abbie_'s Reviews (1.79k)

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

I was drawn to this one as it was a queer coming of age set in Malaysia, centring a family going through some serious shifts in their lives. My main gripe with it is that I genuinely felt like my edition was missing 100 pages off the start. We’re thrown in with these characters without a life raft, things are mentioned like we’re supposed to know it, characters do things with seemingly no reasoning, relationships are already formed and built within a few pages. It just felt lacking in development from the get go. By the end it was slightly better, but yeah, a bit weird!

The writing was lovely, Tash Aw paints a countryside scene vividly. I also appreciated the commentary about farmers losing their livelihoods because of demand from rich folks wanting tourist traps in the country.

Liked it, but not a love for me. 

Sometimes I like to play little games like reading my books in the order I’ve saved them, just to get to titles I’ve saved ages ago but then forget about for one reason or another. So I picked up Jackson Bird’s memoir Sorted via audio and it was quite lovely! Jackson is super charming and reads this book himself, and you feel like pals by the end - probably why he’s had so much success on Youtube (though I personally had never heard of him, I just enjoy any and all memoirs by trans folk). He keeps it fairly impersonal in terms of relationships, again a trait developed from maintaining his privacy on Youtube, and just addresses the facts of his dysphoria growing up, realising he might be trans, and seeking next steps to feel at home in his body. Personally I like a little more juice in my memoirs, but I’m just nosey.

Jackson’s big break on Youtube came from Harry Potter related content, so there is a lot of HP talk but more so about the community that developed around it. This book was published in 2019, so I think slightly before JK became a truly heinous transphobic villain. No one’s trying to pretend HP doesn’t exist, but just in case that does make you uncomfortable and you prefer to be aware!

Overall, just love to see someone come into themselves and be able to truly experience life as they were meant to be. Stylistically very chatty and amiable, nothing that blew me away, but just v lovely. 

I’m not quite sure what to make of this book. I don’t read a lot of books featuring cannibalism, but when I do it’s usually revealed later as a big twist. The Lamb just comes right out with the cannibalism on the first page, and we spend the rest of the book with Margot and her mam’s, ahem, unusual tastes. But considering it deals with two cannibals luring ‘strays’ into their homestead to cook and eat them, there’s not much tension. It’s a slow build, dwelling on the slimy, sticky bits of life. I liked that it was a horror novel more focused on relationships than gore (though there’s plenty of that too), and it was achingly sad in parts. But I also wanted a bit more feeling from it. 

I will say that the ending knocked it out of the park. I think a lot of authors shy away from taking big risks with their endings, but Lucy Rose has no such issues. 

thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC of The Tokyo Suite. I liked but didn’t love this one. I feel like it went well with one of my other March reads - The Abandoners, which was about mothers who leave their children. Fernanda is a big shot TV exec who regularly leaves her daughter in the care of her husband for her career, a refreshing take. While working and dealing with a strained marriage, she embarks on an affair which consumes her to the point that she doesn’t even notice her daughter’s disappearance.

The other POV is from Maju, the nanny who has kidnapped Cora, Fernanda’s daughter. Her chapters were my favourite, as they were imbued with a strange sense of calm on the surface but sheer panic underneath. The situations she put herself and Cora into had me on edge.

I did notice quite a few grammatical errors and spelling mistakes which hopefully get caught before the final version.

One of those ones where I enjoyed it while reading but when I finished I wasn’t left with a huge impact. 

I kind of enjoyed this book but it was also just a whole lot of people sitting around chit chatting about WHAT to do, and taking their sweet time actually doing it. Agree with other reviewers that the ending is so rushed. Hester is the saving grace of the book, an ageing spinster with knees that give her endless amounts of grief and a flame for an old lover that refuses to go out. She’s probably meant to be written that way, but Cordelia is such a wet wipe that it made her chapters a bit annoying to read. The servants were well written though, funny and biting, exercising as much autonomy as one can in servitude.

Honestly just felt a bit ‘and what?’ by the end.

Read this one with my short story buddy reader Nadia, and we both really enjoyed it and found it to be a solid collection! 

I wanted a little more from some stories, such as The Dusk Market, Bird Woman and the Masquerades. But others were perfect little nuggets of short story excellence. The Hollow, where a house takes justice for its inhabitants into its own hands (walls?); Girlie, where a house girl gets more than she bargained for at the market; Contributions, where a money-lending circle has to get serious when one of its members refuses to pay up.

