readingpicnic's reviews
475 reviews

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for a free digital ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was beyond excited to receive an ARC of this book and let out a “yippee!” of joy! Full of the morbid humor I’ve come to love and expect from Emily Austin, she is a definite auto-read author for me. I’m also obsessed with the continuation of the lesbian main characters of her novels having old woman names, which brings me such unbridled joy. This one’s for the undiagnosed neurodivergent mentally ill sapphics who never quite got along with their family members due to not understanding social cues and were constantly admonished for being too “rude,” “ungrateful,” “impolite,” “abrasive,” “blunt,” and “difficult” and now live in a constant state of anxiety that they are off-putting to everyone around them. I just feel like Emily Austin scooped her main characters out of my brain whenever I read her books–they are far too relatable. Please picture me giggling quietly to myself at my library service desk while reading this. I honestly did not expect the twist ~60% through the book, and it was a pleasant surprise and a great shift in the storytelling, as I was starting to feel that it was getting a bit repetitive for me. I think this book could have easily only included Sigrid's POV and given us her perspective of Margit, but I was really glad that her perspective was shared to, as she is not holding it together like Sigrid thinks she is, and it really showed her complexity as a character--really great way of showing the distance that has grown between the sisters and how they have warped views of each other. The small town politics present through most of the story was also far too relatable, especially the arguments with family members, the pressure to keep quiet and maintain a false sense of peace even while the people around you are spouting hatred, the Facebook comment arguments (which I did partake in with someone from my town about wedding cake makers refusing to serve queer people). I found myself highlighting so many quotes while I was reading and having as good of a time as I could due to the subject matter dealing heavily with mental illness and su*cide. I've come to love how there's always some little mystery that constantly pesters at the main characters of Emily Austin's books: the missing cat in Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, the people "fucking" upstairs in Interesting Facts About Space, the googly eye thief in this book. There's just a really nice consistency across all of these books and they feel inextricably connected with their main characters working through mental health struggles and questions of what it means to be a good person. I think if you enjoyed her other books, you would enjoy this one as well--just have some patience with the "attempts" chapters and know that they aren't the format of the whole book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Holiday House/Peachtree/Pixel+Ink for a free digital ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Phew, this was a hell of a book. Chock full of gore, generational trauma, growing up trans and queer in a very rural area, deadly family feuds, and how the land holds its history, I would not say this is for the faint of heart. My reading experience was full of grimacing, wincing, and shuddering. I felt a deep connection to Miles as someone who grew up in a rural hometown in Michigan that was shockingly similar to the story's West Virginian town, although I figured out my transness much later. Similar to Miles, I was naive in my belief that my parents were good people, and therefore, if I came out as trans to them, they would do the work to understand. Instead, I send TikToks to a groupchat of "how to use they/them pronouns" that go ignored and unopened, similar to the abundance of resources Miles painstakingly collects in his coming out email to his parents, which they ignore at first. The growth of his family and the way they stuck together even when they didn't understand Miles' transness fully was a consistence I needed in this book, painful learning curves and all. There was also an emphasis on being queer and trans without leaving your rural hometown--acknowledging that we still exist in rural spaces, even if the world seems to think we don't.
I really liked the discussions of neurodivergence, both because they were relatable and because they highlighted the importance of finding neurodivergent community to support you and share advice on making your environment as accessible as possible for your needs (loved the shower ritual scene that Amber shared with Miles; it warmed my heart and made me rethink how I force myself into discomfort because I feel like I should be able to handle it.)
I will say that this book lost me towards the middle when it felt like an endless loop of "let's kill these kids! but wait, they're a product of their environment, so isn't this wrong, actually?" I don't know how to feel about the violence these kids enacted on each other throughout this book

and that the conclusion for most of them was gruesome and bloody death

--it made a lot of the valid arguments about how they weren't necessarily at fault for how they were raised and the pressures that forced them into working for the Davies' feel meaningless to me. 
I'll admit I don't know a lot about communism, but it felt like it was kind of sloppily slipped into the story at some points? Like, it felt like the author just wanted to talk about communism and threw in their thoughts as they saw fit. 

More weird plot things that didn't make much sense to me: Miles' parents not guessing that the Davies' and their posse attacked him until Miles said it outright late into the story because it seemed so obvious; Cooper's death felt like a cop-out to me because he was mentally ill and "too far gone" instead of doing more with his character, and I wonder if part of killing him off was to make room for a queer-platonic relationship between Miles and Dallas; the insistence on recreating history with both Miles' family sending him off to trap Noah with the same tools as his ancestor and Davies' insistence on killing Miles with the railroad spike just like his ancestor did to Saint; the family absolutely normalizing Miles and Cooper killing Paul and Eddie as if their family feud excuses them as casualties; genuinely how did Noah know so much about Miles' life and actions?

I think I enjoyed this book overall? The writing style and sensory details were good, but I think the plot just lost me a little bit.

