bookishthea's Reviews (203)

No Hard Feelings by Australian author Genevieve Novak had me flying through chapter after chapter! I am OBSESSED! I am all for sad girl/ millennial lit, I mean, don’t we all love a messy MC? Penny is a charming, loveable dumpster fire of a human with the lowest self esteem. Stuck in a job she has no passion for with a boss on a superiority trip, friends who are way more successful than she is and a situationship with her ex who makes sure to keep her close enough but not so close she can ever feel satisfied or content. She’s a mess, but she swears she’s doing her best!

Penny embodies the overwhelming anxiety and imposter syndrome we all feel in our 20’s, waiting for “that stage” in our life to be over and for our “real life” to begin. Her pessimism and self destructive tendencies drive the plot and her ability to overthink a situation or twist every good moment into an insult is unparalleled! But despite all this, you scan’t help but voraciously devour each chapter hoping that eventually she’s going to wake up and figure it all out.

Not only does this story show a masterfully crafted wit and commentary, it’s also set against the familiar bustling backdrop of local Melbourne haunts, with many mentions of our beautiful regional Victorian locales – rounding the story is such a way that you could possibly finding yourself next to Penny on your train home one evening.

The story provides opportunities for both reflection and introspection. There’s a Penny in all of us, and just like we want for our scrappy MC, we all deserve more happiness than we allow ourselves to hope for in our darkest moments. As Penny confronts her own destructive behaviour and thought processes we are reminded that the work we do on ourselves is an ongoing process and maybe the only thing stopping our “real life” from starting is our over-romanticised notion that it’s something to be achieved in the first place. In reality, that “real life” is a mythical ever moving goal post, REAL life happens outside our comfort zone and in the small moments when we’re waiting for something else.

Just wasn’t in the reading mood at the time. I will go back to this one eventually. 

To say this book had me sobbing is an understatement. Crying in H Mart is a brutally honest, lyrical and heart wrenching memoir about identity, loss and the ways in which we try to keep alive those we have lost. Michelle Zauner (singer and guitarist of Japanese Breakfast) relates her upbringing in a mixed race household, struggles with identity, and the loss of her mother to cancer, with a depth that is equal parts vivacious and melancholic.

I had to go slow with this book as somehow I’ve managed to gravitate towards too many illness adjacent memoirs (specifically cancer memoirs) which I tend to avoid due to them bringing up my own traumatic memories. However, Crying in H Mart is so poetic and profound that reading it was such a cathartic experience, even if it was bittersweet. 

I honestly couldn’t do this book justice in a review. So do yourself a favour and grab a copy from your local indie bookstore or local library 🙌🏼

Some quotes I loved:
‘Now that she was gone, I began to study her like a stranger, rooting around her belongings in an attempt to rediscover her, trying to bring her back to life in any way that I could.’ (p.168)

‘… we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligable to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accomodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.’ (p.169)

‘I wondered if the 10 percent she kept from the three of us who knew her best – my father, Nami, and me – had all been different, a pattern of deception that together we could reconstruct. I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads she’d left behind to pull.’ (p.202)

Had to return it to the library

The book was giving me the heebie jeebies. I was feeling anxious reading so decided it wasn’t for me