this is… the first pure romance book i’ve rated 5 stars. and i have to wait weeks to talk about it at book club. as someone who is so overly picky abothis is… the first pure romance book i’ve rated 5 stars. and i have to wait weeks to talk about it at book club. as someone who is so overly picky about men and whether or not i like them can break a book, i can confidently say that iwan is the best man and now maybe i kinda believe in love again...more
Hala Alyan does an excellent job using creative techniques to write about displacement and diaspora specifically relating to Palestine as well as someHala Alyan does an excellent job using creative techniques to write about displacement and diaspora specifically relating to Palestine as well as some more personal struggles she has had with womanhood, most specifically her journey with motherhood. I foundt that her poems about diaspora and the women in previous generations of her family were the most touching and powerful, while the ones that strayed away from Palestine and being the child of refugees were less powerful to me. Overall, this was an excellent poetry collection and used some unique methods--some that I really loved (the “choose your own adventure” style poems), and somes that I didn’t love as much (the medical records ones).
Here are some excerpts from my favorites:
From “They Both Die on Mondays in April”: “… I am never paying attention. I cried because Fatima was already half-gone, because Nadia would later say I was the happiest bride she’d ever seen, because I didn’t recognize the photographs, because I left the wrong country, but hasn’t everything already happened somewhere? Aren’t we all waiting like unrung bells, and hadn’t Fatima already died that night, and Nadia too, and the city, and the house, and in that hotel bed, in that flesh that is their flesh, in that bone that is their bone, their every season, wasn’t I only remembering?”
From “Half-Life in Exile”: “... Everybody loves the poem. It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwauke, It’s done nothing for Palestine. … The plants are called fire-followers, but sometimes they grow after the rains. At night, I am a zombie feeding on the comments. Is it compulsive to watch videos? Is it compulsive to memorize names? Rafif and Amir and Mahmoud. Poppies and snapdragons and calandrinias: I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you under the missiles. A plant waits for fire to grow. A child waits for a siren. It must be a child. Never a man. Never a man without a child. There is nothing more terrible than waiting for the terrible. I promise. Was the grief worth the poem? No, but you don’t interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage. For what it’s done to get here.”
From “Brute”: “... I want to fight for a country even if that country didn’t want me even if when my mother bought a patch of land & tried to put my name on it they wouldn’t let me because my name is my father’s name because he was born in Palestine and so impossible and so I am fated to love what won’t have me you know the way our mothers did” ...more
This is a grief-stricken, painfully loving, violently obsessive collection that feels like a frantic stream of consciousness, with each poem twining tThis is a grief-stricken, painfully loving, violently obsessive collection that feels like a frantic stream of consciousness, with each poem twining together to create a story in feelings. It’s a bit fragmented at times, lending to the air of desperation. It doesn’t feel as though Siken is composing these words as much as they are flowing out of him uncontrollably and it is a matter of life and death that he gets all the words down. These poems are the grief of a mourning man put into words. They are his shame, his fears, his longing, his loneliness. There is a violence associated with this love because of the circumstances of it and the self-hating that can come with being queer in a time/place that it is not accepted that reminds me quite a bit of the violent thoughts in These Violent Delights, which I found to be especially prominent in “Wishbone” and “Driving, Not Washing”. There is so much content in these poems, but it all whittles down to Siken’s raw emotions, which overpower the narrative, as his cyclical writing forces us to go round and round with him on this repetitive ride that he is stuck in.
Louise Glück writes an incredible forward for this collection and I can’t say it better than her when she said: “That Silken turns life into art seems, in these poems, psychological imperative rather than literary ploy: the poems substitute the repeating cycles of ritual for linear progressive time—in Crush, the bullet enters the body and then returns to the gun. . . the poems are driven by what they deny; their ferocity attests to the depth of their terror, their resourcefulness to the intractability of the enemy's presence."
Below, I’ve copied down some excerpts and full poems that I really love. My favorite poem, and possibly my new favorite poem(?) was ”Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”; my favorite parts are excerpted here, because boy, is it a bit long.
favorites:
[excerpts from] “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” Every Morning the maple leaves. Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out You will be alone always and then you will die. So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than desperation. . . . I can already tell you think I’m the dragon, that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon, I'm not the princess either. Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later. . . . Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero. You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights! What more do you want? I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re really there. Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live? Let me do it right for once, for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes, you know the story, simply heaven. . . . You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back. . . . Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed. Crossed out. Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something underneath the floorboards. Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle reconstructed. Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all forgiven, even though we didn't deserve it. . . . You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud. Actually, you said Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you. . . . Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it Jerusalem. We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought, so do it over, give me another version, . . . Forget the dragon, leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness. Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany, in gold light, as the camera pans to where the action is, lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into from, close enough to see the blue rings of my eyes as I say something ugly. I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way. But it doesn’t work, these erasures, these constant refolding of the pleats. . . .
