Rating: A+ | ★★★★★
Synopsis (from Goodreads): The mixed-race grandson of ex-slaves, Machado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature, who has been championed by the likes of Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, John Updike, and Salman Rushdie. In his masterpiece, the 1881 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (translated also as Epitaph of a Small Winner), the ghost of a decadent and disagreeable aristocrat decides to write his memoir. He dedicates it to the worms gnawing at his corpse and tells of his failed romances and halfhearted political ambitions, serves up harebrained philosophies, and complains with gusto from the depths of his grave. Wildly imaginative, wickedly witty, and ahead of its time, the novel has been compared to the work of everyone from Cervantes to Sterne to Joyce to Nabokov to Borges to Calvino, and has influenced generations of writers around the world. Spoiler-Free Review: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is so very good. It is drifting and listless without feeling useless or overly self-involved, heartbreaking without feeling trite. It is a strange little book about nothing at all—the narrator is dead when the novel begins, and the story progresses as an unrealized life. The narrative style is reminiscent of The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, or (so I have conjectured from other accounts) Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. de Assis’s writing is rendered in beautiful detail by the translator, Flora Thomson-DeVeaux. Philosophy, love, and ambition (or lack thereof) combine in these strange tales, and I cannot help but feel as though de Assis would have liked to see the state of sad-girl lit today. There is something sad-girl about Brás Cubas and his torrid affairs and his insistent ennui. The book has a modern sense of irreverence, a self-awareness that belies its age and status as one of the great classics of Western literature. Reader, do not be irritated by this confession. I am well aware that in order to titillate your fancy,
In just 291 pages (160 chapters!) the reader comes to know the sad, slovenly Brás Cubas and more than that, the reader comes to see some of their own sadness and slovenliness in him.
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Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Review: One of the great pleasures of reading is latching onto a phrase that seems as though it was made for you, for your singular pair of eyes. My phrase: “Tatung rice cooker.” For nearly my whole life, my paternal grandparents have owned a Tatung rice cooker—a bright orange metal pot resting on four stubby legs, held down by a shiny steel lid and proud of its two settings: cook and keep warm. That rice cooker has fed my father’s side for well over twenty years, as the family expanded from seven to twenty-one. Seeing it represented in Stay True feels like a thin line spun out from Hua Hsu to me (probably more accurately and clinically known as the Taiwanese diaspora). One of Stay True’s greatest strengths is Hsu’s ability to draw together decades of immigrant history while also leaving room for Hsu’s personal story—the story of him and Ken. It is a testament to how Asian-American lives are built on the sacrifices of parents and grandparents, and how the journey to define oneself as American must coexist with those sacrifices. Hsu contextualizes Asian-American life—the history of which is still evolving in the United States today—providing a brief history as well as a memoir of his own life. Simultaneously, the book is a meditation on the mosaic of youth: the late-night dinners and the baseball caps and the brief glimmers of growing up. It is not just about who Ken was but about what Ken meant to his friends—the bonds that never leave one’s mind, regardless of the years or miles that pass. Hsu rejects the notion that youth is something to grow out of, to leave behind. The feelings felt then, and the experiences had then, continue on. What the moment brings: that forward-facing dimension of friendship, the knowledge that you will grow old, or apart, and that you may one day need each other in some presently unimaginable way.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart. How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity—its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power—we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted. We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. Review: As a crash course to modern feminist theory, The Right to Sex is particularly helpful. (I speak as someone who has never formally studied feminist theory.) As a work aspiring to anything deeper than that, it falls short. All essay collections have their hits and misses, and The Right to Sex is no exception. The first two essays, “The Conspiracy Against Men” and “Talking to My Students About Porn” feel particularly weak and their revelations, self-evident. Srinivasan dedicates large chunks of each chapter to explaining other feminist thinkers’ work. Of course, no scholarship exists in a vacuum, but such extended references beg the question, what exactly does Srinivasan herself think? A thread of uncertainty and nervousness runs through this collection. There are many moments where Srinivasan wanders in her argument—moments where she falters, or attempts to mount too wide of a scope, or concedes too much. These moments appear to be symptoms of Srinivasan’s insistence on a holistic assessment of the factors underpinning today’s female condition(s), but they add up to a book that is frustratingly inscrutable. It is difficult to understand what Srinivasan is arguing, and sometimes if she is arguing anything at all. Thankfully, the final four essays showcase more of Srinivasan’s original thought. “On Not Sleeping with Your Students” is the clear winner from this collection, partially because Srinivasan reveals her own sardonic voice, her own opinions, the most in this essay. Is it too sterile, too boring to suggest that instead of sleeping with his student, this professor should have been—teaching her?
