en-US Sun, 06 Apr 2025 17:40:32 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 211640295
As they attempt to evade the boy's increasingly desperate father, horrifying incidents of butchery follow them. At first Jess thinks she understands what they're up against, but she's about to learn there's more to these surreal and grisly events than she could've ever imagined.

And that when the wolf finally comes home, none will be spared.
]]> 285 Nat Cassidy 1250354358 Em 5 2025, arc, horror When the Wolf Comes Home! You can catch this novel when it releases on April 22, 2025.

[4.5 stars]

For those of you with daddy issues, do I have the book for you!

Synopsis:
A woman down on her luck and the young boy she comes across one terrible evening flee on a road trip across the country, finding terror and horror in their wake. That is all you need to know! Oh, and there's a huge werewolf. Wolfman? Gigantic beast.

I love a good creature feature, so I was so excited when this novel was released, even though werewolves are often a hard sell for me. And, I'll be honest, I was unsure how I felt about this novel for the first 30% or so of the novel. The plot is propulsive, barely giving the reader time to breathe. It's also a little wacky (when it's not incredibly gory -- the body horror in this is top notch), feeling like a campy 90s horror movie. It didn't feel like what I was promised in the synopsis.

It is, but it's not. There's also a lot of heart here, as our main character, Jessa, attempts to befriend and keep her young charge safe. She's battling more than just a twenty foot werewolf; her father has just died and her acting career has fizzled out, leaving her unsure of what she's even doing. We watch as she's trying to navigate her own fears while quelling the young boy's, and I found her voice to be authentic and realistic. She's kind of a mess, but wouldn't we all be in this situation?

What I love about Cassidy's work is how he manages to balance the moments of gore and horror with a message that resonates with many of us: in this case, it's centered around fear and insecurity and the darkness that terrifies us because it reflects our own faces back at us. This novel, while not perfect (I wish the last 5% had a bit more space to breathe), is great and so fucking gross and a big win for those of us with daddy issues. And by big win, I mean emotionally devastating, of course.

And, I hope Cassidy continues writing such heartfelt afterwords. They're beautiful.]]> 4.29 2025
author: Nat Cassidy
name: Em
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: 2025, arc, horror
review:
Thank you so much to the publisher, Tor Nightfire, and Netgalley for an e-arc of When the Wolf Comes Home! You can catch this novel when it releases on April 22, 2025.

[4.5 stars]

For those of you with daddy issues, do I have the book for you!

Synopsis:
A woman down on her luck and the young boy she comes across one terrible evening flee on a road trip across the country, finding terror and horror in their wake. That is all you need to know! Oh, and there's a huge werewolf. Wolfman? Gigantic beast.

I love a good creature feature, so I was so excited when this novel was released, even though werewolves are often a hard sell for me. And, I'll be honest, I was unsure how I felt about this novel for the first 30% or so of the novel. The plot is propulsive, barely giving the reader time to breathe. It's also a little wacky (when it's not incredibly gory -- the body horror in this is top notch), feeling like a campy 90s horror movie. It didn't feel like what I was promised in the synopsis.

It is, but it's not. There's also a lot of heart here, as our main character, Jessa, attempts to befriend and keep her young charge safe. She's battling more than just a twenty foot werewolf; her father has just died and her acting career has fizzled out, leaving her unsure of what she's even doing. We watch as she's trying to navigate her own fears while quelling the young boy's, and I found her voice to be authentic and realistic. She's kind of a mess, but wouldn't we all be in this situation?

What I love about Cassidy's work is how he manages to balance the moments of gore and horror with a message that resonates with many of us: in this case, it's centered around fear and insecurity and the darkness that terrifies us because it reflects our own faces back at us. This novel, while not perfect (I wish the last 5% had a bit more space to breathe), is great and so fucking gross and a big win for those of us with daddy issues. And by big win, I mean emotionally devastating, of course.

And, I hope Cassidy continues writing such heartfelt afterwords. They're beautiful.
]]> 11224741 A paranormal rollercoaster ride with goosebumps at every turn--now a motion picture starring Uma Thurman and Anna Sophia Robb! Kit Gordy sees Blackwood Hall towering over black iron gates, and she can't help thinking, This place is evil. The imposing mansion sends a shiver of fear through her. But Kit settles into a routine, trying to ignore the rumors that the highly exclusive boarding school is haunted. Then her classmates begin to show extraordinary and unknown talents. The strange dreams, the voices, the lost letters to family and friends, all become overshadowed by the magic around them.When Kit and her friends realize that Blackwood isn't what it claims to be, it might be too late.]]> 194 Lois Duncan Em 0 currently-reading 3.76 1974
author: Lois Duncan
name: Em
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 220161389 A real-life Latin American haunted mansion. A murky labyrinth of family secrets. A young, aristocratic woman desperate to escape her past. This haunting debut gothic horror novel is perfect for fans of Mexican Gothic and The Shining.

In 1923 Soacha, Colombia, La Casona—an opulent mansion perched above the legendary Salto del Tequendama waterfall—was once home to Antonia and her family, who settle in despite their constant nightmares and the house’s malevolent spirit. But tragedy strikes when Antonia’s mother takes a fatal fall into El Salto and her father, consumed by grief, attempts to burn the house down with Antonia still inside.

Three years later, haunted by disturbing dreams and cryptic journal entries from her late mother, Antonia is drawn back to her childhood home when it is converted into a luxurious hotel. As Antonia confronts her fragmented memories and the dark history of the estate, she wrestles with unsettling questions she can no longer Was her mother’s death by her own hands, or was it by someone else’s?

In a riveting quest for answers, Antonia must navigate the shadows of La Casona, unearthing its darkest secrets and confronting a legacy that threatens to swallow her whole.]]> 256 Carolina FlĂłrez-Cerchiaro 1668062577 Em 0 to-read 3.78 2025
author: Carolina FlĂłrez-Cerchiaro
name: Em
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 224070664
For fans of Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder and Lisa Taddeo's Animal, Shy Girl is a harrowing tale of girlhood, survival, autonomy, and revenge.]]> 247 Mia Ballard Em 0 currently-reading 4.07 2025
author: Mia Ballard
name: Em
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 54814662
Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza (whose bleached blond "Claw" sees and knows all), the Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society's stale notions of femininity. Through the crucible of team sport and, more importantly, friendship, this comic tour de female force chronicles Barry's glorious cast of characters as they charge past every obstacle on the path to finding their glorious true selves.]]> 360 Quan Barry 0525565434 Em 0 to-read 3.85 2020
author: Quan Barry
name: Em
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209357454 Brown Girl in the Ring, The Salt Roads, Falling in Love with Hominids) is an internationally renowned storyteller. This long-awaited new collection of her deeply imaginative short fiction offers striking journeys to far-flung futures and fantastical landscapes. Hopkinson is at the peak of her powers, moving effortlessly between art, folklore, science, and magic.

Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as having “an imagination that most of us would kill for,� Nalo Hopkinson and her Afro-Caribbean, Canadian, and American influences shine in truly unique stories that are gorgeously strange, inventively subversive, and vividly beautiful. In her first stories since 2015, a woman and her cyborg pig eke out a living in a future waterworld; two scientists contemplate the cavernous remains of an alien lifeform; and an artist creates nanotechnology that asserts Blackness where it is least welcome.]]> 224 Nalo Hopkinson 161696426X Em 0 to-read 4.15
author: Nalo Hopkinson
name: Em
average rating: 4.15
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199018245 155 Nolwenn Le Blevennec 1908670835 Em 0 to-read 3.51
author: Nolwenn Le Blevennec
name: Em
average rating: 3.51
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 64398791
Escaping into her work in the conservation studios of the National Gallery, she chips away at the layers of overpaint on a canvas from the collection. Will the discovery of an unexpected truth help her find the clarity she craves?

SECOND SELF is a novel about confronting expectations, and learning to cope with the nagging, complex questions that shape a life. It's about minds and bodies at the mercy of natural forces and social pressure. Above all, it's an ode to big decisions, small, tender moments, and how we choose to be.

This absorbing second novel from the author of WET PAINT is perfect for fans of EXPECTATION and SORROW AND BLISS.]]> 302 Chloë Ashby Em 0 to-read 3.74 2023
author: Chloë Ashby
name: Em
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 19449840
Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim ThĂşy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters become rough again: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy's autism. Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy.]]> 141 Kim ThĂşy 1608199185 Em 0 to-read 3.86 2009
author: Kim ThĂşy
name: Em
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 175123970
Her daughters are mostly on the internet and abroad; her husband is easier to meet on Facebook than at home. Who cares if Eliete, who feels strongly that her youth is gone, allows herself to experiment on Tinder? She would prefer to reignite her relationship with her husband, but he doesn't seem interested. Eliete stays cool and doesn't despair. Then suddenly she finds someone and something different - an inkling of love? Is Duarte a real-life version of one of the heroes in the teenage magazines of her childhood? And what on earth does it mean when her dementia-suffering grandmother says that Portugal's former dictator is part of their family story?

With precise language and acute psychological insight, Cardoso creates a multifaceted character of great strength. Ironic, but by no means distanced, Eliete reflects on an apparently ordinary life against the background of a three-generation story of the 20th and 21st century in Portugal.]]> 241 Dulce Maria Cardoso 1529418828 Em 0 to-read 3.64 2018
author: Dulce Maria Cardoso
name: Em
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49049906 From a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter from the smallest newspaper ever to win the prize for investigative reporting, an urgent, riveting, and heartbreaking investigation into the corporate and governmental greed that pumped millions of pain pills into small Appalachian towns, decimating communities.

Death in Mud Lick is the story of a pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, that distributed 12 million opioid pain pills in three years to a town with a population of 382 people—and of one woman, desperate for justice, after losing her brother to overdose. Debbie Preece’s fight for accountability for her brother’s death took her well beyond the Sav-Rite Pharmacy in coal country, ultimately leading to three of the biggest drug wholesalers in the country. She was joined by a crusading lawyer and by local journalist, Eric Eyre, who uncovered a massive opioid pill-dumping scandal that shook the foundation of America’s largest drug companies—and won him a Pulitzer Prize.

Part Erin Brockovich, part Spotlight, Death in Mud Lick details the clandestine meetings with whistleblowers; a court fight to unseal filings that the drug distributors tried to keep hidden, a push to secure the DEA pill-shipment data, and the fallout after Eyre’s local paper, the Gazette-Mail, the smallest newspaper ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, broke the story.

Eyre follows the opioid shipments into individual counties, pharmacies, and homes in West Virginia and explains how they hooked thousands on prescription drugs—resulting in the highest overdose rates in the country. But despite the tragedy, there is also hope as citizens banded together to create positive change—and won. A work of deep reporting and personal conviction, Eric Eyre’s intimate portrayal of a national public health crisis illuminates the shocking pattern of corporate greed and its repercussions for the citizens of West Virginia—and the nation—to this day.]]> 320 Eric Eyre 198210533X Em 0 to-read 4.08 2020
author: Eric Eyre
name: Em
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213681682 The brilliant detective Ana Dolabra may have finally met her match in the gripping sequel to The Tainted Cup--from the bestselling author of The Founders Trilogy.

In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach, an impossible crime has occurred. A Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—abducted from his quarters while the door and windows remained locked from the inside, in a building whose entrances and exits are all under constant guard.

To solve the case, the Empire calls on its most brilliant and mercurial investigator, the great Ana Dolabra. At her side, as always, is her bemused assistant Dinios Kol.

Before long, Ana’s discovered that they’re not investigating a disappearance, but a murder—and that the killing was just the first chess move by an adversary who seems to be able to pass through warded doors like a ghost, and who can predict every one of Ana’s moves as though they can see the future.

Worse still, the killer seems to be targeting the high-security compound known as the Shroud. Here, the Empire's greatest minds dissect fallen Titans to harness the volatile magic found in their blood. Should it fall, the destruction would be terrible indeed--and the Empire itself will grind to a halt, robbed of the magic that allows its wheels of power to turn.Ěý

Din has seen Ana solve impossible cases before. But this time, with the stakes higher than ever and Ana seemingly a step behind their adversary at every turn, he fears that his superior has finally met an enemy she can’t defeat.]]> 432 Robert Jackson Bennett 059372383X Em 5 2025, arc, fantasy, mystery
[4.5 stars]

In A Drop of Corruption, we find Din and Ana in Yarrowdale, where a seemingly impossible crime has occurred. A man has been disappeared, all traces of him vanished, but his room and windows have been locked from the inside with no sign of entry.

