kyatic's Reviews (974)

Knit One, Girl Two follows Clara, an avid knitter, as she seeks inspiration for her next sock club (essentially a surprise sock subscription service - nope, me neither!) and comes across the paintings of Danielle. The two of them have much more in common than their shared love of art; both women are Jewish and huge fans of the same TV series, and as they work on their respective art projects, their relationship develops into something more.

Reading this one felt a bit like the equivalent of a warm cup of tea. The narrative itself is very cute, and both Clara and Danielle are peak millennial. There's an adorable cat, discussions of feminism and Jewishness, and lots of one-liners. If you're looking for a high stakes thriller with a multi-layered plot, then this isn't it, but it's the perfect pick-me-up after a long day. It's a short read and it leaves you feeling completely satisfied.

In terms of rep, I particularly liked how Clara is openly gay and Danielle is unapologetically bi. I don't see anywhere near as much bi rep as I'd like, so it was a very welcome surprise to see a bi character represented as monogamous and content to be in a same gender relationship. The author is bi and I loved the own voices angle.

A very short and sweet f/f romance which could practically be prescribed to cheer someone up.

(Review of an ARC via Netgalley)

I'm not sure there's a way to articulate how this book made me feel. It's the sort of book that you experience rather than read; for the day it took to read it, it really did feel like I was an opera singer in her mid-twenties, entangled in a toxic relationship with a man who might be awful, or might be wonderful, or might be some entirely human combination of the two. I'm rather glad I'm not, all things considered.

Imogen Crimp is one of those writers whose work seems entirely effortless; she can craft a simile unlike anyone I've ever read before, and her observations about people are so incisive and insightful that you wish you'd written them yourself. I was fortunate enough to be able to read extracts from this novel in draft form back in its early days, and it speaks to her talent that there are turns of phrase in here which remain from the earliest versions. They're just that good.

The thing that really sets this book above other novels about toxic relationships is that it's genuinely never clear whether Anna is imagining all the ways in which Max is terrible, if he's just terrible for her rather than in general, or if he really is a complete c-word, as Anna's friend likes to call him. Much of his behaviour, told through the unreliable lens of Anna's narration, seems targeted and insidious, but it's also clear that Anna maps her own thoughts about herself onto his behaviour. She acknowledges this herself. For that reason, you could read this same book over and over again and pick up on all the subtleties and nuances a thousand different ways. There's no villain here, unless there is.

This book is going to win every single award going, and it should. It's frankly one of the best books I've read in years, and it's going to linger for a while.

This book somehow took me 4 months to read, largely because, despite being a book about a man who gets smushed by an avalanche and breaks his pelvis and has to crawl miles and miles to safety, it was actually rather dry. Unlike Ken Jones, who spends most of the book being various degrees of damp. Compared to other survival books, like Touching The Void (also about a man who breaks his pelvis and has to crawl miles and miles to safety, which is clearly a surprisingly rich genre, except that dude also has to climb out of a glacier) this one isn't written with quite the same exhilirating prose which makes you unable to stop turning the pages. It's interesting, in the voyeuristic and schadenfreude sort of way that all these survival memoirs inevitably are, but it's not particularly gripping.

HOWEVER, that said, four stars for this paragraph alone:

'Each rise [of icy water] caused me to breathe in sharply, my teeth started chattering and my balls ached horribly.'

GOOD GOD MAN, you've been hit by an avalanche, shattered your pelvis and your leg, haven't eaten anything except soggy sausage roll crumbs for days, and now you're hopping through an icy river with only a stick to bear your weight, and yet you're STILL thinking about your testicles? An absolute icon.

Not many of the reviewers of this one seem to have trichotillomania themselves, which is perhaps a testament to the difference between reading a memoir which is about something that you have intimate knowledge and experience of, versus reading one which is interesting purely because it illuminates a completely different set of circumstances to anything you've heard of before. I fall into the former camp, as a card-carrying member of the trichotillomania club, and I do think that this book, despite being primarily marketed as being one which will speak and appeal to fellow trichsters, might be more enlightening and interesting to people who haven't heard of it before.

Barbara Lally does come across like a genuinely lovely person here, and I think this book would be a particularly great resource to buy for someone who knows someone with trich to give them a better understanding of it; parents whose children have trich will find a lot in here to give them reassurance, information and ways to help their child. It's definitely a useful book, and I really do hope that more people with trich start writing about it, because if I have to read one more book in which the only person with trich is some kind of serial killer without eyelashes, I will simply scream. Barbara Lally is doing really good work in destigmatising a disorder which is actually pretty common (I'm not sure why some of the reviews here paint it as something rare or unheard of - it really isn't either of those things) and I hope that this is just the first of many such books.

An addendum: do bear in mind that, if you're reading this as someone with trich, there are paragraphs here which will very likely trigger either pulling or another kind of reaction. The paragraphs where Lally described in detail the sensation of pulling made me feel viscerally nauseous, largely because the hairs that she actively enjoys pulling are the ones that make me want to perish if I accidentally get one. I actually had to skim past whole paragraphs of - boke - descriptions of how it feels when the root 'pops' out. No no no, absolutely not, no thanks. I wonder if a trigger warning might have been helpful at the start of this one (I know that's a thorny topic, so I'm just putting the warning here!)

There was so much to love about this book: Gilda is one of the most interesting narrators I've encountered in a long time, and the way that Emily Austin portrays her slow unraveling is genuinely disturbing. I laughed out loud frequently on the train at the oddly dark humour, and I thought that the inclusion of Grace was a real masterclass in making a character seem completely believable and real, even though she only ever appeared in epistolary form. I did think that the book resolved itself much too quickly; it all comes to a head and comes good in about 5 pages at the end, which is a shame considering how well-paced the rest of it was. Still, a book I know I'll be thinking about for a long time.