mariebrunelm's Reviews (478)

There is a ton of historical context and tidbits woven through the narrative, which never feel like info dump but rather delicious morsels to enjoy while reading the immensely enjoyable story of three generations of historians faced with unsettling discoveries surrounding Drakula.

While reading the second half, I found echoes of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, in a much more focused and believable way. Bear in mind, I've only seen the movie adaptation of Dan Brown's books, but there was a lot less of face-palming involved.

Could I love a book more? That remains to be seen. This graphic novel about a young blacksmith discovering the existence of tea dragons is cuteness incarnate and will warm your heart. 

Fun fact: for the first few days I started reading this book, every time I joined my parents for meals (I live with them) I'd tell my mum: "Holy guacamole, did I tell you how amazing this book is?". Despite her feeling a bit fed up after the first couple of times, I needed someone to shout my love for this book at.

The beginning of April marked a new step in my PhD thesis, with the beginning of the redaction phase. This is a dreaded phase, mostly because it's the beginning of the end, so I wanted a book that would encourage me and spur me on. For that, I picked up a dark academia novel that I'd been saving for the Autumn, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, and sweet Eru was I right! This is the perfect blend of nerdiness, academia and Gothic vibes with tons of travelling involved, which soothed my lock-down self beyond words.

The cast of characters isn't too big, so that even though the story is split over 3 different time periods (the 1930s, the 1950s and the 1970s) I had no trouble following each narrative, which is saying a lot for me! They all revolve around historians or historians-to-be who discover a mystery surrounding the character of Dracula. As the size of the book may suggest, the pacing isn't too fast and leaves room for enchanting descriptions of all the locations the protagonists travel too across Europe and a bit of the USA. This book definitely soothed my wanderlust and put me in the right mood for my own academic pursuits!

I've always seen this vintage paperback on the family shelves. No one remember exactly how it arrived there. The name "Tolkien" probably is a clue, although the book has little to do with him beyond the short but well-written introduction by Jane Yolen. And that's one of the two reproaches I have with this book. It feels like the editor was so afraid a short story collection wouldn't sell, that he put the name of Tolkien on the cover. While some of the stories play with Tolkienian themes, most of them only have the genre of fantasy in common. I enjoyed the short story by Terry Pratchett a lot, and a couple of others were pleasant enough, but the majority was so blatantly sexist it made the enjoyment difficult.

TW : mention of rape & suicide in a text.

I only kept reading in the hope the next story would prove better. For instance, it's the first time I read Stephen Donaldson's prose, but I was not impressed. I do hope I missed something, because having the heroic figure of his story ask a woman who has been raped why she hasn't killed herself, deeply, deeply shocked me, especially when this question wasn't challenged. It tainted the whole collection to me. Several of the other stories had rampant sexism like having the woman in a group take care of the children, or have to be saved. And most of them didn't feel particularly original.

Well, this one won't be taking space much longer on my shelves!

In my science-fiction-reading quest, I couldn't really escape reading at least the first tome of Douglas Adams' cult series. Sadly, it wasn't the book for me. I do enjoy a bit of absurd humour now and then, but if it isn't backed with characters I care for, or a pleasant writing style, I quickly get bored. I think a large part of the problem I had comes from the translation. I could feel the original text was challenging to translate, and I'm not blaming the translator at all because humour is probably the most difficult thing to get from one language to another, with poetry.

Voilà un livre qui s'annonce dès la première page. Sa narratrice, Sarah, est morte et nous raconte ses dernières années.

