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kyatic's Reviews (974)
The amount of historical research in this one is impressive. As a romance, however, I didn't really feel it. There wasn't much chemistry between the leads, although I absolutely loved their friendship. There were also just too many side characters and plots to keep track of over 400 pages - the subplot about a stolen snuff box could easily have been cut with no detriment to the rest of the book. This book seemed to oddly straddle the line between a sumptuous and detailed period novel, a la Sarah Waters, and a light-hearted romance, and I don't think it necessarily should have tried to do both. Still, I read it all in one day, so I can't say that I didn't enjoy it, just that it's not going to go on the re-read list alongside its predecessor.
(Received an ARC via Netgalley to review)
This is one of those poetry collections that absolutely begs to be bought in paperback, so that you can do the pretentious thing of dog-earing every page and scribbling all over it and memorising all the best lines so that you can say them over and over again, just for the joy of hearing them out loud. 'Joy' is perhaps an odd word to apply to this particular collection, given that it's essentially 80 or so pages of unrelenting grief, but there really is an odd sort of joy to be found in reading a work which takes someone's particular experience and manages to make it both entirely singular and of the poet, but also something that the reader can experience.
I know there are reasons that this book speaks to me. Like the poet, I've held the hand of someone I love as they die. I've been there for the undignified end, seen the way a body changes when there's no life in it, wondered how everyone and everything else can just keep going on like the world hasn't ended, when I just saw it happen. And that's the exact feeling that this collection manages to make manifest. The bizarreness of sitting at a party, as the poet describes, while everyone else around you is having fun, and all you can think about is how different someone's face looks when they've been dead for half an hour. The unrelenting urge to speak out about it, the way you want to be asked about it but also don't ever want anyone else to know what you saw, the way everyone else's problems are nothing in the face of your grief. These feelings are at once universal to anyone who's ever been bereaved and also entirely personal on the part of the poet; no-one's grief is ever the same, even when they've lost the same person, and I think Schminkey really excels in conveying the complexities of grieving someone.
Honestly, there's so much that could be said about this one that I don't even know where to start. The language is often beautiful, often surprisingly funny - some reviewers have commented negatively on Schminkey's use of humour, as though it diminishes their grief, when actually anyone who's ever been in a similar position will tell you that it's literally the only way you can cope with the enormity of watching someone die, and in my mind it also added some much-needed levity to the book, albeit a rather dark flavour thereof - and every single poem, even the ones which feel the least polished, stands entirely on its own merit, whilst also pulling the narrative of the collection through. Grief isn't the only subject of the poems; queerness, addiction, fatherhood, found/chosen family and the gendered nature of 'care' are all themes that Schminkey weaves in alongside it, and which make it feel less like a monotonous treatise on death. It's nuanced and clever and brilliant and I really do just want to haul a copy of this book around with me forever.
This isn't a collection to read if you aren't in the right frame of mind, but for anyone who's ever experienced anything like the poet has, reading it feels like being witnessed and recognised in a way that speaks to the cleverness of Schminkey's work, and I'm absolutely going to be looking out for whatever they write next.
This is one of those poetry collections that absolutely begs to be bought in paperback, so that you can do the pretentious thing of dog-earing every page and scribbling all over it and memorising all the best lines so that you can say them over and over again, just for the joy of hearing them out loud. 'Joy' is perhaps an odd word to apply to this particular collection, given that it's essentially 80 or so pages of unrelenting grief, but there really is an odd sort of joy to be found in reading a work which takes someone's particular experience and manages to make it both entirely singular and of the poet, but also something that the reader can experience.
I know there are reasons that this book speaks to me. Like the poet, I've held the hand of someone I love as they die. I've been there for the undignified end, seen the way a body changes when there's no life in it, wondered how everyone and everything else can just keep going on like the world hasn't ended, when I just saw it happen. And that's the exact feeling that this collection manages to make manifest. The bizarreness of sitting at a party, as the poet describes, while everyone else around you is having fun, and all you can think about is how different someone's face looks when they've been dead for half an hour. The unrelenting urge to speak out about it, the way you want to be asked about it but also don't ever want anyone else to know what you saw, the way everyone else's problems are nothing in the face of your grief. These feelings are at once universal to anyone who's ever been bereaved and also entirely personal on the part of the poet; no-one's grief is ever the same, even when they've lost the same person, and I think Schminkey really excels in conveying the complexities of grieving someone.