The Right to Sex is not 2021’s Second Sex, nor does it have to be. But it is a promising afternoon read, and a worthwhile opportunity to engage with issues of sex, gender, and exploitation that modern society has considered foregone conclusions.
Rating: 60% | ★★☆☆☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay--playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized--has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories--moments of joy and oblivion--and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures? Spoiler-Free Review: Justin Torres returns, more than a decade after We the Animals, with Blackouts: a sprawling, arcane overview of queer culture in America. It has been difficult for any reviewer to adequately describe what Blackouts is. Hugh Ryan of the New York Times speaks of a mix of "erasure poetry and queer history." Charles Arrowsmith of The Washington Post considers it "fable-like." Sam Sacks comes closest to the core of the novel: "Instead of illumination, “Blackouts” invites readers into the smaller consolation of shared sadness. Even if it had something transcendent to impart, after all, we would forget it anyway." It is this mutability, this fundamentally unplaceable aura, that gives the novel its strength. It is also this mutability that makes the novel so difficult to enjoy—though that may be too reductive a word to describe the experience of reading Blackouts. There is such a thing as a lack of alignment between the reader and the story, and it happened in this case. Torres smartly and proudly does not condescend to the reader's lack of knowledge about the real-life Jan Gay, or even to the reader's lack of knowledge about the queer struggle worldwide. For me, lying outside the intended audience of this book, the characters felt feeble and the plot, tangled and unclear. It is difficult to know where the narrator and Juan Gay have emerged from in the vast universe, and where they may be going. These absences of a static origin and a sure future would be sobering if it were not for the fact that they melt into the equally ill-defined fabric of Jan Gay's life. Blackouts is fraught with suspense; though their relationship is never explained, the tension between Juan and the narrator propels the novel. Throughout the story the reader understands the narrator's premature mourning and Juan's preternaturally calm retelling of Jan Gay's life. Yet, as much as this tension forms the attraction of the novel, it never quite finds its terminus. The reader completes the novel with much the same curiosity about the narrator and Juan present in the beginning. In formal terms, the narrator and Juan's interactions form the frame story for Blackouts, but Jan Gay's story vies for—and wins—greater attention. This unsteady relationship between the twin strands of the plot, along with the lack of definition in either strand, result in a novel that feelings unsettlingly incomplete and unfulfilling—though, of course, there is a case to be made for those qualities being the exact foci of Torres's project. I am perhaps not the reader for Blackouts, but I have enormous respect for what the novel aspires to and ultimately achieves.
Rating: 76% | C | ★★★☆☆
Warnings: + Death + Illness Synopsis (from Goodreads): From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old. Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Review: It is somewhat impossible to review this book—not necessarily because of its subject matter, but because of the distance at which Didion holds the reader. The reader is confined to an observer's role, just as Didion is an observer to her daughter's illness and to her own frailty. As Didion physically weakens, the reader can do nothing but feel frustrated alongside her. The synopsis on the back cover implies that Blue Nights is a masterpiece of commiseration, something for grieving parents to read, but this is a suggestion that vastly oversimplifies the book. What is so frustrating about this collection, in addition to the reader's distance, is Didion's apparent lack of finesse; essays leap between past and present, between quiet days and devastating days. Grief is not linear, and not even a writer like Didion can escape its powerful disruption of life. Nevertheless, this disjointedness renders the book difficult to read. I was crying for the tiles, the Minton tiles in the arcade south of Bethesda Fountain, Sara Mankiewicz's pattern, Quintana's christening. I was crying for Connie Wald walking her dog through Boulder City and across Hoover Dam. I was crying for Diana holding the champagne flute and smoking the cigarette in Sara Mankiewicz's living room. I was crying for Diana who had talked to Blake Watson so that I could bring home the beautiful baby girl he had delivered home from the nursery at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica.