That's all you really need to know: Din and Ana are off to solve an impossible crime, and what an impossible crime it is.

Robert Jackson Bennett does such a fantastic job at blending fantasy and mystery, both in the first novel in this series and in this one. Starting with the infamous locked room mystery set up, Jackson Bennett expands out, revealing more of this world than we've previously been introduced to. This is a novel that is rife with politics and mythmaking (particularly of the regal variety), and it is so well done. If I had any critiques, it would be that it's a bit heavy handed, but that did not take away from the story for me.

As with the first novel, I loved Din and Ana here, though I do wish we had learned just a bit more about their characters. I'm hoping as we delve into future books, we get to see more of their personalities outside of their roles in the Iudex.

There's a great secondary cast of characters here. I especially enjoyed Malo, a warden with augmented senses of smell, hearing, etc, who helps them as they unravel what's been happening in Yarrowdale.

As with the first novel, there's a great array of quite nasty body horror as we learn more about the consequences of coming into contact with any part of a leviathan. There's a scene in this that's particularly brutal, but so well done.

I can't wait for future installments! ]]> 4.62 2025
author: Robert Jackson Bennett
name: Em
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: 2025, arc, fantasy, mystery
review:
Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-arc of this novel!

[4.5 stars]

In A Drop of Corruption, we find Din and Ana in Yarrowdale, where a seemingly impossible crime has occurred. A man has been disappeared, all traces of him vanished, but his room and windows have been locked from the inside with no sign of entry.

That's all you really need to know: Din and Ana are off to solve an impossible crime, and what an impossible crime it is.

Robert Jackson Bennett does such a fantastic job at blending fantasy and mystery, both in the first novel in this series and in this one. Starting with the infamous locked room mystery set up, Jackson Bennett expands out, revealing more of this world than we've previously been introduced to. This is a novel that is rife with politics and mythmaking (particularly of the regal variety), and it is so well done. If I had any critiques, it would be that it's a bit heavy handed, but that did not take away from the story for me.

As with the first novel, I loved Din and Ana here, though I do wish we had learned just a bit more about their characters. I'm hoping as we delve into future books, we get to see more of their personalities outside of their roles in the Iudex.

There's a great secondary cast of characters here. I especially enjoyed Malo, a warden with augmented senses of smell, hearing, etc, who helps them as they unravel what's been happening in Yarrowdale.

As with the first novel, there's a great array of quite nasty body horror as we learn more about the consequences of coming into contact with any part of a leviathan. There's a scene in this that's particularly brutal, but so well done.

I can't wait for future installments!
]]> 205668510 In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of earth magic, power struggle, and self-invention in an own-voices story of trans witchcraft.

Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch: learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy.

When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind. She soon discovers the dark powers threatening the kingdom: a magical blight scars the land, and the power-mad Duchess Helte is crushing everything between her and the crown. In spite of these dangers, Lorel makes friends and begins learning magic from the powerful witches in her coven. However, she fears that her new friends and mentors will find out her secret and kick her out of the coven, or worse.]]> 343 Margaret Killjoy 1558613315 Em 0 to-read 4.04 2024
author: Margaret Killjoy
name: Em
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 22749710
One of Europe’s greatest recent poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize–winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. Her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. “If you want the world in a nutshell,� a Polish critic remarks, “try Szymborska.� But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.

Carefully edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems in Map trace Szymborska’s work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred and fifty poems included here, nearly forty are newly translated; thirteen represent the entirety of the poet’s last Polish collection, Enough , never before published in English.
Map is the first English publication of Szymborska’s work since the acclaimed Here, and it offers her devoted readers a welcome return to her “ironic elegance� ( The New Yorker ).]]> 464 Wisława Szymborska 0544126025 Em 0 to-read 4.45 2015
author: Wisława Szymborska
name: Em
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 223957369 A stunning narrative from one of the most powerful young writers at work today�We Survived the Night interweaves oral history with hard-hitting journalism and a deeply personal father-son journey into a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence.

    Julian Brave NoiseCat’s childhood was rich with culture and contradictions. When his Secwépemc and St’at’imc father, an artist haunted by a turbulent past, abandoned the family, he and his non-Native mother were embraced by the urban Native community in Oakland, California, as well as by family on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia. In his father’s absence, NoiseCat immersed himself in Native history and culture to understand the man he seldom saw—his past, his story, where he came from—and, by extension, himself.

Years later, NoiseCat sets out across the continent to correct the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding the First Peoples of this land, as he develops his voice as a storyteller and artist in his own right. Told in the style of a "Coyote Story," a legend about the trickster forefather of NoiseCat’s people who was revered for his wit and mocked for his tendency to self-destruct, We Survived the Night brings a traditional artform nearly annihilated by colonization back to life on the page. Through a dazzling blend of history and mythology, memoir and reportage, NoiseCat unravels old stories and braids together new ones. He grapples with the erasure of North America's First Peoples and the trauma that cascades across generations, while illuminating the vital Indigenous cultural, environmental, and political movements reshaping the future. He chronicles the historic ascent of the first Native American cabinet secretary in the United States and the first Indigenous sovereign of Canada; probes the colonial origins and limits of racial ideology and Indian identity through the story of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina; and hauls the golden eggs of an imperiled fish out of the sea alongside the Tlingit of Sitka, Alaska. This is a rewriting and restoration—of Native history and, more intimately, of family and self, as NoiseCat seeks to reclaim a culture effaced by colonization and reconcile with a father who left. Virtuosic, compelling, and deeply moving, this is at once an intensely personal journey and a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence.

Drawing from five years of on-the-ground reporting, We Survived the Night paints a profound and unforgettable portrait of contemporary Indigenous life, alongside an intimate and deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son. Soulful, formally daring, indelible work from an important new voice.]]> Julian Brave NoiseCat 0593320794 Em 0 to-read 0.0
author: Julian Brave NoiseCat
name: Em
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 67999409 A brilliant and imaginative debut graphic novel that brings to life a fantastical Cairo where wishes are real. Author, illustrator, and translator Deena Mohamed presents a literary, feminist, Arab-centric graphic novel that marries magic and the socio-political realities of contemporary Egypt.

Shubeik Lubeik--a fairytale rhyme meaning "Your Wish is My Command" in Arabic--is the story of three characters navigating a world where wishes are literally for sale; mired in bureaucracy and the familiar prejudices of our world, the more expensive the wish, the more powerful and therefore the more likely to work as intended. The novel's three distinct parts tell the story of three first class wishes as used by Aziza, Nour, and Shokry, each grappling with the challenge inherent in trying to make your most deeply held desire come true.
Deena's mix of calligraphy and contemporary styles, brings to life a vibrant Cairene neighborhood, and a cast of characters whose struggles and triumphs are deeply resonant. Shubeik Lubeik heralds the arrival of a huge new talent and a brave, literary, political, and feminist new voice in comics.
]]> 528 Deena Mohamed Em 4 2025, graphic-novel, egyptian Schubeik Lubeik follows three characters who are presented with (or buy) a wish. I thought each story was interesting, and the way Mohamed depicts depression in Nour's story was especially relatable and honest.

The art was great -- I do wish it had all been in color. Only the interstitial pieces are in color in this collection, and the black and white is a bit difficult to navigate at times.

]]> 4.46 2022
author: Deena Mohamed
name: Em
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: 2025, graphic-novel, egyptian
review:
This was fun! A graphic novel trilogy set in an alternative Cairo where you can make and sell wishes, Schubeik Lubeik follows three characters who are presented with (or buy) a wish. I thought each story was interesting, and the way Mohamed depicts depression in Nour's story was especially relatable and honest.

The art was great -- I do wish it had all been in color. Only the interstitial pieces are in color in this collection, and the black and white is a bit difficult to navigate at times.


]]> 55273096 �Last year I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don’t know for certain.�

So begins Mary Gaitskill’s stunning book-length essay, the closest thing she has written to a memoir. Lost Cat begins with the story of how Gaitskill rescued a stray cat in Italy and brought him to live with her in the US, where he went missing.

As she explores the unexpected trauma of her loss, Gaitskill describes how she came to foster two siblings, Caesar and Natalia, a pair of inner-city children who spent summers and holidays with Gaitskill and her husband. The joys and ultimate difficulties of this relationship leads to a searing examination of loss, love, safety and fear. Gaitskill applies her razor-sharp writing to her most personal subjects yet.]]> 120 Mary Gaitskill 1911547801 Em 4 2025, non-fiction, essay
This long essay is a meditation on loss and grief under the framework of Gaitskill's lost cat. Using the loss of Gattino, Gaitskill explores the loss of her father and her complicated relationship with two children she occasionally fosters. I thought Gaitskill's exploration of grief and her meditations on love and loss were beautiful, if a little sentimental. I was a bit uncomfortable with how she spoke of Caesar and Natalie, the two foster kids, and how she wrote of their situation and their mother.

The writing is concise and a bit simplistic, but I felt it fit the narrative voice of the essay well.]]> 4.08 2014
author: Mary Gaitskill
name: Em
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: 2025, non-fiction, essay
review:
[3.5]

This long essay is a meditation on loss and grief under the framework of Gaitskill's lost cat. Using the loss of Gattino, Gaitskill explores the loss of her father and her complicated relationship with two children she occasionally fosters. I thought Gaitskill's exploration of grief and her meditations on love and loss were beautiful, if a little sentimental. I was a bit uncomfortable with how she spoke of Caesar and Natalie, the two foster kids, and how she wrote of their situation and their mother.

The writing is concise and a bit simplistic, but I felt it fit the narrative voice of the essay well.
]]> 12992927 The Devil All the Time follows a cast of characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.� There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.]]> 320 Donald Ray Pollock 0307744868 Em 3
This is fine. I think it will work better as a movie, but that depends on if they keep the grotesque nature of the book up to par.

This definitely reads as a mix between a Cormac McCarthy novel combined with Winesburg, Ohio but it's not as good as either of those. I'm a fan of bleak Midwestern town, crime fiction novels, but this lacked a lot of depth and character. We're told a lot, rather than shown it, and some of the overarching 'themes' (or, what is off and uncanny about this town, like the way religion is used to justify atrocious and violent acts) is never fully explored or examined. It just felt like people were terrible to be terrible, which can be the case for some, but to have every character act that way feels disingenuous. We really only see a break from that with Arvin, the "main" character if there is one, but even there, we're not shown the struggle he's undertaking about his actions.

I dunno, it could have used an extra fifty pages or so of depth for the characters.

It doesn't happen "on" screen, but TW for animal killings. Also TW for rape and torture (again off screen, but present).]]> 4.16 2011
author: Donald Ray Pollock
name: Em
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2020/09/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: 2020, contemporary-literature, crime
review:
[3.5 stars]

This is fine. I think it will work better as a movie, but that depends on if they keep the grotesque nature of the book up to par.

This definitely reads as a mix between a Cormac McCarthy novel combined with Winesburg, Ohio but it's not as good as either of those. I'm a fan of bleak Midwestern town, crime fiction novels, but this lacked a lot of depth and character. We're told a lot, rather than shown it, and some of the overarching 'themes' (or, what is off and uncanny about this town, like the way religion is used to justify atrocious and violent acts) is never fully explored or examined. It just felt like people were terrible to be terrible, which can be the case for some, but to have every character act that way feels disingenuous. We really only see a break from that with Arvin, the "main" character if there is one, but even there, we're not shown the struggle he's undertaking about his actions.

I dunno, it could have used an extra fifty pages or so of depth for the characters.

It doesn't happen "on" screen, but TW for animal killings. Also TW for rape and torture (again off screen, but present).
]]> 222615926 The next novella in the New York Times bestselling Sworn Soldier series, featuring Alex Easton investigating the dark, mysterious depths of a coal mine in America

Alex Easton does not want to visit America.

They particularly do not want to visit an abandoned coal mine in West Virginia with a reputation for being haunted.

But when their old friend Dr. Denton summons them to help find his lost cousin—who went missing in that very mine—well, sometimes a sworn soldier has to do what a sworn soldier has to do...

