First of all: the audiobook of this is exquisite. One of my all time favourite performances. Melodramatic, breathless, emotional. Perfectly matched to the story and really brings out the poetic prose.

This is pretty exactly what it says on the tin. Written in an open letter format from Constanza to Dracula, chronicling the entirety of the turning of her as a vampire to the conclusion of their relationship. It’s got Bluebeard’s Bride vibes with a dash of queer relationships as their marriage grows to include others and Dracula controls his family by putting them under his thumb with sex, violence, and mercurial attentions that feels in-line with his character, but also expanded upon for this more intimate setting.

Had the structure had more points of conflict or interest to interrupt the overlong brooding and one-track, predictable denouement, it would have been an easy 5 star read for me. I started with reading it on the page but when I switched to audio when cooking, I never went back. I highly recommend the audio experience.

Based on a real killer, the story begins with a woman murdered, triggering a kind of spirit to delve into the history of the killer and the victim to mine an understanding of what Justice might look like in a web of socio-economic tragedies that cascade into the inevitable conclusion of the book.

It does not shy away from, or cut to black, etc. really difficult subject matter, including sexual assault on minors. While sometimes really graphic they don’t feel gratuitous either. The author makes a note at the end saying that her research and reporting on missing, endangered, and murdered kids in social welfare and the connections to indigenous women are a throughline for the book, along with the real killer. It’s really, really difficult to read, and that is the point, imo.

First of all, this audiobook is now one of my absolute favourite experiences. All three character perspectives have a narrator to themselves, and the language really lends itself to the format. Highly, highly recommend it.

This is a relatively plotless, highly interior book predominantly examining one character, who is left at the high house to raise a child that is not her own. Post climate effects, her sister, the mother of the child, is intwined in dealing with the aftermath, or stymying of further effects (it’s not concerned with these specifics), and in the process alienates her child, who endears himself to the person who is around.

This book is absolutely perfect at encapsulating the push-pull of selfishness and altruism intrinsic to humanity, especially regarding the climate crisis. The dynamic is replicated within this small, unusual family and slightly larger cast as the story grows. It is certainly bleak, leaning toward realistic outcomes, while not interested in the granular survival aspects (which I personally was very grateful for). The point is the human element and the relationships between one another being the same ones correlating to why we are failing the present catastrophe, even as some of us negotiate ourselves to moments of hope; reasons to continue on and live.

There is a liminal, subjective space in which the ending could be taken a few ways, depending on what resonates. I think it’d just as bleak as any other confrontation with death in fiction. The fact that the problem is essentially manmade didn’t particularly give me more anxiety than I already do with the state of climate change and effects. I like that this has an element of hope, even as there is also a heavy handed tempering hand that telegraphs how because our empathy often doesn’t extend to those we don’t know, we are already hampered in the monumental battle to save future generations from the global situation currently unfolding. For that reason, I find it one of the most effective books of its kind.

I didn’t necessarily expect a character study drilling down into a problem we face that isn’t convincing people this is happening, or the logistics and science needed to combat effects—but I think it certainly is an insight into the core frustration of not enough people simply caring to even begin the work that needs doing, and why that is.

An “old” divorcee, translator of many titans of literature into Arabic, trundles about her Beirut apartment, constantly dredging up the past. When her family attempts to hoist her estranged mother upon her, she instead starts tracking new paths of memory and trails in her conjoined mind and city.

Constantly shifting from pivotal moments that crafted her into the insular, friendless shut-in—preferring books to people by far—we learn about her quiet life. The suffering of her Art and her nature seemingly invalid to her, humanity and compassion drips onto the page to juxtapose her own conclusions about herself.

I love novels like this. Where nothing much happens and it is all wonderful rendered interiority. Where the character cannot view themselves fully by virtue of their solipsism, yet the reader catches glimpses that endear and humanize them. Coupled with a wonderful ecosystem of references to literature that make sense for a translator and her interests, there is just the right amount of pretension here, for me. I found this very moving and completely absorbing.

This is about a black, Latinx woman’s experiences—named Vivian—steeped in verisimilitude, negotiating her job, friends, love life, and general life in The Big City as a single person. A granular breakdown of her interiority to build a necessarily solipsistic model of how she perceives and processes the world as a product of a traumatic upbringing she has yet to reckon with.

