pineconek's Reviews (816)

Anaïs Nin short stories aren't stories - they're paintings. 

I enjoy beautiful writing that doesn't have much plot but has a lot of inner torment. There's a profound cosmopolitan sadness in these stories and many beautiful passages to underline. We experience the inner world of women seeking both love and an understanding of love. 

For the reasons above, I also find it challenging to review Nin. These stories melt together in my memory, and are not dissimilar from her other works. But what she does, she does well. 

Recommended if you've read some Nin and are craving more, and also recommended to read in the sun on a riverbank while eating cherries. 3 stories, 3 stars.

A murderer and the women who met him. 

Notice that it's not the women who loved him, although that would be a cliche. 

The killer's story is told in a dual timeline: the hours counting down to his execution are narrated to him (in second person), and major events in his life are recounted through the eyes of women he knew. We meet Lavender, his mother, who I remain extremely fond of and who had a truly terrible early adulthood. We meet Saffy, a girl our killer briefly shared a foster home with and who meets him again as an adult. While we don't directly hear from his girlfriend and wife Jenny, her sister's account is equally harrowing. And then there's Blue... 

There are portions of this book that, in retrospect, are a little bit clumsy. I've never been a fan of second-person narration, and I don't love how it's used here. Some of the puzzle pieces slot together a little too cleanly, and I had to suspend disbelief in a few moments. 

But I love a good character study, and especially when it turns into a character study of half a dozen well crafted characters. The atmosphere was exquisite and there were portions of the book I could hear and smell. It scratched the itch for deep American grit that I've had since reading The Devil All The Time. 

Recommended if you're both interested in serial killers and the cult of personality that surrounds them, are interested in how tragedy ripples through many lives, and have mixed feelings about the death penalty. 4.75 stars rounds up for GR.

I think it's time that I face the facts: I enjoy a good romance book. 

And this one was several layers of cute. Sickiningly so. We follow the at-first-fake romance of Elle, a free spirit astrologer, and Darcy, a stoic type-A actuary. As they keep seeing each other to maintain their ruse, they (and we) start to see each other as people - with all the baggage, insecurity, heartbreak, and fear that that entails. The supporting characters are entertaining and don't overshadow the story. I will likely pick up the sequel to this, which follows two of the side characters entering their own romance. 

This is not a serious book in the least - there's buzzfeed listsicles based on zodiac signs, many awkward scenes that may make you cringe, and it oozes with millenial angst. The plot is predictable but the lightness of the writing and the likeability of the characters made for a very enjoyable experience. I do want to say that I liked this one better than the other wlw romances I recently read (honey girl and one last stop), in which some bizarre elements had pulled me out of the story. Written in the Stars kept due course and got the "cheesy romcom" exactly right. 

Recommended if you're looking for a lighthearted funny wlw romance, if you know your birth chart and your big three, or if you're afraid of loving again after a big heartbreak. But really, this is a solid and wholesome piece of entertainment. Four bright stars. 

Jenny Lawson's first book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, was the first book that made me laugh out loud in a context in which I shouldn't be laughing. 

There's something incredibly endearing in her work, which I confess I haven't kept up with. I read this book nearly a decade after it was out (that means her daughter Hayley is basically a grown up now??) and it felt like reuniting with an old friend. A friend who sometimes irritates me, but usually because she's reminding me of things I find irritating about myself. A friend who effortlessly sneaks into my emotional defences and brings vulnerable tears to my eyes when I least expect them. 

I was a teenager when I first came across her mantra that "depression lies". I still remember that moment, circa 2011 and age 17, where I was terrifyingly learning to navigate moments that my brain just...short circuited. Turned on me. Lied. This simple concept was something I've clung onto more times than I can count. 

Now, at 30, I think a mantra of being furiously happy is a useful one to add to my repertoire. This book is a testament to "sometimes chronic illness flares and everything is terrible...but eventually that ends". And there's so much absurdly hilarious and wonderful life to live and enjoying it is worthy of a battle cry of furious happiness. Or something like that. 

Anyway, I'm not great at coherently reviewing books, but I do it incoherently because it makes me happy. So here's a "this is how the book made me feel" review. I recommend it if you want to feel this way too. 

4.5 stars on SG rounded up to 5 on GR.

I love stumbling upon gems that I wouldn't have picked up otherwise (and I love my libraries). 

See, my libraries sometimes make unlimited licenses of an ebook and/or audiobook available for a few weeks, usually in partnership with a federal or international book club. Hotline was that book last month, so I borrowed it in a "will read it I have time - if not, no biggie" way. And then I finished it in under 24 hours. 

Hotline follows Muna, a Lebanese woman who move to Montreal with her eight year old son in the late 80s. To make ends meet, she works for a not-quite-not-predatory call center in a company providing meal kits and dietary advice to people wanting to lose weight. She navigates the reality of immigration, poverty, Canadian weather, helping her child adjust, language barriers, education barriers, racism, feeling invisible in a new society, working a job with ridiculously high turnover, and isolation following trauma and tragedy. 

I'm not surprised that this gripped me. Firstly, it was tremendous to read about parts of Montreal that I love and know well (the shoutouts to the used bookstore, the Word, warmed my heart). Secondly, as a child of immigrants, I warm to good immigration stories. And finally, this was genuinely just a really great read. The author' inspiration was his own mother's story, and it shows. 