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> T. Kingfisher 1250354935 Em 0 to-read 4.50 2025
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Em
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214009189 "Gothic horror for the ages…Combining shiver-inducing horror with sharp-fanged social commentary, this more that merits comparison to Dracula and other genre titans."—�Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"I'm in your blood, and you are in mine�"

The Netherlands, 1887. Lucy's twin sister Sarah is unwell. She refuses to eat, mumbles nonsensically, and is increasingly obsessed with a centuries-old corpse recently discovered on her husband's grand estate. The doctor has diagnosed her with temporary insanity caused by a fever of the brain. To protect her twin from a terrible fate in a lunatic asylum, Lucy must unravel the mystery surrounding her sister's condition, but it's clear her twin is hiding something. Then again, Lucy is harboring secrets of her own, too.

Then, the worst happens. Sarah's behavior takes a turn for the strange. She becomes angryâ€� and hungry.Ěý

Lucy soon comes to suspect that something is trying to possess her beloved sister. Or is it madness? As Sarah changes before her very eyes, Lucy must reckon with the dark, monstrous truth, or risk losing her forever.]]> 361 Johanna van Veen 172828158X Em 3 2025, arc, gothic Blood on Her Tongue releases March 25, 2025.

A short summary: Upon receiving a disturbing letter from her twin sister, Lucy leaves her home and employer to find out what's wrong. When she arrives at her sister's and brother-in-law's home, she finds her sister unwilling to eat and raving about the woman they recently uncovered from a bog near the house. From there, Lucy finds herself caught in her sister's madness, attempting to figure out how to save her sister from herself.

I read the author's first novel and found it, while written well enough, a bit disappointing in its structure and pacing. This novel is better paced and has some really good moments of body horror and gore. Definitely one that might make you a little squeamish.

That said, I don't really feel like it's a gothic novel. Instead, it reads as an imitation of a gothic novel. The beginning opens with the sort of description and atmosphere we would see from novels like Dracula, but this quickly fades and the novel reads much more modern. Some of the dialogue choices really took me out of the novel -- you would never know that this took place in the Netherlands if it weren't for some very small naming conventions and its mention in the synopsis. It could easily be set in England.

I also thought that it lacked a lot of tension in the latter half. Once a key plot point happens, it feels like the plot sort of deflates and we just get a series of the same thinking and actions happening over and over again rather than a smooth progression of the story, and then it ends so abruptly and neatly. A key element of the gothic novel is the slow unraveling of what's happening, the character usually questioning their reality or uncovering an increasing amount of horrific things before finally reaching the denouement. We don't get that here. And the novel tries to do a bit too much with the elements of gothic novels it brings in: is this a book about madness? About queer Othering? About patriarchal violence? About obsession? In trying to do too much, it does very little.

The characters' motivations left me scratching my head at times, as well, because the characterization falls a little flat. Lucy has no character traits aside from being very codependent upon her sister, and the men in the novel very much act like stereotypical gothic men with nothing else added to their personalities or backstory.

I will give the author some props for having a relatively unique take on vampirism. I don't know that I necessarily love it, but I certainly wasn't expecting it.

van Veen's novels are easy to read, but at the end of the day, they leave me questioning why. Why should I pick up this novel instead of a classic gothic novel? There isn't anything all that interesting being said about queerness (which is a very small part of the novel) or any of the other traditionally gothic elements I mentioned above. I just feel like there is something missing from the characters and the plots.

]]> 3.91 2025
author: Johanna van Veen
name: Em
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: 2025, arc, gothic
review:
Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-arc of this novel! Blood on Her Tongue releases March 25, 2025.

A short summary: Upon receiving a disturbing letter from her twin sister, Lucy leaves her home and employer to find out what's wrong. When she arrives at her sister's and brother-in-law's home, she finds her sister unwilling to eat and raving about the woman they recently uncovered from a bog near the house. From there, Lucy finds herself caught in her sister's madness, attempting to figure out how to save her sister from herself.

I read the author's first novel and found it, while written well enough, a bit disappointing in its structure and pacing. This novel is better paced and has some really good moments of body horror and gore. Definitely one that might make you a little squeamish.

That said, I don't really feel like it's a gothic novel. Instead, it reads as an imitation of a gothic novel. The beginning opens with the sort of description and atmosphere we would see from novels like Dracula, but this quickly fades and the novel reads much more modern. Some of the dialogue choices really took me out of the novel -- you would never know that this took place in the Netherlands if it weren't for some very small naming conventions and its mention in the synopsis. It could easily be set in England.

I also thought that it lacked a lot of tension in the latter half. Once a key plot point happens, it feels like the plot sort of deflates and we just get a series of the same thinking and actions happening over and over again rather than a smooth progression of the story, and then it ends so abruptly and neatly. A key element of the gothic novel is the slow unraveling of what's happening, the character usually questioning their reality or uncovering an increasing amount of horrific things before finally reaching the denouement. We don't get that here. And the novel tries to do a bit too much with the elements of gothic novels it brings in: is this a book about madness? About queer Othering? About patriarchal violence? About obsession? In trying to do too much, it does very little.

The characters' motivations left me scratching my head at times, as well, because the characterization falls a little flat. Lucy has no character traits aside from being very codependent upon her sister, and the men in the novel very much act like stereotypical gothic men with nothing else added to their personalities or backstory.

I will give the author some props for having a relatively unique take on vampirism. I don't know that I necessarily love it, but I certainly wasn't expecting it.

van Veen's novels are easy to read, but at the end of the day, they leave me questioning why. Why should I pick up this novel instead of a classic gothic novel? There isn't anything all that interesting being said about queerness (which is a very small part of the novel) or any of the other traditionally gothic elements I mentioned above. I just feel like there is something missing from the characters and the plots.


]]> 223854541 A down-on-her-luck woman makes a deal with a crafty demon to win back her ex-girlfriend after a proposal gone awry, only to discover the girl of her dreams might be the devil she knows, from nationally bestselling author Alexandria Bellefleur.

Samantha Cooper is having a day from hell.

In less than 24 hours, her life has unraveled, leaving her single and with nowhere to live. Adding insult to injury, she’s trapped in an elevator with a gorgeous woman claiming to be a demon.

Daphne is not at all what Samantha expected from someone claiming to be an evil supernatural entity. She’s pretty, witty, dressed in pink, and smells nice. And she’s here to offer Samantha a deal she can’t refuse. Six wishes in exchange for one tiny trade—Samantha’s soul. There’s a glaring loophole in their contract, one Samantha fully intends to exploit so she doesn’t fork over her soul. After all, she only needs one wish to win her ex back.

Hell-bent to gather the last of the one thousand souls she needs so that she can be free of her own devilish deal, Daphne grants each of Samantha’s wishes . . . with a twist, so that Samantha is forced to make another.

As Samantha’s wishes dwindle and Daphne offers her glimpses into the life she thought she wanted, the unlikely pair grows close. Perhaps the girl of Samantha’s dreams is actually the stuff of nightmares, but Samantha and Daphne will have to outsmart the Devil himself if they want a chance at happily ever after.]]> 336 Alexandria Bellefleur 0593952502 Em 0 to-read 4.12 2025
author: Alexandria Bellefleur
name: Em
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216684512 Drawing on the creatures and horrors of Irish folklore, The Burial Tide unearths our darkest how far we’d go to win our freedom, and how quickly our desires blur the line between human and monster.

A woman who can’t remember her death.
On an eerily quiet island off the coast of Ireland, a woman with no memory claws her way out of her grave and back to life. But not everyone welcomes the return of Mara Fitch.

An island with a terrible secret.
Inishbannock. Where strange misshapen figures watch from the trees and the roads are covered in teeth. Where two brothers gamble for nothing, the doctor only treats the dead, and the pub owner speaks in riddles. Where a poet loses and finds his soul. And a husband without a wife claims to know everything about Mara.

A past that refuses to stay buried.
As Mara returns to her life on this upside-down island, her memories begin to leech their way back to the surface. The more she remembers, the more the village will do anything to stop her . . .

But the sea remembers it all.]]> 384 Neil Sharpson 1638932026 Em 0 to-read 4.56
author: Neil Sharpson
name: Em
average rating: 4.56
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 41219 A beautiful hardback edition of the Booker Prize-winning novel. A romance, a literary quest, a modern classic.

A pair of young scholars investigate the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time. Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story.]]> 555 A.S. Byatt 0679735909 Em 0 currently-reading 3.89 1991
author: A.S. Byatt
name: Em
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 19183753 193 Renata Adler 1590176332 Em 0 to-read 3.66 1976
author: Renata Adler
name: Em
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62793 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780099282990

Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich provincial familes, a new and powerful political and social elite. Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family - members of the waning aristocracy - but he is not one of them. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new, and his feelings for the exquisite, spirited Satoko, observed from the sidelines by his devoted friend Honda. When Satoko is engaged to a royal prince, Kiyoaki realises the magnitude of his passion.]]> 389 Yukio Mishima Em 0 to-read 4.18 1967
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Em
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60808760 A reclamation of female rage and a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman.

Frances is quiet and reclusive, so much so that her upstairs roommates sometimes forget she exists. Isolated in the basement, and on the brink of graduating from university, Frances herself starts to question the realities of her own existence. She can't remember there being a lock on the door at the top of the basement stairs--and yet, when she turns the knob, the door won't open. She can't tell the difference between her childhood memories, which bloom like flowers in the dark basement, and her dreams. Worse still, she can't ignore the very real tapping sound now coming--insistently, violently--threatening to break through her bedroom wall.

With the thematic considerations of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson's work, and in the style of Herta MĂĽller and Daisy Johnson, Tear is both a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman and a bristling reclamation of female rage. Blurring the real and the imagined, this lyric debut novel unflinchingly engages with contemporary feminist issues and explores the detrimental effects of false narratives, gaslighting, and manipulation on young women.]]> 297 Erica McKeen Em 0 to-read 3.33 2022
author: Erica McKeen
name: Em
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 222376682 A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington.

In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor, drinking his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his family in Houston, particularly his mother, whose preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they’ve last seen each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.

Separated only by the son’s cat, Taro, the two of them bristle against each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life begins to steer them in unexpected directions� the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner, and the son to cautiously getting to know a new patron of the bar—the two of them begin to see each other more clearly. Sharing meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, both mother and son try the best they can to define where “home� really is—and whether they can find it even in each other.

Written with understated humor and an open heart, moving through past and present and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan, Bryan Washington’s Palaver is an intricate story of family, love, and the beauty of a life among others.]]> 336 Bryan Washington 0374609071 Em 0 to-read 3.90
author: Bryan Washington
name: Em
average rating: 3.90
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 39948347 From Man Booker Prize Finalist Ali Smith, Winter is the second novel in her Seasonal Quartet. This much-anticipated follow-up to Autumn is one of the Best Books of the Year from the New York Public Library.

"A stunning meditation on a complex, emotional moment in history." --Time

Winter. Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. And now Art's mother is seeing things. Come to think of it, Art's seeing things himself.

When four people, strangers and family, converge on a fifteen-bedroom house in Cornwall for Christmas, will there be enough room for everyone?

Winter. It makes things visible. Ali Smith's shapeshifting Winter casts a warm, wise, merry and uncompromising eye over a post-truth era in a story rooted in history and memory and with a taproot deep in the evergreens, art and love.]]> 336 Ali Smith 1101969954 Em 3 2025, literary
Still excited to continue on with the series, but I wish I had loved this a bit more. ]]> 3.88 2017
author: Ali Smith
name: Em
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: 2025, literary
review:
This has such a strong opening and then it kind of loses me by the end. While there are elements I quite enjoyed, I felt this book lacked cohesion in a way that made me not want to pick it up, and I didn't feel like the characters were as realized as they were in Autumn. There's a lot to be said here, of course, about politics and where we were (specifically Britain, but also America) in 2017. To be reading this now, during a second Trump administration, is...something. I do also like how Smith blends her literary influences into her work.

Still excited to continue on with the series, but I wish I had loved this a bit more.
]]> 223371312 'Haunting, heartbreaking, and gorgeously atmospheric' KATE GOLDEN
'Adrienne Young's writing is simply magic' EMILY RATH

Two twins. An unbroken bond. A truth unspoken.

The only thing James and Johnny Golden have ever had is each other. For as long as she can remember, James's deep connection with her twin brother, Johnny, has gone beyond intuition - she can feel what he feels. So, when Johnny is killed in a tragic accident, James knows before her phone even rings that her brother is gone and that she's alone - truly alone - for the first time in her life.

When James arrives in the rural town of Hawthorne, California to settle her brother's affairs, she's forced to rehash the ominous past she and Johnny shared and finally face Micah, the only person who knows about it. He's also the only man she's ever loved.

