This excels in terms of voice. She sounds plausibly her age, but also intelligent. Something YA gets wrong more than it gets right.

This is also perfectly fine, otherwise - but it is also exactly as you imagine the story to go. A story of a young girl illegally and immorally married to a man so the family can hold onto property and not slip into homelessness. It doesn’t help that the dust jacket gives about 3/4 of the plot and the central conflict away. I am not being hyperbolic. The book matter is about that much of the plot (beats).

Once the discovery of New York and her sort-of settling in to her new life occurs, the voice takes a back seat and the plot becomes almost perfunctory.

I did like the ending, though.

Having watched the movie a few weeks ago, I was curious about the book. The movie is substantially, sometimes comically hollywoodized, which I had expected, given it’s sort of Robert Langdon-esk style.

The book turns out to be, as with the movie, just alright, for me. I find the author lingers on stuff I don’t care about and substantially abstracts aspects of crime thrillers that I go to them for. But I do find the maths concept pretty interesting, and it is better in the book. Less dumbed down for the audience and just much better articulated.

It’s also got a memoir type feel, probably trying to evoke some Watson-Holmes, where he is looking back on his life. This deflated the stakes and, along with the abstraction, makes it very hard to care about the characters. It’s a decent story, though.

A far superior coming-of-age story to A Separate Peace, which I read just the other day. Sure, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is much longer, but it’s also got way more to say and is far more applicable to the average young adult.

This book chronicles the life of Francis Nolan after a short stint of following her mother, which is longer than you’d expect and works very well to illustrate the generational challenges of immigration and poverty and youth.

This story is about, at its core, perseverance. It is beautifully characterized and written, though more granular than I tend to like, especially in the first of the five books. But when it does get going it starts shifts focus from seemingly absolutely everything—as we tend to do in adolescence—to what really matters. The bones of a life in a time that does feel a long time ago, until the obstacles come into focus. Then we see it’s the same human endeavours for most.

We are all trying to figure out what nourishes us and we all have flaws that too often seem annunciated by life.

As someone born to a young mother, with parents who struggled for most of my life to get up and out of poverty while putting themselves through university, a lot of this hits home for me. It doesn’t feel like poverty tourism and it celebrates the growth of all people, but especially those seen as the weeds and stumps in an otherwise lovely garden.

Had I been able to connect a bit more with the voice, I think this would have been a 5 star read. But as it is, I felt like I always always a safe distance away from the characters, even when they suffering and in trouble. It’s a weird psychic distance to have for such a story, but it does enable some wide meanderings that bear fruit.

Very glad to have finally gotten to it.

2.5 rounded up to 3

The first half of the novel alternates between the history of the 4 sibling somewhat main characters’ parents, and the setup for a “legendary” party. It’s kind of American Snuggie Bain diet lite, but it does pretty effectively set up a very great character moment—perhaps the only truly great moment of the novel—for Nina, the protagonist of the story, more-or-less. Because so much of the novel is the family history, which is the embodiment of American cliché, I won’t go into it. It does feel like a boiling point coming to a head as it builds up though, and is when the novel kept me most interested.

The second half of the novel is the events of the party itself, which pretty categorically did not work for me whatsoever. Sure the family went from rags to riches to rags to riches. But the constant focusing on inane details of the party and characters that have no other function than to perform the way rich people completely devoid of literary interest do. They’re shallow lifeless, selfish beings.

The problem is… we already know this. Literally everybody does. I do. Not. Care. About rich people and their selfishness, generally, but specifically at a party that is out of hand. It is so hard to keep being interested as random people show how they’re a specific kind of an asshole, all of which has a vague through line as a theme, which is broken people break things, rich people suck, etc. etc.

This backdrop provides the intensely late inciting incident for Nina and her siblings, and the fantastic character moment that pushes this to 3 stars. It finally makes the first half pertinent (though still overwritten, I’d argue) and is so satisfying because it isn’t just character development, it is a decision and a moment with weight of history behind it. And because Nina was the only person I found myself caring about in this entire novel, I got a lot of payoff from that.

This historical through line that annunciated the character moment was so good and has such an interesting thing to say about family and the weight of family—present in our lives and otherwise—and the inheritance we get from our parents. How we deal with it, how it shapes us, and the dynamics of obligation such a thing has on the individual and family unit. I really liked that about this novel.

The rest, however, is pure chaff. The things that happened to characters that aren’t developed or rendered feels more than superfluous. It’s actually actively annoying. It feels like random things happening to random people, trying to get the reader to empathize with everyone and everything in a we-are-all-human-kind-of-way but it’s not descriptive writing. It’s not evocative or interesting. It’s just there. Blandly presented, with these events trying to roughly sketch people we know matter very little, and feel like they matter exactly that much. The whole party just made me remember how much I hate drunk people and parties and I didn’t need half a book about the same kind of person having moments we have all heard about at one party or another.

The entire party could have been a page or two in a novella and the first part, the family history, significantly truncated as well, and I think that would have made it such a fantastic novella or short story with originality, and verve.

