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kyatic's Reviews (974)
(ARC received via Netgalley)
I really didn't get on with this one, and I wish so much that I could've. This just doesn't work for me as written poetry at all. There's no attention paid to rhythm or rhyme, the phrasing is clunky and awkward and often juvenile (the amount of times the word 'freaking' was used made me cringe) and all the emotions are so surface level that I just didn't feel anything. There's no depth of feeling or language here. It was like reading a stranger's diary.
As for the structure, I liked the idea of having interims where the poet talked confessionally about how the poems came to be and gave some context to each of them, but in actuality they were just repetitive, jarring and read like filler to make up for the fact that there weren't enough poems to warrant a collection. It felt like a missed opportunity.
I can absolutely see how these poems might have been cathartic for the author, and I can see how they would possibly work in a slam context, with the atmosphere and the author's delivery giving the emotional weight to the poems that the words themselves don't quite convey on the page, but this just doesn't work as a collection of poetry for me. Perhaps it could have been pruned and published as a chapbook, or as an accompaniment to one of the poet's shows, but not in this format.
I really didn't get on with this one, and I wish so much that I could've. This just doesn't work for me as written poetry at all. There's no attention paid to rhythm or rhyme, the phrasing is clunky and awkward and often juvenile (the amount of times the word 'freaking' was used made me cringe) and all the emotions are so surface level that I just didn't feel anything. There's no depth of feeling or language here. It was like reading a stranger's diary.
As for the structure, I liked the idea of having interims where the poet talked confessionally about how the poems came to be and gave some context to each of them, but in actuality they were just repetitive, jarring and read like filler to make up for the fact that there weren't enough poems to warrant a collection. It felt like a missed opportunity.
I can absolutely see how these poems might have been cathartic for the author, and I can see how they would possibly work in a slam context, with the atmosphere and the author's delivery giving the emotional weight to the poems that the words themselves don't quite convey on the page, but this just doesn't work as a collection of poetry for me. Perhaps it could have been pruned and published as a chapbook, or as an accompaniment to one of the poet's shows, but not in this format.
I read this one because I read several reviews which made it seem like it might be up my alley, and I've been looking for romances which don't make me cringe. Without going into unnecessary personal detail, the story of a woman who has difficulty with kissing, sex etc being presented as something positive and as the basis of a romantic plot was something that appealed to me. I'm not autistic like the protagonist here, but thanks to some ~delightful childhood trauma~ a lot of the issues seemed pretty close to home, and I was excited to see some of my problems represented here.
It was disappointing, then, that basically all of the protagonist's issues were resolved within the first 100 or so pages, with the rest really dedicated to another related plotline. Turns out that sexual dysfunction can pretty much be cured by just sleeping with someone who's really good in bed. Who knew?
The romance here was well done, but it irked me that there was so little time dedicated to the protagonist actually dealing with her issues; they seemed to become non-issues as soon as she was presented with a man who knew how to do the nasty but nice, and that's just not how it works in real life. I liked the characters well enough, and there were some interesting differences from the romance norm - the main love interest is Vietnamese, for example, and the female protagonist earns significantly more than the male protagonist - but it didn't do enough to differentiate itself for it to merit the hype, in my opinion. I'd recommend it to fans of romance in general, but probably not as anything other than a relatively sweet and often, erm, less sweet romance.
It was disappointing, then, that basically all of the protagonist's issues were resolved within the first 100 or so pages, with the rest really dedicated to another related plotline. Turns out that sexual dysfunction can pretty much be cured by just sleeping with someone who's really good in bed. Who knew?
The romance here was well done, but it irked me that there was so little time dedicated to the protagonist actually dealing with her issues; they seemed to become non-issues as soon as she was presented with a man who knew how to do the nasty but nice, and that's just not how it works in real life. I liked the characters well enough, and there were some interesting differences from the romance norm - the main love interest is Vietnamese, for example, and the female protagonist earns significantly more than the male protagonist - but it didn't do enough to differentiate itself for it to merit the hype, in my opinion. I'd recommend it to fans of romance in general, but probably not as anything other than a relatively sweet and often, erm, less sweet romance.
