I liked the plot of the novel, where we follow essentially the arc of the Wager from England around Cape Horn, to its demise and beyond. What I didn't like was the deep character study of all these historical figures. I think there's a "good enough" sketch you can give the reader of a character and when you develop a character too much, it's exhausting. I felt fatigued with this book, not because of the plot points but because of how the characters kept getting overcooked and dried out. I would've been fine knowing Cheap was the captain, he used a silver cane and was basically out for himself. At every scene with him, I felt like I was being hit over the head with this character study, and not just Cheap, all the characters. Maybe I'm not that much of a stickler for history, or I prefer more plot driven nonfiction. 

I love reading about shipwrecks, and this one stood apart because of the mutiny aspect, and how we explored each character's psyche. Ad nauseum in my humble opinion. I read this book for read harder 2024, read a book and see the author speak. I saw David Grann 25Jan2024 at Arlene Schnitzer hall in Portland. He spent 30m talking about the Osage and 30m talking about this book. 

His advice to would-be writers was, there's no trick. You have to sit down and write. He used to tell people all these stories he was going to write, at cocktail parties. He stopped sharing his ideas and started writing them in earnest. Both books follow a theme of disinformation and the Truth. I think the next prompt I'll do is the media literacy one, as a gentle segue from here to there! 

The elusive 5 star! I saw this on IG as a book that was described to be like Kuang. I enjoyed both Yellowface and Babel so I requested this from the library. Honestly it reminded me more of Ocean Vuong! The emotions were so powerful, and the characters were so well-described and shaded. Kuang is a great writer too but I'd describe her more as plot writing, and this was more character writing. 

This book was powerful. It made me cry and made me laugh. I'm so hard on and judgey of my parents and seeing a young girl parentified to her brothers gave me a lot of sympathy for the struggling parents. The author did a great job of showing the light and dark of a 'parent' wanting better for her kids, but also resenting everything she missed out to be their parent. 

5 stars for atmosphere, 2 stars for plot. Overall I liked the plot and writing. Fast paced and foreboding. Open to interpretation at the end? 

I saw this on IG in a grouping of some kind of weird book collection. The other book I remember being in the collection was Earthlings. Sooooooooo this was not *anything* like Earthlings (well MC is female), which makes me wonder what these books were supposed to have in common. I tried to find the reel I saw but most of what I saw for Milk Fed in collections was "20-30 something millennial loneliness" and "likeable mc figuring it out" which is a lot more apt. It was a breeze of a book, I think this might even fall into the Beach Reads After Dark category with a slight edge to it. It wasn't weird so much as sensual. 

So we meet Rachel near the rock bottom of her ED. She has a horrible relationship with her toxic mother and seeks validation and nurturing from all the wrong places. She's bi and possibly questioning her female identity, or at the least, is interested in power dynamics of men and women. 

Every day she gets fat free, sugar free froyo at lunch which is how she meets Miriam. Miriam (and her therapist) help Rachel crawl back to life. It's steamy, and I honestly expected ABF to come up but it didn't. I was braced for much weirder. 

That said, it really does fit into the other two mentioned niches. Other books I found in this niche were from Miranda July ❣️ & Dolly Alderton ❣️. I also saw Eleanor Oliphant, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, and Pizza Girl lumped into the same niche. Yeah, if you liked any of those you'd probably like this. 

What I loved about this book and the passages I highlighted were mainly about were the complicated feelings about your mom. 

“My daughter is only eleven,” she said. “But I only hope that she can one day have your success.” “Let’s not get carried away,” I said. “It’s a blog.” It seemed strange that mothers like Dr. Mahjoub existed in the world—mothers who supported their daughters. I felt jealous of her daughter, that she got to have a mother like that. I told Dr. Mahjoub I hadn’t expected fanfare from my mother. But I’d thought she would at least be a little bit proud. “You were going to the hardware store for milk again,” said Dr. Mahjoub
--
“So I’ve been a terrible mother,” said my mother. “I guess I’ve done nothing right.”
--
I could feel her opening an emotional spreadsheet that began with the womb.
--
as though my mother and I were friends, great friends, as though I were one of those daughters who said, Oh yeah, my mother is my best friend. Those women were upsetting. Mothers who doted on their baby daughters also killed me.
--
My mother had never known me either, though it wasn’t because I hadn’t given her a chance. I’d given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn’t seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn’t even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.
--
I wondered whether there was a deadline for when a person had to finally stop blaming her mother for her own thoughts.

Another passages that killed me: 
She did it in the softest possible way—like a ghost haunting a place

I can't say I was introduced to new ideas in this book but I don't think that makes it a bad book. I found myself sliiiiightly triggered by these mythical parents who give their kids a set allowance, and teach their kids about money. Can't blame that on the book/author. I think this book is for someone who has money to give, and who has a hard time saying no to their kids. This gives you a framework for how to install good financial habits in your kids. 

This book kept me guessing. I read Babel earlier this year and I really like the style of the author's writing. I'd read more of her work. I preferred that setting (timeless fantastic Oxford) to this setting (current DC area inundated with social media and the publishing industry). But the thing they both have in common is the depth of the character's Asian history.  

