bahareads's Reviews (1.09k)

Min Jin Lee was born to be a writer. The words on the page sucks you in with an immediacy, compelling you to keep turning the pages. Pachinko makes you think. It is very layered. I have read family sagas before but not staged like this. It is a continous flow adding generations while allowing you access to the ones that came before.

I had not thought before about the creation of North Korea from a Korean perspective. Seeing how life was for Koreans in Japan during the 20th century was eye opening. I had not given it much thought before. I wonder what xenophobia is like now in Japan, given that Jin Lee goes up to the 1980s (which was not THATTT long ago). The overt and subtle xenophobia is what peaked my interest toward the end of the book. The way a few of the character internalize it, and use it to accept their place in Japanese society made me go "mhmm" often.

The dichotomy between Solomon and Phoebe as it relates to their experiences as Koreans in foregin places was also fasinating. Readers see that while you can be of the same ethnicity, your environment places a large part in your perspection of the world.

My favorite characters were Sunja, Yangjin, (adult) Mozasu and Yumi. All of the characters complex and nuanced. Jin Lee crafts the book so that readers can see the layers of every character. Each one has depth. I thought all the secondary characters were crafted well.

The book dragged towards the end. I wondered where Jin Lee was going with it, especially since it was character driven. I was wondering 'how many more characters can see add??"

Pachinko is complex with many many themes. Worth the read.

May 2024
3.5 stars

The audiobook was great. Scarlet continues right where Cinder leaves off. Scarlet's incessant and non-logical need to find her grandmother NO MATTER WHAT, really pissed me off. Can we have a plan?! Can we think things through before we act. Other than the inane reasoning, I enjoyed Scarlet's ability to care for others and herself. I enjoyed Wolf's character, and I (truly) did enjoy Captian Thorne (for comedic relief). I'm excited to meet them again in Cress . I was suprised that Cinder went from being a scared girl to a badass warrior in the span of 10 hours? While I know she got a physical upgrade, how would that have changed her mindset so quickly?? I did not think that was reasonble.
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May 2015- 4 stars- Much much better than Cinder. I loved this book. Wolf is bae BTW.

May 2024
3.5 stars

The audiobook was great. Cinder has a fantastic plot with interesting characters. Cinder and Iko are loveable, and their chemistry with each other and the plot translates over audio. The insta-love trope is played out. (Cinder is older, but when will we move past it). Kai spilling his guts to Cinder, does not make sense to me. A PRINCE?!? talking to (essentially) a peasant. The step-mother was the prime example of a well-written villian. The perfect balance of evil and "I feel that." Queen L is too sterotypical villian for me. I enjoyed the fairytale and scifi blend.

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Dec 2014

I'm giving this book 3 and a half stars.

"Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl.

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future" - Goodreads

I was 44 pages into the book when I had already figured out a major point in the plot which was disappointing. I wish we could have learned more about Garan but I guess that's just how the plot goes..
I did have a bit of a problem about Prince Kai. Why would he, a prince who has lived in the palace with probably fake people all his life, tell deep things to a girl he just meet a couple of days ago. Like no it didn't make real sense to me.
I wanted a bit more from depth from this book. I found it to be a light, yet still enjoyable read.

3.5 stars
(I am a Bahamian book reviewer)

Where was Goodbye? shows the POV of Karmen dealing with the very immediate aftermath of her brother, Julien's suicide. Her family is a mess. The dad wants to stick to a routine to try to overcome the grief, and the mum cannot get out of bed. As an audience to their grief, it can be overwhelming. Karmen is struggling in her own way to figure out why Julien would commit suicide. She cannot comprehend it, that is not the brother she knew. She tries to dig for answers because of the belief there has to be a specific reason. Karmen only finds that sometimes people are just depressed to the point of not being able to go on with living.

The language - I'm speaking to Bahamian Creole with grammar, syntax, and spelling - could have had more depth. I would have liked to see Karmen's inner monologue be less proper English. The sentences that were in Bahamian Creole were like a soft brush of silk on the brain. I would have liked to see more phonetic (?) spelling eg. een/ein for aint. I (of course) want more Bahamian Creole in my Bahamian books in general. My desire is for Bahamian authors to more fully embrace the use of it, especially in fiction works. Now speaking to the actual writing style of Mather - it is honestly not my favorite. It reads easy. However it is not memorable.

It warms my heart to hear familiar names and places spoken in a text. I think about the way fiction can utilize the live reality of the writer. I adored the fact that Julien was a history major and that he wrote about Liberated African communities on New Providence. That is an actual historical fact! It tickled my historian's brain.

The characters mention during a conversation that young girls who are missing are often seen as 'quick' and hiding off with 'big man.' It's true to this day that that is the preconceived notion of most Bahamian people when presented with missing flyers of young girls. It is such a shame that the emphasis of shame is placed on the disadvantaged young women and not the predatory men. I like that Mather is bringing this everyday discourse into literature.

