abbie_'s Reviews (1.79k)

Read this one for Lebanon in the StoryGraph’s Read the World 2024 challenge and the art was exquisite. Absolutely beautiful attention to detail especially when it came to the surroundings, home decor etc. The story itself was simple - brother and sister are waiting for their parents to return home, delayed by some barricade or other. Various neighbours drop into to keep the kids company. It’s not a broad-ranging story of the civil war in Lebanon - it never leaves the one room of the apartment, and I like this. We still get a glimpse of the neighbours’ lives and life under civil war through the general chit chat of the characters. The strength of community in times of war is heartening, and I especially loved the male characters - Arab men are so often demonised in Western media. In this graphic novel, they’re soft and caring and protective. 

I knew nothing about this book but its cover caught my eye on the NPR Best Of list and then I noticed it was available on Everand, so I picked it up - and it was a beautiful find! I read it by accident at the same time as Takeaway by Angela Hui, and though they're very different, both deal with the distance felt between the children of Chinese immigrants and their parents, and also both deal with a daughter coping with her mother's sudden illness (though one is set in Canada and one in the Welsh valleys). This graphic novel is quite simply drawn, but it's effective. I particularly liked the panels which were somewhat repetitive (such as when Teresa was going back and forth to piano lessons) - they held a great sense of melancholy which I loved.

That melancholy tone permeates the entire memoir, especially the parts about her mother's illness, and the parts about her ancestors journey to Canada and Canada's treatment of Chinese immigrants once they finished building the railways. I also had no idea that people swam to Hong Kong to escape Chinese communes.

Would recommend to anyone interested in diasporic communities and the divide in communication between immigrant parents and their children. 

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

I can see this one making a huge splash next year - in fact, it already seems to be! Fundamentally unfolds at breakneck speed, brimming with razor sharp humour, poking into taboo subjects most people would rather turn a blind eye too. If you read and loved Guest House for Young Widows and wished there could be a hilarious fictionalised version featuring a young woman who made one terrible mistake as a teenager and a queer lecturer in way over her head, get yourself a copy of Fundamentally.

Its pace is the weak point for me. I know it's not supposed to be a factually accurate depiction of a UN initiative to rehabilitate ISIS brides, but it feels like the author just skipped over the parts that felt too tricky or lengthy to include. Nadia, the lecturer who suddenly finds herself running the rehabiliation programme for ISIS brides in Iraq, arrives at base, then suddenly it's one month later - what have they achieved? There are regular time jumps like this which pulled me out of the story and made it seem flatter than I'd like. 

But overall it is a singular book which pushes a lot of buttons, forces the reader to confront young women on the margins whose teenage decisions dictate their entire lives for the worse, and root for those who have no fucking clue what they're doing, but dammit they're trying to make a difference. 

I always love how much space Tilted Axis Press gives to their translators for afterwords and notes on processes. Tiffany Tsao’s afterword about how she and Norman Pasaribu worked so closely together on the English translations of these poems was utterly fascinating. They transcended the boundary of author and translator, both becoming author-translator as Pasaribu rewrote some of their own poems in English for Tsao to edit, and encouraged Tsao to be more playful in her translations, as well as open minded when it came to gender - she admits she initially was constrained by a heteronormative view of these intrinsically queer poems. I think it’s safe to say I actually enjoyed this section of the book more than the poems themselves 👀 I did enjoy some of them, but more than a few went over my head. My favourite was probably the extended speculative fiction piece near the end, which was just fun! Others exploring the risks involved with living queerly in Indonesia were beautiful but sad. I say this every time I read a poetry collection, but I must read more. 

Read for my final Genre Challenge 2025 prompt (about food), I really enjoyed this personal memoir about growing up as a Welsh-Chinese kid whose parents ran the local Chinese takeaway. I wasn’t fully enamoured with the author’s narration of the audiobook - sometimes it felt like she was rushing through it - but not enough for it to dampen Angela Hui’s story. I don’t think I’ve ever considered just how much work goes into owning and running a takeaway - you must really live and breathe your business! Hui is super forthright about the differences and issues she faced with her parents, mainly due to the difference in communication styles and a growing language barrier as the kids grew up speaking English and giving up on Chinese lessons, while their parents struggled to learn English. The family’s experiences with racism and xenophobia in their small, mostly-white Welsh village were vile, it’s never lost on me that so many white Brits love a Chinese or Indian takeaway, but are so quick to stereotype or outright racially abuse the people who bring this food to them. It was also difficult to read about Angela’s father’s outbursts of rage, and I appreciated her vulnerability. 

An audiobook roulette choice for me, and a book I’ve had saved on my Everand list since I started my subscription a couple of years ago! I wasn’t sure what to expect from the audiobook but I (mostly) really enjoyed the narrator’s performance. Considering the story’s told in vignettes and jumps around loads in time, the audio format actually works surprisingly well. It’s not necessary to maintain a firm grasp on the timeline, what’s important is the mosaic of Clio’s life that’s revealed through all of the perspectives and time jumps. Initially she seems like an idealistic one-hit wonder, trying to use her moderate amount of fame to do some good in the world, but as the book goes on the portrait of Clio grows ever more complex. I’m just always a fan of books where you can see one person through myriad people’s eyes - it will never not be interesting to me. 

The protest scene was also a fascinating aspect - I had no idea police officers would ingratiate themselves into protest groups in the UK to spy.

Just a very solid, multifaceted look at a (fictional) political activist’s life in Scotland, and I’d recommend to fans of fictional musical memoirs! 

Picked this one up because it was on the Lambda finalist for bisexual fiction, and while it wasn’t groundbreaking, I did enjoy my time with it. (Though I will say the audiobook narrator was not my favourite.) This book melds queer 20th century history and queerness in the early 2000s in a very engaging way. I loved reading about Dawn’s struggle with her gender presentation, although I could have done with less of the relationship toxicity. I couldn’t see a valid reason why she’d stay with Lukas, and the lack of communication between them was infuriating.

The hidden piece of history Dawn uncovers while at work (as a book binder/restorer, very fun) is a lovely little rabbit hole of queer resistance. It sort of gave off Lote vibes, but not as magnificent. 

I enjoyed this one as much as I could for having zero knowledge about the bible. I did enjoy the sass Eve had towards Adam and other men of the bible, setting the record straight about their ‘true’ personalities - spoiler alert, they’re trash. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s ‘entertaining’, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Just not that memorable. 

I think this book deserves a reread and a re-review, because while I definitely remember enjoying reading it, it’s now November and I can recall very little about the plot since August. Consider this a stand-in rating and review, and I may revisit the book in 2025. 

Although I didn’t have much clue what was going on by the end, I did enjoy this odd little book about a lonely woman who fakes a pregnancy for nine whole months to get out of doing tedious tasks at work. It’s an interesting little commentary about what’s seen as valuable in women, and tasks and jobs that are seen as women’s work. Gets weird towards the end but I liked that.