Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis is a sharp, unflinching critique of the feminisms that claim to be liberatory but ultimately reinforce oppression. Lewis takes on TERF ideology, white feminism, and the insidious ways respectability politics and ideological purity stifle truly radical movements. She refuses to romanticize feminism’s history, instead demanding a more self-critical, accountable, and abolitionist approach. It’s an urgent call to embrace discomfort and let go of defensive posturing in the pursuit of real liberation.

Despite my appreciation for the book’s aims, I found myself struggling to stay engaged. Lewis’s writing is dense, academically rigorous, and often paradoxical—a style that, while intellectually rich, made it difficult for me to focus. Her sharp, sometimes flippant tone also didn’t quite land for me. After two chapters, I realized I wasn’t getting anything new from it and decided to DNF. It’s not a bad book by any means; it just wasn’t the right fit for me.

I'm sorry, guys. I just couldn't do it. There's nothing wrong with this book. I just don't care enough about genetics. I got through 300 of the 500 pages and that was just the best I could do! Thanks to Jillian for the rec, anyways <3

While I really enjoyed the first few stories in this collection, I couldn't get past the story "Ally," voiced by a trans woman, when Nalo Hopkinson is a cis woman. Hopkinson opens the story with an acknowledgment of this discrepancy and states that she chose to write the story to show her support for trans people. I didn't enjoy the story itself, and you never need to appropriate someone's voice or experiences to stand in solidarity with them. I tried to keep reading past "Ally" but found my experience of the other stories was tainted by my distaste for "Ally" and Hopkinson's choice to voice a trans person when she is not one. As such, I chose to stop reading this book at 47%. 

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC. This book will release from CLASH Books on February 25, 2025 in the US. However, I stopped reading at 17% due to concerns about the author, a white writer, voicing a Korean American character. 

In All Our Tomorrows, Amy DeBellis dissects millennial and Gen Z culture through the lives of three young women navigating the complex realities of New York City in a near-future, hyper-capitalist world. Janet, an overworked online therapist; Anna, a retail worker and sugar baby seeking financial survival; and Gemma, a college student turned aspiring influencer, each confront their struggles with nihilism, isolation, and climate anxiety. DeBellis employs sharp critiques and dark humor to explore the intimate challenges of identity, privilege, and resilience in an era defined by economic instability and digital culture.

I stopped reading All Our Tomorrows at 17% because Amy DeBellis’s portrayal of Janet, a Korean American character, felt misaligned with my values around racial justice and representation. As a white author, DeBellis’s decision to voice a character with a specific racialized experience raised concerns about appropriation, particularly because Janet’s ethnicity seemed incidental to the story rather than thoughtfully integrated.  

Janet’s ethnicity is revealed in a scene where her date, a tone-deaf white man, exotifies her background by asking where she’s *really* from, “like ancestrally.” While DeBellis’s critique of white privilege and microaggressions is evident, the scene risks reducing Janet’s racial identity to a narrative device for advancing this critique. If her ethnicity plays no significant role beyond this scene, it feels tokenizing and exploitative. If it reappears later, the risk grows that it could be mishandled in ways that amplify the problematic nature of this choice.  

While I appreciate DeBellis’s incisive commentary on millennial struggles, her approach to Janet’s character felt at odds with my values. I’m not comfortable supporting a narrative that might perpetuate the very erasure or commodification of marginalized voices it aims to critique, particularly when those voices could be more authentically written by someone with lived experience.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC. This book will release from Atria Books on January 28, 2025 in the US. I felt this review needed to be public for other readers' awareness, but please be aware that I only read the first few sentences of this book.

I know Emily is a celebrated, beloved author in our community, and I’ve been a fan of some of her work in the past. While I struggled with her second novel, Interesting Facts About Space, due to triggering content related to stalking and what I felt was a mishandling of PTSD treatment, I was still eager to read her upcoming novel.

However, upon opening my ARC copy, I found an author's note that explained the story “deals with suicide” from the perspective of someone who treats their death “as trivial.” Suicide and mental illness are not mentioned in the book’s blurb or marketing materials, so this note took me by surprise. I flipped to the table of contents and saw that the first chapter is is a suicide note, followed by 21 chapters titled “Attempt One,” “Attempt Two,” and so on. Initially, I interpreted this to mean the book chronicled 21 suicide attempts, which was alarming and triggering for me.

In my search for clarification, I came across reviews explaining that these chapters detail the narrator’s attempts to write a suicide note, not suicide attempts themselves. However, reviewers also mentioned unsettling elements, including a narrative that oscillates between humor and distortion when discussing suicide, mental illness, and psychosis. One review shared how the narrator fabricates stories, walks back serious claims like experiencing hallucinations, and justifies these fabrications as attempts to make her suicide “more comprehensible.”

Given my past concerns with Emily Austin’s handling of sensitive topics and the deeply personal nature of this subject matter, I’ve decided not to read We Could Be Rats. While I respect the nuanced and complex ways writers approach mental health, I feel strongly about prioritizing my own mental well-being and only engaging with stories that handle these issues with care and clarity.

To my fellow readers: if you choose to read this book, please tread gently. I encourage us all to remain mindful of how storytelling impacts both ourselves and others, especially on topics as sensitive as this. 

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! DNF at 27%.