Pretty enjoyable, though unabridged I can tell it’s edited. When there’s a swear word it starts the first syllable and then fades; it’s possible that only augmented the experience though, since it was written in the 30s. It’s also very well narrated. I can tell it’s the actor who plays Ross’s father in Friends, which sometimes sprang into my head at odd times. But otherwise it suited the subject matter well and he’s great at making each character distinct.

The actual story is familiar to me having seen the movie. I didn’t expect the prose to be Hemingwayesk and yet halfway to distinctive writing. It’s pretty interesting, stylistically. The dialogue is almost certainly where cyberpunk got its jargon use. It effectively creates a sense of a sub culture and can be an exercise in intuition on the readers part. I’m sure some of it is antiquated diction too, but it’s effect is somewhat timeless because it serves its purpose.

Plot wise, it was a heck of a lot of fun and it’s an interesting psychic distance for the character. We aren’t privy to some thoughts in the characters head but only sometimes can we know the actual reasoning and turning of the case, which should feel like it isn’t playing fair, but I never seemed to mind. I’m not sure if I prefer the movie plot or this one, both suit the mediums. Anyway, this was pretty fun. I’ll probably read some more of them.

Really enjoying this series so far. This one is a bit more melodramatic, but the craft is also improved and I really liked that the romance did not dominate the story, as I feared it might based on the ending of the first book.

There’s more reveals, just as interesting as the first book, which threw out some doozies! I also am just so into the gene hacking and virus aspects of the book. Very biopunk, but turned up to 11 on the technological scale. Yet still plausible, thematic, and rooted in deep seeded and compelling questions.

I wish the covers were a bit different because that was my initial balking point on these books. Well reviewed and liked, but it’s not a book you’d want to pick up based on the cover and the market is fairly saturated. This series deserves to be far more popular than it is.

The first volume was really great and felt like Blade Runner. The second and third, this volume, feel like one really protracted arc that could have been condensed. And it shifts from the interesting questions and world building from one, into this save and be saved dance that over stays it’s welcome.

The bad guy especially just didn’t feel as intelligent as what you’d expect from the world of Blade Runner either. Especially over this long a period.

The art is still great, the dialogue serviceable, and there are certainly bits of world building that still occur. A pleasure to read, but did not exceed the expectations set from the first volume. That said, I will 100% continue on to the 2029 storyline. Still a good time.

The Eldest daughter of a meth cook has to search for her father, now missing for days, when a bondsman comes calling. Seems her dad got out of jail by borrowing money and hasn’t been seen since, and the problem with that is, if he doesn’t show up in court quite soon, well the whole family will lose their house and land. And they’re already living hand to mouth.

What a short and punchy piece of writing. I loved it.

Southern lit from America has its hooks in me. The poetic musicality and honest eye feels like a fantastic continuation to McCarthy. This didn’t feel particularly gothic to me. It’s grounded in realistic and verisimilitude, but the loss of agency stems from institutional America and her fathers decisions, themselves driven by kin and poverty.

This certainly has the voice of southern gothic, though. The prose are gorgeous and definitely reminiscent of poetry when we get descriptive writing. It’s musicality and verbiage drips with a style that conveys time and place and atmosphere. But sometimes it actually is flowery, concerned with the musicality to the point where the prose feel lost, rather than the intentional grounding they do when they strike the right chord. I lean heavily toward descriptive writing but not at the expense of what the sentence is trying to convey to the reader. It happens just enough that I found my eyes overdriving the text and had to go back and re read.

Everything else about this worked. The characters, the dialogue, the story, and the setting are all top notch and dripping with personality. I will 100% be reading more from this author.

Interesting concept that didn’t completely hit for me, due to pacing and overwriting.

What begins as workplace drama showcasing white micro aggressions at a massively white majority workplace. Slowly—excruciatingly so, sometimes—it shifts into a satirical metaphor that, along with the epilogue, firmly rooted this as a 3 star rather than 2 star rating. The last bit of the book is really, really good.

This took a long time to develop a plot and was very heavy handed in its very granular on the workplace interactions front, so much so that even the nibble of a plot you get (at about 25% in) was almost enough for me to call it a day. If you can dig through the spinning wheels though, there is some interesting things going on; in the back quarter of the novel, especially. I don’t know how many people will make it there though. What appears to be the main subject matter discussed are the white space dynamics, and that kind of lulls you into thinking you know what this is going to be.

But then the “weird” shit starts happening. And it does all come together.

However, I’m not entirely convinced this wouldn’t have made a much better, more intense, short story or novella. I’m not sure it justifies the page count despite the plot structuring. I think everything about it might have been punchier and very little lost had it been reworked. There were several dnf moments I had to claw through. No matter what the pay off is like at the end, aspects of it clearly didn’t work for me.

I have a feeling this will be a pretty polarizing book due to that. Couldn’t get through it—love it to bits. You’ll find me somewhere in the middle. Glad I read it. But unable to get over how puffed up it felt.