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793 reviews

Strange Pictures by Uketsu

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Strange Pictures is a twisting, quietly haunting novel that balances horror, mystery, and generational trauma in a way that feels both brisk and lingering—though perhaps not indelible. I admired how Uketsu captures a creeping sense of wrongness without relying on overt violence, instead letting unease accumulate through missing blog posts, childhood memories, and half-told truths.

The story’s fragmented structure—first Sasaki's fascination with the dormant "Oh No, Not Raku!" blog, then young Yuta’s unsettling home life, then the devastating truths hidden in Naomi’s past—creates a slow-burning dread that pays off when the narratives converge. Uketsu’s decision to reveal the monstrousness of love, the way violence can wear the mask of protection, felt especially resonant. Naomi is not a caricature of evil; she is a wounded woman who chooses to perpetuate harm in the name of care, a complexity that echoes across generations.

That said, while Strange Pictures held my attention easily, it left a surprisingly light impact after I closed the final page. There’s a dreamlike, almost vaporous quality to the story's movement—it drifts rather than lingers. The characters’ voices, though distinct enough in the moment, don’t fully anchor the book emotionally, which made the tragedy at its core slightly more intellectual than visceral for me. 

Strange Pictures is a novel that keeps you engaged while reading, but when the dust settles, it doesn’t quite stay with you as deeply as it could have. Even so, Uketsu’s ability to weave together mystery and emotion makes this a thought-provoking, if not entirely unforgettable, read.
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Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert by Sunaura Taylor

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informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

Sunaura Taylor’s Disabled Ecologies is a revelation—gritty and intimate, blisteringly political yet tender in its insights. With poetic precision and righteous clarity, Taylor excavates the toxic legacy of Tucson’s aquifer poisoning, not just as a site of environmental collapse, but as a story of systemic violence against disabled, racialized, and working-class communities. What begins as a study of ecological harm slowly, devastatingly, unfurls into memoir: Taylor herself is disabled as a direct result of this chemical catastrophe, tying the fate of her body to that of the land.

Taylor defines a “disabled ecology” as the web of interdependent disablements that emerge when ecosystems are deliberately corrupted—by capitalism, by militarism, by settler-colonial extractivism. Her analysis pierces through the sanitized myths of environmentalism that so often center purity and whiteness, exposing instead how the state and corporations like Hughes Aircraft weaponize pollution, ableism, and racism to obscure culpability. These “slow violences” aren’t accidents, she insists. They’re choices—efficient and profitable ones—that disable both landscapes and lives with devastating permanence.

Through vivid storytelling and archival rigor, Taylor dismantles the artificial line between human and environment. She reminds us that aquifers are living bodies too—porous, vast, and full of memory. Her exploration of the O’odham people’s relationship to the land, of monocropping and eugenics, and of the weaponization of “health” against BIPOC communities, insists that healing must be collective, ecological, and rooted in justice.

This book aches with rage, but also with clarity and care. Taylor doesn’t just document harm—she insists on responsibility. She offers a fierce call for an “environmentalism of the injured,” one that centers interdependence over individualism, and truth over institutional denial. Disabled Ecologies is a luminous, unflinching testament to the fact that our bodies are not separate from the world—they are shaped by it, harmed by it, and, with enough will, capable of transforming it.

📖 Read this if you love: eco-crip theory, abolitionist environmentalism, slow violence narratives, or the works of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

🔑 Key Themes: Environmental Racism and Ableism, State Negligence and Corporate Harm, Disability and Ecological Entanglement, Collective Care and Interdependence, Capitalism and Contamination. 
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

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informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

Reading this book felt like watching the scaffolding of my house collapse around me—suddenly, what once looked like a solid structure is exposed as cruel design. With lyricism and piercing clarity, Wilkerson names caste not as a relic of the past but as the living, breathing operating system that undergirds American life. Race, she argues, is the skin; caste is the bones.