But James soon discovers that the strange connection she had with Johnny isn't quite gone, and the more she immerses herself into his world, the more questions she has about the brother she thought she knew. Johnny was keeping secrets, and he's not the only one.

What she uncovers will push her to unravel what happened in the days before Johnny's death, but in the end, she'll have to decide which truths should come to light, and which should stay buried forever.]]> 9 Adrienne Young Em 2 2025, mystery
An incredibly mid novel. It's really nothing I haven't read before. The writing is fine, but the storytelling is so incredibly slow. I also felt the characterization fell flat -- I don't feel like I really know any of the characters by the end of the novel (beyond like three or four personality traits). Likewise, I really didn't think it was that atmospheric? It was fine, but I think the novel could have built tension and suspense more effectively; the pace really undercut both.

Easy enough to listen to, but a book I'm going to definitely forget.

I also thought the ending was a bit too Lifetime. ]]> 3.59 2025
author: Adrienne Young
name: Em
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: 2025, mystery
review:
[2.5 stars]

An incredibly mid novel. It's really nothing I haven't read before. The writing is fine, but the storytelling is so incredibly slow. I also felt the characterization fell flat -- I don't feel like I really know any of the characters by the end of the novel (beyond like three or four personality traits). Likewise, I really didn't think it was that atmospheric? It was fine, but I think the novel could have built tension and suspense more effectively; the pace really undercut both.

Easy enough to listen to, but a book I'm going to definitely forget.

I also thought the ending was a bit too Lifetime.
]]> 207567782 For readers of Nightbitch and We Ride Upon Sticks, this strange and sexy novel of queer love in a small town is an unsettling reminder that the horrors of modern life are monsters ready to possess us all.

In the valley at the intersection of three towering mountains sits Cadenze, an ugly, remote town with little to its name. It's filled with tourists in the summer and dead the rest of the year, when most of its residents surrender to a sleepier existence. Except, that is, for whatever is lurking in the caves...

Angelina Sicco was born and raised in Cadenze, and for many generations, so was every member of her family. Determined to be content with her lot in life, she walks her mongrel dog, attends her brother's heavy metal concerts, holds court in the local dive bar, and does everything she can to bait hot, queer women to her sleepy, conservative hometown. But on the night of a family party much like every other, Angelina runs into Patrick's ex, the sternly handsome Jagvi, who's back in town for a spell. Perhaps enticed by Jagvi’s arrival, an ancient evil lying dormant in those caves is awakened, and soon Angelina’s small, contained world begins to shatter.

As the monstrous force grows bolder, it infiltrates Angelina’s life. It talks with her dog’s mouth; it guzzles on her memories; it controls Angelina from the inside. Only Jagvi’s touch repels it � the final trigger for a secret, passionate romance. But this monster feasts on all the passion, heartbreak, and mess that makes up a life, and Angelina Sicco’s life has never looked tastier. What will Angelina do to protect her future? And what will it cost her?]]> 304 Mikaella Clements 153874225X Em 0 to-read 3.89 2024
author: Mikaella Clements
name: Em
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 128139837
Elmore Trent is a professor of Indigenous studies who finds himself entangled in an affair that's ruining his marriage; Paul North plays in the IHL (Indigenous Hockey League), struggling to keep up with the game that's passing him by; Detective Ruby Birch is chasing a string of gruesome murders, with clues that conspicuously lead her to both Elmore and Paul. And then there's Fabiola Halan, former journalist-turned-author and famed survivor of a plane crash that sparked a nationwide tour promoting her book.

What starts off as a series of subtle connections between isolated characters quickly takes a menacing turn, as it becomes increasingly clear that someone—or something—is hunting them all.

Taking tropes from murder mystery, police procedural, thriller, and horror, Drew Hayden Taylor weaves a pulse-pounding and propulsive narrative with an intricate cast of characters, while never losing the ability to make you laugh. Cold takes Indigenous traditional stories and thrusts them into the modern streets of Toronto, exploring themes of displacement and trauma, as well as offering playful satirical critiques of the current landscape of Indigenous literature.]]> 368 Drew Hayden Taylor 0771002890 Em 0 to-read 3.69 2024
author: Drew Hayden Taylor
name: Em
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 51045451 FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE ADVERSARY

One morning, a man shaves off his long-worn moustache, hoping to amuse his wife and friends. But when nobody notices, or pretends not to have noticed, what started out as a simple trick turns to terror. As doubt and denial bristle, and every aspect of his life threatens to topple into madness � a disturbing solution comes into view, taking us on a dramatic flight across the world.

Translated by Lanie Goodman]]> 192 Emmanuel Carrère 1784876143 Em 0 to-read 3.76 1986
author: Emmanuel Carrère
name: Em
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217039930 86 Sarah Pape 1960329596 Em 0 to-read 4.80
author: Sarah Pape
name: Em
average rating: 4.80
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 Em 5
This is a heavy book. It's a book about grief and loss and the hopelessness that can come in the face of climate change and climate disasters. It's about love. It's about a family that's grieving and their inability to communicate with each other. It's a long, slow study of these characters and the island they live on, and it's absolutely beautiful. McConaghy writes about nature and landscape so incredibly well -- I could smell and taste the salty tang of the ocean, feel the cold and the damp seep into my own skin and clothes.

I felt incredibly connected to Rowan, the mysterious woman who washes ashore, but I also really loved the family: Dominic, Raff, Fen, and Orly. They felt like such fully realized characters.

This isn't going to work for everyone, but man did it work for me. I loved it. ]]> 4.33 2025
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Em
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: 2025, literary, climate, family-saga
review:
I don't know how to write about this book because I'm still reeling in its aftermath.

This is a heavy book. It's a book about grief and loss and the hopelessness that can come in the face of climate change and climate disasters. It's about love. It's about a family that's grieving and their inability to communicate with each other. It's a long, slow study of these characters and the island they live on, and it's absolutely beautiful. McConaghy writes about nature and landscape so incredibly well -- I could smell and taste the salty tang of the ocean, feel the cold and the damp seep into my own skin and clothes.

I felt incredibly connected to Rowan, the mysterious woman who washes ashore, but I also really loved the family: Dominic, Raff, Fen, and Orly. They felt like such fully realized characters.

This isn't going to work for everyone, but man did it work for me. I loved it.
]]> 67291921 A collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster from Chamorro human rights lawyer and organizer Julian Aguon.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon's No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a coming-of-age story and a call for justice--for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples.

In bracing poetry and compelling prose, Aguon weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Undertaking the work of bearing witness, wrestling with the most pressing questions of the modern day, and reckoning with the challenge of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences--from losing his father to pancreatic cancer to working for Mother Teresa to an edifying chance encounter with Sherman Alexie--to illuminate a collective path out of the darkness.

A powerful, bold, new voice writing at the intersection of Indigenous rights and environmental justice, Julian Aguon is entrenched in the struggles of the people of the Pacific to liberate themselves from colonial rule, defend their sacred sites, and obtain justice for generations of harm. In No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, Aguon shares his wisdom and reflections on love, grief, joy, and triumph and extends an offer to join him in a hard-earned hope for a better world.]]> 3 Julian Aguon Em 4 2025, non-fiction
This is a brief collection of essays, speeches, and other reflections that covers important topics related to the colonization of Guam and the Marianas by the United States. A climate lawyer and activist, Aguon covers the fight for libration and climate freedom on behalf of his homeland. While I enjoyed many of the reflections in this collection, and I learned about an area I have not previously read from before (an error on my part, due to my country's heavy involvement in the area), I struggled with finding a cohesive thread to what I was reading. Climate change and the fight for liberation is definitely there, but it's not cohesively woven into all of the pieces. I did love how, clearly, Aguon loves the writers who have inspired him (majority women of color and other Native/Indigenous women) and that he uplifts their work and their importance in his own activism and writing. I just wanted there to be more of a cohesive thread throughout this.

I do still very much recommend this, though heavy trigger warning for the essay "Fighting Words," which covers the "banality of brutality" and, while very important, does get very graphic in a way I wasn't expecting because it was a tone change from the rest of the collection.
]]> 3.50 2022
author: Julian Aguon
name: Em
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: 2025, non-fiction
review:
[3.5 stars]

This is a brief collection of essays, speeches, and other reflections that covers important topics related to the colonization of Guam and the Marianas by the United States. A climate lawyer and activist, Aguon covers the fight for libration and climate freedom on behalf of his homeland. While I enjoyed many of the reflections in this collection, and I learned about an area I have not previously read from before (an error on my part, due to my country's heavy involvement in the area), I struggled with finding a cohesive thread to what I was reading. Climate change and the fight for liberation is definitely there, but it's not cohesively woven into all of the pieces. I did love how, clearly, Aguon loves the writers who have inspired him (majority women of color and other Native/Indigenous women) and that he uplifts their work and their importance in his own activism and writing. I just wanted there to be more of a cohesive thread throughout this.

I do still very much recommend this, though heavy trigger warning for the essay "Fighting Words," which covers the "banality of brutality" and, while very important, does get very graphic in a way I wasn't expecting because it was a tone change from the rest of the collection.

]]> 55023700 Discover the haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic tale of female friendship and intimacy set in a deserted world.

Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus?

Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. But, as the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone and outcast in the corner.

Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. The woman who will never know men.]]> 188 Jacqueline Harpman 1784877204 Em 5 4.25 1995
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Em
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: 2025, translated-fiction, dystopian, science-fiction
review:
This book is as good as everyone says it is. I was so invested in following Child's story and learning along with her, and I just didn't want to put the book down. A beautiful, heartbreaking read that I'll be thinking about for some time after finishing. I already want to reread it.
]]> 60784390
“Eerie, profound, and daring, this is a book only the inimitable Hunt could write.�
―Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire


From Samantha Hunt, the award-winning author of The Dark Dark, comes The Unwritten Book , her first work of nonfiction, a genre-bending creation that explores the importance of books, the idea of haunting, and messages from beyond

I carry each book I’ve ever read with me, just as I carry my dead―those things that aren’t really there, those things that shape everything I am.

A genre-bending work of nonfiction, Samantha Hunt’s The Unwritten Book explores ghosts, ghost stories, and haunting, in the broadest sense of each. What is it to be haunted, to be a ghost, to die, to live, to read? Books are ghosts; reading is communion with the dead. Alcohol is a way of communing, too, as well as a way of dying.

Each chapter gathers subjects that dead people, the forest, the towering library of all those books we’ll never have time to read or write. Hunt, like a mad crossword puzzler, looks for patterns and clues. Through literary criticism, history, family history, and memoir, inspired by W. G. Sebald, James Joyce, Ali Smith, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and many others, Hunt explores motherhood, hoarding, legacies of addiction, grief, how we insulate ourselves from the past, how we misinterpret the world. Nestled within her inquiry is a very special ghost book, an incomplete manuscript about people who can fly without wings, written by her father and found in his desk just days after he died. What secret messages might his work reveal? What wisdom might she distill from its unfinished pages?

Hunt conveys a vivid and grateful life, one that comes from living closer to the dead and shedding fear for wonder. The Unwritten Book revels in the randomness, connectivity, and magic of everyday existence. And at its heart is the immense weight of love.]]> 384 Samantha Hunt 1250863082 Em 0 to-read 3.77 2022
author: Samantha Hunt
name: Em
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 13365479 The Guardians is an elegy for Manguso's friend Harris, two years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and jumped under that train. The narrative contemplates with unrelenting clarity their crowded postcollege apartment, Manguso's fellowship year in Rome, Harris's death and the year that followed—the year of mourning and the year of Manguso's marriage. As Harris is revealed both to the reader and to the narrator, the book becomes a monument to their intimacy and inability to express their love to each other properly, and to the reverberating effects of Harris's presence in and absence from Manguso's life. There is grief in the book but also humor, as Manguso marvels at the unexpected details that constitute a friendship. The Guardians explores the insufficiency of explanation and the necessity of the imagination in making sense of anything.]]> 124 Sarah Manguso Em 0 to-read 4.04 2012
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Em
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61481100
A lonely shopkeeper takes it upon herself to solve a murder in the most peculiar way in this captivating mystery by Jesse Q. Sutanto, bestselling author of Dial A for Aunties.

Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady—ah, lady of a certain age—who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to.

Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing—a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. In his outstretched hand, a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer.

