what if you had a crush so bad that a committed murder couldn't cure it? that's the real horror story.
this is one of those books where the protagonistwhat if you had a crush so bad that a committed murder couldn't cure it? that's the real horror story.
this is one of those books where the protagonist is so unlikable it's actually difficult to get through. but also it's probably intentional? so it feels unfair to not like it for that reason.
but i also don't like anywhere this book went, so.
anyway, misleading title. this book is very serious.
i think the cover and synopsis give off a vibe that this is going to be goofy in some way, but it is very much not. it is very self-serious and very much not self-aware. its plot revolves around drugs, and it is set in san francisco, but there is not so much as a nod to the debilitating impact of addiction or of housing. our villain is depicted as a piece of sh*t rich dude, but he works on behalf of the climate, whereas our protagonist has...a soulless and extremely lucrative tech job.
i guess my real problem with this is that its scope begins and ends with our main character. the most unprivileged person you can be in the world is a straight white woman with a mid 6 figure income whose friends venmo request her for half of dinner. end of list.
i don't like when books occupy themselves with an extinct version of feminism, in which we've never heard of intersectionality and there are no people of color in sight. i just don't happen to believe that i am facing the worst of all biases. this has a few gay characters in it, but it doesn't go any further than that.
don't even get me started on the bizarro version of criminal justice that happens here.
bottom line: i do think a lot of what is so annoying about this book is supposed to be annoying. just not all of it.
i'll know i'm fully healed when i can resist adding every low-rated lit fic i see.
then i could have avoided this one.
oof. this was just not good.
i li'll know i'm fully healed when i can resist adding every low-rated lit fic i see.
then i could have avoided this one.
oof. this was just not good.
i like character driven books, i like books about unlikable characters, i like stories that are 99% dialogue of people having philosophical conversations.
so it wasn’t that.
this is not a well written book, and it isn’t an interesting one. it’s 300 small-print pages of six unbelievably privileged people debating whose guilty-conscience liberal politics are the most correct. it’s five white people and one Black person all noticeably created by a white woman talking about race. it’s a protagonist having an affair with a guy who is so pushy and traitless that an unsexier flight of passion cannot be imagined. it’s an all-star lineup of literature’s most punchable faces and our main character is worst of all.
there were moments i had to actually put this down and breathe through it.
the tough part is that a lot of this is intentional, and a lot of it isn’t. and somewhere between the 7th and 13th time our cast ate ceviche i stopped caring enough to determine which was which.
this is very stylized fiction with a protagonist that has the author's name and chapters randomly in verse or footnotes and several astonishingly litethis is very stylized fiction with a protagonist that has the author's name and chapters randomly in verse or footnotes and several astonishingly literary sex scenes.
i'm telling you these things because they really paint a picture i wish i was aware of going in.
(review to come / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)...more
who among us hasn't experienced heartbreak so intense we'd accept a potentially immoral international job offer from the united nations?
this is a verywho among us hasn't experienced heartbreak so intense we'd accept a potentially immoral international job offer from the united nations?
this is a very fun idea for a book, obviously. unfortunately, i didn't find it fun.
this is a humorous take on a surprising subject: our protagonist, nadia, a real hot mess / hoot whose british drunkenness and casual sex in any other bridget jones-like iteration would have charmed me, accepts a job "deradicalizing" a group of women who have been brainwashed into joining isis and are now imprisoned in a foreign camp.
i know. shock value.
i was really excited to read this because it's based on the author's real experiences, which very few people have, but she might as well have made it all up for all the insights we actually glean.
i think the commentary around the UN and other institutions is genuinely funny, and the beginnings of just how out of place nadia is, but as the book wore on and never took itself seriously on these very serious subjects, i got frustrated. this author has real expertise, but she never shows it to us.
nadia is supposed to be working to send these women home, but instead she becomes obsessed with a teen she sees as herself, (view spoiler)[then she gives up and the book ends. (hide spoiler)] in the last pages, we get a strange "where are they now" for the various bureaucrats we've met and no mention of the hundreds of women who are still trapped.
this is objectively funny and well-written, and i would love if this author could use her powers of jokes on anything i can find humorous in the future.
