essjay's Reviews (635)

Read this aloud to the 14y/o. Most stories were almost exactly the length of time we read before bed. If a story was short, it gave me time to explain/read the original folk/faerie tale. The kid never had an Andrew Lang phase (which I did/do), so other than the obvious inclusions many of these were new to them. 

Our favourites (mostly meaning that they made us cry) were:

• The Instant I Died – Gary Lonesborough (The Dog and the Sparrow)
• The Cherry Blossom Queen – Maggie Tokuda-Hall (The Old Man Who Made Trees Blossom)
• Alda, Aysel & The Edisto River – Amber McBride (Mary Belle and the Mermaid)
• The Wooden Boy – Abdi Nazemian (The Adventures of Pinochio)

There were no outright stinkers, I think the lowest we rated any of them was 3/5. Most were in the four range. Highly recommended!

I might come back to this, but can already tell I'm just not in the mood for it rn. 

Sometimes you wonder if maybe you read and watch too much gory stuff bc something you should probably grimace at makes you cackle. 

(I read portions of this aloud to my oldest, who also thought the things I was laughing at were absurd, so at least someone else is as desensitized as I am.)

[whew]

I knew there would be MonsterFucking, but didn't anticipate just how MUCH would be packed into (heh) the relatively short page count. 

My kingdom for a map and a dramatis personae!

At about 40% I asked my Buddy Reader "Anyway, what the fuck is [redacted]? What the fuck is [further redacted]? What the fuck was happening with that [redacted] on the [redacted]?"

There were eventually answers to those questions (some sooner than others), but by the time we got to them, I was kind of past caring. In the best possible way.

Much like Clarke's debut The Scapegracers, the story here is meandering. It sometimes feels like it takes forever to get to any sort of point, but I firmly believe this is a feature of their writing, not a bug. 

I hope this book finds its audience so I can have more people to talk about it with. This might be the single most queer female gaze focused book I've ever read? Truly, absolutely, wonderfully off the rails and delightful.

(Ignore the people who say this is a second person narrative. It's not.)

[fart noise]

Tempted to just leave my review at that, and maybe I actually should? 

Nah. 

I like a lot of extreme horror/splatterpunk, and I LOVE the angry cannibal ladies, but I HATE when it's all just "ope, she's mentally ill, that's why she eats people!" I don't want to feel SORRY for them! What the fuck, that IS not the point at all. 

Also terribly overwritten. Like, Baby's First Fic™ (from a fandom I'm not part of) overwritten. Like, my editor did me a terrible disservice by not telling me these sentences sounded better in my head than they do on the page overwritten. 

It took me an hour and forty five minutes to read this, and I already wish I had that time back. 

So, an article I read by the author basically spoiled the "twist" part of the ending for me, but I still had a good time with this. The perils of the health and wellness industry combined with

cannibalism

were always going to be a winning formula for me.

I did genuinely hate how long it took Anita to twig the wrongness of every godsdamned situation she found herself in, but I guess that's why I'm just reading these books instead of living that life. 

I guess Spooky Season this year is all about

cannibalism

for me. I enjoyed this quite a bit, read the whole thing in almost one sitting. I do feel like the ending was a little rushed (the first 50% had me wondering if it was even going to actually be a horror novel), but overall I am happy to've spent an afternoon with it and will be checking out Kim's future work, for suresies. 

Well, goddamn. 

I loved the structure of this, and the tone, and it even managed to surprise me a little (which isn't easy to do).