Perhaps more than any of her other collections, Blue Nights is about Didion herself—her concrete personal life. The reader comes in close contact with details about the author that shatter popular perceptions of her as an ordinary private citizen. It is clear in Blue Nights that, in her later life, Didion was accustomed to certain creature comforts and privileges that were not as evident in her earlier 60s- and 70s-focused works. Didion's casual name-dropping of celebrities like Natasha Richardson are occasionally jarring. These moments do not detract from her accomplishments, but they produce occasional moments of atmospheric inconsistency in a book that is otherwise about something deeply painful and tender.
Blue Nights reads as a largely un- or self-edited work—for better or for worse. Its status as one of Didion's last works immortalizes it; its content and organization argue for much less critical scrutiny.
Rating: 78% | C+ | ★★★☆☆
Warnings: + Eating disorders Synopsis (from Goodreads): Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting. Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey. Review: Milk Fed has been the darling of the book community—specifically the blasé, cool girl sub-sect of the community since the book's release in 2021. Melissa Broder's dry wit sweeps up eating disorders, family dysfunctions, and queerness in its rushing current. Broder's descriptions of food are at once delectable—burritos swaddled in tortilla blankets and frozen yogurt bedazzled with toppings—and unsettling, reflecting the mood of the novel. Milk Fed is minimalist; the characters frequent the same locations and talk only amongst themselves. The claustrophobia, the lack of alternative lives and alternative choices, is acute. Supporting characters, including Rachel's offscreen mother, add to the haze. Like Elaine Hsieh Chou's Disorientation, Milk Fed is a satire with persistent emotional appeal, and its greatest strength is perhaps not its focus on Rachel's eating disorder but its window into the complex relationship between Rachel and her mother. Milk Fed is a novel written by a woman, for women, in an intimate shorthand on modern beauty standards and familial relationships. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.
Milk Fed falls short in its overall arc. Satire is always a toss-up for me, and in this particular instance I'm unsure if I can commit myself fully to Broder's vision. Satire seems to be her aspiration, but Milk Fed feels far more serious—at least on its surface and even on its immediate sub-layers—than its contemporary satirical peers.
And, as a story, its cohesion is wounded in the last few chapters. The end of the novel emphasizes a different theme than the food-related one Broder explores in the rest of the novel, abruptly turning the reader in a different direction. The characters remain largely enigmas, with minimal development. Still, Milk Fed is extremely timely and deserving of its attention; it is a novel that prompts a turn inward.
Rating: 79% | C+ | ★★★☆☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. After a sojourn across the pond, she arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time. In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Money runs ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than their precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill. Spoiler-Free Review: Happy Hour is perhaps best described as a lot of incisive quotes strung together with minimal plot. Needless to say, I liked it. Granados's writing brims with sardonic verve; the story proceeds in an almost–stream-of-consciousness journey through dive bars, sublet apartments, and dizzying high rises. Isa and Gala strike at each other, then at everyone around them, in the midst of a sweltering, heat-vibrating New York summer that brings out the desperation and determined carpe diem in everyone. I received Happy Hour as a gift from McNally Jackson during their winter holiday giveaway last year, but I'm happy I waited (procrastinated) reading it until the season was right. Only in the thick of it, with sweat dripping into your eyes on the subway, can you understand the simultaneous itch to run screaming into the street and the desire to sink down into yourself. The fast-and-loose nature of the plot allows Granados to dig into Isa's thoughts and especially into Isa's observations of the city; I have sticky tabs on just about every other page. Happy Hour is a novel that will only improve upon successive re-reads. There's so much to pick apart about the characters' chemistry and about the way Isa thinks. I could live in Granados's mind forever. Or, more accurately, she seemed to live in mine while I read, rifling through my memories and private thoughts. I realize now, the older you get, the harder it is to be impressed because people make you feel ashamed of ever being impressed by anything at all. I kept many glowing remarks to myself because of this.