[excerpt from] “A Primer for the Small Weird Loves” 1 The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway.
You’re in the eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn’t do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore.
“Driving, Not Wishing” It starts with bloodshed, always bloodshed, always the same running from something larger than yourself story, shoving money into the jaws of a suitcase, cutting your hair with a steak knife at a rest stop, and you’re off, you’re on the run, a fugitive driving away from something shameful and half remembered. They’re hurling their bodies down the freeway to the smell of gasoline, which is the sound of a voice saying I told you so. Yes, you did dear. Every story has its chapter in the desert, the long slide from the kingdom to kingdom through the wilderness, where you learn things, where you’re left to your own devices. Henry’s driving, and Theodore’s bleeding shotgun into the upholstery. It’s a road movie, a double-feature, two boys striking out across America, while desire, like a monster, crawls up out of the lake with all of us watching, with all of us wondering if these two boys will find a way to figure it out. Here is the black box, the shut eye, the bullet pearling in his living skin. This boy, half-destroyed, screaming Drive into that tree, drive off the embankment. Henry, make something happen. But angels are pouring out of the farmland, angels are swarming over the grassland, Angels rising from their little dens, arms swinging, wings aflutter, dropping their white-hot bombs of love. We are not dirty, he keeps saying. We are not dirty. . . They want you to love the whole damn world but you won’t, you want it all narrowed down to one fleshy man in the bath, who knows what to do with his body, with his hands. It should follow, you know this, like the panels of a comic strip, we should be belted in, but you still can’t get beyond your skin, and they’re trying to drive you into the ground, to see if anything walks away.
[excerpt from] “You Are Jeff” 22 You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terri- ble, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you don’t even have a name for.
[excerpts from] “Snow and Dirty Rain” . . . … My dragonfly, my black-eyed fire, the knives in the kitchen are singing for blood, but we are the crossroads, my little outlaw, and this is the map of my heart, the landscape after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is a tenderness, which is a room, a lover saying Hold me tight, it’s getting cold. We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and a gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it… . . . … I’ll give you my heart to make a place for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger. Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars for you? That I would take you there? … . . . … I would like to meet you all in Heaven. But there’s a litany of dreams that happens somewhere in the middle… . . . … Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one. We have been very brave, we have wanted to know the worst, wanted the curtain to be lifted from our eyes. . . . The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling, and they’re only a few steps behind you, finding the flaw, the poor weld, the place where we weren’t stitched up quite right, the place they could almost slip right through if the skin wasn’t trying to keep them out, to keep them here, on the other side of the theater where the curtain keeps rising. . . . … I made this place for you. A place for you to love me. . . . … We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want, so I said What do you want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. Here I am leaving you clues, I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back.
“Just holding and kissing gently. Little angel kisses. If this had been it, if I had died then, I would have said it was enough.”
A devastating yet b “Just holding and kissing gently. Little angel kisses. If this had been it, if I had died then, I would have said it was enough.”
A devastating yet beautiful story of being gay in Australia from the seventies through the nineties, “Holding the Man is the nonfiction story of the Timothy Conigrave’s life as a gay man, from his sexual awakening to battling HIV and then AIDS with his partner, John Caleo, and their friends. While there is sorrow in the diagnosis, it is accompanied by the juxtaposition of the joy that Tim finds being an out gay man, in spite of his mum’s warning that, if he didn’t grow out of being gay he would live a ‘very sad, lonely life.’
“He smiled and whispered, ‘I wish you were a girl.’ I wasn’t sure what he meant but said I wished he was a girl too.”
While I’d say the bulk of this book has to do with John, a lot of it also has to do with both of their families and the support and love they found in their friends. Every place there was hatred and an attempt at pulling John and Tim apart from their families (especially John’s), their friends, even in the beginning, were loving and supporting, always finding ways to help them see each other and accepting them for who they are. There is a really big part of this where you can feel Tim fighting back against his mother’s notion that being gay is lonely and, almost always, proving her wrong. This helped a lot with keeping a lighter tone for the majority of the book, but sometimes John’s catholic parents would win, like when his mother told him that if he wanted her to tell people that he was in the hospital for an AIDS-related cancer then she wouldn’t be his mother anymore, or when John’s father tries his very hardest to complete erase the fact that John and Tim were in a fifteen-year relationship that was a marriage in everything but name. But even then, when John’s father is taking so much from them legally, their friends are there to find small ways to fight. There is sorrow in the times that they were born, but there is also light and Tim is set on making sure that people who read this know that.