Honestly, there's so much that could be said about this one that I don't even know where to start. The language is often beautiful, often surprisingly funny - some reviewers have commented negatively on Schminkey's use of humour, as though it diminishes their grief, when actually anyone who's ever been in a similar position will tell you that it's literally the only way you can cope with the enormity of watching someone die, and in my mind it also added some much-needed levity to the book, albeit a rather dark flavour thereof - and every single poem, even the ones which feel the least polished, stands entirely on its own merit, whilst also pulling the narrative of the collection through. Grief isn't the only subject of the poems; queerness, addiction, fatherhood, found/chosen family and the gendered nature of 'care' are all themes that Schminkey weaves in alongside it, and which make it feel less like a monotonous treatise on death. It's nuanced and clever and brilliant and I really do just want to haul a copy of this book around with me forever.
This isn't a collection to read if you aren't in the right frame of mind, but for anyone who's ever experienced anything like the poet has, reading it feels like being witnessed and recognised in a way that speaks to the cleverness of Schminkey's work, and I'm absolutely going to be looking out for whatever they write next.
I think I was expecting more from this one. I agree with a lot of what it has to say about online shaming being an ultimately unproductive tool for safeguarding marginalised people as it doesn't address the systemic causes of hurt, and I definitely agree that these weaponised takedowns disproportionately affect already marginalised people, and that too often they become a tactic for oppressors to silence those who've already had to fight for their platform. Those are the primary issues I have with so-called 'cancel culture'; to me, it seems like the only people who are ever really cancelled are the people who don't have the resources to rebuild, often owing to pre-existing institutional oppression. I think brown does a good job untangling these problems and writing about them from a place of real concern, rather than moral panic. You can tell she's thought a lot about these ideas and theories, and they're usually well articulated and considered. It's genuinely illuminating to read a critique of online shaming which doesn't boil down to 'people on the Left are just becoming the moral police', because that's a disingenuous critique of cancel culture and it's infuriating that this is the primary critique presented in the media, rather than the genuine issues that brown identifies here. For that reason alone, this book is invaluable, and I'd be interested in reading a lot more on the topic from both brown and other writers.
However, my main problem with it was that I didn't feel that this book delivered a viable alternative. In that respect, it reads a lot more like a manifesto rather than a considered analysis. brown speaks a lot about 'healing' and 'mediation', but there's no tangible idea of what this looks like. Whilst I do think this is a genuinely helpful book in terms of explaining some of the problems with online shaming to someone who might otherwise only have heard of and dismissed the more hyperbolic right-wing objections, I didn't feel like ultimately this book offered an image of how to facilitate the other methods that are nebulously named in lieu of it. I also found it difficult to stomach some of brown's metaphors; she wrote in the introduction that she had to rewrite her initial essay and undertook a lot of work to find metaphors which weren't rooted in racist terminology, but I feel like she ultimately fell into using ableist language instead (e.g. metaphors of online shaming culture as a cancer / disease) and it left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, to be honest. There's also an awful lot of language in here which reads like those aspirational corporate slogans you see in people's LinkedIn bios, and again, it rang slightly hollow; it felt like filler.
Finally, and perhaps most egregiously for me, although brown states at the beginning that she is only applying her analysis to cases of 'cancellation' following conflict or mistakes, and not in cases of abuse, this doesn't actually seem to be the case in the rest of the book, where abusers are often lumped in with generic wrongdoers as people who can be rehabilitated within their communities. That raised a red flag with me; I think this book needed to do much more work in untangling the difference between people who are 'shamed' for mistakes and conflict, and people who are publicly exposed as abusers and predators. You can't just say 'I'm not applying this analysis to abusers' and then do exactly that for the rest of the book. As it stands, it really read like brown was suggesting that abuse survivors sit down to mediation with their abusers, and I think that's a dangerous path to head down; abusers are far too good at manipulation tactics for this to be a viable process of healing. Some people frankly do need to be removed from their platforms and their communities, and I feel like this needed to be addressed as part of the analysis here.
I don't know. It's not a bad book by any means, and it gave me a lot to think about. I just think it needed to engage much more fully with the topic and stop being so wishy-washy. For a book which did, at one point, dedicate several (necessary and genuinely enlightening) pages to defining the terms and language used, it still managed to be evasive a lot of the time. It's a good primer to the reasons that the veracity and usefulness of online shaming as a tool needs to be considered from a Leftist perspective, but it's very much a book which asks the right questions rather than answers them.