But, of course, a plot-less novel has its limits, and as the novel meets its second and third acts, the pacing slows dramatically. It becomes less clear what kind of ending Happy Hour will have, and more crucially, if any ending will be satisfying. But Granados's writing is so irresistible, and the city so spectacular, that to DNF would be a travesty.
Autumn has set in once again in New York, but for readers who want to recall the heat, the sound of vendors on the street, and the masses of people dancing under neon lights, Happy Hour gives everything its title promises.
Rating: 89% | B+ | ★★★★☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): CHICAGO, SOMETIME-- Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings. For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision. To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that keep him going. Without them, the entire framework of his existence would collapse. For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability—until the two meet. Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation? Spoiler-Free Review: Alone with You in the Ether is Olivie Blake at her most Olivie Blake–ness. As with The Atlas Six series, Blake fuses physics with long odes on love to create a spellbinding, if unevenly paced, tale. Aldo and Reagan are so much more than what the synopsis promises—they are deeply human and flawed, and they move through their lives with an utterly sympathetic fear and sense of loss. They are beyond typecasting, and perhaps it is to the synopsis's credit that it understates the true chemistry between the characters—leaving all the more for the reader to discover. The novel is subtitled a love story, but there is neither swooning (on the part of the characters or on the part of the reader) nor many confessions of infatuation. It might be more aptly subtitled a soulmate story, with all of the less-romantic connotations of the word "soulmate." She wanted to tell him, to teach him: every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else.
Where Blake stumbles is with the pacing and with the overly complicated science tangents. The third act of the novel is exhilarating and vulnerable; the first two acts, equally vulnerable but not as even. The story drags at times, especially when Blake sinks so deeply into the dreamy landscape of the writing that it's unclear what is actually taking place—what Reagan's criminal past actually is, what Aldo's teaching is actually like. And, of course, try as I did, I could never quite figure out Blake's passionate odes to mathematics and science, though I certainly gripped the life raft of symbolic bees and hexagons for dear life.
I liked this book, but it's probably more accurate to say that I almost loved this book. Many of its quotes will remain with me. This is a story for those hoping to be seen, and for those for whom the societal ideal of love has never fully assuaged their self-consciousness. A new edition of Alone with You in the Ether will be available November 29, 2022.
Rating: 78% | C+ | ★★★☆☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem—after a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead. When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won’t give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father. For ten years, she’s run from the town that never understood her, and even though she misses the sound of a warm Southern night and her eccentric, loving family and their funeral parlor, she can’t bring herself to stay. Even with her father gone, it feels like nothing in this town has changed. And she hates it. Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as broad and infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is. Romance is most certainly dead... but so is her new editor, and his unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories. Spoiler-Free Review: I have a certain respect for three-star books. They remind me that I—or my reading preferences—am capable of being indifferent. The Dead Romantics does not elicit the choked-back tears of Beach Read, nor does it inspire an itch to chuck it across the room as The Idiot does. Instead, The Dead Romantics is very simply—fine. (I also have a soft spot for The Dead Romantics because I bought it at McNally Jackson and now I can be smug about having a direct-ish connection to the start of the book.) It starts with a relatively fresh premise: a young ghostwriter returns home to help with her father's funeral and unexpectedly bumps into her newly dead editor. But the rest of the story lacks legs: Florence and Benji's romance is never quite fleshed out; Florence's individual arc feels two-dimensional and the solution feels self-evident; and the resolution of the novel is a messy tribute to deus ex machina. Neither Florence nor Benji are particularly complex characters, and I feel that Benji was written as a mere tribute to the idea of the "grumpy male hero" rather than organically developing into that trope. This book also feels like a cobbled-together version of tropes from other novels; an acute sense of déjà vu from Beach Read gripped me as I read the scene with Benji in the hospital. Love wasn't a whisper in the quiet night. It was a yelp into the void, screaming that you were here.
But Poston tries her best. There is plenty of heart in The Dead Romantics, from Florence's struggle to overcome the identity her ex-boyfriend projected onto her to Benji's struggle to come to terms with his death and his burgeoning relationship with Florence. This is a book for readers who want a light, fall-tinged story that will leave them feeling much lighter at the end.