This is not a light or comfortable read. Wilkerson takes us through Nazi Germany, caste-stratified India, and anti-Black America to identify eight pillars that hold caste in place: divinity, heritability, endogamy, purity, dehumanization, terror, occupational hierarchy, and the fiction of superiority. Her research is chilling and intimate, spanning the atrocities of eugenics to the quiet violence of societal indifference. What struck me most was her exploration of how caste not only controls the oppressed but distorts and confines the dominant caste as well—how maintaining supremacy becomes its own prison.

Wilkerson’s prose is beautiful and devastating in equal measure. She has a gift for metaphor that invites deep feeling without sacrificing precision. The image of caste as an invisible grammar of American life—that which dictates what’s possible before a sentence is even formed—will stay with me.

There’s a fierce honesty here about how systems coerce complicity. That oppression is upheld not just by those who wield violence but by those who choose silence. And still, Wilkerson insists on hope. She urges us toward solidarity, toward the radical act of seeing each other beyond inherited roles.

Caste is required reading for anyone committed to justice. It does not ask for guilt or shame—it asks for reckoning. For truth-telling. For choosing liberation over hierarchy. And for understanding that we cannot dream of freedom without first recognizing the architecture of our chains.

📖 Read this if you love: incisive social critique, anti-racist frameworks, and the works of bell hooks, Angela Davis, or Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

🔑 Key Themes: Caste and Racial Hierarchy, Dehumanization and Social Control, Solidarity and Collective Liberation, Eugenics and White Supremacy, Historical Memory and Justice. 
Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction by Shira Hassan

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slow-paced

5.0

Shira Hassan’s Saving Our Own Lives is not just a book—it’s a reclamation. A reclamation of care work from institutions that have made safety synonymous with surveillance. A reclamation of harm reduction from sanitized nonprofits and state-sanctioned scripts. A reclamation of survival itself, especially for queer, trans, disabled, and BIPOC communities who have always had to create their own safety in a world designed to discard them.

At its heart, this book is a radiant manifesto for liberatory harm reduction—a politic and practice born not in sterile clinics but in syringe exchanges, hormone sharing, sex worker drop-ins, and whispered community care networks. Hassan reminds us again and again: harm reduction did not originate in academic journals or white-led recovery centers. It emerged from the wisdom of trans women of color, sex workers, drug users, and disabled folks who dared to believe they were worth saving on their own terms.

Through essays, interviews, and deeply rooted political analysis, Saving Our Own Lives invites us to look beyond behavior modification and into the soil of systemic harm: criminalization, white supremacy, carceral psychiatry, and structural abandonment. Shira does not flinch from complexity—she names how the state profits off our pain, how public health has co-opted care, how even our own protective instincts can edge into coercion. And yet, every page pulses with love. Not the kind that demands change before safety, but the kind that says: you deserve care exactly as you are.

What struck me most was the expansiveness of harm reduction here. This isn’t just about drugs—though Shira powerfully debunks the punitive failures of carceral “treatment.” It’s about how we treat hormone use, abortion access, mental illness, sex work, food justice, housing instability. It’s about what happens when we believe each other capable of change, but don’t make that belief a prerequisite for love. Harm reduction becomes a framework for self and community liberation—one that rejects high-risk rhetoric and instead asks: what unmet need is driving this pain? And how can we meet that need, together?

Standout contributions like Kelly McGowan’s essay on carceral psychiatry and the Native Youth Sexual Health Network’s reflections on food sovereignty and Indigenous wisdom broaden the scope even further. There’s no top-down expertise here, only peer knowledge, shared tools, and collective survival.

Saving Our Own Lives refuses disposability. It whispers: we are not our worst day. It insists that every one of us is worthy of care, rest, and interdependence. This is harm reduction as transformation, not transaction. As community, not compliance. As liberation, not leniency.

Shira Hassan has given us a blueprint for loving each other better, not in spite of our struggles, but precisely through them. This book is a lifeline. I’m so grateful it exists.

📖 Read this if you love: abolitionist praxis, radical community care, and the works of Mariame Kaba, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and adrienne maree brown.

