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.
this is an untraditional, timeline-twisting book in which a company has accidentally invented time travel and is committing inter-time violence accordthis is an untraditional, timeline-twisting book in which a company has accidentally invented time travel and is committing inter-time violence accordingly...
and somehow the most unrealistic part was its depiction of human emotion.
the thing they never tell you about sexism is that it's boring. that's the worst part of misogyny: just the most boring female characters you've ever read.
ok, maybe not the worst part. but it's not in my personal favorites.
i am personally of the opinion that if you are going to tell me something relatively insane, such as time travel is real and being hoarded for evil by corporations (with some parts of that being less insane than others), you need to ground me in the narrative. maybe give me some lovable characters. maybe give me some real-feeling feelings. dare i say give me a dose of reality via human relationships, or human life, or human thought patterns.
this book skipped all of that, and the result was dramatic and annoying.
bottom line: logically i know i read this as a book. but in my heart, this is one of those budgetless interchangeable shows you scroll past on a lesser streaming platform and know no human has ever watched or talked about.
i was willing to lose a minor part of the body in exchange for this book. a pinkie toe, or an appendix. something like that.
i didn't have to do that, i was willing to lose a minor part of the body in exchange for this book. a pinkie toe, or an appendix. something like that.
i didn't have to do that, ultimately, but it would have been worth it.
i could read this author's books about crazy weird damaged people healing and being happy exclusively for the rest of my life and be content.
this was heady and intense and very truly bizarre, and at many points i felt anxious reading it, and it really reminded me why i hate true crime (which is honestly a pro), but all of those ended up being good things. i connected to this story and this protagonist, and this book is very strange and very real and very dark and very fun all at once. while being somewhat less so than the book by this author that i truly love.
i saw this book half off in a barnes & noble and still maintained my book buying ban, and like any self-respecting bookworm i expected my medal of brai saw this book half off in a barnes & noble and still maintained my book buying ban, and like any self-respecting bookworm i expected my medal of bravery to promptly arrive by pony express.
AND THEN, THREE DAYS LATER, A REAL-WORLD MIRACLE OCCURRED.
i went to my parents' house where i discovered the publisher had shipped me a copy of this.
the universe is in love with me.
and in truth, this was very nice, in a very lit fic-y way. i love people and i love life even though i think both are sad and aggravating and complicated, and this does too. i like books like that.
i think this showed its debut-ness in some ways: the characters actually talk too much about too much, and rather repetitively in a very convenient way, and plot events happen similarly. there's a mundane neatness that is hard to explain, but for the deus ex machina of first novels. but i liked it anyway.
bottom line: can't wait for more from this author!
had me at "a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic"!
and it is haunting, in a lot of ways! well written, draws from the inferno and spirihad me at "a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic"!
and it is haunting, in a lot of ways! well written, draws from the inferno and spiritual sources, filled with the kind of english class-esque lengthy descriptions you can draw a bajillion themes or motif sor symbols out of.
so in that way, yes, haunting. what is not haunting, or particularly memorable, or effective: this as a novel. our narrative and our characters leave Something To Be Desired, namely believability or entertainment value or the kind of feeling of being drawn in as a reader.
but 1 out of 2 ain't bad.
bottom line: not the best jesmyn ward book, but still a jesmyn ward book....more
had me at queer literary vampires, lost me at everything else.
i think that what this book needed to work for me was a stunning writing style.
without had me at queer literary vampires, lost me at everything else.
i think that what this book needed to work for me was a stunning writing style.
without it, it felt kind of adolescent and silly, ungrounded. none of these characters felt real — the only thing that felt real was the city of buenos aires.
if you're reading a book about a 16th century vampire lady falling in instalove with a 21st century single mother ready to leave her son to live in a mausoleum, i at least need to feel like something is believable. even if that's the writing being nice.
instead this just felt overwrought and goofy.
bottom line: brb fleeing to the nearest graveyard home.
this was the book equivalent of the bakery case holding the magic of manifold pastries within.
in other words, it contained many of my favorite things this was the book equivalent of the bakery case holding the magic of manifold pastries within.
in other words, it contained many of my favorite things (books about career women becoming mothers, the line between lit fic and family drama, character driven to the point of nothing driving at all), but i felt constantly separated from it, as if there was a film between the story and me.
we very much live within these characters, but i didn't feel like i really knew them. their feelings felt separate from me. and while i am one of the few defenders of the way children are written in lit fic (call me precocious!), this was ridiculous — five year olds writing perfectly spelled complete sentences, babies expressing fully developed concepts of abandonment.
there is also a catfish (as in the mtv docuseries hosted by the silver fox) (silver fox as in handsome gray-haired man, also not the animal) plotline that i do not understand. not "i don't know why it was in the book." not "i'm missing what it was trying to say." i actually straight up am incapable of comprehending what literally happened. i reread pages. i tried explanations on for size. i don't know.
i think, to my misfortune, this author just may not click for me.
bottom line: i said earlier that i don't like lockdown fiction, but that's actually one of the only aspects of this i appreciated.
2.5
------------------ tbr review
i will be honest, i have never once read lockdown fiction and been like "great, so glad i get to read about this time during which the only thing i could do was think my thoughts about this time."
for me, this book was love at first sight (that cover! girls falling in love at the university of edinburgh!)...and dislike at first read.
unfortunatelfor me, this book was love at first sight (that cover! girls falling in love at the university of edinburgh!)...and dislike at first read.
unfortunately, this is just not well written. that feels like the meanest criticism there is, but there's no avoiding it here. this book uses synonyms for said, is teeming with appearance descriptions, and has darlings on every page that likely should have been killed.
and this extends, sadly, to plot: everything seems to be going really quite well, and then suddenly someone does something quite unforgivable, out of nowhere and inexplicably. less than ten pages later the book ends. that's after hundreds of pages of what feels like flippant, underexplored inclusion of a dozen serious social issues.
i wish it could, but debut doesn't begin to explain it all away: this was under-edited by a lot. it feels tropey, shallow, cliched, and i came away thinking i needed more and less at once.
bottom line: if you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all...but i really wanted to like this book.
a little thing i like to call Too Much and Not Enough, sadly.
in the first half, i have to tell you...i hated this so much. it stole the "where are youa little thing i like to call Too Much and Not Enough, sadly.
in the first half, i have to tell you...i hated this so much. it stole the "where are you supposed to put all of it" beautiful love and mourning line from fleabag and had a going rate of one simile per sentence, as in most sentences on average had one but sometimes mercifully one would be spared, but not to worry because just as often, somehow, evilly, there would be more than one.
the second half was better, for some reason. but that's a lot to get over.
this very badly wants to be a quiet, striking, introspective book, like those written by sally rooney or brandon taylor, but it doesn't know how to do that. maybe the author will find a way!
bottom line: yipes.
(thanks netgalley for the e-arc)
------------------ tbr review
blacked out and requested books on netgalley exclusively because of their covers...more
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