Karmen, and I would say her mother too, were the only fully developed characters in the story. Everyone else played their role to move the plot along. They were just narrative devices. I can't put my finger on how Mather could flesh them out more, I just know they need it. Karmen's mother became more alive in the novel the more Karmen interacted with her.

I enjoyed the romance. I love a good friends-to-lovers trope. I thought it fit well with the plot, especially when we get the flashbacks before the suicide. I'm a fan of Karmen and Issac. I liked Pru as well. I thought she added a lot to the plot and book depth overall. Mather could have built the friendship between Karmen and Layla up more before giving us negative thoughts about Layla. It made me not like Layla at all. I felt sad that their friendship was not the same toward the end of the book. I reflected on my personal experiences with friends.

Grief and loss is a constant theme throughout the book. In one particular scene, I almost cried like a baby; I did tear up. I found it odd (up to a point) that so many people would know about the circumstances of Julien's death. However after it's revealed the method Julien used to die, it made more sense. It would have been all over the news.

Skating being a part of 'counter-culture' in The Bahamas was very very interesting to me. Honestly, I do not know many skateboarders at home so it is a blank in my mind. I need to do more research on it. At the end of the novel, there are suicide and crisis hotlines for the US, Canada, AND The Bahamas. I just love that.

A quick read with a lot of punch in it.

Cadwell Turnbull takes us on a wild ride (AGAIN). I am so thankful I had a character chart (from a book friend) to help trace who was who. We are the Crisis a tumulous and spacey ride. It keeps you hooked and guessing. It chilled my blood. It made me laugh. It made me wonder. Turnbull does not suffer from second-book syndrome with this one.

A childhood classic that I listened to on audiobook. My favorite in the series so far. I felt a depth of emotions while listening to this book. The stage of life Anne was in resonated deeply for me. 

A childhood classic that I listened to on audiobook. I resonate with this version of Anne so deeply. I'm working and in school in a new place, away from my significant other and family. I loved this book, and before it was my least favourite when I was a kid. 

I really enjoyed listening to this audiobook! It was a great reminder for me how to have a more balanced life while being productive.

I read for a graduate class

I highly recommend this book. I enjoyed it a lot, even for school. Noelle Stout explores boundaries between labor and love, and how these boundaries are blurred in practice. Her source material is 100 hours of formal and informal interviews with queer persons, sex workers, and tourists. Noelle Stout prefers subjectivity over identity and uses the word 'queer' to highlight the shifting nature of desire and fluidity of sexuality. She focuses on Cuban on Cuban relationships but looks at Cuban-tourist encounters. However 'tourist' is used as a broad encompassing term. She uses her experiences and reactions to relationships cultivated while in Cuba and the demand placed on them as a source of insight and is very transparent about it.

For the scholarship, Stout is targeting two distinct realms: (1) sexuality and (2) contemporary transnational capitalism that associates practices of love and intimacy with heterosexuality, excluding queer people. She builds on those who look at intimate economies (tangle of market and everyday intimacies) and counteracts superficial accounts of homosexuality in Cuba. She also looks at lesbians and bisexual women, not just gay men which uncovers how gender norms play a role in socially acceptable forms of homoeroticism. However Stout Focuses on people with nonconforming genders and sexuality to uncover the experiences and concerns of contemporary Cuban social life. She uses 'gay' as a gender-neutral word; saying terms are flexible by nature.

Stout argues that disagreements about intimacy in the context of rising inequality can teach us a lot about young Cubans in a post-Soviet nation. She says intimacy and desire are shaped and influenced by cultural meaning during the introduction of capitalism to Cuba during the 1990s and early 2000s. The study illuminates how people whose sexual desire is outside the mainstream failed to conform during the transition from communism to socialism. One significant piece of her work is to show that Skin colour played a huge role in people separating sex work from jineterismo; as blackness can = criminality in Cuba.

In talking about race, Noelle Stout brings in her own experiences of how she was perceived in Cuba. She has a whole paragraph dedicated to in. She says "Because I am light-skinned and blue-eyed, Cubans in Havana's queer nightlife often assumed that I was the tourist client of my American girlfriend..." whom they mistook as Cuban. Stout discusses her ethnicity, a "combination of French-Candian and Native American-Germn heritage." And I want to touch her hand when I say this - it's okay to be White presenting and to call yourself White while holding on to your ethnic heritage. She never explicitly calls herself a POC but that's what I was gathering from the paragraph.

Once again I highly recommend it. There's a lot to be said about the book but it's a great read, actually entertaining.

I enjoyed this book more than the first one. I lovedd the characters a whole lot more. The ending had me shook. I need the 3rd book!