S'il y a bien un type d'histoire qui me fait pleurer presqu'à chaque fois, c'est les histoires d'hôpitaux. Celles qui fauchent les malades dans la fleur de l'âge, contre lesquelles ils se révoltent et s'arc-boutent. "Il est juste que les forts soient frappés" est de ces histoires, et je le savais en l'ouvrant. Ce n'est pas un œuvre que j'aurais lu s'il n'avait pas été dans la liste du concours de ma bibliothèque municipale. Inconsciemment, j'ai dû décider dès le début que je ne m'impliquerais pas émotionnellement dans ces personnages, sachant où le récit les menait. Mais finalement, ça n'a pas été si difficile, car je pense qu'en plus de ma carapace ce livre ne m'a pas touché autant qu'il aurait pu. Son style, tout d'abord, est assez oral, ce qui n'est pas particulièrement de mon goût. Ensuite, j'ai trouvé qu'il manquait assez de subtilité. En sous-texte, il est plein d'abléisme et d'hétéronormativité, des mots que je ne connaissais pas il y a un an mais que j'apprends à reconnaître quand je les croise. Ces insinuations qu'il y a les forts d'un côté et les faibles de l'autre, ce que le compagnon de la narratrice répète avec condescendance, comme une armure contre le chagrin. Que toute relation est forcément hétéro et qu'elle débouche forcément sur la constitution d'une famille de carte postale avec enfants. Que ce n'est pas grave si Théo trompe sa compagne malade parce que, vous pensez, il est bien malheureux. Je ne sais pas si c'est ma propre armure contre un récit tiré-larmes qui m'a fait réagir comme ça et voir des problèmes là où il n'y en a peut-être pas. Je pense que je n'aurais pas lu ce livre s'il ne s'était pas trouvé dans la sélection de la médiathèque, et que ça aurait peut-être été aussi bien.

Ce court roman d'une grande sensibilité trace le portrait que sa narratrice sans nom livre à son frère. La dimension autobiographique ne semble jamais loin, tant le parcours de Loo Hui Phang fait écho à celui de son personnage tiraillé entre le Vietnam, le Laos et la France, où elle n'est jamais tout à fait à sa place. Trop Vietnamienne pour être française, trop Européenne pour être Vietnamienne, elle explore les différentes facettes d'elle-même, à commencer par son rapport à son corps, et surtout son corps dans les relations éphémères qu'elle tisse avec des inconnus. Elle se met en scène, observant ses ébats avec un détachement qui est moins froid qu'il ne le laisse penser au premier abord, et qui évite l'écueil du voyeurisme qui menace constamment. C'est également le rapport à sa famille que la narratrice explore, à l'occasion d'un rare voyage à Savannakhet, la ville de son enfance où elle est confrontée une fois de plus à l'espace semble-t-il infranchissable entre les fragments qui la composent. 

Malgré l'omniprésence des réflexions autour du sexe, qui d'ordinaire me rebutent, j'ai trouvé ce roman très subtil. La plume délicate de l'autrice se déploie au fil des pages, se chargeant de plus en plus d'émotions à mesure qu'elle rassemble autour d'elle ses différentes identités et s'en pare comme d'un manteau. Dans n'importe quel autre roman, la façon que la narratrice a de se définir par le regard que les hommes portent sur elle m'aurait exaspérée, mais ici j'en garde surtout l'impression d'un portrait en creux et en reliefs qui explore toutes les nuances d'une personnalité tiraillée, et ne se contente pas d'une contemplation nombriliste, car il se fait aussi l'écho de l'histoire coloniale de la France et de l'empreinte indélébile qu'elle a posé sur des territoires et des corps. 

I started writing a blurb for this book but I couldn't put my finger on the atmosphere. How to describe something that is so dark, so poetic but also so mundane? The Bone People is a sneaky book. It starts quite lyrical, lures you in with the author's very unique way with words, and slowly lets darkness seep in until you can't stop reading but you're increasingly disturbed by what you discover. This is a harrowing, harrowing book. It's mostly about the peculiar relation between the three main characters - reclusive artist Kerewin Holmes, the boy who meets her and disrupts her world, and the boy's father Joe who is capable of the most tender fatherly love and the most excruciating violence. These three humans gravitate towards each other, staying at arm's length or coming dangerously close to one another.

The author's Maori culture shines through, seeping into words and sentences to add a glint here, a depth there.

Rep: aro/ace MC.

Jade, or rather Geok Huay, is a young Chinese woman in 1920's multicultural London, eeking out a life as a writer of women magazine columns and literary reviews, until one day her path crosses that of the famous author of the moment whose book she has just written a scathing review of.
This novella was a lot of fun, with a diverse cast of characters (both in terms of origin & sexuality). The narrator tells her adventures in her journal, and her witticisms reminded me of I Capture the Castle (a book I adore). One thing that really threw me off, I'd rather point out, is the very graphic sex scene. I wish, given that the narrator tells the story retrospectively, that that scene had been put a little more into context rather than being thrown at the reader like that. Apart from this, there were interesting character dynamics, and a lot of themes packed into this quick story, including a distinction between romantic and sexual attraction which was quite welcome.
Rep : Chinese MC, Indian secondary character, lesbian secondary character.