Edit: so I bumped this up to 5 because I just did a video review and found I actually loved it a lot more than I expected when I talked about how clever it is at displaying gender dynamics and roles, agency, a logical minds descent and how that is situated in arguments now being “correct” and morally good, yet at odds with the behaviours of the protagonist.


A woman’s partner commits suicide and a woman becomes unhinged when it unearths past trauma and a myriad of unaddressed and y acknowledged feelings.

This is short and sweet. The voice, interestingly shifted from slightly annoying to exceptional flow a short way into it. As I got a grip on the plot beats and the first person narrative I landed on this being like the TV show Fleabag in tone and humour and, perhaps Virginia Woolf? It’s a stream of consciousness that has a lot of character. It’s wildly funny sometimes; a treat for me as I typically don’t get on with humour. But it’s witty and dark and perfect. I laughed full on for a minute due to a bathroom scene.

“Thank you for coming.”

And the cadence really puts you into the headspace of the narrator who reasons things out and often comes back to thoughts or chews them through for some time.

There is a plot but it’s quite short and more focused on the interiority of the character and illustrating, at least, to me, what unprocessed trauma looks like inwardly as well as outwardly. I see a woman who feels like she has completely no agency and is just careening from the strongest feeling she can identify with to the next.

The thing that struck me the most about it was, no one really seems to try to engage with her in any meaningful way. It would probably be very apparent. There are perfunctory questions that are essentially rhetorical, but otherwise all her engagements are pretty shallow and no semblance of real effort for a connection is attempted.

Though, this is all lies, in the end. There is no such thing as a reliable first person narrative. And the ending is fairly subjective, and does lean into the idea of a different interaction than was witnessed previous. Her rationale and keen observations and thoughts in relation to what is happening I found to be always riveting.

An easy read and easy 4 stars for me.

I’ve now read two books in a row where editors and author don’t know that the singular form of dice is die. Of course, the very last page on this has to have that on it. Haunted me this entire damn book. The die is cast. Not the dice ffs. (David Mitchell is the other author with a book peppered with this mistake, btw).

ANYWAY—Astra is a pretty interesting book. One which I’ve got mixed feelings on, if I’m honest. From just after conception to her reaching old-ish age—70s, it seems like—we leap from character to character in linear time; receiving her life filtered through individuals that orbit her for various proximity and length.

Usually, these people go from not understanding Astra very well, to catching a glimpse of who she is. Often, they’re not understanding of her trauma or triggering it.

I have complicated feelings about using these people as devices to portray Astra, a person immediately abandoned by her family to fend for herself, spring boarding her into various forms of trauma she has to process by herself. They generally don’t have interesting stories themselves either, though this varies from tedious to great. Sometimes they occur, other times they’re there to give a brief snapshot of a specific time period. It’s just a bit… weird? I guess? To tell a person’s story, especially as loaded as it is, via everyone else’s lens.

On the one hand, I really like that we see her grow to be who she is despite this adversity and despite people who, pretty literally are drawn to her because of her trauma in order to sculpt her into what they want. Or otherwise project themselves onto her. There’s perseverance there. And there is an arc and a sort of plot, in the way that anyones life story would be a kind of plot. Luckily this comes together for a pretty nice ending. Some of which ties together some seemingly fairly loose threads the book weaves near the start.

But while we see Astra via others, I also don’t really feel like we know her that well, either. And so, the small epilogue where it finally is her at the end narrating, doesn’t feel like it’s enough. The sum total of her is fragmentary interactions, most of which were harmful to her person in some way. And so, while it’s nice to see some progress of her, it still feels very odd to spend most of your time in superfluous narratives in which the point is another character, and so most of the content isn’t exactly pertinent. It’s also quite unreliable.