What Vera does not expect is to form friendships with her customers and start to care for each and every one of them. As a protective mother hen, will she end up having to give one of her newfound chicks to the police?]]> 11 Jesse Q. Sutanto Em 4 2025, cozy-mystery, drama
Definitely will check out the next novel! ]]> 4.05 2023
author: Jesse Q. Sutanto
name: Em
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: 2025, cozy-mystery, drama
review:
I'd say this novel is more drama than mystery (though there is, of course, a murder to be solved!), as much of the action is about the cast of characters Vera brings together into a very cute and wholesome found family. It spends more time and investment into their interactions and their relationship to the murdered man than who murdered him. That said, I quite liked it. Eunice Wong does a fantastic job as the narrator for the audiobook -- she really made Vera, in particular, come to life for me. And I loved Vera. She's nosy and a busybody but she's so funny. I would gladly let her roast me in exchange for a cup of great tea.

Definitely will check out the next novel!
]]> 196774809 We Could Be So Good.

The 1960 baseball season is shaping up to be the worst year of Eddie O’Leary’s life. He can’t manage to hit the ball, his new teammates hate him, he’s living out of a suitcase, and he’s homesick. When the team’s owner orders him to give a bunch of interviews to some snobby reporter, he’s ready to call it quits. He can barely manage to behave himself for the length of a game, let alone an entire season. But he’s already on thin ice, so he has no choice but to agree.

Mark Bailey is not a sports reporter. He writes for the arts page, and these days he’s barely even managing to do that much. He’s had a rough year and just wants to be left alone in his too-empty apartment, mourning a partner he’d never been able to be public about. The last thing he needs is to spend a season writing about New York’s obnoxious new shortstop in a stunt to get the struggling newspaper more readers.

Isolated together within the crush of an anonymous city, these two lonely souls orbit each other as they slowly give in to the inevitable gravity of their attraction. But Mark has vowed that he’ll never be someone’s secret ever again, and Eddie can’t be out as a professional athlete. It’s just them against the world, and they’ll both have to decide if that’s enough.]]> 360 Cat Sebastian Em 4
My biggest critique for this one is that so much of the interior monologuing for both Mark and Eddie is repetitive. While it makes sense given the fact that Mark is grappling with his grief and they're both trying to navigate being together in a time when it was illegal, I do wish there was a balance between all the monologuing and action on the page. Like more dinners with Mark's friends or seeing Mark at the Chronicle or something.

I did think that the way Sebastian handled Mark's grief was well done and the way Eddie handled it was so gentle and caring and beautiful to see.

Selfishly, I also wish we saw more of Nick and Andy.

I hope Sebastian returns to these characters and this world she's created -- I'd love to see a sapphic midcentury novel from her!]]> 4.45 2024
author: Cat Sebastian
name: Em
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2025, historical-fiction, queer-lit, lgbt
review:
While I thought this was super cute, it didn't quite work for me as much as We Could Be So Good. While I liked Mark and Eddie's relationship by the end of the novel, I didn't buy in right away. I do love the golden retriever loves black cat energy they have. Mark's personality did seem a bit different from what we see in WCBSG but perhaps that's just because we were in Andy and Nick's POVs.

My biggest critique for this one is that so much of the interior monologuing for both Mark and Eddie is repetitive. While it makes sense given the fact that Mark is grappling with his grief and they're both trying to navigate being together in a time when it was illegal, I do wish there was a balance between all the monologuing and action on the page. Like more dinners with Mark's friends or seeing Mark at the Chronicle or something.

I did think that the way Sebastian handled Mark's grief was well done and the way Eddie handled it was so gentle and caring and beautiful to see.

Selfishly, I also wish we saw more of Nick and Andy.

I hope Sebastian returns to these characters and this world she's created -- I'd love to see a sapphic midcentury novel from her!
]]> 60630848
Andy Fleming's newspaper-tycoon father wants him to take over the family business. Andy, though, has no intention of running the paper. He's barely able to run his life--he's never paid a bill on time, routinely gets lost on the way to work, and would rather gouge out his own eyes than deal with office politics. Andy agrees to work for a year in the newsroom, knowing he'll make an ass of himself and hate every second of it.

Except, Nick Russo keeps rescuing Andy: showing him the ropes, tracking down his keys, freeing his tie when it gets stuck in the ancient filing cabinets. Their unlikely friendship soon sharpens into feelings they can't deny. But what feels possible in secret--this fragile, tender thing between them--seems doomed in the light of day. Now Nick and Andy have to decide if, for the first time, they're willing to fight.]]> 383 Cat Sebastian 0063272776 Em 5
I loved this. Andy and Nick and their romance was exactly what I needed. This was so cute, but didn't negate the very real challenges that queer couples have had to navigate to love who they love and be who they are.

I need a sequel that's like twenty or thirty years down the line, please and thank you.]]> 4.39 2023
author: Cat Sebastian
name: Em
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: 2025, historical-fiction, queer
review:


I loved this. Andy and Nick and their romance was exactly what I needed. This was so cute, but didn't negate the very real challenges that queer couples have had to navigate to love who they love and be who they are.

I need a sequel that's like twenty or thirty years down the line, please and thank you.
]]> 216523180 A young Black gay man reckoning with the death of his father must confront his painful past—and his deepest desires around gender, love, and sex.

The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis, to be touched by any man, let alone a white man. He did not raise his son to whisper that man’s name with tenderness.

But on the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar. Never mind that his mother, who died decades before, and his father, whose anger drove Davis to flee their home in Ohio for a freer life in New York City, won’t be there to walk him down the aisle. All Davis needs to be happy in this life is Everett, his new family, and his burgeoning career as an award-winning violist.

When Davis learns during the wedding reception that his father has died in a terrible car accident, years of childhood trauma and unspoken emotion resurface. Davis must revisit everything that went wrong between them, his fledgling marriage and irresistible self-confidence spiraling into a pit of despair.

In resplendent prose, Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes fearlessly reveals the pain of inheritance and the heroic power of love, reminding us that in the end we are more than the men who came before us.]]> 291 Denne Michele Norris 0593729617 Em 0 to-read 3.00 2025
author: Denne Michele Norris
name: Em
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 28187191 416 Nick Cutter 1501144839 Em 2 2018, horror drag to read.

I won't go into major spoilers, but if you want to know nothing about the book, stop reading and just know that I would not recommend reading this––which is a shame, because The Troop is one of my favorite horror novels, but both this novel and Little Heaven have disappointed me in various ways.

The Good

*There were some great creepy images in this book, and I do enjoy the way Cutter describes these images in abject, visercel ways.
*LB was adorable and should have been protected at all costs.

The Bad

*The only character I cared about, LB, was a dog. The other characters, particularly Luke, Al, and Clayton, were devoid of (good) character development and were just plain boring.
*The weird pseudo romance/attraction thing between Luke and Al. Why? It was completely unnecessary.
*Clayton and Luke were not close, in any way, shape, or form (because Clayton was a giant asshole), so I have no idea why Luke would decide to go on this little quest. His motivation didn't make sense––he wanted to help, but why? Why wouldn't he just stay up top and try to radio Clayton?
*What I loved about The Troop was its originality. Both The Deep and Little Heaven have lacked in the originality department, and their endings have been questionable. Again, it's just a shame.

The "Oh My God I'm So Fucking Tired Of This"

*If your entire depiction of someone as "evil" and "cruel" relies heavily on their "grotesque" overeating and weighing hundreds of pounds––you're being a lazy writer. I'm so tired of this trope. It perpetuates unnecessary stereotypes, and, again, it's lazy writing. Cutter could have made the mother cruel without so heavily relying on her slovenly behaviour, and it would have made her character much more compelling. Relying on lazy tropes and stereotypes just makes characters uninteresting.

Will I read Cutter's next novel, whenever it gets released? Probably. I have a dream that we'll get another amazing novel like The Troop. Someday.

]]> 3.51 2015
author: Nick Cutter
name: Em
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2015
rating: 2
read at: 2018/09/02
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: 2018, horror
review:
This story would have been a lot better had it been a novella, and not a four-hundred page novel. There just wasn't enough (good) material for the plot, and it was a drag to read.

I won't go into major spoilers, but if you want to know nothing about the book, stop reading and just know that I would not recommend reading this––which is a shame, because The Troop is one of my favorite horror novels, but both this novel and Little Heaven have disappointed me in various ways.

The Good

*There were some great creepy images in this book, and I do enjoy the way Cutter describes these images in abject, visercel ways.
*LB was adorable and should have been protected at all costs.

The Bad

*The only character I cared about, LB, was a dog. The other characters, particularly Luke, Al, and Clayton, were devoid of (good) character development and were just plain boring.
*The weird pseudo romance/attraction thing between Luke and Al. Why? It was completely unnecessary.
*Clayton and Luke were not close, in any way, shape, or form (because Clayton was a giant asshole), so I have no idea why Luke would decide to go on this little quest. His motivation didn't make sense––he wanted to help, but why? Why wouldn't he just stay up top and try to radio Clayton?
*What I loved about The Troop was its originality. Both The Deep and Little Heaven have lacked in the originality department, and their endings have been questionable. Again, it's just a shame.

The "Oh My God I'm So Fucking Tired Of This"

*If your entire depiction of someone as "evil" and "cruel" relies heavily on their "grotesque" overeating and weighing hundreds of pounds––you're being a lazy writer. I'm so tired of this trope. It perpetuates unnecessary stereotypes, and, again, it's lazy writing. Cutter could have made the mother cruel without so heavily relying on her slovenly behaviour, and it would have made her character much more compelling. Relying on lazy tropes and stereotypes just makes characters uninteresting.

Will I read Cutter's next novel, whenever it gets released? Probably. I have a dream that we'll get another amazing novel like The Troop. Someday.


]]> 216625982 Utterly riveting, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time.”�


Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18 she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.�)


Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.


The first volume’s gravitational pull—a force inverse to its constriction—has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.


Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects.Ěý As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”]]> 164 Solvej Balle 0811237265 Em 0 to-read 3.98 2020
author: Solvej Balle
name: Em
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 33282643 224 Fumi Yoshinaga 1421594110 Em 3 2025, manga [3.5 stars] 4.40 2009
author: Fumi Yoshinaga
name: Em
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: 2025, manga
review:
[3.5 stars]
]]> 33282269 Despite Iemitsu and Arikoto's best efforts, there is no male heir to take over the shogunate. As the Redface Pox continues to ravage the country, it becomes increasingly clear within Edo Castle that Japan's continued existence relies on overturning the centuries of custom that define it!

]]> 232 Fumi Yoshinaga 1421594102 Em 3 2025, manga [3.5 stars] 4.11 2008
author: Fumi Yoshinaga
name: Em
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: 2025, manga
review:
[3.5 stars]
]]> 33003451 The tale told in the Chronicle of the Dying Day continues as the young female shogun Iemitsu tries desperately to conceive a male heir. But her lover Arikoto seems unable to give her a child, and they must betray their hearts to save their country. Meanwhile, the Redface Pox continues its ruthless progress through Japan, leaving famine, despair, and the threat of anarchy in its wake.

]]> 232 Fumi Yoshinaga 1421594099 Em 4 2025, manga 4.47 2007
author: Fumi Yoshinaga
name: Em
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: 2025, manga
review:

]]> 198216854 192 °ŐłółÜáş­n 0811238547 Em 0 to-read 3.29 2013
author: °ŐłółÜáş­n
name: Em
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 32998683 200 Fumi Yoshinaga 1421594080 Em 4 4.54 2006
author: Fumi Yoshinaga
name: Em
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: 2025, manga, historical-fiction
review:

]]> 32977981 In Edo period Japan, a strange new disease called the Redface Pox has begun to prey on the country's men. Within eighty years of the first outbreak, the male population has fallen by seventy-five percent. Women have taken on all the roles traditionally granted to men, even that of the shogun. The men, precious providers of life, are carefully protected. And the most beautiful of the men are sent to serve in the shogun's Inner Chamber...

]]> 216 Fumi Yoshinaga 142159384X Em 4 [3.5 stars] 4.17 2005
author: Fumi Yoshinaga
name: Em
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: 2025, manga, historical-fiction
review:
[3.5 stars]
]]> 38402046
Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.]]> 266 1551527383 Em 0 to-read 4.55 2018
author: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
name: Em
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 79488490
Titus Crowne is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County. A former FBI agent and security expert, Titus came home to take care of his father and look out for his troubled younger brother. He ran for Sheriff to make a difference, especially in the Black community, which has so often been treated unfairly by the police.

