mercedes's Reviews (299)

Equilibrium. That's the good stuff.

I'd never heard of this book until I saw it in a display at the library I volunteer at. It hasn't stocked graphic novels until now, so this was a really exciting return to my roots.

The art style, messy and scribbly, is able to depict so much emotion, especially with the added watercolour. The scene where Elise finds Dagmar's perfume was a beautiful use of watercolour to represent a strong feeling. The story itself feels so realistic I actually thought it was a memoir at first. The author has an amazing connection to the reality of human actions and emotions and is able to show this through words and visual art so adeptly.

It's like I am an amusement park that's closed for the season. Everything is quiet. The carousels, the roller coaster, all the rides are just waiting. And then! You just have to kiss me on the neck
And the lights go on
The pavilions open
The chocolate wheels start spinning
People start pouring in
The carousels are filled
The popcorn machines overflow
The rollercoaster starts to climb
And far away, over the city, fireworks...
And this is when we've only just made it to the couch. 

I really enjoyed reading this book. From the get go C.S. Lewis explains Christianity in ways I hadn't heard before. I found his arguments compelling and his analogies and explanations were humorous and interesting. 

DNF @ 74%

This is the most irresponsible, unhealthy, eye-roll inducing book I've read in a while. The fact it's written by a therapist is disappointing and concerning, but at least serves as an explanation for why the entire thing is written in progressive therapy-speak. In the 2 hours I spent listening to this drivel I lost count of the amount of times terms like 'valid' and 'morally neutral' were used. 'Don't call them chores, call them care tasks!'... Give me strength.

This book can parade itself as self-help for neurodivergent people all it likes, but it's nothing more than self-destruction. 'Only shower once a week? You're SO valid. Until a while ago, people didn't even have showers! And they were fine!' Yeah, K.C., because they BATHED. The fact this is coming from a licensed therapist is appalling. Again and again, K.C. tells her readers it's okay for them to live in their own filth, and to subject others to it. She reiterates over and over and over again that it's not a 'moral failing' to have bad hygiene. The main reason she seems to believe that it isn't morally wrong to subject people to your poor hygiene is because this makes you feel bad. However, that has nothing to do with whether or not something is wrong, and feeling shame about something is a good indication that it is.

This is not to say we shouldn't have compassion for those struggling with cleaning their house (or themselves) and believe me, I've been there. And now that I'm out the other side I just cannot tolerate the coddling and excuses. At 17 or 18 I was still getting my mum to clean my bedroom and en suite because, as I'd been told online, I had issues with executive function (which K.C. discusses on multiple occasions) and I literally couldn't clean my own room because of my autism! The thing is, my mum wanted to clean my room about as much as I did. And instead of finding ways to get it done myself, I let my mum take on the added work of cleaning my room on top of cleaning the entire house and cooking all of the meals, because the internet had convinced me this was valid. This book has very few tips on how to keep house, but it does have a boatload of excuses that will make you feel a whole lot better and 'valid' for not cleaning your house. And this isn't helping people. This is irresponsible, and it's discouraging neurodivergent people from learning valuable life skills and having responsibility.

The very few tips that K.C. does include are mind boggling. She states that she would leave wet clothes in the washing machine until the smell of mildew became noticeable because she'd forget about it, and then leave clothes in the dryer until they wrinkled. Instead of setting a timer for the laundry, she says to put a laundry basket in every room of the house, to not fold your clothes, and then put everyone's clothes into the same wardrobe or just leave them in a pile somewhere. WHAT? The thought of just leaving piles of clean laundry around the house is so stressful... how is that genuinely helping anyone? All of her solutions are the most outlandish band-aid excuses for putting things off, things that will genuinely improve your life (like having clean clothes). She claims that shaming yourself for not cleaning is abusive - but then isn't giving yourself a messy, chaotic and unclean living space just as bad?