I like that it’s a bit out of the box, but in, say, The Bone Clocks, where every chapter revolves around Holly in linear snapshots, each chapter is a short story that ties into the meta story and that character is well developed and has a plot and it’s beats. You get everything. Whereas this is never actually centering Astra, nor does it have very interesting characters or arcs, typically. It’s well written and interesting conceptually, yet it tries to refuse what people want from a story… ostensibly to paint a complex character via others. I’m not sure I can say that it fully succeeds, as you can tell.

Does it matter we never really come to understand Astra as she sees herself? I don’t know. It’s interesting enough that it exceeded my expectations of it. And I don’t think it having to be completely success affects my expectations, since it wasn’t what I expected—and I like that. It’s obviously thought provoking and slightly different than other narratives similar to it. Im glad it exists and think it took some chops to bookend it so well. The ending really does feel like a resolution I hadn’t expected.

So, yeah, mixed bag. Not completely surprised it didn’t make it to the short list of the Giller but also very happy it made it to the longlist. I nabbed it even before then, so I’m ahead of the curve.

Dynamite prose and a compelling, weird cadence make this book a real stand-out for me. File it away as another unhinged woman narrative that is probably just my favourite thing lately—and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

It doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. Quick and punchy. Something like fantasy. An ageless daughter and her guardian heal people as they come to them with a spiritual bent. It uses soft worldbuilding techniques, clearly uninterested in particulars and more focused on interactions, feelings, and atmosphere.

It makes it’s point well, with a through line of theme stitched across. And then it leaves. Pretty much immediately. It’s like old horror in that ways. Central tension over? Roll credits. I could not put this down. Absolutely great. And a strong contender for an easy, fun reread in the future.

https://medium.com/@frasersimons/7819e3a99424?sk=ee6c26f043f180b7fc2db882342ea9e8

The intersections Tannahill’s The Listeners, a Giller Prize longlisted book, occupies are almost overwhelming when you stop and consider its ingrained themes.

Powerfully, the novel sets itself up as a memoir of a woman who is retrospectively trying to arrange the moments of her life that turned into a rampant cascade that swept her away from what was her “normal”. There are remarks situated outside of her narrative that reference fictional events. Disclaimers or context that work to give the reader an added sense of suspense and unease simply because it implies with its framing that this is reality.

In a way it is.

Claire Devon is not weak-minded or willed. She, in many ways, holds a leadership position in almost every dynamic she encounters in her town. She’s a teacher who cares. A mentor when needed. Someone who stands up to bullshit rhetoric that is little more than stereotyping and misogyny. But she’s also got an element of everydayness that permeates her life like a nervous tick. Unbidden and unwelcome in an otherwise curated, mostly happy existence is this malaise that she deals with. Nothing is perfect.

But without rhyme or reason, one random evening, she begins to hear the sound of a low hum that throws off her equilibrium. Her tick is now real.

When she discovers one of her students, Kyle, also hears The Hum, the two form a camaraderie that feels beyond friendship (and any other categorization) — and the fiction adopts detective-like undertones.

They chart the town in search of a sound no one, ostensibly, can hear but them. And this obsession, as it becomes, is a catalyst for Claire’s life to morph into a completely different vessel. The shape of which her friends and her husband and daughter cannot make sense of, and so shun her.

Alone together, Claire and Kyle discover a group of people in town who also hear The Hum, and they begin in earnest (and fervor) to tackle this mystery. The interesting thing about this is Claire’s shame rubs off on the reader. When she feels seen, the reader does. The impact of finding an in-group for something so strangely marginalized simultaneously ramps up the suspense — as each group member seems to have a different theory ranging from scientific, or perhaps pseudo-scientific, to conspiracy theories and spirituality.

Claire, meanwhile, is not sleeping.

She tows a line where she is vulnerable and completely contrary to her former self as established, but also more supported and loved; surrounded by people who hear The Hum and believe her unequivocally. Is it healthy? Is it dangerous?