But a year to the day after his election, a school shooting rocks the town. A beloved teacher is killed by a former student, and as Titus attempts to deescalate and get the boy to surrender, his deputies fire a fatal shot.

In the investigation, it becomes clear that the student they shot had been abused by the dead teacher, as well as by unidentified perpetrators. The trail leads to buried bodies—and secrets. While Titus tries to track down a killer hiding in plain sight, while balancing daily duties like protecting Confederate pride marchers, he must face what it means to be a Black man wearing a police uniform in the American South.]]> 13 S.A. Cosby 1250897629 Em 5 2025, thriller
Cosby does such a fantastic job writing propulsive thrillers. I thought Titan was a great MC, and really enjoyed the relationship and banter between him, his father, and his brother. This book is *dark* so definitely check trigger warnings ([spoilers removed], but I never wanted to put this down even when other responsibilities called me away from it. I had some minor quibbles with the pacing and one of the subplots, but overall, really enjoyed this one!

Highly recommend the audiobook!]]> 4.25 2023
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Em
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: 2025, thriller
review:
[4.5 stars]

Cosby does such a fantastic job writing propulsive thrillers. I thought Titan was a great MC, and really enjoyed the relationship and banter between him, his father, and his brother. This book is *dark* so definitely check trigger warnings ([spoilers removed], but I never wanted to put this down even when other responsibilities called me away from it. I had some minor quibbles with the pacing and one of the subplots, but overall, really enjoyed this one!

Highly recommend the audiobook!
]]> 13037 253 Lawrence Durrell 0140153195 Em 0 to-read 3.86 1957
author: Lawrence Durrell
name: Em
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1074460
"How will you begin?"
"Describe a morning you woke without fear"
"Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?"

The manuscript is set in diverse places—Punjab, Central America, England, Arizona—where the meditations on the "interrogations" considered by the narrator are described in surprising, sensual language that is segmented and seeking. Only at the end of the twentieth century could a writer create this compelling combination of experience and imagination, education and tradition, sex and prayer. This magic and modern coming of age could not have been written at any other time, yet its references bring the reader places that are distinctly not 1990s America.]]> 111 Bhanu Kapil 0932716563 Em 0 to-read 4.27 2001
author: Bhanu Kapil
name: Em
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 203162267 From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings--but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.]]> 255 Hiromi Kawakami 1593766203 Em 0 to-read 3.85 2016
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Em
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216247518 One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.]]> 208 Katie Kitamura 059385232X Em 0 to-read 3.88 2025
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Em
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55918474 A novel from the author of A Separation, a taut and electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths.

An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.

She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into explosive political fires: her work interpreting for a former president accused of war crimes becomes precarious as their relationship is unbound by shifting language and meaning.

This woman is the voice in the ear of many, but what command does that give her, and how vulnerable does that leave her? Her coolly impassioned views on power, love, and violence, are tested, both in her personal intimacies and in her role at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her; it is her drive towards truth, and love, that throws into stark relief what she wants from her life.]]> 225 Katie Kitamura 0399576169 Em 0 to-read 3.62 2021
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Em
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 28187199 355 Nick Cutter 1501144820 Em 4 2017, horror
I'm excited to pick up Cutter's other works. ]]> 3.91 2014
author: Nick Cutter
name: Em
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2017/07/29
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: 2017, horror
review:
I really enjoyed this novel! The writing is, at times, definitely reminiscent to both Stephen King––which isn't a bad thing. Cutter's voice shines through. And, the book does read like a grosser, grotesque Lord of the Flies. Again, not a bad thing. That's exactly what I wanted when I picked up the book. It met every expectation I had, and then some. The writing is good––though, not for those who have a weak stomach.

I'm excited to pick up Cutter's other works.
]]> 42116109 Limbo is a companion for the stuck, the isolated, delayed, stranded and those in the dark. Fusing memoir with a meditation on creative block and a cultural history of limbo, Dan Fox considers the role that fallow periods and states of inbetween play in art and life. Limbo is an essay about getting by when you can’t get along, employing a cast of artists, ghosts and sailors � including the author’s older brother who, in 1985, left England for good to sail the world � to reflect on the creative, emotional and political consequences of being stuck, and its opposites. From the Headington Shark to radical behavioural experiments, from life aboard a container ship to Sun Ra’s cosmology, Limbo argues that there can be no growth without stagnancy, no movement without inactivity, and no progress without refusal.]]> 152 Dan Fox 1910695815 Em 0 to-read 3.86 2018
author: Dan Fox
name: Em
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6335913 Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, among them On Style, Notes on 'Camp', and the titular essay Against Interpretation, where Sontag argues that modern cultural conditions have given way to a new critical approach to aesthetics.]]> 312 Susan Sontag 014119006X Em 0 to-read 4.04 1966
author: Susan Sontag
name: Em
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220998994 A deadpan, wildly imaginative collection of stories that slices clean through the mundanity and absurdity of modern life, from the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams

In “Machine City,â€� a college student’s role in a friend’s movie causes lines to blur between his character and his true self. In “Slide to Unlock,â€� a man comes to terms with his life, via the passwords he struggles to remember in a moment of extremis. And in “Weird Menace,â€� a director and faded movie star discuss science fiction, memory, and lost loves on a commentary track for a film from the â€�80s that neither seems to remember all that well.Ěý

In Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters question the fleetingness of youth and art, reckon with the consequences of the everyday, and find solace in the absurd, the beautiful, and the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. All together, these sixteen stories have much to say about the meaning—and transitory nature—of our lives. And they are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most insightful and imaginative writers working today.]]> 224 Ed Park 0812998995 Em 0 to-read 4.38 2025
author: Ed Park
name: Em
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53487237 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?� He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.]]> 403 George Saunders 1984856049 Em 0 to-read 4.55 2021
author: George Saunders
name: Em
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 45199076 Alternate cover edition can be found here

A vividly imagined fantasy of court intrigue and dark magics in a steampunk-inflected world, by a brilliant young talent.

The youngest, half-goblin son of the Emperor has lived his entire life in exile, distant from the Imperial Court and the deadly intrigue that suffuses it. But when his father and three sons in line for the throne are killed in an "accident," he has no choice but to take his place as the only surviving rightful heir.

Entirely unschooled in the art of court politics, he has no friends, no advisors, and the sure knowledge that whoever assassinated his father and brothers could make an attempt on his life at any moment.

Surrounded by sycophants eager to curry favor with the naïve new emperor, and overwhelmed by the burdens of his new life, he can trust nobody. Amid the swirl of plots to depose him, offers of arranged marriages, and the specter of the unknown conspirators who lurk in the shadows, he must quickly adjust to life as the Goblin Emperor. All the while, he is alone, and trying to find even a single friend... and hoping for the possibility of romance, yet also vigilant against the unseen enemies that threaten him, lest he lose his throne � or his life.

This exciting fantasy novel, set against the pageantry and color of a fascinating, unique world, is a memorable debut for a great new talent.]]> 449 Katherine Addison Em 0 to-read 4.24 2014
author: Katherine Addison
name: Em
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 174622 308 James Salter 0679740732 Em 0 to-read 4.07 1975
author: James Salter
name: Em
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 221164539 Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby returns with King of Ashes, a Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic and dazzling family drama.

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.

Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he’s forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his himself, and his own particular set of skills.

Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything.

Because everything burns.]]> S.A. Cosby 125039502X Em 0 to-read 0.0 2025
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Em
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214988449 A scathing, provocative novel about contemporary existence by a rising star in Italian literature.

"One of Europe’s most talented young writers, Latronico has written the great Berlin novel we’ve all been waiting for." —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker staff journalist

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukölln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation, and Berlin’s twenty-four-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp. With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico’s first book to be translated into English, is a brilliantly scathing sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, beautifully written, impossibly bleak.]]> 136 Vincenzo Latronico 1681378728 Em 0 to-read 3.80 2022
author: Vincenzo Latronico
name: Em
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 26181345
"In 1967, Brazil's leading newspaper asked the avant-garde writer Lispector to write a weekly column on any topic she wished. For almost seven years, Lispector showed Brazilian readers just how vast and passionate her interests were. This beautifully translated collection of selected columns, or crônicas, is just as immediately stimulating today and ably reinforces her reputation as one of Brazil's greatest writers. Indeed, these columns should establish her as being among the era's most brilliant essayists. She is masterful, even reminiscent of Montaigne, in her ability to spin the mundane events of life into moments of clarity that reveal greater truths."—Publishers Weekly]]> 212 Clarice Lispector 0811224953 Em 0 currently-reading 4.14 1996
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Em
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 150249
Simone Weil described “decreation� as “undoing the creature in us� -- an undoing of self. In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson explores this idea with characteristic brilliance and a tantalizing range of reference, moving from Aphrodite to Antonioni, Demosthenes to Annie Dillard, Telemachos to Trotsky, and writing in forms as varied as opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, shot list, and rapture. As she makes her way through these forms she slowly dismantles them, and in doing so seeks to move through the self, to its undoing.

"Cool, resolute, smart, and lovely.... Carson has emerged in the last two decades as a kind of prophet of the unknowable." -- The Village Voice ]]> 245 Anne Carson 1400078903 Em 0 to-read 4.18 2005
author: Anne Carson
name: Em
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 5912068
This new translation includes Diderot's all-important prefatory material, which he placed, disconcertingly, at the end of the novel, and which turns what otherwise seems like an exercise in realism into what is now regarded as a masterpiece of proto-modernist fiction.

About the For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.]]> 209 Denis Diderot 0199555249 Em 0 to-read 3.84 1796
author: Denis Diderot
name: Em
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1796
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 1372681 May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida -- even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the centre of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces -- a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.
This audacious vision of the nature of love -- its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread -- is rich in characters and striking scenes, and in its profound understanding of how alive the past can be.
A major addition to the canon of one of the world's literary masters.
"This is coast country, humid and God fearing, where female recklessness runs too deep for short shorts or thongs or cameras. But then or now, decent underwear or none, wild women never could hide their innocence -- a kind of pitty-kitty hopefulness that their prince was on his way. Especially the tough ones with their box cutters and dirty language, or the glossy ones with two-seated cars and a pocketbook full of dope. Even the ones who wear scars like Presidential medals and stockings rolled at their ankles can't hide the sugar-child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside, between the ribs, say, or under the heart. -- from" Love]]> 208 Toni Morrison 0676976182 Em 4 2025, literary
]]> 3.84 2003
author: Toni Morrison
name: Em
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: 2025, literary
review:
An exploration of love written in a way only Toni Morrison could write. It's heartbreaking and haunting and poignant and sharp. These characters will live in my head for some time. It's a novel I can't wait to reread.


]]> 219134676 From World Fantasy Award-winning author Tasha Suri comes The Isle in the Silver Sea, a heart-shattering romantasy of sapphic longing, medieval folklore and a love that spans the centuries.

In a Britain fuelled by stories, the knight and the witch are fated to fall in love and doom each other over and over, the same tale retold over hundreds of lifetimes.

Simran is a witch of the woods. Vina is a knight of the Queen's court. When the two women begin to fall for each other, how can they surrender to their desires, when to give in is to destroy each other?

As they seek a way to break the cycle, a mysterious assassin begins targeting tales like theirs. To survive, the two will need to write a story stronger than the one that fate has given to them.

But what tale is stronger than The Knight and the Witch?]]> 384 Tasha Suri 0356524418 Em 0 to-read 4.67 2025
author: Tasha Suri
name: Em
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 21628170

In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.


“Profound and disturbing, A SHORT STAY IN HELL is a perfect blend of science fiction, theology, and horror. A terrifying meditation on faith, human nature, and the relentless scope of eternity. It will haunt you, fittingly, for a very, very long time.� � Dan Wells, author of I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER


“An irresistible invention. Peck has somehow squeezed all of human experience, not to mention near-infinite expanses of space and time, into one miraculously slim novella. You won’t be able to stop thinking about this book.� � Ken Jennings, author of BRAINIAC and MAPHEAD]]> 88 Steven L. Peck 0983748438 Em 0 to-read 4.19 2011
author: Steven L. Peck
name: Em
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 124029281 In Claudia Dey’s Daughter, a woman long caught in her father's web strives to make a life—and art—of her own.

To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.

