essjay's Reviews (635)

Helga is honestly Just so fucking cool. Not the book (although it is, too), but the character. I want to gather her up and hold her and tell her that it doesn't matter that her father is a self-absorbed egotistical dickbag, that I'll be her mom. Pretty sure the 14y/o (who I read this aloud to) wants to date her. Just a whole lot of anti-capitalist fun, tbh. You should read this. 

I was really excited at the prospect of a cannibal chef who is also a bureaucrat for Hell to discharge his soul debt, but...that wasn't what this ended up being at all? I didn't really care about the mystery portion of the story, however much I loved the setting and the premise. Will likely not be continuing this series. 

I don't know what I expected from this, but it sure as hell wasn't what I got. Will be thinking about this for a while. 

3.9, rounding up. 

There's a lot to dig into here, almost all of which I'd forgotten since the last time I read it (more than 20y ago), but I think what will stick with me the most this time is the discussion of Lost Media (which has become even more of an issue in the more than 30y since this was published). Holy run-on sentence, Batman!

If you know me at all outside of reading spaces, you'll know that reading is ofc my oldest love, but second only to reading in my heart is music. Many, many, many nights in my youth were spent worshipping at the altar of live music, and many of those bands I saw before the ubiquity of the Internet have been lost to time. On more than one occasion, I have found and reached out to former members of those bands to find out if there was any way to get a copy of just one song that the Internet insists never existed. Friends will find and purchase used CDs for me just to get me to shut up about a band I've been unable to listen to for more than 25 years. It's like when Arnold Lobel's Owl (at Home) made himself cry by thinking about songs that can never be sung again bc all of the words have been forgotten and books that can never be read bc some of the pages have been torn out. It's part of why the Internet Archive is so fucking important. 

Sparrow would get it. 

(Mind the content warnings.)

You know, I usually fucking hate when people say "oh, the first book isn't that great, but it really hits its stride [x] books in," but I've been guilty of saying that exact thing about this series. I ALSO hate when people say "oh, it's even better upon re-reading," but I'll be godsdamned if that isn't exactly the case here, too. 

I'm not going to post a bunch of spoilers for later books in the series, but there is honestly SO MUCH in this first book that comes back in a BIG way (much much) later on down the line. 

The first time I read Rosemary and Rue, I probably would have given it a 3 if I was feeling incredibly generous, the second and third times also a 3-3½. Idk if I was just in the middle of a decade plus long grumpy phase or what, bc this time I thought it was mostly delightful. Looking forward to re-reading the rest before book 19 (!) comes out and seeing how many more breadcrumb trails there are to follow. 

I picked this up bc I needed something fluffy and dumb after a shitshow of a week. It ended up being neither. 

If I wasn't already sold on the idea of a Hindu cannibal demon wanting to become the next Bourdain, the fact that it's another story brought to life by Ram V and Filipe Andrade was more than enough to get me on board.

Me: [explains premise to my oldest]

Him: Did...did you, like, cast a spell to have this comic created just for you???

Me: FUCKING RIGHT?!

Now I'm hungry and pissed at my aging body for deciding I'm not allowed to have nightshades or legumes anymore bc I want to make all of the recipes in this comic (without the long pork, obvs).

Anyway, stop comparing shit to Eat the Rich, blurbizers! 

Parasite Pig was released more than 20 years ago (and almost 20 years after Interstellar Pig was released) when I was in my early 20s. I remember seeing it on a spinny rack at my local library and thinking "huh, interesting choice for a sequel" but not checking it out bc I was in my early 20s and oh so pretentious about my reading (at the time, I was mostly reading Douglas Coupland, DFW, and [always] Tom Robbins). Once I got over myself, and started not giving a fuck about re-reading childhood favourites, I started actively looking for a copy of this book, but couldn't bring myself to shell out the money for a used, not great condition copy (plus shipping!) of a mass market paperback that I might not even like.  I almost bought it so many times, but never pulled the trigger for one reason or another. Then I'd forget about it for a few years, almost buy a copy, rinse, repeat.

Found it at my library this week, and finally read it. I didn't love it as much as I did Interstellar Pig (which, honestly, still holds up), but I did still enjoy it quite a bit. I like that it was left open-ended, in case Sleator had decided to return to it before his death, and definitely would have read a potential third volume. 

Also, howtf did I manage to read two books in as many months with toxoplasmosis as a motivating factor. Fuckin weird. 

I read this book A LOT in junior high, and after 20 years, finally found a copy of the sequel, so ofc I had to re-read this one. 

I had forgotten some of how it played out at the end, despite being sure I remembered it quite well. Nicely twisty, and a lot of fun. Some parts are still pretty creepy, too. 

Some lovely stories in here, some not so great. Still very B-town, which is where my heart resides.