Graphic novels and comics aren't usually my cup of tea, but I couldn't resist this one, and I'm glad I didn't. I love everything about it. Julia Kaye has a really impressive way of showing nuance in a series of 3-panel cartoon strips; she doesn't even need words to make you feel things. I've not read the first one, but even without that context I really appreciated how this book covered her life after she was already several years into her transition; it showed a different side to the transition narrative we usually get, in which an individual's transition is often portrayed as the natural conclusion to their life's greatest journey, and so on and so forth. Even though her gender is a huge part of her identity, Julia's life isn't magically perfect just because she's overcome that initial hurdle and has reached a point at which she's living happily as a trans woman and is almost always gendered as female. She still has to get through breakups, men being men, work pressures, friendships, the works. It made her feel a lot more authentic and three-dimensional as a protagonist and author.
That said, she also very clearly shows how her transition will always be a tangible part of her life through the hardship of misgendering, the trauma of her own family rejecting her, the constant worries about whether she's performing femininity 'enough' or 'correctly'. I think these were my favourite panels, when Julia writes (?) about how, as a trans woman, the pressure to perform a certain type of femininity in order to almost justify being trans can be a roadblock to authenticity. She feels a constant guilt over not doing enough (her phrase, not mine) to avoid misgendering, whilst being objectively aware that it's absolutely not her fault at all, and that the general gendered aspects of the society she lives in are to blame. It was an interesting aspect that, as a cis woman, I've never had to consider; I can wear trousers or a baggy jumper without getting misgendered, for example, and it was illuminating to be forced to confront the inherent privilege of that.
Literally the only thing I would nitpick over is that it only covered 6 months of her life and I would have liked to live alongside her longer. That's it. Oh, and sometimes the art style made people difficult to differentiate, particular her first girlfriend and her therapist. They looked very similar and it could be jarring. Still, there are limits to black and white cartoons, so that's really more of an issue of medium for me than anything else.
Now I have to pick up the first one...
That said, she also very clearly shows how her transition will always be a tangible part of her life through the hardship of misgendering, the trauma of her own family rejecting her, the constant worries about whether she's performing femininity 'enough' or 'correctly'. I think these were my favourite panels, when Julia writes (?) about how, as a trans woman, the pressure to perform a certain type of femininity in order to almost justify being trans can be a roadblock to authenticity. She feels a constant guilt over not doing enough (her phrase, not mine) to avoid misgendering, whilst being objectively aware that it's absolutely not her fault at all, and that the general gendered aspects of the society she lives in are to blame. It was an interesting aspect that, as a cis woman, I've never had to consider; I can wear trousers or a baggy jumper without getting misgendered, for example, and it was illuminating to be forced to confront the inherent privilege of that.
Literally the only thing I would nitpick over is that it only covered 6 months of her life and I would have liked to live alongside her longer. That's it. Oh, and sometimes the art style made people difficult to differentiate, particular her first girlfriend and her therapist. They looked very similar and it could be jarring. Still, there are limits to black and white cartoons, so that's really more of an issue of medium for me than anything else.
Now I have to pick up the first one...
Hoo boy. I... no. I was so, so excited for this one (bigender rep! An author who worked as a costume designer on my favourite TV show!) and it just did not work for me at all. I hate to give a poor review, especially to a book which has rep that we've never seen before, and I wouldn't do it if I thought a book was just not my cup of tea, but parts of this were disturbing and possibly harmful, so here we go.
The good:
- bigender rep, which I've never seen before in a book. I'd love to see more of it, and I'm so glad that books with protagonists who aren't cis are being published more frequently, especially when they're own voices. I know that the author of this book uses they/them pronouns but I don't know their gender identity, so I can't say if this is own voices or not; I have a feeling that it might be.
- a complex and often unreliable narrator, which is my personal favourite type of narrator, so a thousand yays for that.
- some nuanced discussion of people's relationship with God, within and outside of organised religion. I liked how characters who were part of the Catholic church had their own opinions on things and were shown to question doctrine without questioning their faith. That, to me, was realistic and sensitive.
- good depiction of Comic cons and the skeevy stuff that goes on there when the boundary between fans / creators / characters is crossed. I've been to cons with friends who have been assaulted because people allowed themselves to think of people as nothing more than characters, and it's a very real problem. It was interesting to see it depicted here.
- pretty capable writing, if a little bland.
The bad:
- what. The fuck. Was the plot?! It made sense up until about 65% of the way through, when all of a sudden we're hit with.
- confession booths don't have vents, so it's not possible that Al/eks/is would have been able to listen to people's confessions in the way that they did. I can suspend my disbelief a little, but that was a bit much, really; the whole central conceit of the book just fell flat.
