peeled_grape's reviews
146 reviews

"It was okay" is a good way to describe this. These are all perfectly adequate stories, but the ones I read all fall into clichés, and it is frustrating. I wasn't necessarily moved, touched, or inspired by anything, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were bad. "Serviceable" is another good word. Meh.

This one was surprisingly hard to put down. The protagonist shows a kind of neurodiversity -- we're never told what, exactly -- who deals with adapting to other people's expectations of her. We get a close first-person perspective, so we get all of her thoughts, and the novel does a really great job of showing the logic Keiko walks herself through. This is the most interesting part of the novel: her logic, the way she acts in social situations, how she interacts with others. It reminds me so much of Stephen Florida except that it is more explicit about everything.

It is embarrassing how little of a grasp I had on this. I have no idea how to read it. The first fifty or so pages are perfectly accessible, and then the novel totally shifts. The genre and tone changed so suddenly I didn't know whether or not we were even in the same story, and then, by the time I realized it was the same story, I already felt as if I had been thrown in the deep end. This is part of the work of the novel, though: There is the play with gender and race and performance and the relationship between all of that, but almost as much a part of this is the reader's experience. Take the focus on pausing, for example -- there is an unrelenting amount of em dashes in this, which creates pauses instead of clean sentences that flow all the way through. There is also the images, which throw a break in the text, and the sentence fragments and the line breaks and the English spellings (?) for Japanese words. Given this isn't a translation and was published in the U.S., I'm assuming that we are meant to make us pause to look them up or suffer through not understanding it. Even the first section plays into this -- the writing itself is distracted, something accomplished through the narrator's voice, forcing us to wait for an explanation for what the "Tuna Affair" is, even though it's introduced in the first sentence.

All of this is very good and interesting work, but I have no idea what to do with it yet. I have a feeling I'll come back to this in a few years and then be like !! oh! But today is not that day.

Okay, I am not the audience for this one. I couldn't quite get my grounding on any of these stories, and I wasn't connecting with it. It was and is still wildly comforting to read stories about non-binary people by non-binary people, though, and that was magic.

I think the most interesting parts of this novel are at the very beginning and the very end. The first chapter does a really cool thing by leading us to believe we are going to read something boring and then both subverts our expectations and breaks the genre we were led to believe the book was. The magical realism here is fantastic, and the weirdness is fantastic. The way all of that is handled is great. The one complaint I have is that the family is by far the most interesting part of this book, and the legal thriller part of it felt like a distraction from that. It was purposeful to a certain point, and the ending did a nice job bringing us back to the family, but I was not at all invested in the trail.

I actually wished the trial had gone horribly wrong, and that she would be forced to confront the harmful parts of herself. Everything seems to wrap up too nicely, and we didn't get the emotional release I had been hoping for.

Okay, this was all very good and charming and then “Hell Is the Absence of God” absolutely floored me.

The line “And God sent him to Hell anyway” was such a wonderful breakage of the rules of this world. It is the one time I have seen rules established and broken in a way that doesn’t leave me feeling cheated. Cannot emphasize enough the effect of that line, which is, in my opinion, the best in the entire collection.

“Story of Your Life” is also really great, though I’ve heard a lot about it. It was super hyped up and it wasn’t surprising when it was good.

All of these are stories of religion and science and the intersection of the two. Most of it uses science to give credibility to religious tales in a speculative fashion, though “Hell Is the Absence of God” is fun, outright satire, making natural disasters and medical anomalies of angels. Different tone, same idea. The stories can get a little heavy on the world-building—I found it hard to follow at points—but it tends to come together.

Oh boy. I think I should have liked this one a lot more than I did. I typed out a longer review here and then it got wiped so here is the gist: I felt cheated by the world building (or lack thereof), and some of it left me frustrated. I could never get into it all the way. Emotionally, I felt like the parts I really could’ve gotten with were the parts least elaborated on. I don’t know, it was perfectly fine, and Haber is horrible but excellently written, but I just thought it was okay.

First: don’t read this book in public. It is a book about trees, yes, but dear god, it’s also about tragic deaths and accidents, and traces entire lifetimes in ways that make you realize you and everyone you love will end one day whether you like it or not. It is haunting and extensive. brb, now I have to tell some people that I love them and nothing bad is allowed to happen to them ever. I’m not emotional over a 500-page book about trees, YOU are.

This starts off as a short story collection before moving into braided-narrative novel territory: forest-as-novel form. It is well aware of its form, first showing us the nature of trees and then allowing us to realize its connection in the text. There is a pattern to the (many) plot twists in here, but for some reason, I never saw it coming, and everything feels like a surprise—does a great job of subverting expectations throughout.

I also have to speak to my experience reading it—I did not expect to be this invested, or this hypnotized. I have not been sucked into reading a book the way I was here for a long time. Putting it down is like waking up from a nap. It seems to know the exact moment when you get bored and switches tactics right then. Incredible piece of work. There are some books that I read and I’m like “yes, I can see a point in my life where I will be able to create something as good as this,” but oh my god, there is so much control over every part of this book.

Just tore through this one. It’s somewhere between a short story collection and a novel—every other story is about the same people, progressing chronologically—all of it about sex and family/community and queerness and race, all of it centered in Houston. This seems interested in grittiness, too, the way things get dirty and messy and don’t work out for the best sometimes.

My favorite stories were “Lot,” “Waugh,” and “Shepherd,” but all of them blend together, really. Loved the way the dialogue was formatted, loved the form of some of these stories, esp. “Alief.” I’ll be referencing this one for a while.

A short story collection very much in conversation with Yoko Ogawa and Samanta Schweblin. The imagery here is incredible, and rivals Ogawa. It plays so much with implication, never quite telling you what happened, leaving you to guess but giving you enough to understand. It was okay—very good as far as horror goes, though. I don’t really have a lot of thoughts; it was perfectly serviceable, though the work this is doing seems largely to operate within the horror genre. “Adela’s House” and “End of Term” are my favorites.