“He places the towel around my waist and pulls me toward him. ‘Your strength is in this.’ He places his mouth on mine and I am charged. I am strong, I am a man. We sink into the water. I am cocooned. I am whole.”
Throughout the entire book, Tim is very explicit with his attraction and exploits, which is not my preference, but I don’t mind too much as I again kind of found it to be a type of rebellion to be able to openly talk about it in a published book. While I really appreciate the brutal self-reflection, there are (many) times where Tim is unfaithful to John and it can be a bit hard to read about at times. The vulnerability for him to show his audience all of him is commendable though.
“Over our group of friends lay a pall of fear. Discussions would revolve around the latest theory or rumor. ‘We’re going to know people who will die from this.’ ”
Before their symptoms get too bad, Tim is an active member in a theater community to raise awareness for HIV/AIDS and works at the AIDS Hotline once he is diagnosed. With the play, there is a need from the gay community to “reclaim an issue that had been hijacked by the media” as their community begins to notice how much information being told about AIDS is both not told by people who have AIDS nor are gay people at the forefront of talking about it in the media. Instead of education, there is fear and the wondering if anyone cares because it feels like nothing is being done because of the community it is most affecting. This is another place where Conigrave mixes a devasting reality with the hope and joy of community banding together to help each other in any way they can. It is devasting, but they don’t give up hope.
“ ‘I don’t think we realized what we were dealing with. I believed that all we needed was a positive attitude, and everything would turn out right. What a way to find out we were wrong.’ ”
“I have AIDS. I’m not afraid of dying but I don’t want to be in pain. I want as much time as I can get. What’s that? Six months? Three years? Will I ever see my play produced? Everything needs to be reassessed now. I have AIDS. What will the boys in the project think? What will my friends think? I don’t want them to be scared of me or the fact that I’m dying. Am I dying? I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Conigrave doesn’t shy away from the sometimes-nauseating details of living with and being the caretaker of someone with HIV, and later AIDS. This is the first book I have read on the disease and, while I knew how terrible it was at a distance, it felt important to see the inner workings of it up close and how much ruin it left in its wake. While there is devastation, a huge part of the second half of this book focuses on how the queer community came together to help each other, highlighting how, even in the midst of an incredibly devasting time where their loved ones were dying left and right, there was a strong community of people helping each other and supporting each other. While John and Tim are dealing with their sickness and, later, Tim is dealing with John’s family’s attempt at erasing him completely from John’s life, there is still a strong, loving support system that allows them to stay as strong as they can, which almost feels like a rebellion in itself.
“I guess the hardest thing is having so much love for you and it somehow not being returned. I develop crushes all the time but that is just misdirected need for you. You are a hole in my life, a black hole. Anything I place there cannot be returned. I miss you terribly.”
This book was finished ten days before Tim Conigrave died of an AIDS-related illness and was published posthumously. While I do not know if I believe in an afterlife, I hope John and Tim’s spirits are somewhere happy together, despite the attempts at erasure of their relationship.
I’ve started losing patience for the sad girl narrators who are stuck wallowing in their own misery, unable to look anywhere but at the past, and thatI’ve started losing patience for the sad girl narrators who are stuck wallowing in their own misery, unable to look anywhere but at the past, and that’s probably in part because I’ve started losing patience for myself in that regard too, which is kind of sad because I am no longer enjoying these sad girl books, but maybe it’s also happy because it makes me want to push myself out of my wallowing. // full rtc in the morn...more
“It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I’m thirty-one now and my mother is dead.”
Casey is 31 and has been working on her nove “It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I’m thirty-one now and my mother is dead.”
Casey is 31 and has been working on her novel for six years. She spends her mornings trying to write while she waits tables during the afternoon and night. She is dealing with the grief of her mother and the loss of a relationship and she is not very good at letting real things touch her. In short, she is the perfect narrator for a lost-in-your-thirties book. There is so much in these pages that can be so relatable to so many people, including myself. I don't always know how to feel about books about writers, but I really did love this one and the way it was included. It can be so disheartening to be in any creative pursuit until a break happens and this felt like a warm hug just saying "you're not alone."
“It’s a sense of despair about writing itself, a sort of throwing up of hands, as if to say I’ll put this down on the page but it’s not what I really mean because what I really mean cannot be put into words.”