bottom line: i really wanted to like this one, so please don't yell at me.
honestly i come away from this book just feeling bad for the kid.
this is a rendition of how a woman discovered her mentalhell yeah.
or i guess hell no?
honestly i come away from this book just feeling bad for the kid.
this is a rendition of how a woman discovered her mentally ill husband was cheating on her after he'd died. it is not fun to read. mostly you feel terrible for everyone involved: the woman, the man, his many loved ones having to deal with their dirty laundry being aired.
i hope it was cathartic to write, because it felt very wrong to read. like hearing really personal gossip from your most boundary-less neighbor.
not to mention the weird racist paragraph about sex workers around the world.
pretty sure this was on my to-read list because someone said it's the best murakami.
but that must've been a cruel prank.
reading murakami books is alwpretty sure this was on my to-read list because someone said it's the best murakami.
but that must've been a cruel prank.
reading murakami books is always a balancing act between how weird and cool his brain is and how much he hates women.
i will let you guess where this one, which is not magical and centers around infidelity, lands.
so many completely insane things happen in this book: two guys in a bar who can't even speak about how a woman aged because it's too horrifying and disgusting; a guy who thinks it goes without saying that he would cheat on his wife whenever she's pregnant; a father-in-law being like "actually i'd prefer it if you would cheat on my daughter"; a motif of women with leg disabilities that is handled about as well as you would expect.
and then there are the normal misogyny tropes: a woman who doesn't know she's beautiful and that's what makes her beautiful. a woman who is despised by other women because she's simply too hot. women who are supposed to be attractive being continually described as teenagers.
it's so bad.
bottom line: as always, i am praying for haruki's wife....more
the devil herself is in this book and she's a prematurely gray violinist.
possibly it is not the fault of charlotte, one of our two dual-pov second chathe devil herself is in this book and she's a prematurely gray violinist.
possibly it is not the fault of charlotte, one of our two dual-pov second chance romantics, that she sucks so hard. perhaps she has a life-threatening allergy to asking her alleged best friend a single question about her life. maybe she lost all of her non-hair-related characteristics in a tragic accident. there's a chance she was put through a now-debunked invasive psychological experiment that left her heart a la the grinch's at the beginning of the movie. she could have a genetic lineage made up solely of people who ride in sleds and yell at huskies to mush mixed with assistant managers who run fast-casual bowl restaurants like the navy.
but unless the answer is "all of the above, as related in a lengthy and disturbing prequel i somehow missed," she is just the worst without good reason.
she does have A reason, and that reason is the irritatingly named and alarmingly traitless brighton, her ex girlfriend who left her at the altar. sounds bad. but still not really checking all my boxes re: having a personality so bad i fear it's contagious.
this book was painful to get through. i didn't root for these two monsters to get together — far from it. i was hoping one of their wintertime activity fails or hangovers would have a more lasting impact so i could ride out a few pages of silence (or, god forbid, other characters), but no dice. just a who's who of tropes thrown at the wall to see what sticks. fake dating, enemies to lovers, second chance, miscommunication, forced proximity, friends to lovers, rescue romance: i'm sorry. all of you deserved better.
AND SO DID I.
all i wanted was some christmas cheer and instead i nearly lost everything. and by everything i mean "my mind for like 300 pages."
bottom line: to each their own. this book is not my own.
(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
------------------------- tbr review
it's actually never too early to begin christmastime...more
this is a book about sisters, scams, paris, magic, sapphic romance, and ghosts.
that's like 6 of my 10 all time favorite things.
turns out it also has athis is a book about sisters, scams, paris, magic, sapphic romance, and ghosts.
that's like 6 of my 10 all time favorite things.
turns out it also has a lot of my least favorites.
what it doesn't have enough of is story. it's not even 300 pages long and yet we don't have enough content to cover us! we try our hand at multiple perspectives (all my homies hate multiple perspectives) that cover the SAME TIMELINE, resulting in the first 200 pages becoming totally redundant as we sit through the same story once more. 150 pages of the first pov, 100 pages of the next one telling the same story, all with a slow pace and an actual plot beginning at the halfway point. by the time we catch up to where the first perspective left off we have less than 50 pages to go.
