gxuosi's Reviews (390)

so much of this book is beyond me, what i can understand. ella and kev being given a power to convey more pain, violence, destruction to the audience. the pain and sorrow is palpable, but i won’t pretend to have had a deeper understanding of it.

i spend a lot of time missing my old house, my old street. the noise. the cars, the race track, the junkyard compactor, the basketballs on the pavement. but madrina is right, going forward is better. i'd rather be a stream than stagnant water.

who are you after you become a wife? who are you after you become a mother? and what becomes of you when your loving husband, your nuclear family falls apart. will you ever be yourself again or are you something new? a creature born from the mess of your life.

it took until 50% of the way in for the book to pick up the pace and get good, but god do i love werewolfism as a representation for sexual trauma and loss of bodily autonomy

the shortest little novella but somehow so painfully sweet oooooh im in love

he's got 4 arms, (presumably) 8 spider legs, and he KNOWS how to use them IN spider form.

i only made it through the first of 3 stories in the book. which there being 3 was probably part of the problem. in the first story, which i can assume is much the same for the other 2, there was no real plot; just fornicating. the author even forgot the main character’s name at one point. it was free, it was worth trying, but it wasn’t worth finishing.

the short stories suffered from their own length. they were SO short that the pacing was off or stories left unfinished. 30% of the pages are acknowledgements, teasers for the reddening, or author bio. the 2nd story was SO good and the 3rd was promising. i just wish there was more.

grocery shopping list: mom, dad, friends, job, belonging, identity, culture, love, a bucket of pig’s blood. *P.S. i’m still hungry.

dnf’d at 24%. i really wanted to like this. there was so much i should have liked. the slow mental decline of a woman mourning her wife who isn’t really dead ala “The Seep” Chana Porter. a woman gone missing who returns and isn’t Quite The Same anymore. the underwater eldritch horror of it all. but the book is SO disjointed with 2 POVs who both have nonlinear narration and neither narrator is really reliable. both miri and leah relive moments from their marital bliss in disconnected tableaus, neither serving to help us love their character or understand them deeper.

maybe the book plot is still at the bottom of the ocean with half of leah’s soul.