So much of her advice centres around buying single-use products. Don't want to wash dishes? Just buy paper plates! Haven't donated your old clothes yet? Just throw them away for the landfill! Struggle brushing your teeth? Buy one hundred single-use toothbrushes. She then claims she actually really cares about environmentalism, and buying single-use toothbrushes is really just the same as using a covid mask, because those are also single-use. Why feel bad about creating waste when corporations like Walmart do worse? And remember everyone, feeling bad is NOT ALLOWED. Everything we do is valid! Don't question your actions because you don't want to end up feeling bad! [Self care jargon]. Ugh. It feels like she just wrote this book in order to feel better about things she's doing that she knows deep down are wrong. If you're a stay at home parent with two very young children, it isn't right to make them live amongst day-week old dishes, or week old wet laundry, or rubbish scattered around the house that you didn't put into the bin. I just don't believe that's right.

It doesn't help that K.C.'s opinions in this book are presented as facts. She states that laziness doesn't exist on more than one occasion. She doesn't let us forget it. At one point she even says, 'remember, laziness doesn't exist.' Saying it doesn't make it so. That goes for a lot of what K.C. has stated in this book. I don't believe that this book has any genuine skills, advice or tips to give people. The one thing of value K.C. writes is to set a visual timer for a task. Any article or video online could've given you that tip. If you're struggling with cleaning your home or your personal hygiene, you can get through this. But it starts with making a difference, not an excuse. I find watching cleaning videos helps to get me in the mood for cleaning. When I struggled with showering every day, I'd watch personal hygiene tutorial videos from the 1950s. You and the people around you don't deserve to live in or around filth. Cleaning and being clean will massively improve your life. If this review sounds angry, it's because it is. I'm tired of people coddling neurodivergents in ways that will have an active impact on their life. That en suite I never cleaned at 18? It ended up having a lot of mold that I then had to breathe in for the next four years. Don't set us up for failure by making excuses for us, because all its doing is making people feel temporarily better about themselves.

I think if you read this on the basis of it being a horror novel you will be disappointed. At no point does it approach anything close to being scary, and the elements that you could maybe say are 'horrifying' don't really appear until the 60% mark. But if you go into it looking for a fresh take on the vampire novel... you may very well enjoy it as much as I did. The audiobook is delightful (although the narrator's narration voice sounds like a Barbie narrator. With all the talk of being indentured I felt like I was listening to Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper at points). Not sure if I would've enjoyed it as much if I read it rather than listened to it, I'd recommend the audiobook to be honest. I was gripped from beginning to end and found it a really intriguing and thrilling novel, but I can completely understand why others didn't. This is a horror novel almost in a 19th century sense, and doesn't really hold up to modern day qualifications of 'horror', but that's perfectly fine for me. 

I really tried with this, I hate DNFing books - especially classics. But this was just becoming torture. I was listening to it as an audiobook and even though the narrator was good, there were times where I'd rather just sit in silence than listen to it. Doing nothing was less boring than listening to this. It's such a shame because D.H. Lawrence had some really interesting things to say in regards to relationships, classism, the war, worker's rights, women's pleasure and the lack of it during intimacy with men... but jesus, some of the dialogue went on for FAR too long. I'd find myself zoning out for minutes at a time and when my focus came back to the audiobook, there were still having the same exact conversation and it had gone nowhere. 

 I wasn't sure what I was going to make of this considering that it's a retelling of a classic, and a young adult retelling at that. Retellings and adaptations of Frankenstein are overdone at this point, which is understandable because it's a solid classic and one that lives in the public consciousness more than perhaps any other. But The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein was a nice surprise.

This was insanely readable. At points it was obvious that it was written by a 21st century author, but at other points I completely forgot that fact and found myself fully immersed within the early 19th century setting. The concept of retelling the story from Elizabeth's point of view was an interesting one, and I enjoyed what Kiersten White did with the characters and the story. The twists were great and certainly added to how enjoyable this book is to read.

Maybe the best thing that came out of me reading this was that it made me want to reread Frankenstein, which will likely be the next book I pick up