- the actual plot of the book as it's marketed (a bigender teen overhears a priest confess to molesting someone and the teenager then goes on a mission to solve the case) doesn't start until 63% of the way into the book. The entire first half - which I actually preferred! - is about them settling into life in their temporary home with their religious relatives, and trying to act as a guardian angel to other people in order to distract themself from their own problems and trauma. That, to me, was a way more interesting concept than the ridiculously melodramatic and overblown second half of the book, which was like a weird TV soap opera.
The ugly:
- the fact that the protagonist identifies themself as 'one of those gay rights people' but then immediately suspects the only gay person they know of being a paedophile, based on no other evidence besides the fact that they're gay. They literally say at one point that 'all evidence points to [character]', but the only evidence is that this character is gay and went to confession once. Is that gay rights? I think not.
- the protagonist is absolutely awful with respect to other people's boundaries. They keep randomly touching the person that they have a crush on, even though this person tells them repeatedly not to. They also listen to people's confessions in the confession booth without their knowledge or consent and then intervene in people's lives, which is just so out of order that it made it very hard to empathise with the character. I don't mind an unlikeable narrator, and this wouldn't make me give a book a low rating, but when Al/eks/is mentioned to one of the nuns that they had been doing this, it seemed to be forgiven when they made it clear that they had tried to help the people that they'd intervened with. This, to me, made it seem like their actions were supposed to be viewed as justifiable, but they just weren't. All the awful things that the protagonist does are painted as totally fine, and they're just... not.
- the protagonist seemed incredibly mentally ill for the duration of this book, which is fine if that's actually touched upon and dealt with within the narrative, but it isn't here. They hear voices constantly (and they do actually hear them as auditory hallucinations, as is made clear when they overhear someone's confession and note that the voice 'sounds different') and seem to have constructed two totally separate personalities, Aleks and Alexis, to embody different facets of their personality, and experience a 'switch' similar to people with DID when they change gender. I can't say if that's accurate to bigender people or not because, as I said, I'm not bigender, but a lot of Al/eks/is' behaviour was very concerning in this book. They finally agree to get therapy at the end, but it's only very, very briefly mentioned. I would have liked a bit more discussion of how their gender was separate to their trauma, because the conflation of the two made it seem like their gender was almost a symptom of it, and I don't know how accurate that is to many bigender people.
Overall, I'm glad this book exists, but I wish it were better. I feel like it needed more editorial work and some more sensitivity reads.
The good:
- bigender rep, which I've never seen before in a book. I'd love to see more of it, and I'm so glad that books with protagonists who aren't cis are being published more frequently, especially when they're own voices. I know that the author of this book uses they/them pronouns but I don't know their gender identity, so I can't say if this is own voices or not; I have a feeling that it might be.
- a complex and often unreliable narrator, which is my personal favourite type of narrator, so a thousand yays for that.
- some nuanced discussion of people's relationship with God, within and outside of organised religion. I liked how characters who were part of the Catholic church had their own opinions on things and were shown to question doctrine without questioning their faith. That, to me, was realistic and sensitive.
- good depiction of Comic cons and the skeevy stuff that goes on there when the boundary between fans / creators / characters is crossed. I've been to cons with friends who have been assaulted because people allowed themselves to think of people as nothing more than characters, and it's a very real problem. It was interesting to see it depicted here.
- pretty capable writing, if a little bland.
The bad:
- what. The fuck. Was the plot?! It made sense up until about 65% of the way through, when all of a sudden we're hit with
Spoiler
child murder and people dumping the body in a swamp and an evil priest who literally says 'any last words?' before he tries to murder someone in a fiery inferno, like a Disney villain with none of the subtlety- confession booths don't have vents, so it's not possible that Al/eks/is would have been able to listen to people's confessions in the way that they did. I can suspend my disbelief a little, but that was a bit much, really; the whole central conceit of the book just fell flat.
- the actual plot of the book as it's marketed (a bigender teen overhears a priest confess to molesting someone and the teenager then goes on a mission to solve the case) doesn't start until 63% of the way into the book. The entire first half - which I actually preferred! - is about them settling into life in their temporary home with their religious relatives, and trying to act as a guardian angel to other people in order to distract themself from their own problems and trauma. That, to me, was a way more interesting concept than the ridiculously melodramatic and overblown second half of the book, which was like a weird TV soap opera.
The ugly:
- the fact that the protagonist identifies themself as 'one of those gay rights people' but then immediately suspects the only gay person they know of being a paedophile, based on no other evidence besides the fact that they're gay. They literally say at one point that 'all evidence points to [character]', but the only evidence is that this character is gay and went to confession once. Is that gay rights? I think not.