At this point, the book can be examined almost like a prism. You can easily see a particular reading of what occurs only so far until it elicits other thoughts which then collide with one another. You can choose to believe Claire. Or not. Both roads set you down alternate readings. If you do believe her, you then need to pick up the same theories Claire does and twist them about in the hunt for a connection you can label as “correct” or “right”.

It is impossible not to make the connection between her beliefs and others. What is The Hum compared to Him; God, of any stripe or color or flavor?

Perhaps the most horrific thing in this novel is it pointing to how we treat people outside of our socialization — especially clever here because there are no existing (moral or political or otherwise) associations with people who hear The Hum, as with other marginalized identities that our socialization has prompted us to sort already.

The reaction to Claire by her loved ones is similar to people being confronted with anything they don’t understand.

At one point even Claire describes her meeting the others as something similar. It’s as though she lived in one room her whole life and then discovered a door that led to another room. But it’s black and cavernous and terrifying. But she needs to know what is in the other room. Yet the effects on Claire are discernable and troubling. Are they caused by The Hum itself, not sleeping, mental health, being ostracized? What is the relationship between these things, if any?

And because this is all first-person narration by Claire after the fact, there is a component that feels noticeably absent: objectivity. The larger context is not provided outside of Claire, save for her group.

This is where The Listeners really shines.

Passages detailing the dynamics between the characters in their AA-esk meetings are so believable and pungent and tangible that it reaches into that liminal space some readers know and yearn for. Where these granular qualities imbued in a scene transcend; the reader entering a hyper-reality of their own experiences and thoughts and interactions. The text becoming a universal shorthand or bite-sized truth that briefly encapsulates the complexity of people into a consumable form for the reader.

It’s a rare gift hopefully every reader has received.

The suspense that underlies these really beautiful moments between people who share something no one else understands underscores the unique quality this book evokes.

How easy it is to fall out of status with society and with the people who should be best equipped to support you and love you unconditionally. If you do not conform to what is described by society as “normal” you do not get to participate in it. Even though, arguably, all our interactions are performance. If you are out of step you learn what it’s like outside of the dance.

In the time of COVID, this feels particularly prescient and compelling. The Listeners made me think a lot about society and how we interact with one another. About beliefs and their power. About the scope of knowledge, we currently take for granted but continually revise across our lifetimes.
It made me feel really angry about how we treat each other. What we consider good and bad and nourishing or vile.

It is easy to picture a place where all the fallout that comes from Claire hearing The Hum would simply never happen. Maybe there are massive power lines going through a town, towing electricity to a city. There Claire is walking into a school, bumps into Kyle. One tells the other that The Hum is especially loud today. One fingers the clouds, coming on rapidly, says that it looks like a storm is coming. Both things are self-evident there.

Both are true.

Unhinged women is rapidly just becoming a subgenre that ticks all my boxes, apparently. Combined with climate fiction (cli-fi), the thematic considerations work in tandem with the unhinged narration angle. It’s fraught, a difficult read, cuts you to quick, and forces you to confront questions in which there is no easy or “good answer”.

Basically, it’s everything I want from this intersection.

The main characters are two women; twins, raised by separated parents with views that overlap in the distrust of humanity, go to Scotland to introduce wolves to an ecology that has been altered by human occupation. Deer run rampant, systems are out of whack. The Scots think they know what they’re doing. The team going to Scotland to introduce the wolves think they know what they’re doing.

The past trauma—which is quite vivid, and deserves a content warning for sexual assault and domestic abuse, both physical and emotional—the women have suffered directly correlate to the plot and themes. The releasing of wolves into the wild is an apt comparison to loosing traumatized people who have not come to grips with their trauma into a similar unknown habitat.

When a person goes missing, events conspire to force the twins to confront their past, as well as every characters’ preconceived notions regarding nature and the degree to which a person, or animal, can alter the fundamental components at its core.

