pineconek's Reviews (816)

Raise your hand if you're weirdly into unrealistic thrillers provided that they're internally consistent and keep you guessing because...same.

I'm so glad I read this trilogy. It started with a good book, followed by more of the same with higher stakes, followed by this beast intent on shaking things up.

The way things are shaken up can be polarizing. The general story arc doesn't follow "mystery is established, clues are collected, vital clue is revealed, mystery is exposed" which can be destabilizing. Personally, I found it a lot of fun. It hooked me and pulled me in the same way that The Girl Who Played With Fire did, so that's saying a lot.

While still being a teen thriller that leaves us frustrated with some of the teen's unrealistic choices ("Pip, you have loving parents!! Tell them about what's happening!!"), I just really enjoyed it. I wanted a fun entertaining book, and it delivered.

Recommended if you enjoyed the first books, are ready for a different flavor of story, and don't mind some Gruesome Violence in your thrillers.

More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/7rhiwvWp9YY

What does it say about me that I enjoy reading about people being sad? That I enjoy watching multiple generations interact in innocuous ways but know that they're shaped by unspeakable traumas? That I enjoy reading about loneliness, grief, missed opportunities, loss, and all the painful complicated things that come with it?

Well, "enjoy" may not be the right word.

In this sequel to Beartown (which is a stellar book that I highly recommend), we revisit familiar characters and meet some old ones. Few things happen but, what does happen, matters a great deal. Backman continues to tease us by first revealing the plot ("someone will die"), and then going over it again and again, like a sculptor refining the details, and the reader gets to speculate until they are slammed in the face with what actually happens.

Anyway, I love it.

("Love" may also not be the right word).

Things that would normally annoy me somehow work when Backman does them. The book is sappy, sentimental, repetitive, and filled with platitudes. But I can't stop reading it. And I can't stop feeling Big Emotions while reading it.

Recommended if you're looking to feel Big Emotions about a sport you may or may not care about (I have no interest in hockey, and yet), are prepared to drown in character's ruminating on their trauma and making not great decisions as a result, and your heart dials are set to "sappy" rather than "skeptical".

Can't wait for book #3.

More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/CQjXPtxuYVo

I'm mostly just confused.

I want to have liked this and I want to get it. But I'm left with so many unanswered questions and an unsatisfactory sense of "wait, was this implied? What about that?".

It's a bleak and well-written story and I think I need someone to explain it to me. 1.5 stars rounded up because I'll probably think about this for a while even though I didn't enjoy reading it.

I'm not sure who to recommend this to since I thought I would be the target audience.

I am marinating in mixed feelings.

On one hand - this was cool and very good. The writing is gorgeous and extremely evocative. The horror imagery is memorable and gruesome. The characters are flawed, charming, awful, endearing, and everything in between.

And some of the passages .. I rarely get scared while reading horror, but a scene in the middle of this one had me needing to leave the lights on.

But then there were many a thing I didn't like. I often felt confused and waited for something big to be revealed. I wanted more answers that the book gave me. The balance between suspense and payoff was too skewed for me to enjoy the book as a comprehensive whole.

I think that's really where I'm settling - while I profoundly enjoyed several portions of this book, I found other parts dull and bloated. I was hoping that the latter would be followed by lightbulb moments that made them essential, but alas.

In short, this book was a better version of Stephen King's It.

Recommended if you enjoy slow paced chonky horror books, don't mind being left in the dark as the story unfolds, and love a plot with a hefty political backdrop.

Me @ the first section: nice
Me @ the next few sections: ok a bit slow but nice
Me @ the last section: uh

Wool is a page turner with a stellar opening. The first portion was self published independently and I'm not surprised that the people clamoured for more. I'm also not surprised that it's been further picked up for a tv show (I saw the pilot before reading the book, haven't seen more yet).

I'm glad I read the book and saw the concept play out. What can I say - I'm a sucker for vertical Snowpiercer.

But the omnibus started losing me about 80% through. I like my sci fi focused on social commentary and dialed as far away from blockbuster action vibes as possible. I don't care when the side characters that our main character cares about die in a showdown that serves the plot filler. I don't care when our villain gets his comeuppance, when the main characters finally kiss, where the tone of the sequel is set in the next few pages to the point where you can hear the triumphant string soundtrack. This tone shift from the bleak and mysterious opening left me unsatisfied and staying up late reading low reviews. I agreed with a lot of them.

I'm not sure whether to continue with the series or with the tv show. The show pilot raised interesting ideas about reproductive control that I was disappointed to not see in the book. I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed the book more had I not seen that first episode.

Recommended if you too enjoy the idea of vertical Snowpiercer, like your doomsday books featuring a female protagonist (who, not to be that person, was surprisingly frequently naked), and are ok with plots with unambiguous morality.

Oof.

Executed differently, this would have been one of my favorite books ever. A genre I love (clifi! Survival!) with some great themes (gender! Race! Class! Immersive technology! Man vs nature!) and multiple plotlines that come together? Yes please. All the right ingredients were there for me to read this in a night.

But I didn't read it in a night. It took time and deliberate effort. I wanted to enjoy it and kept compromising with myself - yes, it reads a little YA-y, but I'll try to overlook it. Yes the characters are a bit one-dimentional, but I'll try and overlook that. Yes, the plots are difficult to follow and don't make much sense but... (You get where I'm going in this).

I don't want to be too harsh in my review given how badly I wanted to like this book. But the social issues are tackled with the subtlety of an Instagram infographic, the dialogue and character interactions feel stiff and unrealistic, and I just couldn't "get into it". I was rooting for this book, and ended up just being relieved when I finally finished it.

