its_eel's Reviews (90)

Very well-researched essays, each offering a different look into the way that captialism is subtly and not-so-subtly shaping our lives, desires, and aspirations. I appreciate the call that threads throughout all of the essays to slough away our conceptions of what a fulfilling life should be and what a life that isn't based on any sort of social norm could look like. Shapland shares intimate details and revelations from her life so that we might discover where in our life those details align or differ. The essays are far from prescriptive and never enter into "self-help" territory and I think this lack of pedantry allowed me to really let these essays into my heart while reading this collection. 

Laughter doesn’t need helping.

Transcendental novel writing deftly weaving between complicated themes of identity, death and addiction. This novel is a gift exploring the arduous task of wanting one’s life to mean something in a world that constantly attempts to extinguish that desire. 

There wasn’t a single part of the book that wasn’t dedicated to expanding our nuanced understanding of the wide variety of characters. Each character was distinct and the humor interspersed was delightful despite the sadness and tragedies explored in the novel. Each surprise and twist felt meaningful and the novel’s ambiguous ending felt just right for the certainty that Cyrus was intent on securing for most of the novel. 

5 🌟

I’d been pretty avoidant towards this book for awhile because of it’s virus subject matter, however I finally decided to pick it up. I appreciated that the interwoven stories of all the characters had a distinct yet connected quality to them. Nagamatsu manages to highlight the interpersonal interactions of the characters while balancing the impact the “Arctic plague” has had on everyone. 

This book has a lot of strengths and takes on very complicated themes of death, hope, and human/animal resilience. I think that all of the stories offer a perspective that is slightly different from the one before it. Nagamatsu says there’s no one right way to survive a tragedy with this novel and for that, I deeply appreciate this work. 

The only part that I felt like was out of place in the overall book was “Before You Melt Into The Sea”. I think it could have been left out with no detriment to the overall story because it came right after “Melancholy Nights In A Tokyo Virtual Cafe” which was dealing with unrequited love and non-reciprocation from the other party. I could have seen some fusing of these two story parts as a way to not completely cut the reflections on the future environment that “Before You Melt” was achieving for the story.

Overall, I’m glad I took the plunge to read this novel. I feel like it’s given me an opportunity to empathize and reflect on the ways I might begin to heal from the pandemic and I look forward to Nagamatsu’s next work. 

It’s hard for me to write a review for a poetry book by the same author who wrote Crush, an astounding and heartbreaking collection that I’ve returned to countless times. The War of the Foxes is on a divergent road to Crush and it comes as no surprise that these collections are different thematically from one another. I found myself searching in this collection for that ache of the soul so present in Crush that made me an instant fan of Siken’s work. I would be hesitant to place The War of the Foxes on the same level as Crush, and in the same breath, I’ll also praise TWOTF for it’s sometimes haunting and self-implicating lines that are a hallmark of Siken’s work. Some endings to the poems in TWOTF did strike me as clunky, and I wish that they had been pushed a little further in their poignancy. 

I definitely anticipate returning to this collection after digesting these poems for awhile and seeing how my relationship to them changes.