A very excellent look behind the scenes of Joshua Whitehead's writing and storytelling craft. Having read Jonny Appleseed before this book was really beneficial to my understanding and appreciation of the Joshua's discussions of character and story creation--I loved the imagery of his stories staying attached to him like umbilical cords. I do kind of feel like this book wouldn't have hit quite as hard if I hadn't read Jonny Appleseed first, since they discuss it at such length throughout. I liked the discussions of translation in this book and how authors don't owe it to their readers to translate non-English languages into English--that it's on the reader to do that work or it's simply not for them; how it's like an easter egg for speakers of those languages; how the reader's work of translating language is like a collaboration between them and the author. The comments about the inaccessibility of academic writing being a hindrance or barrier to most people from learning about social justice, theory, and philosophy was so true, and I loved that he slides these topics into his fiction books to try and make them more accessible to a wider audience. The images and layout of this little book was also visually stunning. It did seem like a lot of the interviewer's questions came down to her not realizing that something that was included in Jonny Appleseed was common in Indigenous culture or in the Peguis First Nation and that he was trying to portray those day to day experiences and styles of communicating accurately (such as the comfortability discussing sex, the importance/informativeness of dreams, the humor within his book, etc.)

This book is for the gender neutral girlies who spent their childhoods deeply entrenched in fandom culture on Tumblr (or in my case, Tumblr posts that filtered through into Facebook)--the Larry shippers especially. Reminiscent of the show Swarm and the book Y/N by Esther Yi, this book gets into the nitty gritty sides of fandom culture from two sides: the shippers (a dedicated member of a band's fandom who runs a popular fan Twitter for the band and often reads stories about them on AO3) and the shippee (a member of the band who is often shipped with his bandmate/best friend, which causes him great distress). Oseman dives into the benefits of fandom for queer escapism, pointing out how people in fandoms are often queer girls or gender diverse people looking for community online since they often cannot find it in real life. However, they don't shy away from the negative aspects of fandom, such as extreme/toxic fans who take it too far and make the whole fandom look bad (aka the brick incident), as well as the negative effects that fandom can have on the members of the band in this novel, particularly due to lack of privacy: Jimmy being outed as trans, as well as having frequent panic attacks, depersonalization, and s*icidal thoughts; Rowan's personal life being exploited and exposed to the detriment of his romantic relationship, which becomes very toxic and argumentative; Lister's alcoholism, the biphobia and objectification he experiences, and his experience of being groomed and taken advantage of by an older woman at 16 that he hasn't quite come to terms with. Basically, as Rowan put it, they all need therapy. There are some very heavy topics in this book, particularly mental illness, as is par the course for Oseman's books, but I personally considered it a mostly light read that I devoured in very few sittings; the romantic tension/maybe temporarily one-sided crush also had me giggling and kicking my feet, which is the effect Oseman's romances always have on meee. The characters were so lovable, the relationships felt so real, and I'm excited to pore over Alice's social media for illustrations of these characters, which always feels like a treat after finishing one of their books.

The art style was magnificent, and I was just in awe staring at some of these illustrations, especially the unsettling imagery of her being torn in half by a crack in the earth. I'd definitely say this falls beneath the weird girlhood umbrella, but there is a lot of trauma that comes with that as a queer immigrant from Germany with a very religious and abusive family. The storytelling and the illustrations were in a perfect balance to me in terms of my engagement, so I tried to savor this. The possible plot twist of her Nazi-supporting grandma being Jewish was wild. I think that she gives a lot of depth to her family members with internalized homophobia, antisemitism, etc. because she doesn't write them off immediately. They have failed her and shamed her in so many disgusting ways, but they also have so much that they went through that informs their ways of thinking, and she tries to learn more about their experiences through conversations with them. The part where her mom reveals that she used to have queer relations with girls in her orphanage in her argument for why lesbianism is wrong really broke my heart because that homophobia is INTERNALIZED as fuck. The overarching theme of the fragility and malleability of memory was also done so incredibly well, especially the generational aspects of it with how she doesn't remember a lot of her childhood, her mother saying that Jesus is protecting her from her bad childhood war memories, and her grandma's memories being very fragmented and repeated often. Just an incredible graphic memoir overall.

Honestly, the humor was not for me, and this is a book made up almost entirely of humorous essays. I enjoyed some of it, but reallyy had to embrace the cringe of millennial humor to power through. 

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Knopf for providing me with a free digital ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. To start off, if you still have the option to just read this book now without getting approved for it on NetGalley like I did, then do it! 
This book really broke my heart. I get so emotional when I witness parents supporting their trans children (maybe because my parents don't know I'm trans and think I just changed my name for fun idk). The transphobia from their community is brutal, the justifications and mental gymnastics of the parents not hearing and seeing that their child was trans sooner (even when their child knew from a SUPER early age and told them explicitly), and the comments that Greta makes regarding her transness like "'I'm sad. Why didn't you let me transition earlier?'" or "'Nobody in this town understands what transgender is. So I don't want to be transgender anymore. But I can't be a boy, so I don't want to exist.'" HEARTBREAKING. You can tell while reading this that the mom regrets so much in how she first reacted to her child's trans identity, since she started off denying it or thinking it was a "phase," and you know what, she had a huge learning curve. The way she grows to support and advocate for her child just gave me hope that there are parents like this in the world. I'm so happy that the switch flipped in her head to take her child seriously and believe her. The way the author connected her present situations with her daughter to her gay brother's past was also seamlessly done in my opinion and really shows the author's growth in knowing now how she could have supported both of them better throughout her life. 
The parts where the mom was desperately trying to get accommodations for her autistic daughter reminded me a lot of my mom trying to get accommodations for my brother with ADHD in our rural farm town middle school because they did NOT want to make education more accessible for him. My mom turned to her friend who had struggled hard to get accommodations for her neurodivergent children and she was able to give my mom tips, and this accommodation grapevine is so important in these situations. 
I just felt very emotional reading this altogether, but if you can make it through the difficult read, it is so worth it. Protecting trans kids is more important now than ever, and this book truly exemplifies that.