did that description make sense? it was so surreal as i was reading it i'm struggling to capture the experience.
and the bummers continued apace. this is allegedly set in paris, but it has literally 0 atmosphere and contains a bizarre choice to write one perspective in what i can only describe as "old-timey british dialect." two unredeemed, deeply annoying protagonists were the killing blow.
the writing and synopsis aren't quite my cup of tea, but i thought this could be the exception to the various rules in my hater's heart.
throw in a bunch of unresolved thoughts about familial abuse, suicide, depression, infertility, motherhood, social class, and love...and it's safe to say it was not.
bottom line: it was the best of tropes, it was the worst of tropes.
it wouldn't be summer if i didn't try to enjoy a thriller...
but i probably should've seen this disappointment coming.
i'm far from the best reviewer toit wouldn't be summer if i didn't try to enjoy a thriller...
but i probably should've seen this disappointment coming.
i'm far from the best reviewer to critique the representation here, but i will say the image of nigeria really rubbed me the wrong way. it's portrayed as a cold, unfeeling, corrupt nation, unsafe and crime-ridden, with just about all of the nigerian characters fitting that description. our two british protagonists are continually disgusted by the culture, and respond to it by treating staff like they're subhuman. it's pretty disturbing to read, to the extent that i was wondering if it was a purposeful narrative choice, but that never added up. learning after i finished that the author is british (and spent seven years as a "nigerwife," a foreign woman married to a nigerian man living in nigeria) was unsurprising.
beyond that, this was not a satisfactory mystery to me. character motivations didn't track, with people throwing their lives away over things that only come up once or not at all, or abandoning loved ones without a real reason.
like many other readers, i found this to be more of a plodding, overly detailed family drama than a thriller.
except even though i prefer family dramas, i still didn't like this.
if a book has a low average rating, is categorized as lit fic, and is about a woman destroying her life...i'm in.
even if i should be out.
i think thereif a book has a low average rating, is categorized as lit fic, and is about a woman destroying her life...i'm in.
even if i should be out.
i think there's a thin line between masterfully mysterious lit fic and deliberately obtuse, underedited lit fic. i badly wanted to make this into the former but it was the latter.
there were a few basic inconsistencies that contributed (like a friend who knows a lot about the world of ballet spreading the word that a famous up-and-comer quit on purpose, when in actual fact she broke her ankle mid-performance in front of an audience who could hear her bone snap?)...
but the larger issue is the confusion at the sentence level. this writing feels obscure and hard to parse. it takes effort to read and the result is not worth the re-analyzing. good writing =/= difficult writing — in my experience and/or opinion, the two have little overlap.
it's an overwritten style that almost feels like kwon is writing into synonyms — so many phrases are weird walks into words that fit awkwardly. "I'd marvel at his altering." "Spoil the image, but I'd find the sight ideal." "If I forgot, thin lifts bit through soil, the lapse like skin tearing." "If a friend had taught me this shit, I'd have thought it false." "I got asked, at times, if, with the triptychs, I had regrets." (that one i just included because it's comma city.)
it reminds me of when i dabbled in creative writing as a kid and would try to think of a specific word and, failing, put a slightly wrong one in.
except, like, every sentence.
bottom line: tough when work is pretentious and yet not good....more
(can you tell i'm procrastinating writing my deeply negative review of this.)
i don't think my expectations were very high.where my kerrygold stans at?
(can you tell i'm procrastinating writing my deeply negative review of this.)
i don't think my expectations were very high. all i wanted was interesting. it could've been slow. it could've been false advertising. it could've been character-driven, or plot-less, or even on occasion boring. but this was too far.
this is not a simple, subtle book about food and feminism and society. it's a tell-y-not-show-y over the top too-long diatribe in which nothing happens.
there's a difference, and this could have been half the length (if i'm being generous).
here are a few suggestions of what we could have removed to get there: - the business history of fictional food brands - 3-4 named characters with personalities and backstory who served no purpose - two or three dozen check-ins on our protagonist's weight - some truly unforgettable figurative language, such as the darkness of a turkey cavity compared to unfathomable eyes or applying a butter-based marinade being similar to a romantic massage - the word "sticky" - A COMPLETELY UNACTED UPON HOMOEROTIC SUBPLOT THAT FOR A TIME WAS SINGLE-HANDEDLY ALLOWING ME TO GO ON.
