abbie_'s Reviews (1.79k)

Not sure why I’m not as willing to DNF in 2024 as I usually am, but I need to get my act together because I can’t keep doing this to myself 😭 I really enjoyed Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day so I put her other books on my TBR… Fuming I wasted a Scribd book on this one, it was truly incomprehensible. A Korean girl in Germany tries to learn German, has some thoughts on an extremely dull relationship with a woman, and even more impenetrable thoughts on classical music. 

Maybe if you are a classical music buff, you’ll get something out of this one. For me, just boring. 

This is my third book by Kacen Callender and I definitely prefer their middle grade stuff to their YA. I liked Felix Ever After more than this though, unfortunately this was just too much teenage drama for the sake of drama. Characters go from berating other characters for cheating, to cheating themselves within 50 pages. Nate flits from being in love with Flo to being in love with Oliver James in about three seconds flat. Also, if you cannot even say the words relating to sex out loud, you’re not ready to have sex. Oh boy.

As always, though, love the casual queer rep and also the deaf rep in this book. Also liked Nate’s mam, and their backstory - both of them find themselves hesitant to dive into relationships because of losing their dad/husband young. But most things, the grief included, felt a tad rushed. 

Not bad, just not really for me!

Thanks to Netgalley and Dialogue Books for my free digital ARC of Memory Piece! I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this expansive novel which manages to fit so much into just over 300 pages. It has a really interesting structure. It moves from the 1980s to the near future 2040 and follows three Asian-American women who are trying to make their lives matter.

I thought it was interesting in that their stories are not told at the same time - or rather, we don't get a picture of their lives in the same time. Giselle's story is told mainly in the late 90s/early 00s, Jackie's starts around the same time and then (I think) into the 2010s. But then Ellen's section jumps far into 2040. The women weave through each other's lives at various points, so we do get a sense of where they're all at at each stage, but I just thought that was such a unique way of telling the story!

Judging from other reviews, it seems like people either prefer the first two narratives or Ellen's, in the nigh-on dystopian world where gentrification has made New York unrecognisable, with checkpoints to get from various neighbourhoods. I'm in the first camp. While Ellen's section was still good, it was Giselle's art journey and Jackie's experience with the dot.com that really had me gripped. I wouldn't go so far as to say Ellen's section felt like a different book... But almost. 

Covering everything from class, sexuality, gentrification, policing, environmental activism, tech, the gig economy and art, this is an ambitious novel to say the least. I think it had the potential to be longer and better for it. 

The writing is stunning as well. I haven't read The Leavers yet, but you can bet I'll be making it a priority for 2024!

I expected to like this one a lot more than I did - it was fine, and it feels unfair to rate someone's true story, but I'm more rating the style/format of the book. It took a lot of courage for Se-hee to share her unedited (though translated) transcriptions with her therapist with the world. But I think it would have worked better had it been reworked into a more narrative style, rather than keeping the interview format.

A few parts of Se-hee's issues were super relatable to me, as I also suffer with depression and the sheer exhaustion of being alive (pre-meds!) was something I could relate hard to. However, I do agree with other reviewers that it mostly felt a bit shallow. Whether this is a reflection on the state of mental health care in South Korea, I'm not qualified to say.

I have the sequel on my Netgalley shelf and I'm hoping this one delves a little bit deeper into the meat of it all!

Vagabonds! is a glorious, queer riot of a book which feels more like a full-body experience than a book you read! At first I thought I wasn’t going to be into it, as it’s quite experimental, with chapters narrated by spirits, but as the week went on and I had the time to sit down for longer with it each time, I was absolutely hooked. It flits around the perspectives of various ‘vagabonds’ who are forced to live in the shadowy underbelly of Lagos, shunned for who they love. I'm not sure I ever fully grasped Èkó and Tatafo's purpose, beyond being the narrative thread that binds all of the vignettes together, but that doesn't really matter. The vignettes focusing on the myriad of gorgeous queer lives is the true triumph of this book. 