The writing was always engaging, the concept so creative and mysterious, just great vibes which is what I always want from a short story collection! 

I mostly really enjoyed this book, following the lives of three gay men in India from the 1970s up to now, maybe a little bit further in the future. Through the three men, we see the shifting attitudes towards queer men in India, from laws imposed by colonial rulers and leftover and ingrained, through to the initial repeal of Section 377, its reinstatement, renewed repeal, and today, when Vivaan is able to live *somewhat* freely and out, though there’s still plenty of stigma outside of his family. 

I found Vivaan’s sections jarring in tone. He’s 17 and living in current times, maybe a bit ahead, but his voice notes are read like they’re written by someone who’s maybe never heard a 17 year old talk before. This was especially annoying because content wise, I found Vivaan’s chapters to be the most compelling. So it was a struggle between style and content there. 

I preferred the storytelling style of Mambro’s sections (Vivaan’s uncle) and Sukumar’s, although some of his (Vivaan’s great uncle, we love a queer family), weren’t as compelling as Mambro’s (not his real name, Vivaan’s nickname for him). We’re with Mambro when the law deeming homosexuality illegal is repealed for the first time, when gay men feel safe enough to put their faces to their hook-up app profiles for the first time, when you can get an STD test without fear of being arrested. It’s beautifully written, and then the later section when the law is put back into place 4 years later is just as heart achingly written.

Overall it’s a solid book, moving, but just some stylistic choices that didn’t work for me. 

I discovered this book via NPR’s best books of 2024 list, someone put them altogether in a TSG challenge and I decided it was a great idea to join a 364-book challenge that I’ll probably never complete. But it did at least lead me to this very interesting collection of essays by Spanish author Begoña Gómez Urzaiz which all explore mothers, real and fictional, who for one reason or another, leave their children. Leaving children is something fathers do all the time and it’s an accepted part of western society. They leave to work, or they just leave full stop, and mothers raise children. The only time it’s acceptable for a mother to leave her children is when abuse is involved, and even then there remains stigma. The women in this book mostly leave their children to pursue careers or dreams, and society makes its disapproval of this choice known. It offers interesting mini bios of figures from arts, and also some interesting perspectives that I was aware of but that I never really articulated. Such as how women, even those who don’t have children, often find themselves discussing them with other women at social or work functions, while men wouldn’t generally discuss kids.

Just one of those books that challenges the way you think, particularly around internalised prejudices we may still hold around mothers. 

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC of Selali Fiamanya’s debut novel! I was really impressed by this debut, the differing POVs all kept my attention well, even if Elom does steal the show. It could have done with a bit more cohesion between the chosen time periods/perspectives, as some parts of the family’s lives felt more glossed over than others, but I appreciate that it’s a fairly wide ranging story which has successfully been contained into 350 pages. We know from the start that tragedy has struck the family, then we go all the way back to the parents, Kodzo and Abena’s, first meeting in Ghana. The pair move to Scotland where they face challenges of being one of the only Black families in their part of Glasgow. Over the years they build their family and careers, an interminable effort to carve out a life for themselves.

Of course I am a sucker for any story which deals with a character coming to terms with their sexuality. Some of Elom’s coming-of-age experiences were so bloody sad - who knew a booze-fuelled week in ‘Shagaluf’ could break my heart lol. Fiamanya did a great job of depicting all sorts of relationships in this book. He perfectly encapsulates the way some relationships in your 20s feel - like everyone else is forming more meaningful relationships and yours are all surface level.

Very moving, looking forward to see what this author comes out with next!

All the reviews calling this book absolutely brutal aren’t exaggerating. I’ve read a few fiction books covering femicide in Mexico, and it’s never an easy topic to read about, but so important to keep talking about, so I’m glad this one made the International Booker longlist. However, I don’t see it making the shortlist, personally. The stories do pack a punch, and I liked the interconnectivity of them, but I think some of them lacked depth. The Smile and Sequins were my two ‘favourites’ in that, they were the ones that stomped on my heart the most. 

I have to agree with another reviewer on StoryGraph who mentioned that the English translations of the colloquial language came off as a bit ‘how do you do, fellow kids?’ I’m sure de la Cerda’s original Spanish flowed more naturally, but sometimes the informal English came off as stilted.

But it is overall a very engaging collection, raw and unafraid to pull back the curtain on the blood, violence and corruption that rule the lives of young girls and women in Mexico.