marcellainthemargins's Reviews (496)

 I have long been familiair with the general thesis of A room of one's own; a woman needs money and a room of her own to make great art. And I was really interested to see how Woolf had come to write this essay. 

In the beginning the author talks about how she was asked to talk about women and fiction, and at first she was wondering what approach to take. She then takes the reader along around town, visiting several places she hopes will inspire her and give her insight, and at the same time taking you along in her thought process. 

This is one of those books you want to read with a pen poised in your hand, ready to make notes. Both her ideas and her writing make Woolf a writer in a league of her own. 

There is so much wisdom in these pages and you can see how this has become a classic in feminist writing that has been the base for so many of the consequential feminists ideas. Written in the 1920s, it is definitely a book representational of it's  time. But at the same time it is very easy to transfer her ideas and observations to modern day society. 

It's a book of great thinking, but one that seems to be written effortlessly. The writing has this easy, flowing quality to it, where Woolf just takes you along to sea, with thoughts and sentences coming as naturaly as waves on a beach, but never letting you drown. Whenever you read a book by her it is just best to give yourself over to the rhythm of the writing, trusting you are in safe hands. 

A book I suspect I will turn back to time and time again. 

"Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind." 

Do you ever read a book and it turns out it is something very different from what you thought it would be?
 
 In this case it wasn't anyone's fault but my own, the different Akwaeke Emezi's book got blended in my head and I thought this would be a book steeped in Nigerian folklore and bordering the line of reality and fantasy. So I spend a large chunk of the book being rather confused and waiting for it to become what I expected it to be. 
 
 I think it thwarthed my enjoyment of the book slightly, because it turned out to be a gorgeous novel, it just took a while to wrap my head around the fact that it was going to be something completely different. 
 
 The book is about Vivek Oji, their death and their life.  Vivek is on a journey of self discovery, of their gender, their sexuality and how to be their true authentic self when their life is tragically cut short. 
 We see Vivek's family and friends join them on their journey, and later grieving their death each in their own different way. 
 It is a story of both joy, love and acceptence, but also of fear, misunderstanding and heartbreak. 
 Right from the first sentence I was in love with Emezi's writing, the way they set a scene was so fresh and evocative, I could not help being impressed. 
 And when I finally got settled in the book, it took me on an emotional journey, and I got my heart broken and healed, touched by the way Vivek's short life changed the life of those around them. 
 This book deserves a reread so I can appreciate it for what it is, a story of love and grief and self acceptence, from the start. 
 
 
 
 

In 1974 the author visited a prison in Caïro and interviewed several woman interned there. One of them was Firdaus, a woman awaiting her excecution and this is her fictionalised story. 

It tells her story growing up in a society that treated women brutally and how the horrors she faced in life accumulated and forced her to commit the crime that got her the death sentence. 

This is a grim story, she goes from one abusive, exploitive situation to the other, there is no respite. I can't say I enjoyed reading this book. Sometimes when books deal with difficult topics they can still bring some beauty in the writing. This however is just very straightforward, the telling, not showing kind of narrative.

I do however applaud it for it's place in feminist literature. It gives a voice to the many women and girls facing the same monstrosities in a society that was and still is in some parts of the world out to silence them. 

Is it fair to give a poor review of a book when it does exactly what it says on the cover, but I was just hoping for it to give me more?
 
 When I picked up From here to eternity : Travelling the world to find the good death, I was hoping to find out more about different traditions and practices surrounding death from all over the world. I wanted to know where these traditions came from, how they came to be. What role they played in the grieving process and how they compared to Western death culture. 
 But the book is more about the what and the how, rather then the why. 
 I think the word travelling in the subtitle is a good indicator. It feels like Doughty is a tourist, witnessing different death rituals, describing what she sees and who she meets. She spends a lot of time on the technical details, where I would rather have learned about the psychological and cultural aspects.
 Rather then reading how an ox got slaughtered as a sacrifice, I would have loved to know why, and where the practise came from. 
 I did enjoy the epilogue where she talks about the implications the sanitization of practices around death, especially in the U.S. has on the grief process and how they could learn from other countries, I felt like that had the tone I was looking for in the rest of the book. 
 But as a whole unfortunately, this book wasn't for me. 

