I thought this was really interesting. I liked the vulnerability of the characters and the rural Americana setting in Kentucky. I guess I'm in a little "teenage suicide" thicket right now (don't send help, I simply don't wish to participate in the real world) and this was the best of them so far. Aysel was thoughtful and felt like someone I would have known in high school. FrozenRobot was a good male lead. I didn't like their secret toxic leaning on each other to follow through with their suicidal plans, but that's how it is sometimes: you make plans with people who aren't holding your best interest in mind because they're too immature (emotionally and more) to support the weight of the crippling depression and you're so lonely that you grab any connection, and it feels intoxicatingly like 'they really understand you' because you have depression (your defining characteristic) in common. I'm a grown-up and their problems didn't feel as small as some other teen books. I was able to emotionally connect to their feelings of failure and being outcast, but I think a teenager could too. I didn't predict the ending, and I wondered about the story when I wasn't reading it. What else do you want from a book? Pretty good.

Written by a high schooler. Not great. Erratic, maybe. Underdeveloped characters with great pacing and interesting plot points. I didn't feel connected to any of the characters by the ending. I pictured Liz as Blake Lively in the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and Mischa Barton on the OC.

Meh. ⏭️

Yikes. I think I'll be thinking about this, honestly, forever. This should be "so you want to go vegan?" required reading. I felt myself experiencing life through the lens of this hypothesis; why do we eat meat, why hunt, what's the difference between livestock and a single cow? This was (and I hesitate to use this phrase): revolutionary. It revolutionized my thinking about "meat". I don't know if I'll change my behavior but my thinking has been forever changed by this book. I enjoyed the writing style and tone; If there was a translation (the setting is vaguely European with a cast of German and Spanish characters), it was not distracting. Sometimes with Japanese translations, the version will be much too British but this was Continental. I don't think I anticipated that ending specifically but I knew the situation was too tenuous to continue. All the same, I think it was abrupt. This book also made me Google Dr. Mengele, so thanks for that nightmare!

The only word I saw about this book in a glance at reviews was "graphic". Boy, howdy, was it ever!

A diary of a woman in a separation, living with her young daughter, a single parent for the first time. She's challenged and broken but keeps fighting and introspectively reflects on her marriage. The culture imposes on her that she needs to get back with her husband but she isn't convinced and suspects/knows he's cheating. He pays no child support and at the beginning he kind of forced her into renting an apartment that's too expensive basically saying, 'you'll figure it out'. She never knows when the husband will show up, she never knows where he lives. He had the power that way but she has the power of their daughter and custody. Eventually he disappears, as a slow fade to black. She eventually moves on but she stumbles a lot learning how to single parent.

I didn't read the prequel to this book, Strange Weather in Tokyo, but I think this book held up just fine on its own. A recall to school days when your imagination was wild and kids were pretty shitty, at times. Maybe you were even the shitty kid.

It was disjointed, true. Maybe non-linear. But I liked the effect of disorienting sense of time one can feel after working in a large machine, no matter the tenure.

I can't say I enjoyed this book (trigger warning for manipulation and abuse) but I did think the author was intelligent, insightful and told her story in an eloquent way. I read this as library recommendation of "women in translation". Springora grows up in France and describes her adolescence. I did enjoy translating rudimentary sentences to French and was able to reason "beautiful schoolgirl" as "ecoliére belle" which gave me a cosmopolitan, continental pride. I think she hit the nail on the head pegging him as an ephebophile, someone who is attracted to puberty and adolescence ("the only thing G. was able to love in me was a fugitive, transitory moment: my adolescence").

Interesting thoughts on Lolita: the idea that the book was more self-loathing and remorseful than my memory serves. I remember it being explicit, lascivious and explicit. Did Humbert not feel entitled and tempted by Lolita? The description of G feels exactly like how I remember Humbert: a filthy, manipulator of an extreme predator.

Wow. This book was incredible in a horrific and awful way. When speaking about this to someone close to me, we compared it to A Child Called It and how there must be parents who used it as a parenting guide. Shelly definitely studied the Child Called It method and was a blackbelt. I'm glad she got over 20 years inside but horrified she'll be released next year.