They make up one of the richest narratives I've read in recent years. Women loving women, men loving men, trans folk finding the familial acceptance they deserve, sex workers thriving in a society that both reveres and despises them, fairygod girls protecting their earthly charges, women suffering domestic violence ascending to higher planes... all of it is so evocatively told. As I was reading this one in print, I was also listening to A Two-Spirit Journey, and honestly it probably did that audiobook a disservice. Sometimes they covered similar topics (Two-Spirit is nonfiction), and I couldn't help but compare the writing. 

Some scenes in this book will just never leave my brain, either for their incredible beauty, heartbreak, or pure shock. Two sex workers who return home to their cosy little nest each morning. Women who literally ascend to a different plane while the abusive men they leave behind are left to fend for themselves in the hell of their own making. A young trans girl who, given the attitudes of her society at large, finds unexpected solace in her mother who recognises her for who she truly is (this one absolutely broke me, so beautiful). A hypocritical politician (is there any other kind?) who meets a grim fate when his boy sex robots power down at an inopportune time. 

Again (I'm doing this too much this year), I feel like I did *myself* a disservice by not being able to give this book the attention is deserves when I first started reading it. Had I, it probably would be a no-brainer 5 stars. One I'll be adding to the reread pile, along with Martyr!. 

Thanks to Libro.fm for my free ALC of Maame! I loved Maddie and this audiobook had such a perfect narrator (Heather Agyepong - I’m gutted she hasn’t narrated anything else yet?!) that I felt so sad to finish it! Both the narration and style of writing made Maame feel like talking with a close friend. Maddie’s experiences with depression closely mirrored my own at times, which was both a gut wrench and a comfort. We both google the most inane things that a lot of people would just grasp through intuition, so I loved that as well. I loved watching Maddie grow as a woman throughout the book, come into herself and stand up for what she deserves.

I wish we had seen more from the side characters, especially her two best friends as they had potential to be incredible but more felt like they were just there to prop Maddie up at times. But at the end of the day, it is Maddie’s story. This book delves into Ghanaian culture & family dynamics, and I loved that towards the end Maddie started to lean more into learning Twi and exploring her heritage. I’m not a religious person at all, but I even appreciated Maddie’s evolving relationship with God. Oh, and I didn’t even mention her work yet - Maame encompasses so much, but to me it never felt forced.

Overall just a bloody good book tackling depression, grief, complicated family relationships, micro-aggressions experienced by Black women in the publishing industry, sex, faith, and so much more. Maddie is very much muddling through her 20s, and it was comforting to be along for the ride!

It’s March and I’ve only rated one book five stars this year - I keep reaching for books I think are going to knock my socks off only for my brain to have hyped them up too much 😭 I’ve been meaning to read My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness since 2021, and while it is a super vulnerable, honest and funny memoir (and my first manga!) I wasn’t blown away.

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Nagata Kabi is super awkward and confused about her sexuality, but said awkwardness stops her from doing anything about that organically. So she hires a lesbian escort to explore that part of herself with no strings. Escort services are a lot more common in Japan than the UK, with somewhat less stigma. But I really appreciated how the author comes to terms with the fact that was in fact not emotionally prepared for everything that sex brings with it. Jumping into such an intimate act is probably not the best idea, especially for someone with such little experience with social relationships in general!

Aside from her sexual awakening (or not), we also get an unfiltered glimpse of the author’s battle with mental illness, disordered eating and a troubled relationship with her parents. I’m so glad she has the medium of manga to help work through her issues, and that she was courageous enough to share her most vulnerable experiences with an audience.

I’m no graphic novel reviewer, but the illustrations were lovely! Loved the pink palette, and the emotions portrayed.

I just thought it would have more of an impact on me - perhaps if I’d read it when I was also a freshly-out lesbian or even closeted. Glad I finally read it, sad it wasn’t a new fave!