Often, interactions are encroachments, hierarchal, competitive, and charged. These become a kind of litmus test or a gauge as to how she’s doing mentally. Telegraphing her coping mechanisms and responses. Some healthy, others not. You witness how demanding her processes are. Mentally, physically, sociologically. Some of it—most of it, I’d say—by virtue of living in a white dominant, patriarchal space, feels like a healthy defence system that has molded her into a form of black excellence. Which becomes another intricacy to be negotiated. Some reactions, though, are patterns she doesn’t know about nor feel considered or reason, even as you get a deceptively motivated thinking extraction of why she is doing and saying what she is.

It’s really effective, though has a slow start, and takes a while to sink into the style and what the book is actually doing. This is actually what I expected/wanted from Brown’s Assembly. Whereas Assembly was so short as to reduce everything to caricature and rob much of the humanity of all participants to display the micro aggressions and racism while being in a white space, operating at a high level—Post-Traumatic is the opposite. Showing the internalized misogyny and beauty standards and messy details not just for Vivian, but rendering all characters, most of whom are women, in a stark and realistic light that then segues into how the minutiae and interactions translate into the major themes of the book.

I think it’s far more successful. Prose wise, it’s contemporary to the point of feeling like specificity and acute diction would almost detract from a kind of testimony-like quality the book is imbued with. There’s no bombastic lines or showing off. It’s the everyday displayed as a series of tiny cuts; some of them dealt by Vivian herself, knowingly or otherwise. When you sink into the deceptively rich world, often characterized as it’s been rendered for full context, it morphs from a exhausting play-by-play of Vivian assessing every character, to a rich and vivacious, sometimes sad, reality realistically, empathetically drawn.

3.5 rounded up

A folkloric abstraction ostensibly meant for the narrator as well as someone whose attentions are flighty. Maybe our own, based on how the narrator treats us. That’s why it feels folkloric, or like a parable, maybe. Essential information being boiled down to the intrinsic qualities: aesthetics, faith, feelings unexplained. I think it’s an unabashed, queer lens—or feels like it. Undeniably beautiful at times in its articulation of two people meeting at the right time, or maybe the wrong time. Their future a hallway with the mirror at the end, but then each section looking at it askew.

I can see why people love it so much, but it’s prescription often ground against me. As did the soft world building paired with aesthetics you just need to roll with and the constant doubling back and alliteration. It’s obsessed with musicality, and to be fair you do find out why. But I can’t say for that much of it I found it an enjoyable experience. Even as I do think it was worth reading and finding out some of the answers. The thoughts it provokes, too. Just not quite to my taste, even as I can appreciate it at the distance the narration and framing kept me at. I never even had the opportunity to feel emotional, I feel. Though that appears to common outcome for this work.

A woman recounts her life from an early age to a contemporary pandemic. Juxtaposing creating different kinds of art with various life events that shaped her using a dual timeline narrative and no chapters, there’s a sense of coming to a frenetic conclusion that feels a bit overlong, for my taste. But there’s certainly moments of great effect and it never lost my attention for long. It just felt like it could have been far more tight.

Another 3.5 rounded up because I’m positive on it, but could go either way, generally.

A really effective memoir about a young girl growing up in revolutionary Iran. A wild ride of a story; she sure had a life. And it ends at only twenty-two years old, give-or-take. Which is actually my largest annoyance with it: it abruptly ends, almost as though the rest of her life is something readers may already know? The cut-off is logical but also, because it’s so opaque at times yet alludes to future events semi-frequently, slightly liminal, unsatisfying, and feels somewhat disjointed.

Either way, while I didn’t care that much for the art style, I think it is a granular, accessible look at an experience most people haven’t even glimpsed. I found it informative and sad, humane and easy to empathize with; even at the most shocking life events.

What a quirky book. I’m a little surprised it worked, kind of? Faustian devil queens recruiting people selling their souls to be the next big music sensation and intergalactic undercover donut shops intersecting. So very odd. A fairly low-key pace and queer themes executed really well. It pulls it off.

Edit: I literally think about this book every week and it’s been two years so she gets a five stars bump.

Powerful and well written. Based on 4 years of research and additional sources. The book is so well presented because it has a central narrative surrounding the kidnapping of a particular woman and then moved in chronological order as you find out what happened to that person while it expounds on the troubles in chunks that make everything hit home.

Exceptional, heavy, and thought provoking.