🔑 Key Themes: Liberatory Harm Reduction, Bodily Autonomy and Agency, Anti-Criminalization, Queer and Trans Survival, Community-Based Healing and Mutual Aid. 
The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir by Sophie Strand

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 49%.
As a fellow hypermobile spoonie, I really wanted to love this memoir. Sophie's writing is undeniably beautiful. I enjoyed her reflections on the experience of being ill; I just wish that content had made up more of the book. Instead, most chapters connected Sophie's illness to topics I don't resonate with: animism, new age mysticism, classic literature, mythology, biblical history. To protect my reading energy and time in 2025, I set a rule for myself that I would DNF owned physical books at 30% if I wasn't enjoying them. Unfortunately, almost halfway through Sophie's book, I found myself mostly bored and struggling to connect, so I'll be moving on to something else. Sorry Sophie!
Soul Jar: Thirty-One Fantastical Tales by Disabled Authors by Annie Carl

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3.75

I had a great time reading aloud and being read to aloud from this collection with my girlfriend, Lanelle :) This collection was a super mixed bag. Of the stories I liked, I absolutely adored them. And then, there were several that I skipped entirely! The stories ranged from speculative to dystopian to fantasy to post-apocalyptic. Of the fantasy ones, some were suuuuper high fantasy in a way that doesn't work for me in story form - these were the stories I skipped. Regardless, I loved all the disability rep, as well as the visions of speculative worlds these disabled authors dreamed of. 

Here are my favorite stories:
  • Survivors' Club by Meghan Beaudry
  • Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese by Nicola Griffith
  • The Sorrow Stealer by AJ Cunder (an absolute standout!)
  • Weightless by Raven Oak
  • The Definitions of Professional Attire by Evergreen Lee
  • Wardrobe of the Worlds by Jennifer Lee Rossman
  • A Peril of Being Human by Julie Reeser

I'd generally recommend this collection, but be prepared to enjoy some stories more than others!
The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

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adventurous mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot

3.5

Audiobook review disclaimer:
I process sound less clearly than text (trauma brain things), so my audiobook reviews tend to be shorter and more surface-level than my usual ones. I don’t take notes while listening, and I often come away with impressions rather than detailed analysis. Still, I’m committed to reviewing every single book I read, even when the format changes how I engage. This is my way of honoring the listening experience—with softness, presence, and care. Thanks for reading!

Review:
Such a long book.....so many characters.......so many perspectives........ Another fun time but not a good time. Loved the concept but god, did it take forever to get there. Definitely would've DNFed this in physical form. If you want to give this one a try, I highly recommend doing the audio so you can speed it up! 
Space Invaders by Nona Fernández

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emotional reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders is a haunting and lyrical novella that captures the disorientation of childhood under dictatorship, blurring the lines between dream and memory, the personal and the political. Fernández crafts a chorus of voices from a class of Chilean schoolchildren, all haunted by the faint silhouette of Estrella, a girl they once knew, a girl they all remember differently. Through these characters, we feel the quiet ache of not understanding a game until it’s too late—of living under dictatorship without the language to name it.

Told in the collective “we,” the novella reads like an incantation, looping through remembered prayers, shouted slogans, and ghostly Atari bleeps. Fernández’s prose is elliptical and atmospheric, lingering in the liminal spaces between dream and memory, childhood and history. The surreal slips easily into the real—because in a regime like Pinochet’s, who’s to say what’s imagined and what’s merely unspeakable?

Estrella becomes more myth than girl, more symbol than classmate: her braids flicker in dreams, her letters arrive and then don’t, and her police father's invisible presence casts long, bureaucratic shadows. The children sense something is wrong—two classmates suspended for resistance work, teachers refusing to name what they know—but they can’t quite grasp the shape of it. “We are the most important piece in a game, but we still don’t know what game it is,” they say, and I felt that line reverberate like a warning from history.

This is a book about what we forget to survive, what resurfaces to haunt us, and how history carves itself into the fabric of our collective memory. It’s short, yes, but Space Invaders lingers, reverberates—like the glow of an arcade screen in a dark room, like a memory you can’t trace but can’t quite let go of either. Fernández doesn’t offer answers—only the unsettling, necessary act of remembering.

