abbie_'s Reviews (1.79k)

If this book intrigues you, I can't say I recommend the audio as I think there's just too much going on to grasp while having it read to you. I think it's one of those books you need to read the words on the page to appreciate their form, and it also delves into a lot of gender theory which is difficult to keep track of via audio. Heaven actually interacts a fair amount with C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides, which I also read recently, so that probably explains why I didn't 'get' most of it - I need to stop trying to engage with these academic-adjacent texts on audio! 😅

Zadie Smith is one of my favourite authors and it pains me to give her latest offering a run-of-the-mill rating, but for me this book was only okay. It often struggled to capture my attention, and then when I *was* caught, it would then shift to another perspective or a time jump and I'd have to reacclimate all over again. 

I read quite a lot of historical fiction, but I've never read anything featuring the Tichborne claimant (or even heard of him before now!) so I'm grateful to Smith for introducing me to this fascinating little piece of history. I also appreciated how she wove in the slave trade, sugar plantations, abolition in the UK, politics and race relations. It's a very rich novel, and there's a lot to gain from it for sure. It also features Charles Dickens as a character (with plenty of shade) so there is that if you're a Dickens fan. 

I would have loved to spend more time with Andrew Bogle, as his parts were among the most compelling. I did like Eliza's voice as well, and was pleasantly surprised to find a little kernel of queerness in there. The Fraud is very much a 19th century novel - in terms of emulating the style of that century, and of course the subject matter. For my brain right now, not ideal, but there we are!

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

I was so sure I’d love this one, a twentysomething queer person (the book uses she/her pronouns for Sofie) who spent a lot of her life thinking she liked men but then it turned out she liked women… but unfortunately I found the narration to be a little contrived and in a lot of places the humour didn’t land. I know how tricky it is to translate humour, not only technically but also in the sense that every nation’s sense of humour will differ - well, every person’s does but British humour will likely land very differently to Dutch humour. 

The book is episodic and nonlinear, with Sofie leading the reader through little snapshots of her life. We witness her first (disappointing) sexual experience with a man, sit in on terrifying Russian lessons (some of the strongest portions in terms of humour actually), scratch our heads with Sofie as she tries to get to grips with lesbian dating, and mourn with her when her mother dies fairly young of cancer. The strongest sections for me were the Russian escapades and the poignant exploration of her mother’s decline and death. 

I believe this book is autofiction, but it reads much like an internet essay. It tries a little too hard to be zany, and I think it might have been better off as a collection of essays. 

Also a small thing that ended up bugging me - a phrase is used throughout the Dutch version (from what I gleaned from Dutch reviews) - ‘snap je’. Google translate gives ‘do you understand’. The translator Kristen Gehrman has gone for ‘you know?’ throughout the English. Sofie, the protagonist, uses ‘snap je’ like a vocal tic, but it must work more in Dutch, because the English ‘you know’ just did not fit naturally in a lot of the places it was used. Maybe Gehrman could have switched it up sometimes with ‘you get me?’ Or ‘you feel me?’ A tiny thing but I couldn’t unnotice it and it really began to bug me 👀

Overall a little bit disappointing given my high expectations, but not without its strong points and a fresh queer voice from the Netherlands. 

Another illuminating read about the history of the oppression of the Palestinian people, which goes back to 1917. A little less accessible than the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, though that’s perhaps because I read the audio and Khalidi delves deep into politics both within Palestine and Israel but also internationally, so there are a LOT of names to keep track of. But besides that, Khalidi offers an incredibly forthright explanation of how we’ve ended up where we are today - witnessing the genocide of Palestinians in real time while western leaders endorse it. 

Anyone posting on social media in support of Palestine will have been subject to the ‘but what about Hamas?’ question, and in this book Khalidi does indeed address the fact that Hamas carry out what likely amounts to war crimes, but nowhere near the scale that Israel does. I have also heard the nugget floating around that at one point Israel funded Hamas, but it was astonishing to hear that confirmed - they wanted to weaken the Palestinian Liberation Organization, so funded Hamas in an effort to divide and rule. Truly… no words. I also have no words for the role the US plays in all of this. It makes so much sense that Americans just constantly parrot the ‘self defence’ line, since they are the ones supplying Israel with their insane amount of arms. But any weapons supplied by America must be used in self defence - anything else (i.e. what Israel are doing) will leave the US open to being complicit in war crimes. It’s all just a sickening tangle of money and power - white men in suits playing politics with people’s lives. 

This book was published in 2020, and towards the end Khalidi talks about how much of what occurred in 20th century was able to be carried out due to lack of widespread internet/slower pace of news cycle etc. He seemed optimistic that Israel wouldn’t seek to continue their ethnic cleansing procedures with how connected the world is now. Absolutely devastating to read that now when we are literally watching genocide unfold in real time. 

Less of a review and more of a thought dump, but I highly recommend seeking this one out to understand more about the Palestinian plight. 