Lived experience, internalized trauma, socialization, ingrained, primal response. The animal aspects of human nature interrogated here create so much interesting tension in the plot. We know and learn as little about ourselves in our lifetime as we like to think we know about ecology and nature and the earth. Our very presence and continued existence is both something we cannot change and a force that rarely comes to anything but destruction.

In a real way, this story is a demonstration in intent vs impact, as much as everything else.

It’s a feat, then, that it’s such a pleasure to read. You’re in the head of those people dwelling in hurt and pain. It’s unsettling and impossible not to empathize with and get caught up in. But as with many trauma survivors, the ability to empathize, especially in one woman’s case, is heightened and their perceptions altered. But the rhythm and cadence of the disturbing makes it enticing, too. As if it begs, just like anger, to be listened to and allowed to encompass a person whole.

As gloriously unhinged and wild as Bunny is. There’s a quality imbued in the voice Awad creates for her characters that feel almost like Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness mixed with her letters. Where it’s just this is both how I think, a high degree of verisimilitude, and there’s no censor whatsoever. Coupled with very dynamic scene cuts and frenetic meter, there really just isn’t anything like this or Bunny (the only two books I’ve read of Awads’ work).

This feels like it hits so fine a point regarding societal expectations placed on women; the internalized disassociation of humanity from empathy, especially from those who particularly would benefit from it; the ways in which those with chronic pain are erased and stymied and actively misbelieved. Especially the latter. I have friends with fibromyalgia and the years of undiagnosed bullshit they went through from doctors who claimed it was all psychosomatic or “just stress” is actually astounding.

This book, to me, who knows nothing of the play this parodies and parallels, All’s Well That Ends Well, felt like this book was all about exploring inverted power dynamics as much as the higher societal concerns mentioned above. At a base, human level Miranda, the main character is simply not able to get what she needs from people and is not seen as someone of value whatsoever, all due to her pain. Though this is all heavily from Miranda’s perspective, which shifts from very close psychic distance to something completely dissociative at apt and telling times, I think that this perspective lens itself well to a commonality any reader will experience, simply because everyone, at some point or another, has probably felt like a burden before. And yet very few have also had the additional component of a disability of some kind.

While writing about alienation the reader is able to surmount the internalized societal standards of able-bodied, hyper-sexualized, women who lack agency in their lives due to these projections.

It then also counters this with the simultaneous empowerment and surprising lack of agency the opposite would have, which I thought was quite interesting. Heroine and villainous in one. And eminently relatable due to the structure.

Where this faltered a bit for me was the beginning. Awad keeps you coming with her unique prose—something that, I think, will either click with you or it won’t—but you really do feel Miranda’s pain. It is actually difficult to empathize with her at the start. And we know why. But the book does such a good job of casting the reader as a judgemental critic that it can be a bit of a slog.

The wild thing is that when it’s inverted you’re right there with the characters, reappraising Miranda in terms of patriarchal standards. Even when she’s empowered and villainous it’s also horrific, and that’s the beauty of this text, in my opinion..

Will everyone struggle through the around 25% to get there? I’m not sure. The nice thing is that for the people who have issues with the first portion, I can say that probably the book is About exactly said issues. Judge it by the whole story and all that. But who hasn’t put things aside? This is why, I think possibly like Bunny, this really depends if you click with Awad’s voice or not.

I have a feeling as thematically robust as this book was for me, I think I missed some things simply by now being familiar with the play it references and not really knowing plays, in the same way knowing MFA’s and being a huge literary nerd really helped me appreciate Bunny. I’m somewhat in the dark regarding the metaphor, allegory situation when it comes to Miranda and Helen, plays and productions, in general, and theatre “stuff” in general.

Even still, I adore this book.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC. I was very excited to be approved for this one.

Another book translated to English from the couple who wrote Vita Nostra. This was listed as a sequel to that, but it isn’t. It’s got some of the same qualities of metaphysics fiction but it doesn’t seem to have a direct connection to Vita.