📖 Read this if you love: fragmented, dreamlike narratives; collective memory as resistance; childhood as a lens for political trauma; translated political novellas.

🔑 Key Themes: Dictatorship and Erasure, Memory and Dream Logic, Political Violence and Innocence, Resistance through Storytelling.
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Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin

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medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No

2.0

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor for the eARC! This book was released in the US on April 22, 2025.

There’s something immediately intriguing about the idea of a haunted mall, a cursed orchid, and a queer florist at the center of it all—but Eat the Ones You Love didn’t bloom the way I hoped it would.

We meet Shell at her breaking point—jobless, newly single, and back in her childhood bedroom. She’s adrift in a recession-shadowed town, her once-clear life plan unraveled. Enter Neve, cryptic and alluring, offering Shell both a job and a slow-burning invitation into a much stranger world. The novel roots itself in a decaying mall and an otherworldly plant with sharp teeth beneath soft petals. I wanted to love this story about monstrous love, eco-horror, and emotional possession, but it never came together for me.

The horror here—an orchid that wants to devour what it cannot control—should have been devastating. And conceptually, it is. The orchid’s hunger for Neve and later Shell is a brilliant metaphor for the way femininity is so often shaped by being wanted, used, or held in place. But that thematic core gets tangled in too many underdeveloped plotlines. Shell’s former life, the younger coworker, and Jen’s late-stage POV all felt like detours rather than layers. And the writing never quite earned the slower pacing it leaned on. I didn’t like the characters, and worse, I didn’t understand them. The emotional stakes felt smudged rather than sharpened.

That said, I was compelled to finish the book. There’s something raw and unnerving about the way the novel speaks to loneliness and grief—the way monstrous love can sometimes feel safer than no love at all. The orchid is the most vivid character, full of cruelty and ache. It becomes a metaphor for all the ways we justify the things that consume us. I just wish the story had trusted its terror more, and trimmed the excess to let it thrive.
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In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali

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challenging dark reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Reading In Case of Emergency felt like lighting a match in a windstorm—chaotic, brief, and impossible to ignore. From the very first page, Shadi is not here to make sense to us. She’s not a role model, not even a reliable narrator. What she is, though, is a disillusioned, sarcastic, opium-addled woman careening through a crumbling Tehran in search of something—anything—that might feel like relief. The novel unfolds in a single day, but that day stretches like a lifetime when your body is in withdrawal and your country is shaking itself apart.

Mohebali’s prose, carried deftly into English by Mariam Rahmani, is electric. The translation doesn’t flatten Shadi’s brash, clever, and often vulgar voice—instead, it crackles with her sharp-tongued resistance to femininity, religion, family roles, and respectability itself. Shadi drifts through the city in oversized clothes, misgendered as a man, mocking everything and everyone with a bitterness that never quite conceals her ache. She is as much a product of privilege as she is a victim of a society that has no space for her refusal to perform.

This book is messy, jarring, and deeply honest about the futility of survival under systems that were never meant for us to thrive in. There’s no narrative arc of redemption here—just a slow unraveling, a deep exhaustion, and a raw glimpse into Iranian youth culture post-revolution, where resistance isn’t clean or heroic, but often fueled by spite and narcotics.

I loved how the novel made space for gender nonconformity and the grotesque as forms of rebellion. I loved how Rahmani’s translation honored the slang, the bile, the barely-holding-it-together brilliance of Shadi’s voice. In Case of Emergency is not a comfortable read, but if reading is liberation, then this book cracks something open—something bloody, blunt, and beautifully blasphemous.

📖 Read this if you love: gritty character studies, unapologetic anti-respectability politics, and stories that explore collapse as both external chaos and internal unraveling.

🔑 Key Themes: Gender Nonconformity and Rebellion, Addiction and Escapism, Class Privilege and National Disillusionment, Post-Revolutionary Malaise, Intergenerational Trauma.
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