shane_the_reading_rat's Reviews (1.21k)

not quite like the first one but still fun :D very homophobic of the authors to make me wait until 2025 for the final Grand Slam Romance

easily one of my favorite books of this year, and one of my favorite memoirs of all time. it’s flying incredibly under-the-radar currently and i hope that more people read it.
as a kid, i was raised to believe that missionaries and missionary work was all good, amazing even. the thing is, in that kind of environment, you only hear the missionary’s stories. you never hear from the people they left behind.
see, that’s an almost-never though, because as Nemonte shares in this book, her tribe, the Waorani, had contact with missionaries and it only ended badly. the missionaries (mainly, Rachel Saint) accepted money in exchange for letting oil companies onto Waorani land, and would spout pro-oil company propaganda in sermons. they would bribe the children into going to church with toys and clothing.
frankly i’m not surprised at all at this, but Nemontes story of how they (and by extension, the oil companies) affected her village, the neighboring Indigenous tribes, and their way of life is horrifying. please read this. i would also recommend checking out her ted talk, i watched it after getting about 20% into this book and found it captivating https://youtu.be/kZhmuc3L-YI?si=g6eYktBzuFmB4veT

i have so many words about this but no idea how to organize them or categorize them. I Love This Read It

yknow if i knew necromancy ran in the family and that my son was an extremely powerful necromancer, and i run a mortuary business where i prepare bodies in my basement, i’d fucking speak up before my son raises the dead by accident so i could teach him how to handle his power

this art style grew on me so much over the course of the book, im a sucker for a good blue and orange color scheme and this did that splendidly
i also really like how christine draws environments and backgrounds :D
this book does have quite a bit of spanish spoken (which i think is probably a common complaint about it), but as someone who knows very little spanish, i was generally able to understand from context clues what they were saying (at least the gist of it). didn’t take me out of the story at all, just meant i needed to go a little slower than usual when reading (not a bad thing lmao)

i tried so hard not to dnf this, but i just cant.
i found with this book that even with me only getting to 30 percent, that there is a lot of stuff that could’ve been cut to make the story feel tighter and more compact. including, sadly, Sinne and Riva’s POVs. Keyne was easily the most grounded and fleshed-out main character (although, i can concede that since he and i are both transmasculine maybe i was just drawn to him more because of that). Sinne and Riva felt very similar and from what i can tell are going to get a love-triangle plotline with some prince, and that’s just not something im interested in.
along with this, the line “the only evil i see here is intolerance” feels,,, ridiculous. it feels like a parody.
i do want to try another book by this author, Song of The Huntress, but Sistersong sadly just is not doing it for me

i usually find jokes in books to be cringe but like this book (even with all the serious topics it covers) has a lot of levity, man eddie ndopu is funny

got my kindle much earlier than expected!! this was the first book i read on it and holy shit incredible reading experience both for the lack of eyestrain and for how good this book is
impeccable i love this book it reminds me of basically every crane wives album

im finding this book to be a lot more academic than i expected, and the essays so far are hit-or-miss. something i value in nonfiction books is if its approachable for someone who may not know the topic inside and out already, and this is really not