Teenagers Sophie and Noah are twins being raised by their deeply devout and pious Catholic parents. When their parents catch Noah with a gay pornographic magazine, he is sent away to a Catholic boarding school for “troubled” teens. The novel follows Sophie as a flu outbreak sweeps across the US, and she rushes to save her brother Noah.

Sophie lives in an extremely small, rural, and isolated town in which the church members make up almost the entire population. Sophie hates her parents and her religion so much, she barely wants to live, feels like she’s not even living. The town librarian secretly funnels her novels to read, as her mother has strict rules about what books she’s allowed to check out. There is a strong emphasis on virginity and the danger of women’s beauty. Sophie’s mother became deeply devout and ascetic after being sexually assaulted, because she believes she invited the assault and that her piousness will protect her moving forward. In this way, American Rapture explores how religion can turn us against ourselves.

The flu eventually makes its way to Sophie’s town, and she’s sent home from school one day when a student tests positive. Sophie returns home to find her parents having sex on the living room floor, an almost unthinkable experience considering their devout piousness. When Sophie tries to flee the house, her parents begin to attack her. This culminates in Sophie’s dad attempting to rape her, which she is able to escape from. She steals her parents’ car and heads toward the facility where Noah is being held. On the way, she gets stuck in unmoving traffic. A man in a nearby car becomes infected, breaks into Sophie’s car, and also sexually attacks her. At this point, it becomes clear that the virus is driving people to sexual violence. I realized that American Rapture is a book about a teenage girl surviving a sexual violence epidemic. Considering this is essentially my actual life, I did not feel the need to continue reading this book. This book needs some major trigger warnings for incest and sexual assault. 

This is an all vibes, no plot book full of lyrical writing and reflections that feels like it's been through the MFA wringer a few times. Those kinds of books sometimes work for me. This one didn't. I simply don't have the brain cells for it right now. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC anyways!

Thank you to the publisher for the gifted ARC! Soft DNF - This is just not working for me right now. I'm so bored. It seems likely the marketing on this book was off - I don't actually think there's much Jeffrey Epstein in it. This is also way more rote history and way less political critique than I was expecting. The one thing I was enjoying was the insight into how deeply Victoria's Secret's functioning and growth was influenced by 20th century American capitalism. It seems unlikely this will exceed a 3.5 star rating for me, but I'm still interested in the capitalism history stuff, so will try to circle back to this at another time. 

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book releases from Random House on September 17th, 2024 in the US. Unfortunately, I chose to stop reading the book at 47% due to extremely fatphobic and ableist language.

This is my second foray into Enriquez's work. I withheld my reservations about my first experience with her (The Dangers of Smoking in Bed) because I was new to Bookstagram, who loves her, as well as new to translated literature, which I understand has some nuances when it comes to diction. I was excited to explore Enriquez's latest collection and see whether or not I had the same issues. Turns out, I did.

First of all, a lot of these stories just didn't work for me. "My Sad Dead" was a really strong start, but after that, I got halfway through the book and didn't enjoy any of the other stories. 

The titular story, "A Sunny Place for Shady People," follows a journalist to Skid Row to report on a group that holds rituals honoring Elisa Lam. For those who don't know, Elisa Lam was a real person who mysteriously died in Los Angeles in 2013 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elisa_Lam). Elisa was bipolar and had likely been off her medication at the time of her death. As such, her death was ruled an accidental drowning, with many suspecting she was experiencing a psychotic episode due to her bizarre behavior in surveillance footage that is the last known sighting of her. However, not all the evidence points in this direction, and many people still suspect Elisa was the victim of foul-play. Either way, Elisa was a 21-year old neurodivergent Chinese American woman who died a tragic death, and Enriquez's use of her story in this book feels particularly exploitative.

The story that put the nail in the coffin for me was "Julie." In this story, the narrator's cousin Julie moves back to Buenos Aires after a childhood in the US. Julie started seeing "invisible friends" as the result of seances her parents hosted as social gatherings. Almost immediately, the narrator describes Julie as fat. Several scenes describe how Julie eats with her hands, shoveling fistfuls of food into her mouth at a time. The story describes Julie as "ob3se" multiple times, including in this quote:

For those who aren't aware, the word "ob3se" is considered a fatphobic slur by many because of its medicalized, stigmatizing history and how it pathologizes fat bodies. It is derived from medical language that often equates higher body weight with disease, labeling fat bodies as inherently unhealthy, without considering individual health differences. It is also frequently used in ways that reinforce negative stereotypes about fat people, such as being lazy, unhealthy, or lacking self-control. The Body Mass Index (BMI), which classifies people as "ob3se" or "overweight," is widely critiqued for being an inaccurate and incomplete measure of health. As such, many body liberation advocates prefer terms like "fat," which some have reclaimed as a neutral descriptor without moral or medical judgment. 

Beyond the fatphobia, Julie is assumed to be schizophrenic due to her "invisible friends," leading to some ableism and sanism about psychotic people. 

Despite these concerns, I tried to read the story that follows "Julie" and found it just as disappointing as the others. With this in mind, I chose to DNF A Sunny Place for Shady People at 47%. I am not familiar with all the nuances of translated literature, so I am unsure if this is a problem with Enriquez's writing or McDowell's translation, but I am unlikely to seek out Enriquez's work in the future. 

This book opens with descriptions of the coercive, controlling abuse inflicted on 14-year old Cordelia by her mother. I couldn’t make it more than 10 pages before it felt too triggering! Sorry T Kingfisher :(