However, my main problem with it was that I didn't feel that this book delivered a viable alternative. In that respect, it reads a lot more like a manifesto rather than a considered analysis. brown speaks a lot about 'healing' and 'mediation', but there's no tangible idea of what this looks like. Whilst I do think this is a genuinely helpful book in terms of explaining some of the problems with online shaming to someone who might otherwise only have heard of and dismissed the more hyperbolic right-wing objections, I didn't feel like ultimately this book offered an image of how to facilitate the other methods that are nebulously named in lieu of it. I also found it difficult to stomach some of brown's metaphors; she wrote in the introduction that she had to rewrite her initial essay and undertook a lot of work to find metaphors which weren't rooted in racist terminology, but I feel like she ultimately fell into using ableist language instead (e.g. metaphors of online shaming culture as a cancer / disease) and it left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, to be honest. There's also an awful lot of language in here which reads like those aspirational corporate slogans you see in people's LinkedIn bios, and again, it rang slightly hollow; it felt like filler.
Finally, and perhaps most egregiously for me, although brown states at the beginning that she is only applying her analysis to cases of 'cancellation' following conflict or mistakes, and not in cases of abuse, this doesn't actually seem to be the case in the rest of the book, where abusers are often lumped in with generic wrongdoers as people who can be rehabilitated within their communities. That raised a red flag with me; I think this book needed to do much more work in untangling the difference between people who are 'shamed' for mistakes and conflict, and people who are publicly exposed as abusers and predators. You can't just say 'I'm not applying this analysis to abusers' and then do exactly that for the rest of the book. As it stands, it really read like brown was suggesting that abuse survivors sit down to mediation with their abusers, and I think that's a dangerous path to head down; abusers are far too good at manipulation tactics for this to be a viable process of healing. Some people frankly do need to be removed from their platforms and their communities, and I feel like this needed to be addressed as part of the analysis here.
I don't know. It's not a bad book by any means, and it gave me a lot to think about. I just think it needed to engage much more fully with the topic and stop being so wishy-washy. For a book which did, at one point, dedicate several (necessary and genuinely enlightening) pages to defining the terms and language used, it still managed to be evasive a lot of the time. It's a good primer to the reasons that the veracity and usefulness of online shaming as a tool needs to be considered from a Leftist perspective, but it's very much a book which asks the right questions rather than answers them.
An equally accurate subtitle for this book would be 'The Politics of Giving a Shit.' This whole manifesto is completely utopian and I definitely don't think we're ever going to see a single one of these ideas implemented to any degree whatsoever, but it's nice to imagine, innit.
(Review of an ARC received via Netgalley)
One day, Button Poetry will release a collection that doesn't become one of my new favourites, but today is not that day. Afterwards is a really beautiful and often difficult window into complex grief. Myers' writing is full of lines that practically beg to be underlined and highlighted and read aloud.
As someone who, like Myers, has experienced multiple bereavements in a short space of time, I liked the messy nature of this book; it's not always clear whether she's writing about a break-up or, when it's clearly a bereavement, who she's mourning. That's just how grief works. It gets tangled up in itself. I'm glad that this book wasn't separated into sections which isolated each subject. It's necessarily muddled.
There were a few poems which didn't stand out particularly strongly to me, mostly the ones about womanhood and body image, which I think is purely because those are very common subjects in this style of poetry. The poems in here about grief and mental illness were by far the strongest.
My favourite poems in here were probably the erasure poems, where Myers takes existing texts (such as wedding vows and song lyrics) and reworks them into something completely different. I found those to be such great metaphors for grief; what is grief if not making the best of things?
I'm continually grateful to Button for publishing these short books of slam poetry from an enormous range of voices. I do think that, purely by the nature of the genre, some of the voices tend to bleed into one a little, but as a corpus of work, they continue to be excellent.
One day, Button Poetry will release a collection that doesn't become one of my new favourites, but today is not that day. Afterwards is a really beautiful and often difficult window into complex grief. Myers' writing is full of lines that practically beg to be underlined and highlighted and read aloud.
As someone who, like Myers, has experienced multiple bereavements in a short space of time, I liked the messy nature of this book; it's not always clear whether she's writing about a break-up or, when it's clearly a bereavement, who she's mourning. That's just how grief works. It gets tangled up in itself. I'm glad that this book wasn't separated into sections which isolated each subject. It's necessarily muddled.
There were a few poems which didn't stand out particularly strongly to me, mostly the ones about womanhood and body image, which I think is purely because those are very common subjects in this style of poetry. The poems in here about grief and mental illness were by far the strongest.