Recommended if you're interested in stories of resilience in the face of immigration, love the city of Montreal (but maybe not its ice storms), and want to have your heart broken by the things that immigrant parents endure for their children. 4.75 stars on SG rounded up to 5 on GR.

This book had me, lost me, and then charmed me back to itself at the end.

The Moon Goddess is made prisoner and cannot leave the moon, as decreed by the emperor. But no one knows that she has a daughter. Her daughter is eventually old enough to leave, enter the realms of the immortals and mortals, and to start devising a strategy to free her mother. 

There were portions of the book that I found quite trope-y and uninteresting. This happened most towards the 30% mark, which felt a lot like many "ok time for you to get your special education and weapons training so you can be a hero in the later part of the ye book" scenes that I read before. I felt similarly about the first battles, but this is more of a reflection of my own disinterest in fantasy battles than a reflection of the book.

I was worried that the rest of the book would be an alternation between battle and fetch quest with a side of love triangle, and I considered DNFing the book. While the above things did happen, they were done in less predictable ways that I had anticipated and kept my interest through to the end of the book. I'm a tough crowd to please when I read fantasy, largely because I'm more interested in character study than plot, but I ended up enjoying my time with this one.

Recommended if you generally enjoy mythological retellings centered on women (see the early 2020s publishing trend), don't mind a main character who is super good at most of the things she attempts, and don't mind a slow plot with a few gentle twists and turns. 3.5 stars on SG rounded down to 3 on GR.

I picked this up on a whim and had exactly zero idea what it was about. Turned out to be a book about a powerful female-separatist lesbian nun set in the dark ages in England, which was a wild concept from start to finish. 

I can't figured out how I feel about this book. The narrative style is somewhat strange - theres major time skips that gloss over things that likely should have been explained more, and there is remarkably little dialogue. The reader is sometimes forcibly distanced from the character's inner worlds, but at other times is allowed to peak closely at intimate and gruesome details. And gruesome they are - this book is a tapestry of famine, death, disease, isolation, self flagellation, and graphic births (in the middle ages, I need to reiterate). 

Recommended if you are looking to feel confusing feelings and are ready to be held at arm's length when reading about nuns of old. I think this is a 3.5 read, rounded down to 3 on GR, but I honestly have no idea. Reading this was weird, it made me feel weird, and I think that means that it's art.

The title of this trilogy-memoir truly sets the tone of it, and we get what's on the tin. 

In other words, we see Tove's life unfold in three acts: first, a childhood of poverty, self doubt, and squashed ambition. Then, a youth of false promises, false starts, all against the terrifying backdrop of early 1930s European politics. And we culminate in the personal tragedies of dependence, soured relationships, broken dreams. Overarching themes include art-as-lies, searching for a savior, searching for self reliance, and facing yourself. 

The trilogy is written with remarkable maturity and nothing feels embellished to make the author look better than she is. All flaws are on display, including those that she can't quite justify to herself either. It's a painfully naked read, and feels extremely intimate and vulnerable. I cannot overstate the rawness of it. 

Recommended if you are interested in a first-hand account of "woman as tortured artist" that feels simultaneously honest and voyeuristic, and want to have a rock in your stomach whenever you think back to reading this (which is how I currently feel, writing this review). These emotions are uncomfortable, 's all. 4.5 stars on SG rounded up to 5 on GR.

As I steadily make my way through Junji Ito's entire body of work, I remain impressed. That said, while Remina isn't the best of his that I've read, I  did enjoy it. After all, whole Ito can do better, many do much, much worse. 

Remina is a beautiful but shy sixteen year old girl whose father discovers a celestial body. He decides to name it Remina, after his daughter. She, in turn, has to deal with unwanted overnight fame that turns into a manhunt when the celestial Remina threatens to destroy planet Earth. 

It's whacky, the art is fantastic, and it works as a stand alone story. Recommended if you like his longer works, and especially if you enjoyed the vibes of Sensor (or if you liked Remina, go pick up Sensor). A quick bleak read. 3.75 stars on SG rounded up to 4 on GR.

Saying that this didn't work for me would be an understatement. 

(Feels controversial and scary to say publicly when the overall rating on GR currently stands as 4.29 but...oh well). 

I really enjoyed this book when I first picked it up. The writing was quite good, and the character of Amina that we were first introduced to was intriguing. I enjoyed the trope of longing for a quiet life, after retiring from a successful career (in piracy), only to be needed for one last hurrah. Gathering her rag tag crew for the mission was also fun. 

And then the book just lost me completely. 

The style of storytelling is specifically what didn't work for me. There were multiple cases of telling and not showing, as well as telling me one thing but showing another. I wanted to believe that our setting was the 12th century middle East, but the characters spoke and acted as if they were 21st century Americans. Similarly, our titular character was said to have been one of the most revered pirates, an absolute powerhouse, but that was far from what we saw. I quickly grew frustrated and disinterested with this book, and ended up only finishing it because I'd already devoted so much time to it. I did however first read a bunch of the 1-2 star reviews for it, which I recommend doing if you also found this to be a frustrating experience.

I wouldn't really recommend this one, as it just felt like an example of "good concept, terrible execution". I can't settle on a precise rating but I feel irritated and frustrated when I think of my experience with this book, so 1 star it is.