- the protagonist is absolutely awful with respect to other people's boundaries. They keep randomly touching the person that they have a crush on, even though this person tells them repeatedly not to. They also listen to people's confessions in the confession booth without their knowledge or consent and then intervene in people's lives, which is just so out of order that it made it very hard to empathise with the character. I don't mind an unlikeable narrator, and this wouldn't make me give a book a low rating, but when Al/eks/is mentioned to one of the nuns that they had been doing this, it seemed to be forgiven when they made it clear that they had tried to help the people that they'd intervened with. This, to me, made it seem like their actions were supposed to be viewed as justifiable, but they just weren't.
Spoiler
They literally get someone's disabled brother removed from their family and put into a group home, and we hear that the group home placement 'isn't going well'. Al/eks/is literally ruins people's lives and has no consequences whatsoever.- the protagonist seemed incredibly mentally ill for the duration of this book, which is fine if that's actually touched upon and dealt with within the narrative, but it isn't here. They hear voices constantly (and they do actually hear them as auditory hallucinations, as is made clear when they overhear someone's confession and note that the voice 'sounds different') and seem to have constructed two totally separate personalities, Aleks and Alexis, to embody different facets of their personality, and experience a 'switch' similar to people with DID when they change gender. I can't say if that's accurate to bigender people or not because, as I said, I'm not bigender, but a lot of Al/eks/is' behaviour was very concerning in this book. They finally agree to get therapy at the end, but it's only very, very briefly mentioned. I would have liked a bit more discussion of how their gender was separate to their trauma, because the conflation of the two made it seem like their gender was almost a symptom of it, and I don't know how accurate that is to many bigender people.
Overall, I'm glad this book exists, but I wish it were better. I feel like it needed more editorial work and some more sensitivity reads.
(Review of an ARC received via Netgalley)
I'm not sure how to feel about this one! In many ways I loved it, and in many other ways it left me a little cold. Gorman's use of language is beautiful and every poem is obviously very carefully crafted, not a single word wasted, which is a nice contrast to a lot of the more raw and unedited poetry that we tend to see these days (which is its own separate art form and in no way inferior!) I really loved some of the poems in here, particularly the first one, Brittle Naiad, but then others just didn't really resonate with me at all, perhaps because I didn't have a reference point for them, living halfway across the world and being entirely unfamiliar with the organisms she was writing about. I actually read the Author's Note first and I feel like this helped to give necessary context to the writing, but I wish that hadn't been necessary; without that context, a lot of the poems really didn't mean a lot to me.
I did really like the sci-fi / dystopian element that Gorman wove into the natural world, and thought this was particularly effective when she didn't make it explicit that the poems were set in the future. I liked the duality of the poems that could either be set in our time and our world, or on another planet entirely; for me, those best encapsulated the inherent oddity of nature, and really brought home the alien characteristics of many of the things we consider normal.
This is a strong collection of poems by a writer I'll definitely be looking into in the future, and I really do think that its main drawback is also its biggest strength; it's just so niche that there are going to be some people who absolutely adore it, but for those of us who are coming to it without the weight of pre-existing knowledge, it's not the most accessible.
I'm not sure how to feel about this one! In many ways I loved it, and in many other ways it left me a little cold. Gorman's use of language is beautiful and every poem is obviously very carefully crafted, not a single word wasted, which is a nice contrast to a lot of the more raw and unedited poetry that we tend to see these days (which is its own separate art form and in no way inferior!) I really loved some of the poems in here, particularly the first one, Brittle Naiad, but then others just didn't really resonate with me at all, perhaps because I didn't have a reference point for them, living halfway across the world and being entirely unfamiliar with the organisms she was writing about. I actually read the Author's Note first and I feel like this helped to give necessary context to the writing, but I wish that hadn't been necessary; without that context, a lot of the poems really didn't mean a lot to me.
I did really like the sci-fi / dystopian element that Gorman wove into the natural world, and thought this was particularly effective when she didn't make it explicit that the poems were set in the future. I liked the duality of the poems that could either be set in our time and our world, or on another planet entirely; for me, those best encapsulated the inherent oddity of nature, and really brought home the alien characteristics of many of the things we consider normal.
This is a strong collection of poems by a writer I'll definitely be looking into in the future, and I really do think that its main drawback is also its biggest strength; it's just so niche that there are going to be some people who absolutely adore it, but for those of us who are coming to it without the weight of pre-existing knowledge, it's not the most accessible.