Rating: 95% | A | ★★★★★
Synopsis (from Goodreads): Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby. Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute. If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves. Spoiler-Free Review: Another year, another September. I'm back to college, and it feels as though I've been here forever even though my house is different, my professors are different, and even my friends are different. Everything is the same. Everything is different, and in times like these I crave something cliché and comforting. Emily Henry's Book Lovers was my most anticipated read of this year. It's a rich, warm hug of a novel, made for book lovers by a book lover. Henry excels at creating romances that teeter into tropes without losing realism. While this is my least favorite of Henry's three adult romances, it is by far the funniest of the group. "Have you heard of MOM?"
Nora is a brilliant protagonist, trope-y without being laughable, and unapologetically herself. Everyone has a Nora in their life, and whether you admire, fear, or worry about them, you want to understand them. Henry empathizes with such figures in Book Lovers. Charlie is also Nora's perfect match, so perfect that the reader stops just short of an eye roll. This book is fantastic, trope-y goodness.
There is only one aspect of the novel that feels off-kilter, and that is Libby's character. Compared to Nora, the reader does not spend much time with Libby, and subsequently she feels quite two-dimensional. Placing her as the crux of one of the novel's main conflicts leads to a frustrating conclusion, and interactions between her and the other characters often feel like side storylines rather than integral scenes. (Maybe this is just my internal younger sibling disowning any sort of legitimate annoying characteristic in Libby.) Ultimately, it wouldn't be an Emily Henry romance without some sort of heartbreak near the end. I never expect to cry at the end of her books—but I always do. Whether it's the sister dynamic, the painful hometown nostalgia, or the struggle to move beyond fear of the future, this book will touch a nerve in every reader. That's the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you've built from scratch, you're all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.
This quote plays on a loop in my head. I live in a tender moment of my life. I am simultaneously my work in progress and my crumpled-up drafts. Cheers to you and me, and to the pursuit of our finalized, bound stories.
Rating: A+ | ★★★★★ Synopsis (from Goodreads): As a general’s daughter in a vast empire that revels in war and enslaves those it conquers, seventeen-year-old Kestrel has two choices: she can join the military or get married. But Kestrel has other intentions. One day, she is startled to find a kindred spirit in a young slave up for auction. Arin’s eyes seem to defy everything and everyone. Following her instinct, Kestrel buys him—with unexpected consequences. It’s not long before she has to hide her growing love for Arin. But he, too, has a secret, and Kestrel quickly learns that the price she paid for a fellow human is much higher than she ever could have imagined. Set in a richly imagined new world, The Winner’s Curse by Marie Rutkoski is a story of deadly games where everything is at stake, and the gamble is whether you will keep your head or lose your heart. Non-Spoiler Review: To date, I have never read a book series as engaging and heart-pounding as The Winner's Trilogy. (And yes, I'm going to insist on using the original covers because I'm weak when it comes to fluffy skirts.) Kestrel, Arin, and their story are indelible, igniting flickers of excitement in me even now, years after finishing the series. I can almost see Arin's scar in my mind, hear Kestrel's fingers sliding across piano keys. Rutkoski's writing is gorgeous and precise, creating a rich, real world; while mostly advertised as a romance series, The Winner's Trilogy also boasts a complex and nuanced understanding of politics, with kings, slaves, generals, and two vulnerable protagonists caught at the heart of this sprawling web. This series is the modern literary standard for political drama. The reader can feel how tangible the stakes are, how many tasks and risks the characters balance with every action. Kestrel and Arin are at the heart of the story, planetary bodies attracting and repelling each other. She’d felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self. In short, it would be a crime not to adapt this series for television or film. Hulu, Netflix, HBO—please call Marie Rutkoski soon.
