles like jeff vandermeer's annihilation, bora chung's cursed bunny, some ursula k. le guin, octavia butler, and audre lorde's the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. its placement tickled me. if you're here, there are also multiple copies of johanna hedva's who listens and learns, each tied to its own display table with a thin braid of human hair.