If your name is Kris and you’ve had to deal with me texting you multiple times about how this is the writer version of tick, tick… BOOM! just know that I love you and endlessly appreciate you (even though you didn't like this book). Thanks for putting up with my thoughts. Now let me tell everyone else about how this is the writer version of tick, tick… BOOM! There is often times a glamorization that comes with the idea of a “starving” or “tortured” artist that is directly opposed to the life. The aestheticization of these people who are in bad financial situations by people who are significantly more well off has always felt very empty and weird to me. Like tick, tick… BOOM!, Writers & Lovers does not glamorize the life of people trying to write and get published. In both cases, our protagonist has spent years working on writing something and, having reached 30, are starting to see the majority of their friends “sell out” or get full time jobs for stability instead of continuing their creative pursuits. There’s a sense of being left behind while the world moves forward that always feels so validating to see in media. Casey is losing friends because she can’t afford being in their weddings and isn’t settling down because she refuses to “sell out,” but not selling out comes at a very high price that is not justifiable to a lot of people.
“I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line.”
Grief is at the heart of this novel. A few weeks before the start of this book, Casey lost her mom quite unexpectedly. King does a beautiful job exploring how this grief seeps into Casey’s everyday life from not wanting to finish her novel about her mother to wanting to call her mom about the most mundane things. Grief invades every aspect of Casey’s life in such a raw, borderline unmanageable way that I have to applaud. Every single aspect of this book is layered with the grief of her mother.
“I hate male cowardice and the way they always have each other’s backs. … And when he got caught, he got a party and a cake.”
Another very prominent theme in Writers & Lovers is about harassment women receive from men and the lack of consequences men face from their actions. There is a particularly gross, anxiety inducing situation that happens at the restaurant she works out that really incredibly highlights why it’s so hard to come forward about issues. Additionally, there is a past situation with her father and the male staff’s reactions that reminded me of how Nickelodeon’s Dan Schneider “exited Nickelodeon” instead of being fired even though there were some very serious allegations against him from minors. This protection of men in power over the children that are being exposed is such a pressing issue and it was handled in a very depressingly realistic way here too.
“I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.”
I find the relationships to be especially interesting in this book because, while they are prevalent, they serve more as a way to explore Casey and her growth instead of standing alone as solid relationships. We see her with Oscar, a successful novelist, and his very sweet young children. With Oscar, we see everything that Casey thinks she wants – namely a family that was healthier than her own. We also see her with Silas, a younger struggling writer like her who she hits it off with immediately. There is this internal battle with Casey choosing between having a place already set out for her in a lukewarm relationship or taking a chance and potentially finding painful heartbreak that I really enjoyed. I think both relationships were handled well and watching how Casey handled both men added more depth to the story.
“ ‘The sublime always tracks you down eventually.’ ”
I went into this book expecting it to be pretty heavy on the romance. I came out of it carrying a profound and heartwarming story about a woman in her early-30’s still struggling to find her place in life and eventually reaching a point where things finally start going right. This is so much of a book and it’s all done incredibly well. I could feel all of Casey’s emotions so clearly and was rooting for her the whole time. This is about a woman waiting for her break and trying to figure everything out along the way. It’s about grief, it’s about friendship, it’s about shitty men, and it’s about loving yourself before anyone else.
“I think of all the people playing roles, getting further and further away from themselves, from what moves them, what stirs them all up inside. And I think of my novel on Muriel’s mail table and I hope that tropical fish guy will leave it alone.”
Discussing this at book club was great fun as there was a 50/50 split on people who loved or hated it so we had a nice heated discussion....more
Jandy Nelson has a really special place in my heart. In high school, when I'll Give You the Sun first came out, it was one of the first queer books, aJandy Nelson has a really special place in my heart. In high school, when I'll Give You the Sun first came out, it was one of the first queer books, and therefore pieces of media, that I was able to sneak home and read (along with Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe). As a young queer person who was having trouble even accepting it myself, it was a beacon of light, showing me that other people like me exist. That 16-year-old girl is the reason that I requested this arc, and why I was so excited to read it as soon as I got it.
While I still love Nelson’s writing as much as I remember, I found the plotting of this one to be a bit. . . all over the place. The introduction of Cassidy as a conduit for the stories and an additionally long backstory made it feel like there was way too much going on. The magical realism aspect of this book was really sweet and I did enjoy the family history, but it felt like a lot of it got muddled in the mother and father and uncle’s generation, because it kind of just felt like they sucked in ways that didn’t really relate to the curse? Or maybe the curse was just really well flashed out in the written historical parts and not in the present? There were just some things that felt a bit unforgivably cruel, both done to the parents and to the children that I couldn’t really get over and feel happy about the reunion? I know that was part of the point, but I just. . . didn’t feel bad for any of them so it didn’t work.