Rating: 96% | A | ★★★★★ Synopsis (from Goodreads): Naomi Westfield has the perfect fiancé: Nicholas Rose holds doors open for her, remembers her restaurant orders, and comes from the kind of upstanding society family any bride would love to be a part of. They never fight. They're preparing for their lavish wedding that's three months away. And she is miserably and utterly sick of him. Naomi wants out, but there's a catch: whoever ends the engagement will have to foot the nonrefundable wedding bill. When Naomi discovers that Nicholas, too, has been feigning contentment, the two of them go head-to-head in a battle of pranks, sabotage, and all-out emotional warfare. But with the countdown looming to the wedding that may or may not come to pass, Naomi finds her resolve slipping. Because now that they have nothing to lose, they're finally being themselves--and having fun with the last person they expect: each other. Non-Spoiler Review: Yes. That's all I have to say to this novel: yes. Yes, you should read You Deserve Each Other. Yes, you should drive to your local bookstore right now and pick up a copy of You Deserve Each Other. Yes, You Deserve Each Other is worth all of the online hype it receives. I finished You Deserve Each Other in summer 2021 and haven't stopped thinking about it since. Hogle has a perfect sense of balancing the comedic with the heartfelt, and her skills shine in Naomi and Nicholas's relationship. The concept itself is completely original—a complete reimagining of the enemies-to-lovers trope that asks the question most romance authors don't dare think about: what happens after the happily ever after? When I started to laugh, he got even madder. "DENTAL HYGIENE IS NOT A JOKE, NAOMI." The cast of characters is absolutely perfect, and Naomi shines in particular as a flawed heroine and as someone simply trying her best. Nicholas undergoes an enormous transformation from the start of the novel to its end, from villain to simply a flawed, ordinary man. Beneath the surface, You Deserve Each Other also asks complicated questions: how can those without college degrees support themselves? How should we address elitism towards those who do not hold conventionally esteemed jobs? What is the economy like these days, and who is affected the most?
I'm trying my hardest to push my sister into making this novel her next read of the year, and I hope I've pushed you enough to read it, too. It's in the very title: You Deserve Each Other. Rating: 91% | A- | ★★★★★ Warnings: + Sexual content + Violence Synopsis (from Goodreads): The Alexandrian Society, caretakers of lost knowledge from the greatest civilizations of antiquity, are the foremost secret society of magical academicians in the world. Those who earn a place among the Alexandrians will secure a life of wealth, power, and prestige beyond their wildest dreams, and each decade, only the six most uniquely talented magicians are selected to be considered for initiation. Enter the latest round of six: Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona, unwilling halves of an unfathomable whole, who exert uncanny control over every element of physicality. Reina Mori, a naturalist, who can intuit the language of life itself. Parisa Kamali, a telepath who can traverse the depths of the subconscious, navigating worlds inside the human mind. Callum Nova, an empath easily mistaken for a manipulative illusionist, who can influence the intimate workings of a person’s inner self. Finally, there is Tristan Caine, who can see through illusions to a new structure of reality—an ability so rare that neither he nor his peers can fully grasp its implications. When the candidates are recruited by the mysterious Atlas Blakely, they are told they will have one year to qualify for initiation, during which time they will be permitted preliminary access to the Society’s archives and judged based on their contributions to various subjects of impossibility: time and space, luck and thought, life and death. Five, they are told, will be initiated. One will be eliminated. The six potential initiates will fight to survive the next year of their lives, and if they can prove themselves to be the best among their rivals, most of them will. Most of them. Spoiler-Free Review: The Atlas Six was one of my favorite novels of 2021. Olivie Blake spins an unbelievable world filled with magic, science, and above all, the quest for magic. It's a timely book, exemplifying the dark academia trend online. This low fantasy world leaves the reader with one foot in the real world and one foot in the magical world, simultaneously anchoring them in something familiar and allowing them to explore another, completely mesmerizing world. The plot begins slowly but races through the second and third acts, building up to a hasty but still breathless conclusion that provides a strong jumping-off point for the next installment. "We are medeians because we will never have enough," Callum said hoarsely. "We aren't normal; we are gods born with pain built in. We are incendiary beings and we are flawed, except the weaknesses we pretend to have are not our true weaknesses at all." The two qualities that set The Atlas Six apart from other novels are its cast of characters and Blake's writing style. The cast of characters—the arrogant Nico, the underestimated Libby, the dangerous Parisa, the insightful Reina, the bleeding-heart Tristan, and the enigmatic Callum—make the story what it is, not vice versa. This novel is a masterclass in how to thread relationships together between characters and allow the threads to tangle, to form unsolvable problems that shove the plot forward. There are no villains in The Atlas Six, or perhaps they are all villains.
