This is the first book of P. Djèli Clark’s ive read, even with multiple of his books on my tbr. I think the world building was well done for such a short  book. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered undead assassins before and the world Clark pulled together was interesting, especially the magic system. I don’t think I’ve think the wording was a bit strange at points and the story was rushed at points in an already fast paced story. It was a fun, quick read, even if I didn’t like the ending.

Perhaps I’m too used to dystopian novels that are action packed, but I felt like there were multiple instances where there was a build up to something happening and then nothing did. It felt like there was very little in the way of plot and the novel was more of a daily life reflection of someone living in a dystopia. 

I think the premise was super interesting, an island where people lose their memories of every day items and a police force meant to seize every instance of the item. I also loved the inter character relationships. R, the old man and the unnamed narrator were well developed characters, however I hated how passive the narrator was and how okay she seemed with allowing her memories stolen and not doing anything to fight back against the memory police other than hiding R. Anything else she did to defy the memory police wasnt because she wanted to, but because R pressed the importance of the items.

Regardless, the novel felt disconnected from the reader and it was to the benefit of the atmosphere to the novel. At the same time, there was no little happening with how detached it was from any sort of political commentary and I don’t think a novel can be good based on atmosphere and vibes alone.

I was so excited when I heard this was coming out. The author almost only promoted the monks story leading me to think it was an actual history book focused on the destruction of Mayan literature and culture which inspired my undergrad thesis, but it was actually historical fiction but whatever. The book as a whole was a major fucking letdown. 

The dual POV could’ve been interesting but the relationship between the main characters of each story line felt contrived at best and a connection of random fucking dots at worst. I very much need male authors to stop writing women because they were so passive and one dimensional that you could’ve replaced them with a dog and shit wouldn’t have changed. 

I hated the autistic coding of Cortez. Religious fanaticism and murder being attached to an autistic coded character felt really ableist, as if that was an explanation for why he did what he did. 

The indigenous Maya felt like a stereotype, and again could’ve been replaced with a group of anything without the story changing. Also, considering that De Landa’s personal journal from that time period and the fact that the Catholic Church excommunicated him when he returned to Spain for his crimes against the Maya, this felt too far from actual history for me to enjoy.

Children’s fairy tales are my favorite palette cleanser. This was so whimsical and cute. I couldn’t put it down. I loved seeing Sophie sticking up for herself more and more. I deeply related to how as the eldest daughter she felt like a failure and a disappointment in comparison to her siblings. Howl was a man hold but his growth was sweet. This is the perfect book to get out of a slump, just don’t compare it to the movie while reading.

I did enjoy the core message regarding censorship and free speech but this just didn’t speak to me the same way that The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa did. The warnings in this book are extremely clear but it felt like an extremely surface level exploration/analysis of the effects of censorship and freedom of thought. It also felt like there was no reference for how the world Montag lived in came to be or what a positive world would look like. Perhaps I didn’t connect with it in the same way I would’ve had I read it for school. It also very much felt like I was being told “censorship bad, tv bad” but to no end as to why or what else could happen as a result.

This was such a surreal experience. The prose was evocative, visceral at points. It talked a lot about shit and I was grossed out at points and couldn’t get behind it. I really enjoyed how the Chang explored generational trauma, misogyny and love. The dog stuff was really weird and the obsessive nature of the girls friendship reminded me of my own homoerotic friendships when I was young.

I want to start by saying Baldwin’s prose is absolutely beautiful. I struggle to picture what’s happening in books, but his prose was so atmospheric, it was as if I could see it happening in front of me. I love that it took place in Paris, as a sort of juxtaposition of freedom compared to the norms in America.

The actual plot didn’t measure up to what oomfs promised me. David and Giovanni are both melodramatic and insufferable. Both were extremely misogynistic and Giovanni was also biphobic. Giovanni was described as beautiful but I couldn’t understand what attached David to him. Giovanni seemed like a petulant child for most of the story and we weren’t really shown insight into their relationship, yet it was supposedly more than just lust between the two.

Everyone felt like a one dimensional caricature of what they represented. Hella is a flat caricature of a woman. David is the toxic masculinity American. Giovanni is the amourous, melodramatic Italian. Guillame and Jacques were hated by David and Giovanni for being effeminate “fairies” with one being a predator of younger men.

The text felt extremely superficial, there wasn’t anything beyond self hatred by all the gay men, no insight or analysis into internal homophobia and heteronormativity felt by David and I wished we saw love between David and Giovanni instead of being told it was there.

I was hoping I’d like this but even with little expectations, I was let down. This was a run of the mill demon possession story from the perspective of the possessed. The best this about this story was that it was short. There were several times the mc was casually homophobic and it was before she was even possessed. We got a little bit of the demon’s backstory and at that point, the first nature of the story made sense. It was meant to be an anti-man radical feminist sort of story but fell flat over and over again. The mc was just too passive about getting possessed and taking care of the strangeness of her behavior to be feminist. She just allowed the demon to use her. It was unenjoyable and uninteresting.

Wow. This was ass. Very much the concept of an idea ass stories. Very much a waste of time. None of the stories had any sort of tension or resolution. There were two separate mannequin stories for some reason and they both had the same ending. Overall, it was an incohesive anthology, unimaginative and underwhelming

In mathematics, recursion is the definition of a sequence through self reference, for example, the Fibonacci sequence. Blake Crouch has sci-fi in the bag. 

At first, I didn’t understand the two POV’s. Helena, the creator of “the chair”, a device that (accidentally) can take a person back in time to themselves at a specific moment where they had a strong emotional reaction, made sense. Barry, the detective who lost his 16 yr old daughter 10 yrs prior in an accident, did not (at first). Crouch was a genius in how he brought the two timelines together. I love how he implemented ideas of time, space, memory and quantum physics using recursion as the overarching idea. 

I even enjoyed the romance aspect of the novel and how the characters found each other, recursion after recursion and fell in love almost every single time. AND it didn’t feel like a disaster romance where the characters only fell in love because of circumstances or proximity.

My only issue with Recursion is the same problem I had with Dark Matter. The pacing felt off to me. The beginning felt so slow and I had trouble locking in and focusing on the story until I was about 60% of the way through the novel.

Mr. Crouch has gained a forever reader in me because I’ve loved both of the novels I’ve read of his and I can’t wait to see what topics he tackles next.