That being said, I loved all of the kids. Dizzy and Miles with Sandro were my favorite points-of-view and I really loved the inner turmoil that came from this inability to communicate between Miles and his brother, Wynton. I find myself wishing that Cassidy’s story, which honestly felt out of left field for a lot of the book to me, was less of a focal point and Dizzy, Wynton, and Miles’s story were more at the forefront. There was just so much that could be done with that family dynamic that I felt there was some wasted potential. Part of that may have been due to the fact that it felt as if I was dropped into the middle of the story instead of at the beginning of one. Even with that the case, I did find a lot of this book to be compelling and even grew to love Cassidy’s story, even though I do wish it didn’t fill up the majority of the book, but that could be an expectations thing. I probably would’ve liked it more if I knew she would be the main focus and not the thing that happened to the family.
When I liked this book, I really liked it, but there were a lot of times that I was just. . . eugh. While I enjoyed the curse in the history, I found that it felt like a way to excuse pretty much every adult of their terrible behavior in the present day and found their mother’s past to be just. . . weird in a way that wasn’t explained or justified well. Or really led up to in any way? I just wish it was more believable, because I was just left a bit annoyed instead of understanding. Additionally, I found that the curse was used a lot to talk about how one relationship was definitely not incest and I’m just at a point in life where if I have to listen to a long section of text about how them getting together isn’t incest, I’m not really interested anymore (sorry Clary and Jace, but you are a thing of the past). My last issue was that there was a really odd one off about a bisexual person’s past relationships that felt like it added to a pretty harmful bisexual stereotype and rubbed me the wrong way. I hope they change this part in the final copy, because it really was unnecessary and only added that being with a man and a woman is the perfect situation for a bisexual, which pissed me off.
While I really wanted to love this, the pacing was a little too off, and there were too many small issues that became bigger as the story went on. I did actually really like the ending and message of the book, I just wish that it was done a little bit better. I also loved the history of the town and was pleasantly surprised with the magic that filled the pages.
Thank you Netgalley for the advanced reader’s copy book release date: September 24, 2024
Have you ever wanted to read a book version of a Disney Channel Original Movie? If so, boy do I have the book for you! This book exudes nostalgia for Have you ever wanted to read a book version of a Disney Channel Original Movie? If so, boy do I have the book for you! This book exudes nostalgia for the semi-unpolished, kind of formulaic, but very fun DCOMs of the early 00’s/10’s and it really is such a fun, nostalgic ride that really just portrays a cute relationship that is so high school. Shoutout to adira and s.’s great reviews for getting me to read this sweet book (and remember 3 stars is still a good rating, please let me join the cult thank you <3).
“It seems to me that because of things like car accidents and lost loves, life and death, and broken hearts we should grab every moment and absolutely devour the good parts. Wouldn’t she want that? For me to adlib my life instead of living by some typed in 12-point courier new script?”
This is a really cute romcom following super romance obsessed, kind of delusional Liz as she tries to have a Prom (and senior year in general) that her late mother would be proud of while dealing with her incredibly annoying yet cute neighbor, Wes. Through a (arguably) mutually beneficial scheme, Wes and Liz end up spending a lot of time together as they try to get Michael, a childhood friend who moved away and recently came back, to ask Liz to prom. What ensues is a pretty cute plot about Liz realizing maybe, just maybe she doesn’t have to have the perfect movie-like romance and maybe she should let life ride it’s course and allow herself to feel how she actually feels instead of push herself to feel a way that would help her have her dream happily ever after. I would say there is about the same amount of growth as the DCOMs I’m reminded of, but we do have some really heart wrenching moments as we watch how the incredibly avoidant Liz is trying to process her grief in the only way she knows how. This is a love story, but it’s also about Liz learning how to be her own person and process her grief in a more healthy way (albeit, I’m not sure if she fully got there, but she’s making some steps). I was a big fan of Wes, Joss, and Helena the whole time and this probably would’ve been four stars if I had been given any break from Liz’s pov.
I’ve decided that I prefer these types of romcoms in movie format rather than book format because I really don’t like being in the head of a girl making really stupid decisions because she is so obsessed with boys and a fantasy that she constantly hurts every around her and I had to LISTEN to her think through those decisions and rationalize them in her head. I know it was the center of the plot, but it was torture to have to be in the head of someone who just was so avoidant and was a big fan of ditching her friends for boys. Where I would’ve had a bunch of fun in a romcom, I was screaming about how her friends/family were wayyyy too lenient with her and that someone should have had Liz put in grief counseling/therapy YEARS ago so that she could be some semblance of a human being. I feel weird talking about how much I didn’t like Liz, because I know she was going through some major unprocessed grief, but I don’t know. I ship Liz and therapy and honestly do not see how her and Wes would have any possibility of working out long term if she doesn’t go through some major self-reflective changes. I’m still interested in book 2 and really hope that Liz’s growth as a person is more of a focal point as we watched a lot of her being static in a really bad place which made it really hard for me to read from her pov, no matter how much I understood her.
