readingpicnic's Reviews (500)

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. 

Maybe I’m silly, but I didn’t see the plot twist coming at all, and I didn’t expect this to get quite so creepy (pleasant surprise). This art style is so scrumptious; I adore the thick, clean lines. Emily was getting up to so many creepy kid antics, I loved it (like Rhoda from The Bad Seed vibes). The character growth with Anya was sweet. Hope her mom’s okay lol.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Quill Tree Books for a free digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Honestly, this was just a good book. I don’t know if it was the writing or the sweet story, but it was never far from my mind. I liked the representation of a queer kid trying to figure out their identity in an environment where it’s safe for them to do so; where they have queer and trans friends to turn to and family members who they know will support them. However, that’s not to say there isn’t transphobia and homophobia surrounding her, as most of the book centers on her local drag queen storytime becoming national news due to controversy and subsequently being canceled.
The way that the comic pages and art in the story show Mal exploring her identities as a queer Korean American child was really well done, and I love how the cover of the book connects back to this with her self-portrait in the story. Mal spends the majority of the story trying to be who everyone wants her to be to the point where she loses track of herself and feels a disconnect from how everyone perceives her. Mal screws up a lot, lies to a lot of people, and says the wrong stuff sometimes, but she does genuinely act like a middle schooler, and I feel like these are middle schooler things to do. This book was so middle school in a way that didn’t make me cringe, but was moreso funny and nostalgic to me. Her brothers were also so feral and funny. I feel like this author just understands children and tweens in a way that I don’t get from a lot of middle grade books, and I can’t really put my finger on why. I think it would be excellent for queer middle school kids read this book, and it makes me happy that this will surely happen. 
I think the main part that took me out of the story was the mom’s monologue in the end ending with her saying a line about Mallory being in “full color,” which struck me as a last ditch effort to include the title of the book in the book in a way that didn’t feel organic or natural. I do also think that the tag on NetGalley of this being a graphic novel threw me off because there are only graphic novel pages in between each chapter, so it’s basically a novel with illustrations, which is still cool.

There was also a friendship in the book (with Fiona maybe?) that never felt resolved other than Mal recognizing that she didn’t like how she acted around her and then I don’t think she really showed up again, which felt like a loose end, but wasn't too big of a deal.

I adored the book overall.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher VIZ Media for a  free digital ARC of the book in exchange for an honest review. 
I ended up DNFing this manga at 34% through because although the art was lovely, the story was really falling flat for me. It centered around a very basic love triangle where the guy was childhood best friends with the main character and they maybe harbor "secret" feelings for each other and the popular gyaru girl that everyone calls "Body-Ko" to objectify her. The will-they-won't-they slow burn that I think this story was trying to achieve between the guy and the girl was so repetitive and I didn't care at all for their friendship or relationship. I think their characters and relationship wasn't developed enough for me to be invested in them, and they just were bad friends to each other in general. I did like the fashion school setting because Ai Yazawa is great at drawing outfits, so that was a plus. 
The misogyny and objectification of women in this book was just too icky for me, from like every single character. The way the women changed themselves physically to appeal to the guy weirded me out, and him acting like being a "nice guy" who doesn't like girls wearing makeup makes him the ideal man. Also, just weird comments about how "boys shouldn't have piercings anyway!," like okay... 
Ai Yazawa also isn't beating the cultural appropriation allegations with depictions of TWO non-Black characters in this manga wearing Black hairstyles (Mariko's brother wearing locs and Mikako wearing an afro in the color pages in the back of the book). Past iffy behaviors include, but surely aren't limited to, Hachi's sister in Nana and occasionally depicting Junko's design in racist caricatured ways in the anime and manga. 
Overall, the attitudes and depictions of sexuality and gender feel so cisheteronormative, and I just expected more. I was not the audience for this.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Vintage for a free digital ARC of the book in exchange for an honest review. 
This story is meandering in a good way. Reminiscent of Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin with its unabashed look into the mind of a mentally ill, neurodivergent queer woman who shares her most shameful thoughts with the reader and her therapist, similarly to I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki or Mr. Robot. As someone who was once diagnosed with depersonalization disorder myself, this was an intensely relatable look at dissociation and how it impacts one’s relationships. I haven’t seen dissociation and depersonalization disorder represented this well in a piece of media ever…except maybe playing the game Night in the Woods? The descriptions of what it feels like to not be present in your body, such as the feeling of being coated in saran wrap, were perfect. The humor is also deeply and darkly funny as the narrator obsesses over minute things that bother her, and I found myself laughing out loud often. The formatting of the story worried me at first with it being prose-like and absent of quotation marks, but I quickly got used to it and it wasn’t confusing. The storytelling method of switching between the author’s real life and her memoir-esque fictional short stories was very effective with the blending of these realities featuring magical realism and horror within the short stories being compared with the horrors and traumas of reality. I would suggest looking through the trigger warnings before reading this if you or someone you know has a history with mental illness and childhood trauma especially. One part towards the end that really hit me hard was this: 
“What Norma meant to say with each metaphor was that her writing was doing what her mind had done for twenty-seven years. Her writing kept her pain at a distance from her. It kept her memories dissociated from her body. It kept her emotions trapped somewhere away from her heart. Writing was her attempt at transplanting her trauma into a character so she didn’t have to hold it. And when she transplanted it, she could edit the trauma the way she so badly wanted to edit her memories. Sometimes the pain was so difficult, she had to write a character who was writing another character.”
Just…damn. A lot of my experiences with trauma and mental illness and weird family dynamics were strikingly similar to Norma’s, so this book really hit me hard and I had to take my time with it. Will this book be what finally makes me go to therapy? 

This audiobook was incredible! Stellar performance with added sound effects that kept my attention the whole time. I’m always super interested in stories where young queer people find queer community and friendship online before ever seeking out these communities irl, especially for QTBIPOC people living in predominantly white cisnormative heteronormative spaces. I also loved the love that he had for the women in his life and the emphasis on female, sisterly, and motherly friendships—very sweet.