“Activism and mutual aid shouldn't feel like volunteering or like a hobby it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us.”
A comprehensive, caring, and in-depth yet easy to read guide to what mural aid means and how to build groups successfully. I definitely need to get a physical copy because this is a book I’ll want to reference again and again.

Beautiful and heart-wrenching, dreamy yet real. I loved The Thirty Names of Night, and I can't wait to read more from Zeyn Joukhadar. Nour was so well written, the wonder and thoughts and emotions of a child made her storyline magical without losing the very real emotions of the adults around her and their struggles. The relationships between characters evolved perfectly, and their mourning of lost loved ones and grief of lost homes was so incredibly done. The audiobook narration was done so well. 

My only struggle was with the jumps between Nour and Rawiya's timelines, they sometimes blended together without a proper break to signal that one chapter was over and the POV switched. I'm not sure how this looked in print, but it was difficult for me to follow as an audiobook listener. 

I've been in a bit of a Romance slump, so I was happy to start this book and have no idea where it was going. This was a title suggested in a queer romance list, and I didn't read anything more about it before I checked it out, so the Armenian rep was unexpected and great! It was nice to not know from the beginning who Nareh was going to end up with. The crush at the start was so well done, it took me right into those butterfly feelings. The toxic workplace literally gave me stress-dreams, so also very relatably done haha 
Also relatable, beautiful, and unexpected was how Nar struggled with the memory of her father, and especially the things her family lost to his (understandable but heartbreaking) obsession with assimilating. 

However... the last 1/3 of this book was exactly what put me in a Romance slump in the first place. While some third-act breakups are unnecessary but easily forgivable, this one left me questioning if Nareh was mature enough for a serious relationship. Jumping from 5 years with someone else, no matter how mismatched they were, to love with someone new felt wrong. Triple that feeling with her lack of communication skills.

She should have told Erebuni about her almost-engagement, and Erebuni definitely didn't deserve to be framed as a predator. While the longing and butterflies at the start of the book felt great, Nareh's pining at the end was annoying and overwrought. She did terrible things and deserved to feel bad about them, but it seemed like readers were supposed to feel bad for Nareh anyway. Erebuni forgave her way too quickly. It's one thing to not be out yet, but another to throw the person you supposedly love under the bus in front of your entire community. That put a very dark cloud that over their relationship that I couldn't see ever dissipating. 
Overall, the book was trying to do too much. Too many villains: Trevor, Mark, her horrible boss, the homophobic aunties...  If Nar didn't have a boyfriend and it had started with her mom sending her to check out Armenian guys after 5 years of having short-lived relationships, it might have been an easier read. We could have had more of a slow-burn with Erebuni actually having time to become friends before developing into a believable relationship.
I did think some of the heavier conversations were done well, including Armenian ancestry, coming out, to her family, and expectations as a single 20-something woman. However... making out while talking about the genocide made me cringe. The way Nar grew in the way she thought about this part of Armenian history, why turn that important discussion into a make-out session? 
Finally, there is no way I can see how a reporter could publish a piece without approval and still be hired at another outlet. If her boss fired her because he was sexist and xenophobic, that's one thing. But any reporter putting up unvetted stories without approval shouldn't be a reporter imho. Start a blog? Freelance? Her piece after being fired was picked up, so there were other plot options. I enjoyed her work interviewing people within the community, but the conflict at work also felt like it was one of the too many storylines that could have been trimmed.

The last page left me with chills. I got my copy from someone who gave up after 100 pages, and it did take me a long time to get into the story. It wasn’t what I expected, the plot focused more on Shakespeare’s wife/Hamnet’s mother than on the plays or the plague, but the writing was beautiful and I loved Agnes and Mary and Susanna and Judith. The second half of the book was especially moving, such a true selection of grief and how it warps time and depletes motivation. 
I wish we would have had more time with Bartholomew, his bro-ish-ness in the second half confused me. I would have liked to see how his family developed and seen more of his relationship with Agnes grow. 
This was a peaceful and moving read, I might come back to it in winter months when I’m looking for something to curl up with. 

An interesting story, especially knowing it was based on real people in these events. However, I struggled to keep up with the jumps in time. Perhaps if I had the book rather than an audiobook this would have been easier, but I wonder if I would have finished the book if I hadn't listened to it. While the story follows the family through incredible and terrifying situations and their relationships change, I never felt like any of them were fully developed as characters. Instead, it felt like each event was something that happened to them, and then they went somewhere else and the next thing happened. That said, it was a new look at the leftist ideologies across the globe that I didn't expect to find in a novel.

Beautiful and heartbreaking. Every time I had to put it down I couldn’t stop thinking about it until I could pick it up again! 

Devastating to read during COVID-19, I couldn’t believe it was published in 2018. The horrifying but horribly accurate depiction of capitalism as a zombie curse, the lack of any grieving for the fevered as each system and individual is obsessed with keeping on, the heartbreaking choices of her immigrant parents and their loss with assimilation, the millennial flavor of obsessing with skin care as the world crumbles - I couldn’t put it down.
Time to reread my other favorite post-apocalypse book hinging on a deadly pandemic also written pre-COVID, The Lightest Object in the Universe by Kimi Eisele, to deal with the stress the ending Severance left me with!

“…I've made a home out of how much I miss you and there's no one here to tell me I should leave.”
Incredible, devastating, beautiful. I normally struggle not to rush through poetry, but this books made me take my time and I’m so glad I listened. 

I really had to sit with this one before I worked out how I felt about it. The writing was engaging and I found it hard to put down, reading as much as I could at every break I had in a day. The characters were interesting, but I struggled with Aretha’s relationship with Aaron. I never believed they were really in love, which I think is because Aretha couldn’t figure out what she wanted, but so many of her choices hinging on him made me want more from them, at least from their honeymoon phase. 

Despite how their Maine trip blew up, I wanted Aaron to have been more of a manipulator all the way through. I also really wish the termites weren’t revealed as the cause of the wall cracks until after it fell, that could have been a hilarious plot twist, but it was given up too soon.

Overall, very funny and weird read that I’ll be thinking about for a long time!

An absolutely engaging and important memoir. I knew of Alice Wong from some of her projects, like #CripTheVote/Disability Visibility project and StoryCorps, and it was really interesting to hear how those projects came to be!