Once I got to Chapter 15, I thoroughly enjoyed every second of the book. At lot of stuff was really well done, especially her friends, “enemy”, and family and the ending was incredibly satisfying and cute. The last three chapters really were the classic movie ending feel and were sweet. I can see why people eat this up. While I do wish we got a little bit more closure and discussion with how she treated her friends and Wes, I recognized that this book wasn't going to delve into that as deeply as I wanted it to before I finished it. I did really adore how her relationship with her stepmom Helena progressed and found that aspect of the ending to be my favorite part.
Extra points for a great book playlist being included, special extra points for Death With Dignity aka one of my current favorite songs being on it, we love Sufjan in this house. Points deducted for the “oh my god you’re not like other girls because you eat burgers not salads” scene in a book released in 2021, Wes being HUGE, and random things that she was doing during the entire book not being brought up until they were relevant, lessening their value to me.
Audiobook I listened to this on audible and Jesse Vilinsky was the PERFECT narrator. She really nails the semi-delusional, boy-obsessed Liz – like she sounds exactly as I would have pictured her. I highly recommend the audiobook version....more
What happens when a family secret is revealed and you discover your entire life is a lie? How do you still feel joy for people who loved you? Should yWhat happens when a family secret is revealed and you discover your entire life is a lie? How do you still feel joy for people who loved you? Should you even still love them, or is what they did too great to forgive? How do you even know who you are when your past has been covered up so thoroughly for so long? How do you go on living? And who do you blame and question when the people who were behind this secret are dead? Wilkerson explores these questions in her novella from the Good Intentions Collection as the narrator discovers a jarring secret while she is rummaging through her late mother’s boxes. Deluge focuses on this morally grey area of motherhood in a really interesting way and raises some valid critiques while still portraying that nothing is ever black and white.
“The truth was rarely told in its entirety. The full story of your origins did not spring up clean and cool out of the ground, but gurgled and spat and had to be picked clear of the mud like a stranded crayfish, it’s legs flailing in slow, spindly motion.”
Shoutout to S and their brilliant review for encouraging me to pick up this one as my next read in this collection. With the utilization of second person point-of-view and her incredible prose, Wilkerson makes the reader feel the grief and confusion that the narrator feels in such a vivid way. We are pulled through this confusion and unraveling of the narrator’s life as though we are her, making the emotional effect extra strong. While there is anger, there is mainly sadness and confusion and this sense of lostness as the narrator’s life is upended. Who is she really? Should she love her mother?
“This was how a story could seep into the bones of your identity and into the foundation of your home.”
This topic reminds me a bit of the main subplot in Little Fires Everywhere as it raises hard questions with incredible grey areas about who has the right to do something that they think is helping when it requires hurting an existing family. This book really feels like a gut punch as you feel unmeasurable amounts of betrayal and hurt and have nowhere to put them. Someone else made a decision that impacted you and your family without your consent and now you have to live with the consequences. Now you have to ask questions you’ll never have an answer to and all you can really do is learn to be okay with that.
“Because a person can fail another person and still do right by them.”
Both short stories I’ve read in this collection (this and Mother Country) have been incredibly impactful in different ways and I am eagerly looking forward to continuing with the collection. This was the first Charmaine Wilkerson I’ve read and I really loved her writing style as well and am excited to get to her full length novel soon.
“You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.”
I'll start this off with some disclaimers. I am famously (to me) not a war book rea “You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.”
I'll start this off with some disclaimers. I am famously (to me) not a war book reader. Specifically, I am not a WWI/WWII historical fiction reader. Some part of my brain was oversaturated with watered down romanticized versions of those wars specifically a while ago and I have had a bit of an aversion ever since. However, I was in a mood (depressed and ready to be emotionally destroyed), and this book filled that void for me well. I read this book in approximately nine hours, finishing as the sun began to rise. I laughed, I cried, I felt. I read this fast and I wanted my soul to be ripped to shreds. While this was what I needed and I couldn’t put it down, there were parts that were nagging me, begging me to critique. Just know (speaking to you, mags, don’t combust) that I did have an emotional 9 hours with this book, and if I ever feel compelled to read this again, the rating may go up.
“But Ellwood had never been interested in ugliness, whereas Gaunt… feared that ugliness was too important to ignore.”