Instead of this one, I would recommend picking up Parable of the Sower for clifi that tackles similar themes, Good Morning Midnight (by Lily Brooks Dalton) for the "being stranded in the arctic with a small child" vibes, and Sea of Tranquility for the multiple plots that neatly slot together.

I love stories of resilience, survival, and community support. I also love claustrophobic stories where disaster occurs largely off-screen and characters need to deal with this major but not fully defined disaster.

Moon of the Crusted Snow is a gorgeously written novel following a modern anishnaabe community living in northern Canada. When an ill-defined disaster strikes, not only do the power and communication grids down but supplies of fuel and food from the south stop coming. The community is left to fend for themselves at the start of what will be a long winter. And then, a stranger comes to town...

Other than that, this is somewhat of a "nothing happens" book, where the main plot is predictable. This however works amazingly, since we get to focus on the intricacies of the culture and the community. As such, this familiar premise serves as an excellent backdrop for exploring tensions between modernity and tradition as well as themes of isolationism and the alpha-male type of survivalism seen in post apocalyptic settings.

Highly recommended but especially if you are interested in anishnaabe culture and enjoy "soft post-apocalypse" fiction that emphasizes humanity and explores the cost (and reward) of survival. I'll be looking forward to the sequel.

I mean...who hasn't fallen in love with someone on public transit?

Let's talk about the good: Jane is hot.

Let's talk about the bad: the subway car of that is this book goes off the rails.

I really liked the first third of this book. The characters were caricatures but in a good way. I approached the book looking for wholesome fluff and romance, and I really got that at first. Lots of pining, lots of awkwardness, and even a bit of good banter.

But then the banter gradually got worse, the characters began to grate on me, and the plot was filled with little conveniences. I'll just go ahead and spoil this: "oh no we need money!! Good thing my grandmother who was barely mentioned before suddenly died and left me the correct amount". The world building in general struck me as a bit juvenile (other examples include our main character never going to school but somehow graduating, and also skipping work for weeks straight). I felt like I was reading someone's romanticized and formulaic idea of life rather than something more raw, real, or relatable.

But Jane was hot, so I kept reading. But it wasn't enough for me to overlook all anything little moments that, past the 50% mark, made me want to dnf the book.

(I also went into this book in search of the feelings Nina LaCour gave me in Everything Leads to You and Yerba Buena, so hit me up with recommendations closer to that if you have any.)

Meanwhile, I'll recommend this to you're looking to experience following through with falling in love with a stranger on public transit and are comfortable overlooking narrative issues in favor of hallmark-vibe fluff.

This has big "why didn't I read this in highschool" energy.

Don't get me wrong, I loved our speculative fiction curriculum in highschool - 1984, brave new world, Harrison Bergeron...

Spec fic remains one of my favorite genres. It's weird as an adult to be both super excited that other amazing classic spec fic exists (imagine my delight when I first read Octavia Butler almost a decade out of highschool) and annoyed that you didn't get to this earlier.

Anyway - that's how I feel about LeGuin. I feel like she was kept from me, and I feel like this story specifically was kept from me. And I'm both annoyed about that and delighted that I read this today. And to think it was because I wanted to understand Catherine Lacey's Pew.

This is such a short story that the summary spoils the plot. But the plot isn't what matters. The ideas explored in these few pages touch on class, race, colonialism, capitalism, morality, Christianity, selfishness, sacrifice, utilitarianism, compassion, responsibility... The story is a seed for a new angle of discussion when thinking about what a perfect world entails. And it seems like we've been collectively wrestling with that question for centuries.

Recommended if you have an overly keen interest in the trolley problem (I should make a list of book recs specifically for this), love classic sci fi but have missed out on the amazing female contributions to the genre, and want a short story to punch you in the stomach.

This almost qualifies as a retelling. While I didn't know that going in, this book hit me like a ton of bricks.

When I first finished the book, I grappled with it as a stand alone piece of art. I loved it but didn't completely understand it. We follow a main character nicknamed Pew who has no discernable identity. Pew was found sleeping in a church pew and is shuttled from family to family who try to get information about who Pew is in order to know how to treat them. Some characters relate to Pew and become vulnerable; others show a distinct attitude of "We are different from You". And all this in the week leading up to the Festival. And the tension rises along with hints about the nature of the festival.

I assumed it was inspired by Jackson's the Lottery. I found the way that the tension mounted paralleled that story really beautifully and was masterfully done. But the ending made no sense to me. I'd enjoyed the journey, but the destination was confusing.

Lo and behold, turns out the work cited at the beginning was important. And it was an Ursula LeGuin short story I had been meaning to read for years but putting off. My library had a digital copy available, so I read it and then stared at the ceiling for an outrageously long time.

And that's how this review shot from a "3.5 idk if I should round it up or down" to a staggering contender for one of my top books of the year.

Pew is in direct conversation with The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, and it shines when seen from this light. This story focuses on a simple question: is the lonely excruciating suffering of one worth it if it maintains the happiness of everyone else?

Pew expands on themes found in the original story and asks some questions more explicitly: - does it matter who the child is? How old they are? If they're male or female? Does race matter? How, and to who? How do we see the child when conceiving of this thought experiment?

We get answers along the lines of "yes, to some, in different ways". When viewed from this angle, every character interaction may as well be a manifesto of their personal answers to these questions.

I kinda wanna reread it now. I wanna annotate it. I wanna enroll in an English course so I could write an essay about this book.

Highly recommended reading alongside the LeGuin story. You'll like enjoy this if you've felt the stifling atmosphere of organized religion, have struggled with identity yourself, and are interested in moral philosophy.