So says Mona Dean—playwright, actress, and daughter to a man famous for one great novel, whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half-sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona’s childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and a fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights—painfully, parasitically—in this attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father’s crimes and ejected from the family.

Mona’s tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss—one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements—can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.

Claudia Dey chronicles our most intimate lives with penetrating insight and devilish humor. Daughter is an obsessive, blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, to create, and to break free.]]> 272 Claudia Dey 0374609705 Em 0 to-read 3.93 2023
author: Claudia Dey
name: Em
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 762211 144 Luis SepĂşlveda 0156002728 Em 0 to-read 4.03 1988
author: Luis SepĂşlveda
name: Em
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36266235 143 Rios de la Luz Em 0 to-read 4.21 2017
author: Rios de la Luz
name: Em
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211479192 A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel.

On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.

Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it.

Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice—by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds.

But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own—and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.]]> 384 Samantha Sotto Yambao 0593724992 Em 3 2025, fantasy
And I really didn't love the ending.

]]> 3.82 2025
author: Samantha Sotto Yambao
name: Em
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: 2025, fantasy
review:
This is a pretty low 3 for me. While I love the world and the magical, whimsical vibes, that's about all I liked. I thought the two main characters were a bit like watching paint dry -- very one dimensional, making decisions that really made no sense. I didn't buy their insta-lovey relationship and think it would have been a stronger novel without the romance subplot. I actually think it could have worked well as a short story collection where we get to see more of the different elements to the world, spend more time with the side characters, etc. I could have even handled a romantic subplot if it were with anyone who wasn't Kei, because he was very much giving me nothing. [spoilers removed]

And I really didn't love the ending.


]]> 55187281
“Cancel� or “call-out� culture is a source of much tension and debate in American society. The infamous "Harper’s Letter,� signed by public intellectuals of both the left and right, sought to settle the matter and only caused greater division. Originating as a way for marginalized and disempowered people to address harm and take down powerful abusers, often with the help of social media, call outs are seen by some as having gone too far. But what is “too far� when you’re talking about imbalances of power and patterns of harm? And what happens when people in social justice movements direct their righteous anger inward at one another?

In We Will Not Cancel Us, movement mediator adrienne maree brown reframes the discussion for us, in a way that points to possible paths beyond this impasse. Most critiques of cancel culture come from outside the milieus that produce it, sometimes even from from its targets. However, brown explores the question from a Black, queer, and feminist viewpoint that gently asks, how well does this practice serve us? Does it prefigure the sort of world we want to live in? And, if it doesn’t, how do we seek accountability and redress for harm in ways that reflect our values?]]> 88 Adrienne Maree Brown 1849354235 Em 3 2025, abolition, non-fiction
This collection reads like a tapestry that has threads missing. There are some really wonderful ideas here, and I agree with the general premise that call out culture, or cancel culture, is largely ineffective and actually harms movement work. However, these essays feel, generally, incomplete. It's a bit unclear who they are for -- are they for folks already mired in movement work who know the language, the history? Are they for newbies who are maybe afraid to get into movement work in our particular cultural moment because of call out culture? By not having a clear audience in mind, it makes the threads that are missing more apparent and more robust. Brown never clearly articulates the ways call out culture can work (and she does make a point to talk about how it is effective as a strategy) versus how it is currently used. There's a lack of concrete examples to help give support for her claims. She never defines transformative justice and how call out culture is a direct harm to TJ.
She never really defines what the movement work is or who is in it and how call out culture is operating within the movement versus without society/culture at large.

I think, in five or ten years time, when there has been more thought and reflection and time, there will be more for Brown to work with, but there needed to be more space or reflective editing for this collection.

]]> 4.38 2020
author: Adrienne Maree Brown
name: Em
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: 2025, abolition, non-fiction
review:
It's a bit unfortunate that the essay that most effectively encapsulates Brown's points is the afterword by Malkia Devich Cyril, and that upon finishing this collection, I'm most excited to read more by Cyril.

This collection reads like a tapestry that has threads missing. There are some really wonderful ideas here, and I agree with the general premise that call out culture, or cancel culture, is largely ineffective and actually harms movement work. However, these essays feel, generally, incomplete. It's a bit unclear who they are for -- are they for folks already mired in movement work who know the language, the history? Are they for newbies who are maybe afraid to get into movement work in our particular cultural moment because of call out culture? By not having a clear audience in mind, it makes the threads that are missing more apparent and more robust. Brown never clearly articulates the ways call out culture can work (and she does make a point to talk about how it is effective as a strategy) versus how it is currently used. There's a lack of concrete examples to help give support for her claims. She never defines transformative justice and how call out culture is a direct harm to TJ.
She never really defines what the movement work is or who is in it and how call out culture is operating within the movement versus without society/culture at large.

I think, in five or ten years time, when there has been more thought and reflection and time, there will be more for Brown to work with, but there needed to be more space or reflective editing for this collection.


]]> 211003894
Now, Noon is stuck navigating the submerged town with her mom, who believes their dead family has reincarnated as sea creatures. Alone with the pain of what happened that night at the cove, Noon buries the truth: she is not the right shape.

When Mercy’s predatory leader demands Noon and her mom capture the creature drowning residents, she reluctantly finds an ally in his deadly hunter of a daughter and friends old and new. As the next storm approaches, Noon must confront the past and decide if it’s time to answer the monster itching at her skin.]]> 272 Trang Thanh Tran 1547611111 Em 0 to-read 3.67 2025
author: Trang Thanh Tran
name: Em
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 202655373
A dark, lyrical blend of historical fiction and magical realism, The Curators examines a critically underexplored event in American history through unlikely eyes. All of Atlanta is obsessed with the two-year-long trial and subsequent lynching of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank in 1915. None more so than thirteen-year-old Ana Wulff and her friends, who take history into their own hands—quite literally—when they use dirt from Ana’s garden to build and animate a golem in Frank’s image. They’ll do anything to keep his story alive, but when their scheme gets out of hand, they must decide what responsibility requires of them. The Curators tells the story of five zealous girls and the cyclonic power of their friendship as they come of age in a country riven by white supremacy.]]> 296 Maggie Nye 0810147327 Em 0 to-read 4.20
author: Maggie Nye
name: Em
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213870084 From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.â€� This tweet was viewed over 10 million times.Ěý

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.Ěý

This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France and Germany.â€� It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called â€�rules-based order,â€� a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.Ěý

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> 208 Omar El Akkad 0593804147 Em 0 to-read 4.68 2025
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Em
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 207571196 Spiritual and community lessons for embracing collective care, co-creating sustainable futures, and responsibly meeting uncertain futures—a Zen and Native Hawaiian take on building better, more balanced ways of being For readers of Hospicing Modernity, When Things Fall Apart, and Zen and the Art of Saving the PlanetTalking story, weaving poetry, and offering wisdom at the intersections of strategy, politics, and spiritual activism, When No Thing Works is a visionary guide to co-creating new worlds from one in crisis. It asks into the ways we can live well and maintain our wholeness in an era of collective the swiftly moving current, fed and shaped by human actions, that sweeps us toward ever uncertain futures. Grounded in Zen Buddhism, interconnection, and decades of community activism, When No Thing Works explores questions we stand at a threshold of collective change, what leaps must we make?How can we push through discord and polarization and meet these critical changepoints collectively?What practices, strategies, and spiritualities can align to vision a sustainable future for our communities and descendents?How can we step out of urgency to tend to our crises with wisdom, intention, and care? With wise and witty prose that wanders and turns, guides and reveals, Zen master and Indigenous Hawaiian leader Roshi Norma Wong’s meditation holds our collective moment with gravity and tender care. She asks us to not only imagine but to live into a story beyond crisis and collapse—one that expands to meet our dreams of what (we hope) comes next, while facing with clarity and grace our here and now in the world we share today.]]> 120 Norma Wong Em 0 to-read 4.06
author: Norma Wong
name: Em
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 38473 In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence--which is loosely based on the notorious 1955 killing of Emmett Till--James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race.

For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a boy like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast.

In his award-winning play, Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated--and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.]]> 144 James Baldwin 0679761780 Em 4 2025, plays
All too reminiscent to conversations we see continue today: "We're not much better off than the Communist countries -- that's what Ralph says. They live in fear. They don't want us to teach God in our schools -- you send your child to school and you don't know what kind of Godless atheist is going to be filling the little one's mind with all kinds of filth."

I wish Juanita had been a more nuanced character, but overall, glad to have read this.
]]> 4.16 1964
author: James Baldwin
name: Em
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1964
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: 2025, plays
review:
A difficult read not only in topic, but because it serves as a stark reminder how little things have seemingly changed for some folks. Baldwin writes with such an unflinching, brutal honest that it can come across almost as caricature, even though we know this is how people have talked, felt, and acted.

All too reminiscent to conversations we see continue today: "We're not much better off than the Communist countries -- that's what Ralph says. They live in fear. They don't want us to teach God in our schools -- you send your child to school and you don't know what kind of Godless atheist is going to be filling the little one's mind with all kinds of filth."

I wish Juanita had been a more nuanced character, but overall, glad to have read this.

]]> 199534697 A surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue—and its fascinating role in Black history and culture—from National Book Award winner Imani Perry

Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?� In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.

Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as art and history: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as “Blue Black.� The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one gone too soon.

Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.]]> 256 Imani Perry 0062977393 Em 4 non-fiction, essay-collection
There were times when I wished there was a bit more to some of the essays -- some felt a bit too incomplete or passing.

That said, I really loved this collection, and I'm glad to own it. My favorite color is blue, and having a collection I can turn to that exemplifies the beauty, wonder, and love that is the color blue is perfect for my own personal collection.

]]> 4.35 2025
author: Imani Perry
name: Em
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: non-fiction, essay-collection
review:
A wonderful collection of short essays exploring the importance of the color blue in Black art, history, and more. With some essays ranging from only a couple pages to around 10-15, it's important to note that these are snapshots -- the author telling small stories to the reader in a way that feels intimate and personal. I loved Perry's writing -- her tone and voice is warm, but her language is exacting and brief. I learned so much reading this collection, and I have an array of Black artists that I am excited to learn more about in the coming months.

There were times when I wished there was a bit more to some of the essays -- some felt a bit too incomplete or passing.

That said, I really loved this collection, and I'm glad to own it. My favorite color is blue, and having a collection I can turn to that exemplifies the beauty, wonder, and love that is the color blue is perfect for my own personal collection.


]]> 226365038 This program features multicast narration.

For fans of Jordan Peele’s films, Stranger Things , and The Other Black Girl , Listen To Your Sister is a laugh-out-loud, deeply terrifying, and big-hearted speculative horror novel from electrifying debut talent Neena Viel.

Twenty-five year old Calla Williams is struggling since becoming guardian to her brother, Jamie. Calla is overwhelmed and tired of being the one who makes sacrifices to keep the family together. Jamie, full of good-natured sixteen-year-old recklessness, is usually off fighting for what matters to him or getting into mischief, often at the same time. Dre, their brother, promised he would help raise Jamie–but now the ink is dry on the paperwork and in classic middle-child fashion, he’s off doing his own thing. And through it all, The Nightmare never stops haunting recurring images of her brothers dying that she is powerless to stop.

When Jamie’s actions at a protest spiral out of control, the siblings must go on the run. Taking refuge in a remote cabin that looks like it belongs on a slasher movie poster rather than an AirBNB, the siblings now face a new threat where their lives–and reality–hang in the balance. Their sister always warned them about her nightmares. They really should have listened.

“A knockout debut."–Ashley Winstead

“Incredibly original and seriously scary.”–Nick Medina

“A brilliant fever-dream of a novel that effortlessly dances between horror, literary, and family saga—sure to appeal to fans of Grady Hendrix, Tananarive Due, Mona Awad, and Stephen King."–Maria Dong

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.]]> 12 Neena Viel Em 0 2025, dnf 3.28 2025
author: Neena Viel
name: Em
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: 2025, dnf
review:
DNFing @20%. The story is just a bit too slow for me to get into.
]]> 222264644
In this autobiography, Blouin retraces her remarkable journey as an African revolutionary. Born in French Equatorial Africa and abandoned at the age of three, she endured years of neglect and abuse in a colonial orphanage, which she escaped after being forced by nuns into an arranged marriage at fifteen. She later became radicalized by the death of her two-year-old son, who was denied malaria medication by French officials because he was one-quarter African.