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC of Martyr! out in the UK now! 😍 I had high expectations for Cyrus’s story, thanks to @openbookopen’s joyful love for it, and I wasn’t disappointed. Martyr! is one of those all-consuming stories where I fall so deeply for the characters that I’m loath put it down for a minute when I’m reading. This in turn means… I take no notes for reviews 😂 These are the type of books that make you forget you’re reading, you’re so caught up with Cyrus, Ali, Arash, Roya, Zee, their intertwining stories, the glorious messiness of their lives. If I do have one criticism, it’s that I agree with Traci of @thestackspod, that Cyrus’s narrative voice is so strongly defined that it leaks into a few of the other characters’ POVs as well.

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But not all of them, and as well as obviously Cyrus’s sections, his mother Raya’s were my other favourites. Queerness suffuses this novel in so many ways, and I hadn’t been expecting Raya’s devastating storyline. I think one of the biggest indicators of excellent characterisation is when I want to read whole novels based on side characters, which is exactly what I want from Raya.

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Although the content is often bleak - alcoholism, homophobia, terminal illness - there’s such a playful quality to Martyr!, peppered with humour and pop culture references that give an unexpectedly buoyant feel to a book whose main character is obsessed with death.

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One for the reread pile I think, since there’s just so much to unpack, appreciate and rediscover!

This is another book I’ve been wanting to pick up for a long while, and I think it may have suffered from my expectations building up too much. I knew it was a queer romance of sorts which takes place through letters between two agents of opposing sides during some sort of war. I don’t think I was expecting it to be so heavy on the sci-fi aspects though, and the prose combined with these complicated (for me, a sci-fi amateur) left me a bit confounded at times. 

But there were also some absolutely stunning pieces of writing, and the yearning and longing portrayed between two women who can have nothing to do with each other was top notch. When I wasn’t confused, I loved the creativity on display with the various worlds (threads as they’re called here) visited by the two agents. It’s clearly been very meticulously plotted, and I appreciated the ending. 

It was written by two separate people, but I thought the writing styles really complimented one another. I am assuming that one wrote Blue and the other wrote Red’s chapters, but don’t quote me on that.

Overall, not a new fave but definitely one I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to sci-fi fans who love gorgeous writing. 

I finally picked up the autobiography of two-spirit lesbian Ojibwa-Cree elder, Ma-Nee Chacaby, who has lived an extraordinary life, overcoming countless traumas to live as her true self once she hit her 40s. In her 60s, Chacaby, together with Mary Louisa Plummer, took on the monumental task of putting not only her life, but the lives of her parents and grandparents, to paper. To say she’s not had an easy life would be a gross understatement. Chacaby has endured alcoholism, child abuse, racism, rape, child death, domestic abuse, deteriorating vision, homophobia and more, but she’s come out the other side of it determined to find the joy in life. Her mindset is admirable. 

Even through audio, I found myself struggling a bit with the style though. It’s very direct, no fanfare, and more a laying down of events in chronological order than a true reflection of everything. But it would be a very long book if that were the case, and I think the authors were more concerned with squeezing in every remarkable aspect of Chacaby’s 60 years. 

In the afterword, Mary Louisa Plummer draws comparisons to other told-to autobiographies of Indigenous women, pointing out that these lacked ‘emotional depth’, recounting only the facts and not engaging with any of their feelings around the events. She says that a Two Spirit Journey has tried to offer more emotional depth, and while it’s true that Chacaby does not hold back from baring the most traumatic times of her life, I personally did not find much introspection within the book. The emotions displayed felt a bit surface level. The memoirs I usually read (though I am aware of the difference between autobiographies and memoirs) dwell for pages on a singular event, a memory, the author plumbing their emotional depths. It’s just a difference in approach, and one of the reasons I’m not going to rate this otherwise remarkable book. A valuable read for the perspective Chacaby offers as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian elder!

Oh, and if you listen to the audiobook like I did, I’d recommend 1.8 or even 2 x speed - the narrator is decent but talks extremely slowly.