aimiller's Reviews (689)

I know, I'm like a Terrible Gay, but this was just... weird? The art was very pretty, but it was just a like really bad take on lesbian experience? Like okay maybe it reflects some people's experiences (the author's?) but it was just this like very overwrought lesbian tragedy. Even the struggles with internalized homophobia, which is something I'm really interested in exploring right now in my life, felt just super surface and not very nuanced.

About halfway through the book, I flipped to the frontmatter to see if it was like published in the early 90s or something, but it was published in French in 2010???? And again, as with No Crystal Stair, maybe it's supposed to be Baldwin-esque (in the style of Giovanni's Room) in the way it's written and the story it tells but y'all... we got that with Baldwin and about 800,000 lesbian pulps. Do people like this because it got made into a movie? It was just wildly disappointing to me, as this piece of lesbian lit that had been so upheld as 'must-read'.

(Also, I see the butchphobia right there. Associating butchness with jealousy and possessiveness is gross and I was disappointed to see it.)

So this book, I want to say, wasn't like... egregiously bad? They all come from videos so I guess this is the It Gets Better project's attempt to reach out to kids who don't have internet access? Maybe? It's not clear.

I read this for a project on queer youth suicide, so of course I'm coming at it with a critical perspective, but I'm also coming at it as a traumatized queer person who made it through high school okay but is still grappling with what living in a homophobic and transphobic world did to me as a young person. For the former, this book is a fascinating insight into the discourses from 2010 that appeared and are perpetuating about queer survival, coming out, and survival. For the latter, this book was very, very painful in parts, painful in ways that high school was not, as I start to recognize the discourses that traumatized me. I'm not saying this book does not have the possibility to help young queer people, but I also think there are things tossed around in there (including one that shames people for attempting suicide, which like.... okay....) that are dangerous.

A lot of the essays also just... make better videos? So maybe also go check those out. But also thank you for this book so I can take a selection and not watch all 1000+ videos.

So I know I'm about 800,000 years late on this book- I've been busy okay? But oh my god everyone I know needs to get up and read this--seriously. The book is kind of brutal, in a good way--at some point, after I had thrown it down for the 8th time to cry, I went "this is really a book about the ways that parents bully their children about gender and don't realize it at all." As a non-binary trans person, the way that people around George insist things about her gender was very, very painful, but the end was so satisfying and wonderful. Bless this book--I'm so, so grateful it exists, and I want every person I know to read it.

This book was... fine? It hit some of the fun points of the series, but I really struggled to keep up with the two characters in terms of their decisions. This is not to say that Gray did a bad job necessarily of representing their choices as coming from who they were as characters, because I think she did a fine job of that, but I was rapidly frustrated by those choices.

The love story also bored the shit out of me, because under what circumstances do you fuck the Nazi. Almost none. Liesel from The Sound of Music knew that, and yet I had to read a sex scene in which the former Nazi fucked the current Nazi. Again, this could have to do with the current political climate in which we are living, where my tolerance for those working within fascist regimes is just at an all-time low, but I don't think I need stories creating sympathy for Nazis (or Nazi stand-ins) at this time in my life.

I will say that this book is, as one of the reviews on the back said, difficult to put down, with lots of twists and turns to keep the reader interested. I definitely was interested! So why the low star rating?

I subtitled this book "Star Wars: Because This Universe Needed Settler Colonialism," and indeed, much of the ire I feel towards this book as a lot to do with the way that Miller wrote this, as he noted in his acknowledgments, as a western. A western. On Tatooine. Which I know have to think of as "the frontier," along with everything that comes along with that.

Maybe it's my lack of previous knowledge about the Star Wars universe--I had somehow missed that Tatooine was a planet that had to be "settled" in the first place, and that Sand People were Indigenous people who attack settlers (they're literally referred to as such in the text multiple times) over land claims. Oh, Ai, that's wonderful, the Star Wars universe is taking on complicated questions, except 1) they already did an incredible arc about settler colonialism and futurity in Clone Wars, and 2) it's so terribly, ham-handedly done that it's just offensive on all ends.

Though Miller does eventually pull a kind of 'Dances With Wolves'/'Last of the Mohicans'/every other movie with a white savior siding with Indigenous peoples narrative, part of his TWISTS!!!! narrative form involves setting up the settlers initially as Good Guys--which means portraying the Sand People as Savages. (Again, that word is literally used in the text to describe them--by a settler character, but it's still disturbing.) By the time he pulls out the 'just kidding, it's the SETTLERS who are bad (well, one specific Bad Guy Settler)!!!!!' twist, Miller has already done enough damage; he's relied hard enough on tropes that dehumanize American Indian people that his humanization of his Indigenous Sand People continues to rely on similarly dehumanizing tropes.

Are we better off for all the knowledge we gained in this book about Tatooine, Sand People, and Obi-Wan Kenobi? I'd say no, although it's nice to know that Tuskan is a slur! But though this was a page-turner for sure, it felt more like a chore--that I had to bear witness to this mess of a book--than the delightful diversion I was looking for.

Don't even get me started on the weird 'every woman has a crush on Obi-Wan Kenobi' thing; it's only believable if every man does too, guys.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, I wrote that I was so glad that it was a "Legends" book, and not officially canon; I don't normally care about these types of things, but thank goodness and good riddance.

Just as delightful as I remember, though I forgot how much piloting info dump there is. My enjoyment may have been 98% nostalgia, but it is a really wonderful TEAMS book, and I look forward to the rest of the series.

This might have been a three and a half star, really. It wasn't GOOD- even for an EU book, which I generally really enjoy. I found myself really struggling with the beginning chapters- there was so much melodrama with the flashbacks to tiny!Han, and it was obvious that the author doesn't understand children. But as we moved further into the story, I found myself more engrossed. The tension is very well done, and I'm sure the people on the bus enjoyed my face journeys as I read all the twists and turns. At the end of the day, I'd would say I enjoyed myself, but this is not among my favorite Star Wars books.