aimiller's Reviews (689)

I will fully admit that this rating is because I had an extremely difficult time following all the moving pieces; I'm not as familiar with English history as I should be, so the names that I probably should know, I didn't, and that did not help much, but Thompson shifts around so often that it's also dizzying geographically and temporally. I did love the immense number of dunks on economic historians he made, and he had some really important points for the field of labor history that I was able to recognize even as a person unfamiliar with the content. It also read much faster than I thought it would! Given the enormous size of the book, it goes by pretty quickly!

It's amazing what they used to jam into Star Wars books; this is like 3 different arcs in one. It's fine content but there's a lot of weird heterosexuality (not like that the straightness itself is weird, just how it's phrased?) The whole thing at the beginning with the baby plot was uncomfortable, and I never want to read the word "loins" in another Star Wars book if I can help it, because it appeared WAY too many times here. Also it spans a lot of other books, which is cool if you know what happened there but could be confusing. It wasn't a terrible book, there were just a number of moments that made me roll my eyes.

This was interesting! There were a lot of cute moments in it, it just wasn't the most mind-blowing thing I've read about this topic. Cleves does a really good job of being accessible and clear with her evidence, and she uses her sources really well--she's uncovered a rich archive and she uses it well. Her engagement with the question of "lesbian" and her use of the term throughout is extremely lacking--I imagine she felt like she didn't need to engage in that debate, but it was definitely an interesting choice to leave it out (especially given her engagement with Faderman at the end.) I think this could be really useful in some history of sexuality or history of marriage classes for undergrads depending on what you pair it with; it's definitely accessible enough for them!

Exactly as good as everyone says it is. Some of the panels I wanted to like cut out and put on my bedroom wall. The story was so moving and I was so into it by the end. It was just a really great story with really great art--it was like soft but also conveyed the dark parts? Incredible stuff.

This is such a delight to read. There are about 800,000 different plot lines but there is no struggle to keep them straight, and they all tie together so nicely at the end, it's just so soothing and good to read. Plus it has Luke getting the shit kicked out of him repeatedly which is just delightful and funny, and Leia uses the force and a lightsaber, and there's just. Anything you want out of this book, I guarantee it gives you. It's why it's my favorite EU book, because it's so buckwild and delightful. And it's LONG- it's like 500 pages long! But it goes by so quickly, because the pacing is just that good. And there's some amazing droid stuff in it??? Y'all you gotta just read this, because it's so good and fun.

Oh my god. This book is so, so incredible. I couldn't put it down, especially when I got deeper into the book and there were cliffhangers. This book is just so dense and tightly-woven, but also completely accessible and sucks you right in so you have to keep reading. The book is so rich with questions, too, and the dreams hook is amazing and carries so beautifully throughout. I loved this book absolutely and want everyone I know to read it, so please go out and do so!

I must start this by acknowledging that I received this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, and I am grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

I didn't have huge hopes for this, but boy could I not put it down. Seriously--I read it all in a single sitting, because I had to see it out. Holt manages to write Levi as sensitive and complex, even when things sometimes feel a little cliched or over the top. He makes bad choices, choices honestly that are so painful to watch him make that I like had to look away from the book from secondhand embarrassment, which is a fairly new thing for me. But he's also so clearly growing and making different choices, and it's super powerful to see. I'm not sure how the intended audience for this book would see it, but as an adult, I found it to be super compelling and powerful.

Normally literary fiction is like Not My Deal, and I was reminded of that reading most of this book. It wasn't bad, although some of the ways Alameddine has Aaliya describe herself (she says something along the lines of "I knew I would never be loved, so I strove to be respected" and there were other lines too...) where I was like "please don't make me read your fictional woman say things like this because it lets me know Too Much about how you think women work."

That being said, the last 10% (this review is obvs for the Kindle edition) of this book was really good

because we got women like coming together and being there for one another and I find that waaay more interesting than 90% of a book being navel-gazing about a life and about other books.

I was really delighted by the ending, and wish we could have had more than that.

Overall, not a bad book, just really not my cup of tea, and at least it was a worthy reminder of that!

Before I read it, I heard this book was long, and BOY IS IT FUCKIN' LONG, Y'ALL. It's so, so long, and I would say the last third sort of feels like you're circling around a drain, slowly. It's certainly a beast to behold, and Silko does a great job of building up to her climax. It's also uh graphic as HELL--at one point, I described it as "indigenous Game of Thrones in Tucson" and I honestly stand by that, so please be wary as you approach this. If there's a trigger warning you can think of, this book has it. But it was definitely an adventure, and one that I will be chewing on for a while to come.

I want to say first off that I received this book through a GoodReads Giveaway, and I'm grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. I am also a non-binary trans person, and so that obviously colors the way I read this book.

I've read a lot of trans memoirs in my life, and I'm happy to say this one does a lot of work that isn't within that genre. It helps, of course, that Grace was already known and had a career she could (and did!) write about extensively. In straddling these two genres--the trans memoir and the career memoir--she's able to craft this piece that feels like it in itself is in transition, that she's grappling with things as they're being presented to us. The heavy quotations from her journals are nice in sort of hitting on how she was feeling in the moment.

What I think I appreciated the most, though, was her last chapter about how difficult her experience with medical transition was, and how she second-guessed herself. That we almost never see in transitional-focused memoirs, and I appreciate how candid she was about that struggle.

Overall, this was a great glimpse into Grace's career and personal life, a really moving memoir, and a really candid look at her own experience as a trans woman!