everie's reviews
38 reviews

The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada

dark mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

A meditative trek, a little surreal. Not much sticking power for me, but I loved some at-length monologues and conversations about the crushing day-to-day disregard of temporary employees at a nameless company and the off-kilter atmosphere.

Two characters who together take up a fair amount of the short novella,

the brother-in-law

and the strange animal Asa sees, fall way more flat. The first, especially, is described in ways that both play up and disregard a sense of menace. It leaves you feeling off-center, but feels like there's not much deeper thought put into it.

Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum

dark emotional hopeful tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Romantic body horror up the wazoo hell yeah

Much more fun than I'd expected! Not for the faint of heart but I loved the ending.

girl getting exactly what she wants (though her wants re: her husband's philandering are mind-boggling, it makes them more perfect for each other than her husband realizes. Wishing them the best! I didn't expect a hopeful ending

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.75

An interesting zoom-out on a basic suburban neighborhood in the 70s, centering around the narrators' ogling obsessions with the suicides of five sisters over the course of about a year. Fuddles along for about 50-100 pages more than it needs to. You can tell it's a first novel, and ofc you can DEFINITELY tell it was written by a man named Jeffrey lol

I hesitated to read it for a long time, mostly because of the title and meh experiences with one of the author's other books, but I now wish I'd read it in college or a book club so I could hash out my thoughts about it with some people and compare takes. So definitely an interesting book! 

The greek chorus of boys viewing the girls through their own romantic (and limited) notions add a great layer to an intensly fraught, private story they'll never know the truth about. They don't know or understand the Lisbon girls (or even try very hard to, while they're still alive). No matter how they try to insert themselves in their story and pretend closeness to the girls, all they have left in the end are unanswered questions, unaddressed trauma, and a moldering museum of the girls' belongings.  

The author does a great job of showing how they can't move on from this--though the intense focus on a bunch of horny boys gets old fast (hence the "this coulda been a shorter book") and the last sections of the book go on and on before ending on a strong final two pages. Very literary fiction of you sir but also very clear you bit off more than you could chew with this premise and didn't know exactly how to wrap up. 

I want to see the movie now!

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Suicide

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

dark tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Overly long, but I cheered when

the groom bit the dust

. I think the mystery was....fine. The killer was.....fine. The real strength was probably in the differentiation of the character voices and a satisfyingly bleak portrait of

rich male privilege and the horrors of boarding school boy's club.

I probably won't remember this mystery much longer, but it was fine all around

(Listened to the audiobook version and the two voice actors doing the cast's voices/accents were fantastic! So many different styles!)

The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

dark mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

Not bad, but not particularly interesting. Plague Doctor and Mermaid's story servicable, but not memorable

aside from the prince's demise (hell yeah) and the Plague Doctor's past (oh no :().

I'm guilty of this too, but prose felt a bit overwritten--that made it hard to connect to the story

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A tense thriller centering a pair of sisters--one (Ayoola) who kills her boyfriends

for reasons that remain unexplained :)

and one (Korede) who cleans up the other's messes, literally and figuratively.

The story does a great job letting the reader grow as frustrated as Korede is with Ayoola, showing her as flighty, thoughtless, the angel of everyone's world even as she's taking a knife to Korede's--and, uh, all those guys, too. 

The story is short, but it balances insights on gender and class in Nigerian society with the stop-start panic of Korede's life, which is ruled first by her sister, then by societal expectations (or perhaps the reverse?). A great bitter narrator, a wonderfully realized cast of characters, even those that only show up for a few pages--but by the end,

the devolution of the main character, who seemed to be at the cusp of freeing herself, was a little disappointing. Not because she regressed to the way she was at the start, but because it feels like this situation can only last so much longer before it boils over again. I mean, Ayoola will kill again. She's terrible at hiding her tracks. We still don't know why she does what she does. Maybe she doesn't need a reason, but it feels incomplete

Still fantastic writing. Author to look out for in the future.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Murder

Minor: Child abuse

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.25

It's interesting--I don't feel like I loved any one story (aside from the first one). But that's because almost every one of them sucked me in so much, only to end abruptly (or go on way too long--we'll get to that one). Most of the endings didn't live up to the jouney, but the journey was so incredible that I'll definitely keep an eye on Machado's future works. 

The first story is my favorite. There's really no way to live up to every demand of patriarchy--she's the perfect woman for him, then the perfect wife, but to guard anything within herself is seen as a temptation to unwrap. And when all the mysteries are gone, what then? But I don't think there's only one theme there, of course. Lots to think about, lovely to read, and least meh ending.

Others fell a little flat. And then there's the Law and Order SVU saga.

I feel like Machado wrote this as a personal challenge and then halfway through realized just how many episodes of SVU exist. If it had been half as long, it would have been hilarious. Insteeead it turned into a slog

after the detectives' doubles vanished for the first time

and circled the drain for many many pages. Which may have been the point, poking fun at the endless grimmness of SVU bizarro-world New York City, where weirdos are doing the Worst Crimes Imaginable every 0.5 seconds and it's up to Whozit and Whatzer to be exposed to the horrors. But yeah. There'd have been nothing wrong with cheating a little and skipping like 3 seasons in between.

Excited to see what she does next!

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories by Moto Hagio

4.5

Iguana Girl and Hanshin: Half-God are standouts, but this collection of stoties from different points in Hagio's career is a must read!! And the interview at the end, ugh. Filled with love for Hagio's work and mark on the genre, really a master of shojo/sci fi 

The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura

dark funny lighthearted mysterious sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Good rhythm and mystery, ends with a whimper. 

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar

adventurous dark emotional hopeful lighthearted mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

I'm amazed this is by two authors, because I spent most of the first half annoyed that the "voices" of the narrators were so similar. This got better in the second half--when more details of how Red and Blue navigated their societies were fleshed out--but I still spent the second half until the end wondering whether the story would commit hard to a

selfcest "two alternate universe versions of the main character fall in love"

ending.

(Although technically you could say

can't chew up the pieces of your time girlfriend to reconstitute her from the ground up without turning Red a little Purple if ya know what i mean ;) But not what I was expecting lol

Not bad, liked some parts very much (the wolf and the above spoilered twist), but didn't completely buy the declarations of love, somehow. Or not to that degree? Made me think "hm" and that might ultimately be because it's very hard to think of the characters as characters instead of representative of their timeline/mission/concept. They're fairly...vague, somehow. Idk, it was fine

Almost permanently DNF years ago, started over and finished this time for a book club.