shane_the_reading_rat's Reviews (1.21k)

this was a genuinely stellar anthology. it’s really cool that an anthology of Palestinian sci-fi exists, as often literature from countries that aren’t Canada/the UK that gets published in the US is litfic (particularly translated works). obviously litfic is not bad, but you can get just as much out of reading genre fiction. favorite story was Gaza Luna, but honestly every single story in here was 4 stars or above.

god, this book struck the balance beautifully between being music critique and memoir (it helps that i’ve listened to most of the artists covered, and know of nearly all of the rest). favorite essays were, respectively, the mountain goats one and the julien baker one. those are my two favorite artists that were in here, so that’s truly not surprising lol

i’ve waited about 24 hours to review this, so my memory is slightly more fuzzy than i’d like. this was good though! informative and compelling. my mind did wander sometimes while listening, i think this is because it felt like the setting often jumped without much explanation.

basically any fantasy that feels like a folktale is going to be a 5 star book for me, and this hit that so well.
often (to me) novellas feel oddly paced and like they could be longer, but this felt absolutely perfect (happy surprise for me since i gave Time War 1 star).
just everything about this was my favorite. the magic system, the setting, the sister bond, it was all absolutely lovely.

i really wish this book weren’t so timely. it’s also more than a little horrifying to realize that D. Esperanza is barely older than me, and while i was living a fairly average middle-schooler life in 2018, he was living in a camp of thousands of teens. i really hope that a lot of people read this.

i think mona awad is just not an author who’s writing i will ever really enjoy.
i love the premise of this — very similar to Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang, which i adored — but Rouge just didn’t grab me. everything is vague, i do not care at all about the MC, and life is too short to force myself through a book i dislike when i am trying to read it for pleasure

i’ve tried so hard with this, but it’s just not happening. the writing style is quite difficult to comprehend (at least for me personally) and every single event within this book feels like it takes a thousand years to finish (especially every fight scene. every fight scene takes a horrific amount of time to finish. not horrific as in the horror genre, horrific as in “the length of time is horrifying”). not going to push myself to finish the final 40%.

i liked this a lot!! i don’t know much about paleontology (aside from my childhood dinosaur phase), and this was definitely interesting. favorite part was the chapter about Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska!