thistle_and_verse's Reviews (299)

I thought the aliens and their reef technology were very cool. The power struggle between them and the residents of Water Island was compelling.

The illustrations were gorgeous. Liked that it gave the original source for the story so I can poke around more and do some research

I love the central concept of the book but was iffy on the execution. IMr. Fox, Mary, and Daphne feel full and thought out. The stories that Mr. Fox and Mary come up with felt a bit hit or miss. I tended to prefer the more magical/ folkloric stories. The plot outside of those major stories was interesting, but the ending as story and reality collapse into each other was confusing to me. In the beginning there's commentary on using women's deaths to spice up stories without giving the women interiority/ a life outside of that purpose. Towards the end, the commentary becomes more about Mr. Fox as a person and his relationship with his wife. I felt like Oyeyemi was trying to convey a lesson to me, but I wasn't super sure how to merge the two threads of commentary throughout the story. This was definitely a unique riff on the story of Bluebeard.

Really liked this novella. The living ships, jellyfish aliens, math as meditation. I also hadn't heard about the Himba people before so it gave me something to Google/ learn more about.

The first half is folk tales, and the second half is about hoodoo. It's told almost as a memoir where Hurston explains how she got people to tell her stories and gives the full social context for story telling. This gives the stories a nice rhythmn and makes them feel less disjointed.

Not as compelling as her other anthologies. I really like Hurston's memoir/ narrative style as she shares the folktales. This is a disjointed collection of stories, organized by theme. It works for the 'Tall Tales' section, but it made the rest drag for me. Not anyone's fault. It's a collection of unpublished work that was posthumously assembled.

I am a fan of Nalo Hopkinson and have read a bit of her work. The world of New Half Way Tree felt developed and fleshed out. I was confused as to why Tan-Tan became a local legend (we see some of her exploits, but they seemed minor to me. Most of them we hear the exaggerated local legends instead of what actually happened) and how the world of Toussaint operates. This didn't detract from my enjoyment of the book too much. I liked the local legends about Tan-Tan. My favorite part of the book was her living with the douen and adjusting to life in the bush.

Each story gets an illustration, and the artwork was beautiful. Most of the sections are folktales, and the last section involves interviews with African American women from different time periods. I appreciated the historical context and thoughtfulness Hamilton put into presenting these stories.

Great stories. There were a few classics I recognized, but most of them were new to me. Illustrations were beautiful. There's a particularly good one I remember from the origin story of cats where a glove is halfway into its transformation into a cat. I appreciated the historical context and thoughtfulness Hamilton put into presenting these stories.

I first read an excerpt in the Reading the Bones anthology edited by Sheree Renee Thomas and was very intrigued, so I wanted to read the full work. I don't know what to make of this book. Hairston doesn't outright explain how the world works. The reader gets the lay of the land and the history of this world as the book progresses. I had difficulty keeping track of characters and locations. There's commentary on Hollywood/entertainment, singing as time travel, and clashes between tradition and modernity. Mindscape ultimately felt like a bundle of cool ideas that wasn't quite cohesive, fragmented like a post-Barrier world.