this is one of those books that makes me wish i DNFed. it was a painful slog to get through each and every one of these overwritten, under-significant pages. not a single one of the thoughts conveyed about gender, food, or Society is original or even interesting, and yet we are forced to hear them expressed verbatim again and again.
it felt like it moved in fits and starts. there's some level to which this book attempts to show a manipulated protagonist, but the transition into and out of it is not smooth.
it is, in short, not good.
bottom line: not even food descriptions — one of literature's greatest assets — could save this book....more
i enjoyed — although maybe enjoyed is the wrong word — this author's fii was actually scared to read this.
and i should've been. but for other reasons.
i enjoyed — although maybe enjoyed is the wrong word — this author's first book, because while it didn't have much going on besides shock value and gore it at least did those two things in kind of an interesting way.
reading this was completely unpleasant from start to finish, and not because of the gross-out content. the writing is actively bad, full of clichés and adjectives, and somehow even though all of these stories (?) are very short, they drag on, not ending at the moment they'd be effective or shocking. characterizations are inconsistent, and in fact characters seem almost beside the point — none of these figures feel comprehensible, let alone human or real.
there's repetition here of whole details or lines of dialogue. favorite words are used to the in point of incomprehension — play a drinking game with covet, sense, decidedly, merely, perhaps with 911 on speed dial. this is teeming with repeated images (we get it, wounds have lips), adverbs, em dash breaks for more synonyms and more adverbs.
it's overwritten to the point that words have no meaning, which makes for a wildly frustrating read.
terrifying.
bottom line: i was anticipating this as a book that would make me truly scared, and i am: for the future of publishing.
the REAL haunting was the disappointment we found along the way.
and we found so many:
the names in this — lucky, maverick, rebel — are so insane as to the REAL haunting was the disappointment we found along the way.
and we found so many:
the names in this — lucky, maverick, rebel — are so insane as to actually continually take me out of the story. it's like reading a quirky romance novel while a series of "unique baby names i love but am not going to use" instagram reels autoplays at the same time.
beyond that, the romance (which is, yes, the plot), centers around maverick (sigh), who is a supernatural ghost hunter type tv show guy, being extremely protective of lucky (don’t even get me started), who is…also a supernatural type tv show ghost person.
i do not like Alpha Male Protection type setups at the best of times and this particular one is just ridiculous. this is the rough equivalent of the vp of your department calling you at 9:45 am every monday through friday while you write emails because he’s worried for your safety. THIS IS JUST WHAT BOTH OF YOU DO FOR A LIVING.
she also says at one point, completely seriously, that she avoids anywhere she thinks ghosts might be. she says this in conversation with her ghost-hunter love interest, while in their second haunted location, while in the midst of filming their second ghost-centered project.
there are so many moments like that: very self-serious, emotional conversations that actually have no connection to what is literally going on. i don't know if i've ever felt this before, let alone said it, but it seems like this book was written on vibes. no plot, no plan. just whatever happens happens, logic be damned.
this book is so weird, and so unnecessarily long, and so frustrating. i can't quote to you from my ARC but it also feels...the polite term would be "under-edited."
i can really see why so many of the reviews are from readers who couldn't get through it.
bottom line: i didn't DNF this book, but i might as well have.
(they say if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. but i just said that nice thing so now i getoh how i love a good title...