The focal point of this is book is war and how war changes people and that part seems to be very well and thoroughly discussed. Ellwood has always had idealistic dreams about war, believing what was written in the in memoriam’s for his old classmates and dreaming of a noble battle while quoting Tennyson constantly. Gaunt hates the war and has some ability to see through to the ugly truth of war and doesn’t want to fight. During one of the first times Ellwood sees combat, he turns to Gaunt and says, “ ‘I want to go home. . . We’re not nineteen yet, we could still go home. . .’ ” The war is never glamorized nor is it just used as a backdrop, the affect it has on people is at the forefront of the story. As the fighting continues and the in memoriams of the friends we briefly met pile up, the pain is always felt strongly. I have heard that a lot of the in memoriams and depictions of war are pulled pretty directly from the books that Winn cites as inspiration, I am not sure how true that is as I have not read them, but that is something I would like to note.
“You’re squandering your years as if they’re limitless.”
In Memoriam opens at an all-boys boarding school (a setting I am quite a sucker for) in England, where rich boys discuss the War as if it is the most glorious thing to happen, while the deaths of their older peers who are already in the trenches slowly trickle in through the school newspaper. I am a sucker for a good boarding school and was excited to get to know this (very large) cast of characters in an intimate way through their boarding school life before we got into the war. The biggest complaint I have with this book was that everything moved so fast. There was no time to grab hold of anything. I have a feeling this may have been intentional, to show how little time we have, especially when young men are going off to war and their lives end before they even had a chance to begin, but I found that this also meant that the introductions to characters (even our main ones) and their dynamics were a bit weak. I chalk this up in part to Winn’s fanfiction origins (which I promise I have nothing wrong with, I love a good fanfiction) as in a fanfiction setting characters are already more established so there is less of a need to delve into a character before the action of the story starts. The introduction was so quick I felt like I was getting a bit of whiplash as I expected that Elly and Gaunt would have a little more time to develop and that part 1, approximately third of the book, would be focused only on school, alas Winn moved fast and there was no time for pleasantries I suppose. While I did find this book heartbreaking, I do think that Winn was relying a bit on works that came before her to pull at the heart strings during the set-up period. The War was harrowing, but the I was left wanting with the emotions of youth before we got into the thick of it and found that the relationship between them was the weakest part of the book for me because of the lack of time I had to watch them together. Additionally, I found some of their later dialogue to be a bit. . . well it was clear she wrote drarry fanfiction is the best way I can put it. I found myself being the least interested in their later parts together, in part due to this.
“It was dusk, on a Friday. The battered skeletons of trees tapered against the fresh starlight in No Man’s Land. The sky offered curious glimpses of beauty, from time to time. The men wrote about it in their letters, describing sunsets in painstaking detail to their families, as if there was nothing to see at the front but crimson clouds and dusted rays of golden light.”
The letters from Gaunt to Ellwood while he was on the front line and how we see how much Gaunt censored even for Ellwood once he is on the front himself are an important, yet painfully short part of this book. Again, there were months of letters and I felt as though these were so rushed, I wish we got a little bit more of this development. Nonetheless, seeing the juxtaposition of how Gaunt wrote to Elly, his time in the trenches, and how he wrote to his friend, a soldier on the front lines elsewhere, was harrowing and a great way to show the difference in what soldiers experienced versus what they whittled down and kept inside.
“He did not see colours the way he used to. He knew that the grass must be a vibrant, aching green, but it did not seem so to him. . . It was as if Ellwood hovered in some unreal place where the living faded and the dead took form, and all the world was vague.”
Ellwood is the character that we watch change the most throughout this book, and it is a particularly heartbreaking yet realistic portrait, especially of a man who has lost so many people and who doesn’t know how to do anything but fight anymore. Watching him move from a hopeful youth to violent, erratic, and scared was heartbreaking in a way that I don’t think I anticipated (which is a bit silly of me as this is a book about war).
“It was hard to look at him and remember all the years they had spent together, not knowing what violence awaited them.”
Again, I do really wish we got to spend a bit more time with these boys before the horrors of war caught up to them—this really would’ve benefitted from having a hundred or so more pages focused on that—but watching the change and then deaths of these boys, who I may not have remembered when they were first reintroduced, but damn did I not forget them after that, was especially hard hitting. The juxtaposition of knowing how most of them died versus seeing their in memoriams was also heartbreaking. At the end Winn stated that she directly lifted a lot of in memoriams from actual papers during WWI, which I do think was smart, but does make me wonder how much of Winn’s work I actually loved versus how much of it was lifted from actual WWI stuff. I’m still trying to decide if it makes a difference.
“Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how hard he tried.”