In Guinea, where Blouin was active in S�kou Tour�'s campaign for independence, she came into contact with leaders of the liberation movement in the Belgian Congo. Blouin witnessed the Congolese tragedy up close as an adviser to Patrice Lumumba, whose arrest and assassination she narrates in unforgettable detail.

Blouin offers a sweeping survey of pan-African nationalism, capturing the intricacies of revolutionary diplomacy, comradeship, and betrayal. Alongside intimate portraits of the movement's leaders, Blouin provides insights into the often-overlooked contribution of African women in the struggle for independence.]]> 305 Andrée Blouin 1839768738 Em 0 to-read 4.67 2025
author: Andrée Blouin
name: Em
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60165392 Africa Is Not A Country is a bright portrait of modern Africa that pushes back against harmful stereotypes to tell a more comprehensive story.

You already know these stereotypes. So often Africa is depicted simplistically as an arid red landscape of famines and safaris, uniquely plagued by poverty and strife.

In this funny and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective. He examines each country's colonial heritage, and explores a wide range of subjects, from chronicling urban life in Lagos and the lively West African rivalry over who makes the best Jollof rice, to the story of democracy in seven dictatorships and the dangers of stereotypes in popular culture.

By turns intimate and political, Africa Is Not A Country brings the story of the continent towards reality, celebrating the energy and fabric of its different cultures and communities in a way that has never been done before.]]> 385 Dipo Faloyin 0393881539 Em 0 to-read 4.43 2022
author: Dipo Faloyin
name: Em
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214565614 A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.]]> 448 Stephen Graham Jones 1668075083 Em 0 currently-reading 4.30 2025
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Em
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 171830948
Streaming superstar MEGHAN CAMARENA and MELISSA FLORES (THE DEAD LUCKY) are joined by third-generation comic artist EMMA KUBERT (INKBLOT) for a universe-hopping thrillride from the world of RADIANT BLACK!

RADIANT PINK is a Massive-Verse series.

Collects RADIANT PINK #1-5]]> 148 Meghan Camarena 1534398066 Em 2 2025, comics 3.75 2023
author: Meghan Camarena
name: Em
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: 2025, comics
review:

]]> 214285517 Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power from a "powerful new voice in British Literature� (The Sunday Times).

Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.

An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers, Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.

The thrilling novel from one of the most acclaimed and incisive young novelists working today, Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language. It dares you to look away.]]> 155 Natasha Brown Em 5
Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-arc of this novel! Universality comes out March 4, 2025.

What a delicious little book. With a biting, verging on satirical, eye and voice, Brown explores class, race, and who wields the truth and the stories we tell. Though we start with an assault via gold bar on a dark night, what follows is a look into the truth beyond what we read in the newspapers. I never really knew where the story was going and loved the opportunity to see the story shift and move through different perspectives. I wouldn't necessarily call any of the themes in this short novel subtle, but there is a wry humor behind the absurdity of these characters that I really enjoyed. Brown, as was demonstrated in Assembly, does a fantastic job at getting directly to the heart of a certain type of (white, lower to upper middle class) person in contemporary England.

I can see why this wouldn't work for some people, but I just love Brown's writing and wit and storytelling. I don't want to say too much, because I believe it's best to go into this book a little unaware of what's to unfold.

Obviously, I highly recommend. For the people that this is for, I think you're going to love it.
]]> 3.53 2025
author: Natasha Brown
name: Em
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: 2025, satire, contemporary-literature, british
review:
[4.5 stars]

Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-arc of this novel! Universality comes out March 4, 2025.

What a delicious little book. With a biting, verging on satirical, eye and voice, Brown explores class, race, and who wields the truth and the stories we tell. Though we start with an assault via gold bar on a dark night, what follows is a look into the truth beyond what we read in the newspapers. I never really knew where the story was going and loved the opportunity to see the story shift and move through different perspectives. I wouldn't necessarily call any of the themes in this short novel subtle, but there is a wry humor behind the absurdity of these characters that I really enjoyed. Brown, as was demonstrated in Assembly, does a fantastic job at getting directly to the heart of a certain type of (white, lower to upper middle class) person in contemporary England.

I can see why this wouldn't work for some people, but I just love Brown's writing and wit and storytelling. I don't want to say too much, because I believe it's best to go into this book a little unaware of what's to unfold.

Obviously, I highly recommend. For the people that this is for, I think you're going to love it.

]]> 50490902 Poetic reflections on race, class, violence, segregation, and the hidden histories that shape our divided urban landscapes.

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots that comprised the “Red Summer� of violence across the nation’s cities, is an event that has shaped the last century but is widely unknown. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.]]> 2 Eve L. Ewing 149453844X Em 5 poetry, historical 4.29 2019
author: Eve L. Ewing
name: Em
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: poetry, historical
review:

]]> 63274999 192 El Jones 1773635522 Em 0 to-read 4.59 2022
author: El Jones
name: Em
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 173494551
Leap years are a strange, enchanted time. And for some, even a single February can be life-changing.

Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn’t one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she’s the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they’re long-stemmed roses, she’s a dandelion: an adorable bloom that’s actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her.

When regal nonagenarian, Ms. Della, invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth, and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmers.

One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.

Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance, and opportunity of New York, and whose lives are uniquely and irreversibly linked.]]> 347 Tia Williams 1538726726 Em 4 2025, romance
And damn if that epilogue didn't get me. ]]> 4.19 2024
author: Tia Williams
name: Em
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: 2025, romance
review:
I have critiques of this novel: the plot reveal is a bit over the top and I didn't love the romance, but damn if this book didn't feel like a warm hug. It's a beautiful love letter to found family and Harlem and jazz. I loved the first half or so of this, even though the character choices sometimes don't make sense. I loved the relationship between Ricki and Della. It's a sweet novel and magical to read in February as you follow the journey Ricki and Ezra take over the month.

And damn if that epilogue didn't get me.
]]> 205031034
A young student sits on a bench in a park in San Miguel, Mexico. Bonita is away from her home in India to learn Spanish. She is alone, somewhere she has no connection to. It is bliss.

And then a woman approaches her. The woman claims to recognize Bonita because she is the spitting image of her mother, who made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother didn’t paint. She never travelled to Mexico. But this strange woman insists, and so Bonita follows her. Into a story where Bonita and her mother will move apart and come together, and where the past threatens to flood the present, or re-write it.]]> 109 Anita Desai 1035044625 Em 0 to-read 3.30 2024
author: Anita Desai
name: Em
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 225699546 From the instant New York Times bestselling author of Firekeeper’s Daughter and Warrior Girl Unearthed comes a daring new mystery about a foster teen claiming her heritage on her own terms.

Ever since Lucy Smith’s father died five years ago, “home� has been more of an idea than a place. She knows being on the run is better than anything waiting for her as a “ward of the state.� But when the sharp-eyed and kind Mr. Jameson with an interest in her case comes looking for her, Lucy wonders if hiding from her past will ever truly keep her safe.

Five years in the foster system has taught her to be cautious and smart. But she wants to believe Mr. Jameson and his “friend-not-friend,� a tall and fierce-looking woman who say they want to look after her.

They also tell Lucy the truth her father hid from her: She is Ojibwe; she has � had � a sister, and more siblings; a grandmother who’d look after her and a home where she would be loved.

But Lucy is being followed. The past has destroyed any chance of normal she has had, and now the secrets she’s hiding will swallow her whole and take away the future she always dreamed of.]]> 384 Angeline Boulley 1250328535 Em 0 to-read 5.00 2025
author: Angeline Boulley
name: Em
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 198563691 Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize� Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.

By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.]]> 400 Eve L. Ewing 0593243706 Em 0 to-read 4.60 2025
author: Eve L. Ewing
name: Em
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213730826 From the award-winning novelist, a ravishing new novel set between London and rural Australia, both a love story and a ghost story.

Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he is still here, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the apartment they shared and begins to realize how much of her life was invisible to him.

In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah was haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seemed to offer the potential of a fresh new chapter, but the past refused to stay hidden. It found expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.

Both a celebration and autopsy of a relationship, spanning multiple generations, The Echoes is a novel about love and grief, motherhood and sisterhood, secrets and who has the right to reveal them—what of our past can be cast away and what is fixed forever, echoing down through the years.]]> 234 Evie Wyld 1101871911 Em 0 to-read 3.83 2024
author: Evie Wyld
name: Em
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 19564121 Like the Singing Coming off the Drums is a dazzling exploration of the intimate and public landscapes of passion from one of our master poets. In haiku, tanka, and sensual blues, Sonia Sanchez writes of the many forms love burning, dreamy, disappointed, vulnerable. With words that revel and reveal, she shares love's painful beauty.]]> 144 Sonia Sanchez 0807095311 Em 4 2025, poetry Love Jones, the rain beating against the windows. It's a vibe. ]]> 3.93 1998
author: Sonia Sanchez
name: Em
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: 2025, poetry
review:
Reading this is like opening a time capsule to the 1990s. The writing is lyrical and fluid, though the first two sections of the collection are a bit repetitive. I found the last section to be the strongest, when Sanchez opens up her lens of love to include writers like Toni Cade Bambara and Tupac. If you are looking for the slam poetry of old, I recommend this! You'll feel like you're in the poetry bar in Love Jones, the rain beating against the windows. It's a vibe.
]]> 203684613 From the New York Times Notable author of The Old Woman with the Knife comes a bracingly original story of family, marriage and the cultural expectations of motherhood, about four women whose lives intersect in dramatic and unexpected ways at a government-run apartment complex outside Seoul.

When Yojin moves with her husband and daughter into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, she’s ready for a fresh start. Located on the outskirts of Seoul, the experimental community is a government initiative designed to boost the national birth rate. Like her neighbors, Yojin has agreed to have at least two more children over the next ten years.

Yet, from the day she arrives, Yojin feels uneasy about the community spirit thrust upon her. Her concerns grow as communal child care begins and the other parents show their true colors. Apartment Women traces the lives of four women in the apartments, all with different aspirations and beliefs. Will they find a way to live peacefully? Or are the cultural expectations around parenthood stacked against them from the start?

A trenchant social novel from an award-winning author, Apartment Women incisively illuminates the unspoken imbalance of women’s parenting labor, challenging the age-old assumption that “it takes a village� to raise a child.]]> 138 Gu Byeong-mo Em 3 Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 , in the way that it's looking at gender differences and roles in the household. I liked it, but wish there was more of a balance between the POVs. There were a couple of the women that I never really felt like I got to know. ]]> 3.47 2018
author: Gu Byeong-mo
name: Em
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: 2025, translated-fiction, korean-lit, contemporary-literature
review:
There are interesting aspects to this novel, and I found the reflective musings of some of the women in this apartment complex to be an interesting look at the demands and expectations put on families and mothers in South Korea. It feels very much in the same vein as Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 , in the way that it's looking at gender differences and roles in the household. I liked it, but wish there was more of a balance between the POVs. There were a couple of the women that I never really felt like I got to know.
]]> 53152636
Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And NoemĂ­, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.]]> 320 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0525620788 Em 5
Loved rereading this! Read with my ears and enjoyed it, but it did exacerbate some of the pacing issues that this novel has. Still, I love Naomi and Francis, and I love this novel. Its so deliciously gothic and weird.



[2020 Rating: 5 stars]]]> 3.66 2020
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Em
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/07
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: 2020, historical-fiction, latina-o-lit, magical-realism, mexican-lit, mystery-thriller, horror, reread
review:
[2025 Rating: 4.5]

Loved rereading this! Read with my ears and enjoyed it, but it did exacerbate some of the pacing issues that this novel has. Still, I love Naomi and Francis, and I love this novel. Its so deliciously gothic and weird.



[2020 Rating: 5 stars]
]]> 58417755 'Gorgeous' - Brit Bennett
'Pure genius' - Jacqueline Woodson
'One of the most dynamic books I have ever read' - Clint Smith

At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was in a mood to reflect on her life and her legacy. She had spent decades as one of the most successful entertainers the world had ever seen, but, she told the crowd, "I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too".

Inspired by these words, celebrated poet and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound meditation on the history of Black performance and performers in America, in which culture, politics and his own lived experience collide. Each moment in each performance he examines has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and his own personal history of love and grief. Together they swell to an unique and urgent exaltation of Black communities, artistry, resistance and power.]]> 320 Hanif Abdurraqib 0141995793 Em 0 currently-reading 4.59 2021
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Em
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]>