(they say if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. but i just said that nice thing so now i get to complain.)
this has a kind of folksy and imprecise style that charmed me at first but eventually got on my nerves, with lots of run on sentences and descriptors like "strangely odd" and dangling participles. i'm sorry to be a nerd, but i'm still the same person who enjoyed copyediting so much i designed my own 300-level class on it.
it's a writing style that is mirrored in the never-ending list of quirky characters we meet. this book never quite coalesces into a story: we start off with a mystery, but we never hear about it again. in each chapter, we meet a new Black or Jewish or Italian person with a memorable name and an amusing backstory who is down on their luck, hardworking and yet marginalized to chicken hill (a falling-apart neighborhood in pottstown, pa) and little opportunity by the town's white people.
i cannot even tell you how goddamn frustrating this got. on the off chance one character's solo chapter piqued your interest, you're sh*t out of luck. i tried to care about chona and dodo, and what i got in return is watching unbelievably horrific things befall them, only to exit their story for the next 9 chapters while we hear about people chuckling and hamburger bars.
i was unable to build connections or feel for any of these characters, because there were 982 of them and who knows if i'd see them again before the author remembered he'd promised us a mystery to solve anyway.
(if you, like me, thought that mystery would be any sort of plot, you're sh*t out of luck too.)
bottom line: it's a rare thing to actively dislike a book i don't think is objectively bad. rare in a bad way....more
to me, there is nothing that symbolizes the lack of romance in modern life quite like tpretty great title if you ask me.
so at least i liked one thing.
to me, there is nothing that symbolizes the lack of romance in modern life quite like the qr code. the fact that this book is full of them is the least of its worries.
among the biggest of my worries, you're surely wondering? thank you for asking. that's simple:
WHY DO MEN NEED TO WRITE SO MUCH ABOUT PENISES. i'm no prude but at a certain point spending this much time on phalluses takes up what we should've allotted to regularly scheduled programming, like character development, or themes. you know. the little things. (buh dum ch.)
in fact, an inexcusable section of page count is spent on shock value, masturbation, gross-out descriptions, pop-culture references, and brand names. what we're left with couldn't amount to much even in the best case scenario.
i enjoy an unlikable character more than a likable most of the time, because i am annoying and my brain is a cesspool, but i can't bear an unsympathetic one. we spend 300 pages in the mind of glue, and what is intended to be an exploration of the millennial experience left me unmoved and unrepresented. and in spite of the synopsis' claim that this book centers around hong kong's protests and "demise," that felt like an afterthought at best.
i liked the author's first book, but this reads a lot like the sophomore novel of someone whose debut was praised for its originality and literary quality when its most interesting portions were its observations of other art.
which is, you know. what happened.
bottom line: it's never a good sign when you're writing a rant on netgalley.com.
i'll never be able to see the words milk and honey without thinking of instagram poetry. thanks rupi kaur.
but i liked this about the same as i would ii'll never be able to see the words milk and honey without thinking of instagram poetry. thanks rupi kaur.
but i liked this about the same as i would if it were in that genre, so. fair enough.
this is just not my type of book (no more pandemicish dystopian, please, i'm too fragile) nor of writing style.
more frankly, this is overwritten, with words used for how they sound rather than what they mean. "hulkings," as a synonym for hills. "humping" instead of rising. "eloquent" for an image of a graffitied d*ck. i didn't like it when cormac mccarthy did it, and he did it a lot better.
beyond that, between piles of adjectives, this landed heavily on cliches: "it wasn't until i hung up that i realized he'd never asked my name." no way! really?
add to these its gimmicks: "my employer" unwieldily used as many as four times a paragraph, as what was a fun style choice in early pages loses its sheen by the halfway point. if only there were a short, one or two syllable thing that we could call a specific person in order to reference them.
there are haystacks of em dashes every time another language is used, in an italy surrounded by expats as our monolingual protagonist.
there's italicized dialogue instead of the proletariat quotation mark.
in other words...a lot of unearned style here.
and ultimately my interest in the idea of an illicit, hyper-gifted chef cooking in secret in a dystopian world without food died when met with an untalented line cook. that, and a nonsense plot hinging on the justification-less idea that she'd be portraying a woman of another nationality at least decades her senior.
not to mention that goofy ending.
anyway. this book doesn't know what it wants: for us to condemn its cast of wealthy, even as they do more than the politicians it can't bring itself to frame as the good guys; to extol the virtues of our protagonist, deliberately ignorant to the selfishness and ego and greed that rival anyone's; to approve of fine cuisine or skewer it, same with capitalism and global travel and age- and power-gap relationships and money and philanthropy and and and.
it's mealy mouthed in every way you can imagine, and it leaves a sour taste.
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