This also denies categorization, too. It feels a lot like a weird, dark fairy tale with surrealistic and even some absurdist elements put in the mix. Every character feels like something a bit askew, yet cast in a stark light.

An 11 year old-ish girl is saved by a DJ in the heat of the night from ruffians and their dog. He, a completely inept care giver and toxic personality, she something undeniably otherworldly. Her only possession is a teddy bear that may or may not have a creature attached to it. She claims to be from another world, here on a mission: To find her brother, fallen from this place as well. Only he is sort of reincarnated, if she’s telling the truth, anyway, and so doesn’t remember who he is or why he chose to come to this existence.

What follows are many questions, and a tug of war playing out in our main characters head, the DJ. Is the girl making this up? Can the strange things he’s seen be explained away? Things keep getting not only more uncanny, seemingly, but also deadly. Trouble dogs this girl.

This is certainly a story about a man learning something, as Gaiman would put it. But the realism in it is not what I expected. The DJ is legitimately a pretty terrible guy. He hits the girl a couple times. He’s not overly bright, and because we follow him in the story, the prose reflect that. They’re not as rich and detailed as Vita Nostra. It’s a straight forward affair, for the most part. He’s basically a man child that hates being inconvenienced and thinks he’s suffering for his good deed; though for her part, she’s the ideal roommate.

Most often kind and acting well beyond her years. She neither falls into the tropey roll of parenting him or the damsel in distress. She’s has a single minded nature to succeed at her mission, but is easy to empathize and like.

It’s almost a fairytale about a man who helps a child; almost a tale of a man who takes in something dark that isn’t a child; almost the story of a man who thinks he’s got a good life, but learns he’s missing something important. But never quite anything I’ve read before, which makes it continually compelling and impossible to anticipate while reading.

There is a side character who is like the DJs friend, but isn’t. Provides him security but also is a mobster and a wild card who takes a weird interest in the strange happenings. There’s the notion that the uncanny is hypnosis sometimes too, and so a creature who comes to confer with the girl, who seems like something straight of a fairy tale, may instead be something like a hallucination.

Ultimately, you’ll have to decide for yourself what’s real. I like that there is again, some subjectivity in the ending. I would have even liked more though, making it harder to decide which camp you belong to. It’s interesting to read something that would initially seem to want to convey strong themes and be proverbial or a metaphor, as so often fantasy is, but just instead be an off kilter thing that feels like it doesn’t care whether you like it or not.

While there were some moments that seemed off and some that were perhaps cultural subtext, I really quite enjoyed how different it was. It clips along nicely and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. It often begs larger questions. When it gets into musicality and creativity, it’s even more interesting.

Second reading: so it blew my mind again lol. I will be doing a write up on medium right now; with spoilers and without, as well as a YouTube video on it. So yeah. I love it.

This book… blew my mind a little bit. I am very tempted to just reread it again, right now. It’s that good. I imagine there’s a lot to pick up on the second go around.

Okay, so this is the story of a young adult, struggling to graduate high school at good enough grades to get into a decent post secondary school. She’s accosted multiple times by this older creepy dude, who has a strange power over her, basically he’s able to remove her agency and compel her to undergo tasks; very much in a hero’s journey sort of way - except far more of a suspenseful, surrealistic, and somewhat horrific bent. This book has got a very unique tone it strikes, I don’t even know what to compare it to.

She’s made to go to a school nobody knows about, the universe conspiring to get her there through a series of bizarre incidents and coaxing from the strange guy.

At the school things get even more interesting and surreal. We follow her journey at the school as she unravels what is going on, experiences as coming-of-age at the strange institute, and try to navigate social situations - all while taking classes that make her, and the other class members, to feel like they’re being brainwashed and reprogrammed.

From the plot alone you might suspect that it’s purely surrealistic horror, but I meant it when I said it strikes an odd tone. There IS loss of agency synonymous with horror, but the book is thematically cohesive despite its weirdness. Perhaps it’s one of the most thematically calibrated pieces I’ve yet to read, actually.