My favourite poems in here were probably the erasure poems, where Myers takes existing texts (such as wedding vows and song lyrics) and reworks them into something completely different. I found those to be such great metaphors for grief; what is grief if not making the best of things?
I'm continually grateful to Button for publishing these short books of slam poetry from an enormous range of voices. I do think that, purely by the nature of the genre, some of the voices tend to bleed into one a little, but as a corpus of work, they continue to be excellent.
Firstly, this book is incredibly important. Let's get that out of the way. This book absolutely needs to exist; it's going to mean so much to many people, and we need stories of gender euphoria and joy just as much as we need stories of dysphoria and rage. For the very fact that this book is so groundbreaking and has clearly been written with real love and happiness, it's great.
That said, I just don't understand why, as the editor of a purportedly diverse anthology, you would include 11 of your own essays, and 1 from your wife. There are 29 essays in here, and 12 of them - nearly half! - are either by the editor or her partner. That, to me, is incredibly poor editorial practice. It also absolutely means that the book suffers from a feeling of unevenness. If I read an anthology, as I very often do, I read it because I'm deliberately seeking differing perspectives and narratives. If I want to read all about one person's experiences, I'll pick up a memoir. In the introduction, we hear that Laura Kate Dale received hundreds of submissions for this book, which begs the question of why she only decided to include 17 of them. I genuinely think it would have been a much better and more enlightening book if she'd had just the one essay in here and allowed space for other writers to tell their stories.
That's not to say that I didn't enjoy her chapters in it, because I did; I just didn't think that the structure of this book worked particularly well. There were some real stand-out essays in here (Mia Violet's essay on being a bridesmaid was my favourite!) and I think they would have been given more of a chance to shine had they not all been so outnumbered by the editor. It felt like a missed opportunity for some more diverse narratives and writing styles to be included.
I'd love to see more books in this vein in the future, and I really do hope that this book reaches all the people who need it. I just wish it had been edited differently.
That said, I just don't understand why, as the editor of a purportedly diverse anthology, you would include 11 of your own essays, and 1 from your wife. There are 29 essays in here, and 12 of them - nearly half! - are either by the editor or her partner. That, to me, is incredibly poor editorial practice. It also absolutely means that the book suffers from a feeling of unevenness. If I read an anthology, as I very often do, I read it because I'm deliberately seeking differing perspectives and narratives. If I want to read all about one person's experiences, I'll pick up a memoir. In the introduction, we hear that Laura Kate Dale received hundreds of submissions for this book, which begs the question of why she only decided to include 17 of them. I genuinely think it would have been a much better and more enlightening book if she'd had just the one essay in here and allowed space for other writers to tell their stories.
That's not to say that I didn't enjoy her chapters in it, because I did; I just didn't think that the structure of this book worked particularly well. There were some real stand-out essays in here (Mia Violet's essay on being a bridesmaid was my favourite!) and I think they would have been given more of a chance to shine had they not all been so outnumbered by the editor. It felt like a missed opportunity for some more diverse narratives and writing styles to be included.
I'd love to see more books in this vein in the future, and I really do hope that this book reaches all the people who need it. I just wish it had been edited differently.
I liked this one, but didn't love it. In terms of the actual story itself, I thought it was pretty sweet and a decent low-conflict romance; I usually hate bully / enemies-to-lovers romances, but the author here gave Milo a good enough reason to have behaved badly in the past, and it was easy to empathise with him and not just immediately find him irredeemable. I also didn't find the whole gamer thing as distracting in this book as I did in the first one. It was much better integrated into the narrative.
That said, I really didn't like the writing style of this one. I absolutely didn't buy that this was the narrative voice of two men in their mid-twenties. It read exactly like the internal monologue of a 14 year old girl, and it just felt kind of weird trying to imagine that this was the thought process of two adult men. It also meant that the saucy scenes, which were quite a bit more explicit than those in the first book in the series, felt disjointed and out of character.
I dunno, I just feel like there's something that's not clicking with Albert's writing style in this one. I did enjoy it overall, but I hope the next few in the series feel less like YA novels.
That said, I really didn't like the writing style of this one. I absolutely didn't buy that this was the narrative voice of two men in their mid-twenties. It read exactly like the internal monologue of a 14 year old girl, and it just felt kind of weird trying to imagine that this was the thought process of two adult men. It also meant that the saucy scenes, which were quite a bit more explicit than those in the first book in the series, felt disjointed and out of character.
I dunno, I just feel like there's something that's not clicking with Albert's writing style in this one. I did enjoy it overall, but I hope the next few in the series feel less like YA novels.