Where this novel shined (shone?) for me was the intense female rage, her overt racism,  and entitlement to be a successful author by any means necessary. She had so many opportunities to set the record straight and never did. It gave me Roxy Hart vibes. It's weird watching someone else's social media addiction spiral too. It's familiar (it could happen) but also unrelatable (dear God, that would never happen to me). 

While I read of Juniper's deep depression, I pictured a despaired yet numb Otessa Moshfegh in her year of rest and relaxation. I wondered a few times during this book if Moshfegh and Kuang are anything more than contemporaries. I enjoy their styles very much. 

Too many characters and potential suspects

We get to know Remy and his girlfriend Alicia through their obsession with Jen, the Instagram It Girl who seems effortlessly cool.  But they also despise her, in a way, for her inauthenticity. After a long weekend surfing with Jen's boyfriend (and a cast of detached, out of touch, rich kids) in the Hamptons, their obsession ramps up: Remy wants to fuck Jen (and then dispose of her) and Alicia creepily morphs into Jen (referred to as Alicia as Jen), going so far as to start working at a skincare store as Jen, wearing Jen's jewelry "creations".  Alicia has some mental health history with ED and her parents are fucking weird people who give mixed messages. Alicia is a creative and envisions a personal spa anyone could use to zone out, free dissociate and better themselves, called a Spod (spa+pod) that manifests as a black market hot tub covered in New England Patriots logos in the apartment they share with a Bevvers archetype roommate. 

One day Jen meets Alicia as Jen at the skincare store and the very same day, 

VERY ABRUPTLY ALICIA DIES in a bike accident where her chain broke. Remy struggles to come to grips with this (is she actually dead? The hospital incompetently directs him on a wild goose chase where we think maybe she is alive?) by using this Black Mirror service that lets "Alicia New" text him recapitulated missives from their past. Or are they? We are confused by the 3 typing dots (is she currently typing these?). A notable one speaks of old Alicia's period, "This is like the longest period of my life. I’m bleeding so much." Ooooookay. 

Woven through this loss story and this parasocial orgy is a "The Secret" type book, called The Apple Bush (cue Remy, "apples don't even grow on bushes") about your Consummate Result, and marking those Signifiers around you that lead you to your Consummate Result. Remy resists his flow as much as he resists surfing, weaponizing his skepticism and cynicism. (And I feel that.) Basic manifesting new age fuckery with some Brooklyn-esque hipster hippie granola girls orbiting Jen as spiritual guides. And Alicia's Spod, it might be a portal to other dimensions and maybe serves to provoke a Consummate Result. 

Unfortunately, Remy goes all fiery and his wires get crossed with what his Consummate Result is. At this point, the book veers off a sci fi cliff into a blaze of glory (my storygraph note at 81%: we have jumped the shark). As much as the Apple Bush focuses on the Signifiers and Consummate Flow, we also now experience the  antagonizing forces, Toxic Antagonists, who appear as your enemy/Consummate Result and get stronger as you approach your completion of your Consummate Result. There are murmurs of government cover-ups and Remy's TA is the final act of the book. He is basically playing Guess Who though, and we're never really sure he understands his Consummate Result. He thinks it's Jen's boyfriend who must die so he can bond more deeply with Jen. He shows up to the apartment to end him but he's not home. No matter - he pivots. Then he's pretty sure it's Jen herself and one of the final tableaus of the novel is Remy drowning Jen in a bathtub while he watches his TA (who he thinks is also Jen) weakening. 

The final image is Remy first feeding the corpse of Jen to the Spod and then watching Alicia as Jen come from the Spod. She sits on the couch to simply hold him, which was part of his vision of his Consummate Result, just the wrong people in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Bye Remy. Hope you find your dad. 👋

.

I liked that if we strip away the unreliable narration, and look at the plot points, we can see what might have happened: we watched this cis man fall from a pithy cynicism into depression and psychosis until it devastates his whole social circle. There was so much carnage in pursuit of this Consummate Result...was any of that in alignment with the universe, or was he just crazy? I like that it's open to interpretation. As you can tell by this review, I think the Bevvers roommate, Jake, was kind of a throwaway character, he has some shading and context but he never matters too much, except as a conduit to other characters (Andrea, and maybe even the parrot, Sandy, had more of a role than Jake). 

I loved the atmosphere of the book and found myself wishing I could come back to it when I had to do other things. The creepiness was on point. I felt foreboding and curiosity and when the plot unfolded. And although it might not be how I would have written it, I didn't feel dissatisfied. When we took the turn into Sci-Fi, I was immediately turned off and felt myself eyeroll but in the last 20% I was able to re-commit and find that page turning quality again. I think that's pretty impressive. Maybe I'd glean more on a reread but I don't feel any burning desire to go through that again. Four stars. 

Ps I went back thru my reviews for the year and if you told me this book was written by Julia Armfield around the same time as Our Wives Under the Sea, I'd believe you. I think if you liked that, you'd like this. Detached partners grappling with existential anxiety and forces bigger than them enacting timeless dramas. 

I didn't think I'd like this but I found myself resonating and learning throughout this book, esp chapter 6. I'd return to it again in the future.