This was such a beautiful, beautiful book, so full of heart and hope, just a gorgeous experience. It follows Ranita, who’s just finished her time in prison and is adjusting to life back on the outside, fighting to stay clean and sober and to regain custody of her kids. She’s also trying to come to terms with her late-found queerness, which blossomed during her stint in prison with Maxine (side note, please can the author write a book about Maxine next because I would read that ten times over). The story flips back and forward in time, so we see snapshots of Ranita’s life as a child, as a wayward teenager, during prison, and then after her release. I loved all the chapters, Lee writes with such assuredness and Ranita was an incredibly developed character. My heart broke for her a million times over - she did not have an easy life. Lee addresses complex mother-daughter relationships, emotional abuse over physical, with welts left just as deep, sexual abuse at church, the lure of alcohol and drugs as numbness, but above all the ability to heal and redeem.  I love everything about Ranita’s journey, but obviously especially the queer aspects of her life she begins to seek out and embrace. 

My one critique is that the issue with Ranita’s old partner, DQ, didn’t seem fully resolved. There’s one confrontation with him when she’s back home, but then he just melts away. It felt a little too neat, but honestly with all the shit Ranita has to deal with, she deserves a win like that!!

I picked up this collection on a whim in Oxfam Books a few months ago, I’d vaguely heard good things about Van Den Berg but wasn’t at all familiar with her work. Turned out to be a good purchase, as this was a very strong collection of short stories!

Most of them play with the idea of masks, hiding your true self, pretending to be someone else, putting on a front, and that’s the only reason I didn’t rate it higher. I was reading roughly one a day and in the end (though the last story was incredible) I wanted a little more variety in theme. 

A lot of the characters in these stories are unsatisfied with their lives in some way. They’re stuck in marriages which have hit a wall, dead end jobs, cycles of poverty or misery. But Van Den Berg isn’t interested in giving them any relief from their trials - there’s a definite pessimistic tone throughout, intensified by a hefty dose of mystery/strangeness. 

My favourite story was the last one, Isle of Youth, where a woman wanting to escape her dying marriage agrees to impersonate her twin sister for a few days while she embarks on an affair. But it turns out her sister’s life is darker than she imagined, and she finds herself out of her depth. 

I also loved Antarctica, where a woman travels to the ends of the earth to try to come to terms with her brother’s death at a research station. Opa-Locka was another strong one, where two down-on-their-luck private investigators come up against a baffling dead end in the case they’re working. 

I’d recommend this collection if you’re looking for something a little gritty, with strong characterisation (the stories are all fairly long so the character work is great) and strong, clear prose!

An absolutely stunning and shattering collection of poems from a Palestinian poet. Thankful to City Light Books for offering the ebook for free to everyone in order to get more eyes on Palestinian works. While reading this and Kanazi's collection, I was struck by how so many people still seem to believe that the violence inflicted on Palestine by Israel only began on 7th October after the devastating attacks by Hamas. If you took two seconds to read the work Palestinians have been putting out since 1948, you'd realise how untrue and harmful this is. Palestinians have been living under Israeli occupation since 1948, subject to atrocious violence and knowing barely any peace.

Palestine A-Z was far and away my favourite poem from the collection. Heartbreaking and innovative. Another stanza from Death Before Birth stayed with me: 

'People die.
Others are born.
For us,
the fear of dying before living
haunts us while we are still
in our mother's wombs.'

I read a few books in October that didn't end up leaving much of an impression on me. Black Sunday started off strong, but with the audiobook I found my mind wandering too much from the middle onwards. I'm behind on my reviews, so I'm writing this about a month later and very little has remained with me. I think this is more my fault than the book, it's probably one better suited to print than audio. 

I read this a few weeks ago when my mind was occupied and I wanted something short - short though this was, it didn't really fit the bill for my mindset. I can barely recall anything about it beyond queerness + rocks + volcanoes. It'd benefit from a reread, and I'm definitely wanting to pick up Imbler's How Far the Light Reaches, as the intersection of nature and queerness interests me a great deal!

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

I'm a fan of Broder's work, and Death Valley is another surreal offering to her repertoire. This one draws a *lot* from Broder's own experience. The main character is an author who is a long-term caregiver for her husband, whose father has just suffered a terrible car accident and is in ICU. All of these things are true for Broder as well, and it's clear from the book that writing this was an incredibly cathartic experience for her. 

However, I did see another reviewer (I'm sorry, I forget who!!) point out that this whole book is the MC/author grappling with how *they* feel about their caregiver roles, which sort of makes the people she's caring for seem like a burden. I have no experience being a caregiver but I'm 100% sure it is difficult, but something about this just kept niggling at me the whole way through. Like on the one hand she is entitled to her thoughts and her mental health is valid, but also it came off a touch... selfish? 

That being said, it's a compulsive and unique read for sure. Long story short - woman checks into a Best Western for a mental health break, ends up climbing inside a cactus and getting lost in the desert. Lots of reflections and epiphanies along the way, with a nice little dose of humour. 

Overall, I would recommend it if you like your storytelling a little surreal and a lot meta!