I thought that I had more of an emotional connection to Gaunt and Ellwood before I got to the last part, and then I realized that the swiftness of the first part of the novel had left me a bit. . . empty in regards to their relationship. I could see inklings of it, but it wasn’t as fleshed out as I had imagined it would be. Winn did an excellent job at tugging at my heartstrings during everything except this aspect, where I felt left wanting more. Even as I write this, I am thinking that maybe someone will comment about how that was part of her intention, so I will clarify. It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted more of them together, it was that I wanted to want more of them; I wanted to feel their yearning, their pain, to feel how, while the War had taken so much from them and that they had to shove it down, this was the breaking point for them. I still cared, and was a bit heartbroken, but I wanted a bit more. I think apart of this was the fact that part II, while important, seemed to stretch on forever and it made the pacing feel a bit off. Maybe it was supposed to, but I cannot help but feel that it detracted something that I was supposed to feel deeply.
“ ‘War is. . . a violent teacher?’ he said, eventually. Gaunt smiled at him, ‘That’s right.’ The countryside streamed greenly past the windows. ‘It didn’t teach me anything,’ said Ellwood.”
The end of this book is quite devastating, yet hopeful in a bit of a sad way. I think it shows well how no one is the same after war, how, even if you survive, you are nothing near the same man you were. There is little comfort after the war ends, but there is a little hope of brighter days. Despite my critiques of it, I found it to be quite moving especially in the portrayal of war. I really did appreciate this for what it was, I think I’ve just found other media to be more moving for me in terms of actual queer relationships, and I went into this expecting to be a bit more moved by that aspect of the story.
Vampires – especially queer ones – are my jam. There are so many topics that can be well discussed through a vampiric lens which makes them endlessly Vampires – especially queer ones – are my jam. There are so many topics that can be well discussed through a vampiric lens which makes them endlessly fascinating. This one primarily focuses on death.
In the first half of Thirst we follow an unnamed vampire as she tries to find her place in an ever-evolving world that is becoming increasingly hostile towards vampires. After a particularly brutal event during the beginning of the nineteenth century it becomes obvious that the hunters are finally becoming the hunted, so she immigrates from Europe to Buenos Aires with the hope of finding a place for herself as a vampire. With the urbanization of any city comes widespread epidemic, especially in the nineteenth century. Amidst outbreaks of The Yellow Fever, death thrives and so does the vampire, but as death starts to become less prevalent and the epidemics calm down, the vampire senses that her place is going to be disrupted again.
This part of the book is fast-paced and violent. There is an animalistic nature to our unnamed vampire that modern vampire stories tend to stray away from. The only thing that fuels her is her insatiable thirst for blood. There is no thought of anything except that thirst as she seduces her victims. I loved being in the mind of the vampire and found it so intriguing. Her mind is her urges, and she does some brutal things to satiate herself but is never satisfied. All of this occurs under the beautiful gothic backdrop of nineteenth century Buenos Aires. As decades pass by in a haze, the author introduces some interesting historical events and landmarks that show how the world is changing. This part is fast paced and spans decades. The ending is abrupt but makes sense and closes off the era of vampires well.
The second half takes place in modern day Buenos Aires and we follow a woman dealing with the grief of her mother’s terminal illness as she takes care of her young son. The juxtaposition of life and death along with the symbolism of the vampire was well done her. Death and rebirth is a major theme in this part and it’s a lot slower, told in diary entries spanning a few months. The difference between these parts is quite jarring and almost disorienting to the reader. The stench of death still reeks but in an incredibly different way as our narrator watches her mother lose control of her whole body, knowing the end is near. While it was clear how the stories would weave together, I found it done in a quite abrupt way that didn’t feel natural. The ending left me a bit empty and kind of upset, but in a “why did you do that?” way instead of a fun way. It is still an interesting study on death and grief and rebirth.
There is a very big distinction between these books in terms of tone and pacing, so much so that these could’ve easily been two separate books. While it is a bit jarring, it shows how disorienting it can be to be lurched into the twenty-first century. Overall, the vibes were there for this book but parts of it just felt a bit flat. It’s still an interesting one to pick up. I will say that while I saw this advertised as “sapphic vampires” that feels like mismarketing. This isn’t a romance, it is a literary fiction that studies death, don’t expect much in terms of any time of relationship.
This is Yuszczuk’s first book that has been translated into English and I will be interested to see what comes next.
Thank you netgalley and the publisher for the arc ...more
I've tried to read some of Patrick Ness's other books, but none have come close to how this book made me feel. This novella was extraordinary in depicI've tried to read some of Patrick Ness's other books, but none have come close to how this book made me feel. This novella was extraordinary in depicting the grief of a young boy who didn't yet know fully what grief was and how he went through accepting what was happening. The magical realism with the monster was breathtaking and also showed how there really is no set definition of "monster" and you can't necessarily judge a book by its cover. The first time I read this, I thought it would be more of a horror book, but I was very pleasantly surprised to see it as a book that dealt with grief and loss and the confusions of adolescence. I also think it cannot go unsaid that the artwork done in this was absolutely breath taking. ...more
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