The post secondary experience and the internal mechanisms of youth changing, growing, evolving with knowledge and the fruition of the development of their bodies - basically all natural and systemic change that undergoes in the here and now through all learning and life cycle of the human body (especially puberty) - are literalized in the fiction.

The fiction would be thoughtful and interesting just in that myopic sense if that were all that was going on.

It combines the scientific notions of the body with cerebral concepts on philosophy, and then mixes in magical elements as well. Change, and the potential of every person is the main focal point of the story. Of course, as it relates to Sasha. Her place in the world, in the universe, and the raw potentiality of Sasha nicely counterpoint the horror elements, and, thankfully, explain the wildly strange and problematic teachings the mentors inflict on students.

Without spoilers I will say the magic system is so well designed and just blew me away. Everything about this was my jam.

That isn’t to say it’s an _easy_ read; though I devoured it quickly. The concepts are illusive and heady. The book is broken up into parts and doesn’t otherwise have chapters, just paragraph breaks for new scenes, making it structurally a bit challenging depending on your reading habits. It could also be troubling and triggering for people. There’s esoteric harm that is certainly abusive to the teenagers, including, if I understood correctly, sexual assault of a young woman when she recounts her story to Sasha.

It does make sense, so it’s not just gratuitous shock value crap, but it’s also not easily digestible, and I think that’s why it immediately signals those horror elements from the get go. Still, something to consider.

The ending of this book just. I can’t even. So good. This book works at a mythical story, as a critical reaction to academia, to the way society treats youth; but also a meaningful, self actualization of a person coming-of-age, facing off against an innermost obstacle, and hope in the unlikeliest of places (depending on your point of view).

It’s so fucking good, y’all.

Well realized and definitely like the prose quality, it was just very hard to connect with any character and even the world because of the framing. Even when you’re let into a character’s inner thoughts and feelings I still felt like a spectator watching these cold machines playing at being some variant of humanity.

The themes work well and the world building seems solid. I will still read the sequel, I just am more interested from a meta perspective than in the people in it. It was pretty hyped up to me though, so might have just been mismatched expectations on my part. Either way, I still like what I like about it.

4.5 rounded up.

Woof. Okay, so, the ending is *perfect*. I think the author does a great job at capturing the nuances of war and trauma and the nature of power, both god-like, non “realistic” magical/mystical power and institutional/social power, being a force that corrupts. Not simply in terms as you learn about it in fantasy tales and their roots: power corrupts and is bad, but let me show you exactly how, using real world examples. This dresses moral absolutism down to the damn quick. I loved that about it. This is a very grim tale that manages to constantly get darker. This serves the story very well and further underlines the real world correlations. It’s so unlike western cannon and normal fantasy, and that’s a major plus for me.

I absolutely loved what happened with the Revolution and how it affected all of the characters. It’s an interesting commentary on What If, historically, in regards to what happened in China. I don’t want to give to much away. But it’s very much a battle of ideas/ideologies. There’s a lot of interesting things happening with this series and I feel like what it’s trying to do is so different and ends up all the more compelling for it. It makes you feel uncomfortable and think about culture and (ultra) nationalism and racism/prejudice. Mind you, I don’t think it’s a perfect accounting of these hard subjects, but the author is obviously genuinely trying to have a nuanced discussion piece, and it succeeds at doing so. It’s effective in getting you to think about things that are normally very romanticized in western books, at the very, very least.

The only real criticism I have of this is just that it drags a lot more than the second book. A lot is pretty much always happening, however, the decent that is this book feels slow because it’s just thoroughly demoralizing to read. Theres no beat to let things breath and it is a grind sometimes. There is no winning. War is just desolation. It’s a lot sometimes. I also feel like this maybe could have been a really tight duology. There’s some retreading of themes that makes some parts feel overwritten. So, all in all just a slllllight little .5 tick down, but rounded up anyways.