curiouslykatt's Reviews (1.12k)

“If you feel your feelings physically in your body, you can release them. “

My first book by Zoe Whittall but certainly not my last. 

This a memoir told over a collection of prose poetry that oscillate between past and present over a six year period, before the pandemic and during the lockdowns. 

The anxiety that Zoe feels is palpable in these 74 pages, you can’t help but feel her pain, her loss, her indecision. For many of us we have been in the same space, being an adult woman in your 30s and 40s is really weird and can be unnerving and unsettling. Zoe bares all here, sharing deeply intimate vulnerable moments and in the end you’ll feel like she is your friend and you let out a sigh of relief that someone else knows how it feels. 

Some of my favourite pieces (that I have a vision to turn into a bit of an art project):

Tell Me How You Know, What You Know. 

I’d Like a Double Espresso & The National on Repeat. 

Stolen Daylight

The Somatic Craze

Thank you bookhug press and zgreads for my copy. No Credit River will be available October 29th and I can’t think of a better time to read this. When the weather starts to change and a new season is on the horizon. 

Grief is a funny thing and it can feel like you’re grieving incorrectly and correctly all at the same time. 

This graphic novel tells a part of Reanna’s and her family’s story of losing a sister, a daughter, and a grand daughter. Reanna’s older sister goes missing one day on her way from school. One day she leaves home and never comes back. What follows is a family coming to terms with her absence. Reanna is a teen and trying to find solace and connection with her sister by embracing her Ojibwe traditions. Reanna’s mother’s grief is pushing her away from the traditions that remind her of her eldest daughter, of her bead work, and her dancing in her regalia. 

What Jen Storm does with this story with the help of the imagery by Ryan Howe, colours by Alice Rl, and lettering by Nickolej Villiger is showcase a story that grief and loss manifests differently in each person. There’s some rights, some wrongs, and a wise Koko whose advice is to let people grieve and simply be there for them when they’re ready. There’s truly no perfect way to handle loss, there’s sadness, there’s confusion, there’s rage and with time there’s growth and healing. This is a great opportunity to open up dialogues with older teens about MMIWG2S and for adults to help younger teens navigate heavy grief. 

Thank you Highwater Press for my copy.

“Given what Anna describes as negative experiences with men she seems to have to some extent demonized men in general.”

Doctor I’d have to agree and as a woman who supports women’s rights and women’s wrongs, this is an absolute no for me. 

We know the men have menned, that’s a fact of life. It happens every hour of every day in every crevice of life. But there’s a difference between being able to acknowledge trying to navigate a men’s world as anything other than a man is often really hard, versus blanket blaming men for bad decisions likely linked to the fact you spent your teen years and young adulthood raw dogging life, trying to manage mental illness with no therapy or pharmaceutical assistance. 

AMT willingly checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in 2021, her marriage was ending, she was self harming, and her eating disorder was destroying her body. Men Have Called Her Crazy is AMT’s story of her time in the hospital as well as her “breakthrough” moments of when all the men in her past have wronged her and lead her to the breaking point of 2021. There’s a level of phoniness I couldn’t get past. AMT openly admits throughout this memoir that she was not emotionally or financially stable enough to exist independently from the men she time and time again went after (or fell for) and ending up allowing them to support her because she was unwilling or unable to do it herself. 

You will not find one ounce of accountability in this “breakthrough” memoir, it was trying to be Girl Interrupted and loudly feminist, while ultimately being a manic pixie girl nightmare and a collection of juvenile tumblr posts with some editorial polishing. 

“Houses are always changing. Coats of paint. Rows of laminate. Rolls of carpet. They cover up a home’s stories and secrets, rendering them silent until someone comes along to reveal them.”

What a perfect choice for the ‘ber month reads. Creepy houses, haunted houses, ghosts roaming the halls. All some of my absolute favourite horror elements. 

Maggie Holt is retuning to a house she thought she’d never see again. The house she lived in briefly as a child, the same house her family fled from in terror after only being inside for a few weeks. It’s also the house that to a degree ruined her life and defined who she is. Her father wrote of their experiences in the house of horrors and Maggie has had to carry that baggage with her for her whole life. 

Sager layers Maggie’s current stay at the house with chapters from her father’s book, and I’m an absolute sucker for multi time line stories with differing POVs. Characters from Maggie’s past are still kicking around town and curious to see what she is up to by taking up residence in the hallowed halls. 

This one kept me guessing right until the end, I will admit it to probably went a half twist too far but it was still a fun read and had me questions which ghosts are real. 

“Fear of the dark. Until I came here, I thought that was for children; that you grew out of it. But it never really goes away. It’s always there underneath. The oldest fear of all.”

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver came highly recommended to me as a great isolation horror. If you know me and my reading, I love isolation horror because when you think you’re alone, you’re not. I also love the psychological aspect of isolation horror where your mind starts to play tricks and paranoia can quickly spiral. 

Told over a series of journal entries we join Jack and crew to an expedition to the Arctic. The men remind me of the real life 1967 Denali climbing crew, brawny and moderately brainy in their own rights, but ultimately not equipped for the task at hand. Given that this is a horror story, well they weren’t ready for the trek. 

Paver before this one book wrote more YA content and this was her first attempt at adult fiction and frankly it shows she’s specializes in YA.  I wasn’t overly impressed with this one and it felt like a whole lot of nothing. I spent the vast majority of the time being really worried about the dogs. 

This would be a good intro horror for people who aren’t ready for full terror stories and for readers who appreciate epistolary novels for that additional personal level feeling of found footage. Paver does deliver solid atmospheric elements, but as someone who lives in a region of the world where we can get to minus 40 degrees and it’s dark for two thirds of the day, it felt like a regular winter Wednesday.