Blake's writing style has been criticized for being too complicated, but as someone who finds guilty pleasure in writing that tends towards the purple, I enjoyed it. I did have to re-read certain lines before they made sense to me, but overall I thought the writing style matched the overall dark tone of the novel and mirrored its opinions on elitism, the power of knowledge, and Machiavellian plots. For fans of dark academia, the TV show The Magicians (although admittedly I quit after the second season), and for those who harbor guilty wishes to return to the classroom, The Atlas Six is a must read. The wait for the next novel, The Atlas Paradox, is agonizing but will be, I'm sure, worth every second. I also have a Spotify playlist for The Atlas Six! Find it here. Rating: 83% | B- | ★★★★
Warnings: + Abuse Synopsis (from Goodreads): Tiffy Moore needs a cheap flat, and fast. Leon Twomey works nights and needs cash. Their friends think they’re crazy, but it’s the perfect solution: Leon occupies the one-bed flat while Tiffy’s at work in the day, and she has the run of the place the rest of the time. But with obsessive ex-boyfriends, demanding clients at work, wrongly imprisoned brothers and, of course, the fact that they still haven’t met yet, they’re about to discover that if you want the perfect home you need to throw the rulebook out the window… Non-Spoiler Review The Flatshare has many good qualities—dual POV, well-rounded characters, abuse portrayal—but the execution of these qualities somehow leaves the story lacking. O'Leary constructs her dual POV world with precision. Authors often fall into the trap of writing their characters too similarly to each other, defeating the entire purpose of multiple POV, but O'Leary smartly avoids that at the syntactical level. Dialogue is a primary characteristic of Tiffy's more energetic chapters, while the levelheaded Leon has more laconic, personal pronoun-less insights. Moreover, O'Leary carefully addresses emotional abuse, a topic just starting to peek through in today's fiction. It was a topic I certainly wasn't expecting in this feel-good novel. But either because of the multiple storylines O'Leary juggles or because of the sometimes very divergent events in Tiffy and Leon's lives, I finished this novel at ease, but not amazed. I wanted and want, even months after completing the novel, more of something. Of what, I'm not sure, but it feels as though I'm running my fingers over a paperback without covers after all is said and done. Rating: 91% | A- | ★★★★★
Warnings: + Violence + Suicide Synopsis (from Goodreads): At Montverre, an exclusive academy tucked away in the mountains, the best and brightest are trained for excellence in the grand jeu: an arcane and mysterious contest. Léo Martin was once a student there, but lost his passion for the grand jeu following a violent tragedy. Now he returns in disgrace, exiled to his old place of learning with his political career in tatters. Montverre has changed since he studied there, even allowing a woman, Claire Dryden, to serve in the grand jeu’s highest office of Magister Ludi. When Léo first sees Claire he senses an odd connection with her, though he’s sure they have never met before. Both Léo and Claire have built their lives on lies. And as the legendary Midsummer Game, the climax of the year, draws closer, secrets are whispering in the walls… Spoiler-Free Review: I love The Betrayals so much I have a Spotify playlist for it. This novel is an exquisite triumph, a re-examination of the magic boarding school genre. It begs comparison to Harry Potter for younger readers, but The Betrayals proposes a different reality, in which magic is beautiful but also corrupt—a fantasy but also a tool of the elite. Collins' writing brings the magical academy of Montverre to life, with all of its hulking shadows and dark whispers on full display. Each character, from Léo to Carfax to the mysterious Claire, is beautifully wrought in tragedy and spirit. This novel is not for the impatient. The first thirds of the story is achingly slow, as though Collins dares the reader to look away before she's finally unveiled her masterpiece. There is an element of showmanship present throughout the entire novel involving the reader as a mere pawn. The rules of the game are infuriatingly, perpetually unclear, but it's all part of the magic of The Betrayals. Montverre is a jealous mistress, and the interloper reader will never truly uncover all of her secrets. |
From the ArchiveWhile my main reviews are organized by seasons and I try to write reviews immediately after I finish reading, there are always stories that lose to the hustle and bustle of everyday life. From the Archive is a redemptive collection of mini-reviews of books I read in the past that continue to captivate me.
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