The Member of the Wedding is set of the course of a weekend in August, in a small Southern town. We meet Frankie, or F. Jasmine as she refers to herself later in the novel. She is a twelve year old, who doesn't quite know where she belongs and spends her days with Berenice, the 'coloured' maid, and John Henry, her six year old cousin. We see her being bored and longing for a life outside of her little town, outside of what she knows. She is fascinated by far away places and yearns to travel. She's not a child anymore and yet no one takes her quite seriously, which makes her obstinate, and she lashes out and tries to act tough.  That is until she learns of her brothers wedding. She decides she will be a member of the wedding and in fact also of the honeymoon and any adventures her brother and his bride will go on next. This gives her  new confidence and rather  new outlook on life. 
 This is a book about growing up, about wanting more, going further, dreaming bigger, looking for new horizons, but at the same time being comfortable in familiarity, the repetition and monotony of daily life and wanting everything to stay as it was. 
 With this book McCullers has been cemented yet more as one of my favourite authors. Her writing is exquisite, where you feel every sentence is deliberate, with not a word to few or too many and she continues to surprise me with her fresh choice of words. Even though this a short book, only set over a few days, we really get to know Frankie and McCullers captures the complexity of a young girls mind very well, without being condescending. 
 And as I am expecting of McCullers, she is a master at setting a scene and invoking the senses. There is one particular scene where Frankie, Berenice and John Henry are playing a card game in the kitchen, and they hear a piano being tuned in the neighbourhood. It is such a perfect capture of a lazy summer day, that I felt I was right there, even though I read this book during some rather gray and gloomy winter days. 
 I feel The Member of the Wedding is one of those books that will give me new things to discover anytime I read it and I would highly recommend it if you like books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, A tree grows in Brooklyn, or McCullers The heart is a lonely hunter. 

How to review a book that is the second book of the third trilogy in an overarching series of sixteen books, I'm not sure. 
 This is the eight book in the series and the books have become a comfort to me, a treat I give myself. I'm reading through them slowly, maybe two books a year, because I  don't want it to end. 
 Whenever I start the next book in the series it always takes me a while to fully grasp the story, these are complicated storylines,  and since there is usually quite a long time inbetween the books it will be a few chapters before I settle in. It never takes me long at all however to remind me why I love these books. From the first page Hobb draws me in with her signature rich writing. It is a fantasy book and though fantastic elements like dragons and magic play a big role in this book, it is not an epic tale. In fact, the blurb mentions quest of sorts, which doesn't even get mentioned until half way in, and hasn't actually begon by the end of the book. 
 Rather it is a reflecting of previous events and a wondering of what will come to pass. It ties together different aspects of the realm of the Elderings that previously seemed unconnected. It explores different types of magic and the influence they have on individuals  and on relationships, personal aswell as political. There is new characters introduced, aswell as old characters not being quite who you think they were, new friendships formed and old relationships broken. 
 I didn't like every development in this book, I wish certain things could have stayed the way they were. However, it does set up for an intriguing continuation of story. It has shook up what I thought I knew before and I wonder where the pieces will land. 
 

Flowers in the attic is one of those books I felt I knew before I read it. The story of the four children locked in the attic is famous for its tragedy and the many trigger warnings that come with it. 
 
 Usually I am a bit weary for books that are so widely read, and so popular with a plot that is so disturbing. Nevertheless, I went in with an open mind, hoping this book would also give me some gothic, creepy house vibes, with fascinating but unreliable narrators.  
 
 I'm afraid it wasn't. It's bad, it's just really bad. 
 
 The premise on which the whole story builds is  incredibly flimsy, things that would make the whole plot crumble are conveniently explained away.  The protagonist is annoying, (it didn't help that in the audiobook she was shouting half the time), the characters flat and  onesided and unrealistic, for all the tragedy that befalls them I didn't care for them one bit. The tools that used to make the plot move forward are so blatantly obvious. It is overwritten, overdescribed and no detail left to discover, nothing left to the imagination.  It is one thing to use foreshadowing in a book, another to use floodlights and neon signs to show the signs of where this book is going. 
 
 I mean, in the end I was almost entertained by how bad it was?