This was such a weird and creative little book with incredible wordplay, humor, and imaginings of the future of transness, the evolution of many different species in response to climate change, censorship by governments, and role reversal of commonly held assumptions about disability with youth and elders. I usually despise the dystopian genre as a whole, but the cover was so beautiful that I couldn't resist. Being transgender? Yeah, that's the norm in this book 😎🏳️‍⚧️
The way that climate change and pollution have run rampant and changed the environment irreversibly was such interesting world-building, like fully grown bamboo being the size of a pinky finger or animals in Japan seemingly only existing with a rent-a-dog service that Yoshiro uses. Disability and transness are incredibly prevalent in most, if not all children in this society, which was an interesting concept, and I really liked the execution. I'm not sure if I understood the ending other than it was a teen's t4t fantasy, which was pretty epic. There were a few parts where the story abruptly shifted to 1st person POV which threw me off a bit. 

I picked this up after seeing the multimedia artforms on the cover and the chapter introductions, which I fell in love with. I would just stare at these chapter introduction pages for about five minutes each time I came to one to really soak them in. This was such a feral girlhood book, which I LIVE for. I also really appreciated how the topic of CSA was handled in such a thoughtful and honest way, as I almost never see it talked about in depth in books due to the shame that we associate with it. I had to write down the quote associated with her lack of memories (and avoidance/refusal to remember these memories) of it because it hit so close to home: "Especially because you don't remember that time, you can't forget it but you do remember never to remember it, the time when the shattering into pieces became a way of life."

I've had to sit with this book for a few days after finishing it so that I could try to do it justice in a review. The first half of the book centers around the subject of interest in the latter half of the book, the Palestinian girl who was gang-r*ped by Israeli soldiers and then murdered. The main character in the latter half of the book, a journalist, becomes interested in the girl's story after realizing that her death date was exactly 25 years before the MC's birth date, which caught her eye and generated a need to know more about this girl. The two parts of the book connect in pieces that the MC doesn't even realize because she doesn't have access to the information from the first half of the book, and it's essentially lost knowledge/history. She wishes to feel some connection to the girl who died while not realizing that some of her actions and sensory experiences are replicating what the girl went through, and this strong desire for connection coupled with the not knowing the connections do exist really devastated me. Some examples I wrote down were the dog howling/barking haunting the MC, and the dog also seemed to be a ghost at one point on page 94? There's also a scene on page 92 where the MC spills gasoline on herself after saying that she wishes she could stay in the area longer to get a clue as to what the girl endured, even though her reeking of gasoline for the remainder of the book is part of what the girl endured at the hands of the soldiers.  In the first half of the book, the parts where the main soldier in charge was frantically crushing every bug in his room every night and was losing his mind a bit also fucked me up a lot. The imagery of barriers, both physical and metaphorical was very powerful in this book, especially with the way the MC worried over them in every interaction. One quote that really stuck out to me was "By the way, I hope I didn't cause any awkwardness when I mentioned the incident with the soldier, or the checkpoint, or when I reveal that we are living under occupation here" (56). I saw a TikTok explaining greenwashing before reading this book, and I'm really glad that I went into it with that context since I saw it come up again and again with mentions of Canada Park and Israeli soldiers saying that they were going to revitalize the land because Palestinians didn't know/didn't care to take care of it (not fucking true btw). 
The last few pages of the book felt so aimless and wandering as the MC realizes that she truly cannot find the lost history of the girl and that her journey cannot have a satisfying ending because of all the barriers that prevent her from this knowledge. The ending of the book was shocking, but also not shocking due to the violence of this book and the almost expected violence by Israeli soldiers. The only part of this book that I wasn't a huge fan of was how it's written with every single action spelled out if that makes sense. Like, if a character got out of a vehicle, then every single part of that action was detailed from start to finish. I'm sure there's a reason for this method of storytelling, but maybe I can't see what it is in relation to the overarching themes of the book right now. Overall, this is such a necessary read.
Also, side note, I saw that someone added this to the Autistic Reads Challenge, and I agree that I was contemplating while reading this whether the main character of the second half was autistic and/or neurodivergent due to her thought processes, but I wasn't sure whether that was intentional on the author's part. I hesitate because she may process the world in these ways and think in these ways due to trauma and the circumstances in which she lives under occupation and has to be on high alert and think through interactions carefully, but acquired neurodivergence and disabilities due to trauma are valid, so I'm on the edge with this.