This memoir is Mira Jacobs life experience growing up as a dark skinned Indian woman in America. From teenage years and childhood to 911, Obama being elected, and finally, with Trump being elected.

It is sometimes quite funny, especially when it’s focused on conversations with her family members and, specifically, her son. The tone shifts when it talks about racism and other prejudice, privilege (especially passing in white spaces), but it always feels well balanced.

It is also very nuanced, I found. In very short order the conversations are reduced to the embodiment of specific points of view on various subjects. It’s really, really well done.

The art style is going to be polarizing, I think. It uses a mix of stock art photography and black and white artwork for characters for most conversations. Sometimes actual pictures are used, and that’s when it’s at its best. Childhood pictures and other things lend those sections to have a scrapbook feel. But it also minimizes the presentation of the rest of the book, unfortunately.

Overall, though, this is a very unique memoir. Never read anything quite like it, especially in both it purely being conversations with others, as well as the visual style. Excellent stuff!

Well written and comes to a very neat point at the end. Few books manage as good an ending as that. I can’t say I was too entranced with the setting but the subtle character work via interactions were so enjoyable it didn’t matter all that much.

I am also quite curious about the movie adaptation. My gut feeling is it would be a bit difficult to make an engaging movie from this. I’ll have to give it a watch sometime and find out.

I kept vacillating between a 3 and a 4. Probably a 3.5 then, rounded up. I found it well written and liked the format, for the most part, though it deflates some of the tension and meanders somewhat.

There a few instances where it was either obscure or simply didn’t make sense, which would have made it a more solid read. Probably a different vibe with the virus happening right now as well. The characters and prose make it more than worthwhile a few hang ups though.

CW many forms of physical and emotional abuse/trauma to adults and children.

While in the same vein as other indigenous memoirs, this is unapologetic and couched to be palatable to a particular (white) consumer base/audience, which really does make it feel different from similar texts.

It also is extremely well written and feels extremely present in previous events in a way I’ve rarely read. I am not sure I’ve ever interrogated any events in my past the way every moment is in this. There is a willingness to reflect on the complexities of interactions where abuse is playing out by multiple parties.

Ultimately, it is unlike anything I’ve read and hard to explain. I definitely recommend it but make sure you’re in the right headspace.

Great concept. Kind of an amalgamation of subverted tropes across all super hero lines. Interesting back stories, all of them trapped on a farm sounds kinda dumb on paper, but between flashbacks of their lives and the teasing out of the mystery of how they came to be there and how it is they are unable to now leave, it trucks along nicely. Only disappointment is the last issue which wasn’t very revelatory as one might expect. Would read the next one though.

And on that note: reading oversized hardcovers with ribbons and thick paper stock ain’t the worst. Pretty wild I haven’t read anything in that format before, but I’m pretty damn sold on it as a luxury item. Very, very nice.

Fantastic, vivid characters and a time machine for New York. Wasn’t anything like I initially thought either. The back jacket made it seem like it’d be pretty intense with maybe a whodunnit aspect but, while certainly serious at times, it’s pretty gregarious at heart.

The levity pretty consistently present ends up humanizing every character, and the jumping around from character to character showing their intricate interconnected history made for an engaging read. I usually don’t like comedy much but the it is a natural extension of people being true to themselves, so I didn’t mind it at all.

Quite an interesting concept, showing how the event impacts everyone around it. Just don’t expect it to be too serious, or you may be surprised. Pleasantly, or otherwise~

DNF’d on page 50. In theory I really like this concept but unfortunately one of the ‘timelines’ is far less interesting, and a bit dumb...

Instead of 1 star I gave it 2 because I actually really liked the writing style and flow. The dialogue was great too. I’d probably have liked it, if not for my quibble.

https://medium.com/springboard-thought/less-and-the-comedy-of-error-f841a1b47a02

“Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.”

Usually, I don’t like novels that are self-aware. Not too self-aware. Self-aware at all. Comedies depend heavily on my mood, more so in a novel.

Less, really shouldn’t have worked for me, then. It is perhaps the most self-aware novel I’ve ever read and the entire perspective from which the story of Arthur Less is narrated is one which goes out of its way to find the humor in any situation.

But if there’s one thing I can get behind, its self-deprecation.

“I know I’m out of your life / But the day that I die / I know you are going to cry.”

Arthur Less, 49, learns his boyfriend of 9 years is now engaged to someone else and that he is invited to the wedding. Rather than sit through the humiliation, he accepts the invitations from everyone else that he has received, ones which have come from all across the world. And so begins his travels. And the sprint that takes him away from his problems, or so he hopes.

What follows is a strange narrative style; often switching perspectives, sometimes jarringly. Sometimes the reader is privy to Less’s innermost thoughts, flashing back to his youth; Other times we see Arthur as others see him, or we are told the story in the form of actually communicating literary tropes from a sort-of writer’s room perspective.

This later one even occasionally makes its way into the mouths of characters Arthur interacts with. They criticize his life as a supposed middling white gay male author and the substance of said work, creating an uncanny effect and dissonance between character and story.

“You write what you are compelled to.”

Interestingly —and to varying degrees of success, arguably — this is by design.

Arthur stumbles from situation to situation. Almost falling in love. Almost dying. Almost being the star at a show. Almost almost almost. Arthur is unable to view himself as others see him. He is continually astounded by things working out quite well for him (a commentary on privilege if ever there was one). Each location he traverses: Paris, Berlin, Morocco, Tokyo — all have this magical-realism quality to them.

This structure and form of narration grant the narrator the ability to satirize queer literature tropes while contrasting them with the life of Less. His fictional novels apparently feature characters who bleed for the reader but are given no joy. Less defines himself by his pain and regret even when so many good things are constantly happening for him.

Our narrator’s thoughts and feelings appear to slip into the characters in order to poke fun at Less; sometimes critically, but always as a fan; cheering him on, hoping for the best, positive that more is yet to come.

“Here, all this time, Less thought he was merely a bad writer. A bad lover, a bad friend, a bad son. Apparently the condition is worse; he is bad at being himself.”

Less’s errors are then transformed by the narrator from the things which he believes makes him irrevocably unhappy, into the things that make him worthy of endearment. A byproduct is that this ultimately trivializes the stakes of the story but does make sense within the context of this god-like perspective the narrator engages the reader with.

Overall, I liked but didn’t love Less, but it does what it set out to do: a flipped perspective is exactly what some of us need.

Who knows who sees our errors as inconsequential. To the right person, these errors may be captivating or charming. To the right person, they are a comedy they want only to watch over and over and over, and over.

“I’ve got a theory. Now, hear me out. It’s that our lives are half comedy and half tragedy. And for some people, it just works out that the first entire half of their lives is tragedy and then the second half is comedy.”