yawnsbooks's Reviews (510)

The narration style, which is a conversation between two characters, was not for me. Quit reading after page 35.

This book was the best book I’ve read in a really long time. I can’t stop talking about it. I think everyone should read it and I really hope it gets the attention it deserves.

Crosshairs by Catherine Hernandez is a dystopian novel of a near future where Canada is wracked by climate change and massive flooding in urban centres, leading to increased homelessness and poverty and the Canadian government embracing fascist regimes to “solve” the emerging problems.

The Canadian government pilots “The Renovation”, which forcibly relocates visible minorities, queer people, and disabled people into labour camps in Toronto.

The novel follows a group of queer resistance fighters trying to survive and expose the genocidal labour camps to the international community. It is a disturbing, moving, realistic, horrifying, and a terrifyingly plausible novel. 

The queer characters in the novel are so complex and vibrant and determined to live as their full selves. 

There are so many conversation and reflection points the novel sparked in me. Hernandez dives unapologetically dives into performative allyship and the white saviour complex, and the cost of ineffective allyship. The scenes involving the white characters coming to terms with their position in the regime is going to stick with me. 

Hernandez’ has created a harrowing glimpse into a world that seems so possible as fascism continues to gain currency in Canada.

This book needs to be included in curriculum and conversations. It shows the beauty and importance of queer, racialized and disabled kinship. It illustrates a too-close-for-comfort result and dangers of circulating fascism and white supremacy.

Book 7 of 2021.
5.0/5.0

Book 6 of 2021 Done!

As of today, I can say that I have finally read all of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels. It’s taken me 14 years - but we are finally caught up!

What I love about Kingsolver’s books is how she writes about nature, grief, environmental change, science, and human relationships. Animal Dreams illustrates these themes beautifully.

Codi Nolime comes home to Grace, Arizona, to take care of her father with advanced Alzheimer’s and learns that the nearby mining company is threatening to divert the town’s river after years of poisoning the local watershed. Meanwhile, Codi’s sister is doing agricultural support work in Nicaragua and facing increasing violence from American backed Contras.

While home, Codi tries to learn more about her mother who died during her sister’s birth and archive her family’s history from her father’s moments of lucidity and the local “Stitch & Bitch” club.

This book was heartbreaking on so many levels and left me wanting more (another theme with all of Kingsolver’s novels). 

Finished “Detransition, Baby” by Torrey Peters and wow, wow, wow! What an amazing novel. 

This book is about three people, entering into a triad relationship, with hopes of raising a child together in a queer family in New York City.

This book was excellent. At first it appears to be this bizarre proposition of an ex boyfriend asking his ex girlfriend to enter into a platonic relationship with him and his boss to raise a child - but it is so much more. 

Reese and Amy used to have a loving relationship, until Amy detransitioned following a brutal scene of trans violence. Now years later, Ames has entered into a complicated affair with their boss, and following a pregnancy announcement, invites Reese to join their relationship to fulfill Reese’s desires for motherhood.

This novel is a layered analysis of gender and especially feminine gender identity. It critiques and celebrates queerness and trans politics, it illustrates gender fluidity and the lived experience of trans women. 

As a gender studies major I loved the poignant critiques of how gender theory and transgender people have been theorized and discussed. I loved the queerness represented and explored by every character in the novel, and showed how unstable, fractured, and illusory heterosexuality and gender is. 

Content warning: this book has lots of transphobia, homophobia, serophobia, trans outing, suicide and assault