aimiller's Reviews (689)

This was super gorgeous and the world was so rich; there was so much going on but I definitely still felt connected to the struggles of the characters and their arcs. Everything felt knife-edge sharp tense, and it was gorgeous. 

I will say sometimes I felt confused about what was going on--I was able to get into it, but it took some time for me to kind of settle into it and understand the language of the world. (I will also say that any book that starts with a like 'cast of characters' at the beginning will almost immediately confuse me because I get overwhelmed by the number of names I think I'm supposed to remember.) 

But I think overall this is a really fucking gorgeous piece that manages to combine both dystopia and hope in a way that doesn't feel trite but well-won by the end. Gorgeous work. 

I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, and I'm grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read this. 

This book was interesting, with some pacing issues and also some... age group issues? I wasn't sure who this book was for--given Renna's age, and some of the framing of the story, it felt like maybe older YA, but the parts at the house felt younger, and there were some moments, like discussing Renna's trauma responses, that felt older. (Do teens know what "dissociation" is? I certainly didn't until I was in college.) 

Sometimes the story seemed to crawl, which made parts of the ending feel too fast/underdeveloped. It was fun to have a fleshed out non-binary character whose gender was not a hugely intrusive part of the story, and having a Muslim woman practice magic was cool too (though I think that whole section with the fundamentalist Christians was a little heavy-handed.) 

Overall I think it was interesting, just suffered from some pacing issues. Could be a cool read for older kids who like Harry Potter but yknow we don't want as much transphobia or blatant racism. 

A really interesting and frankly relatable pursuit of lesbian history--Shapland moves in and out of the archives and reflects on her own role in shaping the narrative she writes. Sometimes it felt like.... we spent too much time on Shapland's own need for McCullers to be a lesbian (which, maybe the justification is for straight people, but as like a queer historian, honey I get it,) and to some degree I want there to be like less apology for this. 

I think this could be a really great book club book to be honest--it certainly gave me a lot of reactions, and I think also might be useful in a classroom for ways of writing personal narrative and biography as a genre. I also learned a lot about McCullers's life, when I'd really only encountered her as like a nascent gay writer, so that was cool. But yeah I also have a lot of questions about some history aspects which are more about like personal beefs re: history as a practice than really a calling into question Shapland's methods. (Queer historians are out here! Doing the work! Pushing back against the smoking dick method! Have been for a while! Sorry you've only run into straight biographers!) 

But as I said, a good and interesting read, really useful in the classroom and a good book club read! So for sure check it out if you're interested in like queer histories (but understand the work "historians" is doing when she talks about them, I guess.)  

STARTS TO SCREAM AND DOESN'T STOP

This book was EVERYTHING if you, like me, have been reading The Watch books and have fallen in love with everyone and then THE TIME TRAVEL PARTY TIMES OF SEEING BABY EVERYONE. 

But it was also like. The narratives Pratchett tries to tell about human "nature" through the Watch books are not ones I necessarily agree with--I have way more hope about humanity than he-as-Vimes does--but here we seem to settle on a common ground around mutual aid, where people of a vast variety of political stances can still come together and take care of one another. And how even Vimes who doesn't believe in a larger good of humanity (specifically human here) can participate (you don't have to like people to work for liberation!) and protect one another and also just. I WEEP. 

Also it was SO TENSE THE WHOLE TIME Sir Terry really went "we shall now give you LOTS OF THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT AT ONCE" and just loaded it all up from basically minute one? But the ending is so satisfying and good and nnngh I loved this book, no reservations, no weird racism... just so much love. Bless this book. A real delight. 

The description of this book calls it a "meditation," and I would say that's about right. I think if you want like a settled (lol) analytical arc, you aren't really going to find it, but I do think the meditations on what it means to pursue NDN love and joy, in a settler state that demands the death of those things, are powerful and valuable--I think his citations of Muñoz in particular are helpful in imagining towards utopia but also the brevity of those moments, as he encounters again and again reminders of the settler state and the violence and death that enacts upon and extracts from Indigenous communities.

I think I'd like to go back and reread it again, but found it fascinating for now, and a lot to chew on.

This was really gorgeous--it unfolds so beautifully and with the increasing suffocation the further you get in the book. I think I would probably benefit from another reread to just really soak in the details and world. But really the slow reveal of details was done masterfully, and I appreciate that part of it so, so much. Definitely grateful I read it! 

This was really a delight--Headley makes the work so accessible, even if I don't know that all the insertion of more modern language works (or that it appears so frequently, outside of the "bro" that became kind of the selling point of the translation.) 

But really it's amazing how easy it was to read, especially given just now old the poem is, and the introduction does I think an incredible job of setting you up to read the book--just enough context to help you understand what is going on, orient yourself, and clearly see where Headley sees her translation intervening on previous translations, without like drowning you in information on previous translations or broader history. I think maybe the highest praise of this I could give is that it made me immediately want to go out and read other translations of the text, not because I wanted something more from this text that I felt was lacking, but because reading this made me feel emboldened to go out and reencounter this formidable text in different forms. 

First off, I have to acknowledge that I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, and I am grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. 

I wasn't sure what to expect from this, as I wasn't familiar with the series, but this was way more fun than I thought! All the characters are very funny and fun in their own way, and the mystery was intriguing. It was just a really nice short little book, and really really excellent brain candy--I might go back and read the rest of the series now, because the little taste I've had was really fun! 

A really fascinating look at ghost tours at various points in the US south and the stories they tell, especially about enslavement. Miles does a great job of offering up the details of the tours and including interviews with guides and docents. Some of the analysis feels a little stagnated--I was left with big questions about the ways these tours not only tell misleading, violent stories about enslavement that re-inscribe stereotypes and misconceptions while offering up avenues for white-settler moves to innocence, but also the ways that these tours invent ghosts (to make up for a lack of real archive regarding individual enslaved people? Why are we making up stories about extreme violence when real life stories about the extreme violence of enslavement exist?) which Miles herself seems to put aside rather rapidly even though the ghost she was initially drawn into the project with ended up to be untrue.

Otherwise though I think it raises a lot of questions about our engagements publicly with haunting and ghosts, and how the history can be elided through engagement--that avoidance of these narratives is not the only way to fail to grapple with history and its afterlives. 

A really gorgeous little book--Yu manages to take the horrors of the Australian immigration policies and both highlight them as horrors (through both the mundanity and the acute spikes,) and as something through which people survive, albeit clearly traumatized. There's a real tenderness that Yu shows in tending to her characters, and the relationship especially between Firuzeh and Noor, that makes this more than just a kind of trauma porn. There's so much that is human in this book, in the face of the brutal, faced-but-also-faceless immigration policies.