Forced to return to the library after admitting to myself that things were too busy and too dire in my life to get through my overdue book stack :•(

Boring and not well written i’m afraid. UN international policy left-liberal pilled…

love a party girl! earnest, funny, another extremely solid entry in the genre of “books about being extremely 21 years old”

I don’t know anything about metal; my mom was born in the same year as the protagonist of this book, but she was a punk/new wave kid and metal was smalltown bigoted jock music to her, so despite having pretty expansive music taste in the house as a kid, and a willingness to explore/experiment musically imparted to me, metal is not a genre I’m familiar with and (this is sincerely embarrassing but it DID prime me to feel sympathetic twd metalheads) most of what I know about it, like, anthropologically, is from Mountain Goats songs and John Darnielle books (jesus christ) ????

anyways. metal is obviously integral to the plot & vibe & themes of this story. lots of band namedrops, nerdy teens arguing about guitar specs, shows as places where major plot points occur,

varg vikernes shows up in a basement to be an evil loser for like 40 pages

etc. but it’s also a story you could tell (with differing details) about any weird little freak subcultures. what draws people to the culture? where do the tensions between sub factions lie? what are the internal contradictions - for ex, a music scene where everyone wears weird makeup and glitter and tight pants and is intensely, violently homophobic - ? how is it boring? who’s taking it way too fucking far? I enjoy this kind of story. I like the specifics of time and place and being like “oh my god this character is that fucking guy” or whatever. the lack of metal background didn’t detract for me. 

I liked the central trio. I like reading about incestuous conflict-ridden found families more than ones where everything is idyllic and sweet. I hate to say this but I felt like Leslie and Kira fell the tiniest bit flat!!! maybe it’s because we spend so much time in Kip’s head and get more of what he’s actually thinking & feeling, while Kira and Leslie are much more mysterious to the reader (& Kip)… but I felt like I needed a little more from them. maybe harder hitting critiques of Kip and one another from these two??? I’m not sure.

also I kind of think Kip and Leslie shouldve fucked too or something.

not in a fanfic way but like,

in some way that they regret and both diffuses and adds to the awkwardness and fighting.

I don’t think I like Kira as a hinge here, for half assed feminist media analysis reasons… it’s giving manic pixie dream girl but successfully averted because she kind of sucks.

again, really interesting to have her be such a possibly morally compromised character wrt her affiliation with white supremacy multiple times! but I wanted a little more exploration of this!!! she is totally comfortable around violence and assertion of oppressive power… that’s compelling, but not really shown to be as scary as it really could be…

I hope Leslie makes friends with some other black people at some point. I know that’s kind of the point - that he’s the lone black guy most of the time in this scene, that he’s in this weird position with his older white adoptive parents - but it’s a little brutal that we don’t see much of his thoughts on the matter. also some not so low-key

fatphobia

happening in the latter part of his arc unfortunately. idk man. I think Leslie and Kira are (for the most part) successfully written, interesting, flawed characters whose social positions are partially but not fully or satisfyingly explored here.

enjoyed & related to the way Kip’s anger issues were written and explored - always nice to see one’s heavy & shameful flaws appear not unsympathetically, fr. enjoyed the decision not to go into great expository detail about Kip and Kira’s traumatic childhoods. enjoyed the weird shift of the story from one thing to another in the back third of the book - clunky but fun and tense. 

overall, solid, some small and big flaws but had fun reading this and would probably check out John Wray’s other stuff. 

love the weird dreamlike fantasy/unreality of these stories - it helps that i’d read some of them years & years ago and they had that half-remembered quality to them. genuinely love a series of stories where there’s no real continuity but characters are kind of the same and kind of totally different people from one story to the next. beautiful classic aughts alt cartooning… hell yeah

beautiful and also nauseatingly upsetting and unflinchingly violent. what are your options for the future as a queer child in a harsh place? what does care look like in a community that hurts its members just as much as it looks out for them? to all the gentle sons of glasgow. oof. 

at its worst when trying very hard to be annie dillard. at its best when journalism adjacent. i felt like most of these essays just… weren’t new ideas and had little to say. eh.

fun & messy. love a workaholic self-perceived girlfailure femme dyke blowing up her shit in a series of small, painful decisions. But also that’s kind of every character! everyone & their relationships all felt very real & solid - stuck in these habits that aren’t serving them very well, trying to make shit work. ig Mickey gets a chance to change her life in a way the other characters don’t when she gets laid off from her shitty job - but ofc it comes with all this very real shame and resentment and baggage, so the changes get kind of unhinged instead of clearheaded. interesting stuff here about family and home and comfort too… how those things often don’t come easily or without conflict and work. like a “growing pains” kind of story without being coming of agey bc everyone is thirtyish. I liked this!

I enjoyed the self sufficient child forest commune & the general vibe of lawlessness/anarchy balanced by community care & understated magic (?); the characters fell a little flat for me and to be 100% real I do not know anything about the colonial history of Detroit so the alt history aspect was very much lost on me! love the foundational concept “what if Quebec was really long” though

my partner hated this book and couldn’t finish it but I think that’s because they need to quit their office job really badly lol. 

cool spin on the zombie genre! I enjoyed the ambiguity around how exactly the illness spread & people became infected - & because of that, the constant tension you feel when the narrator starts reminiscing and describing her past and routines. really interesting exploration of a person who is totally uprooted and lost and unmoored from history/place/family. the end of the world already kind of happened for her. what does that mean for this kid? 

I might be getting a little sick of the culty survivor group trope within zombie fiction, which this book uses, but it was effectively tense and the characters were interesting so I’ll allow it… genuinely felt nauseous with anxiety while reading the mall sections!!

I liked this a lot!