Invisible Kingdom Vol.2: Edge of Everything by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward
Status: Completed
I’m still not loving this art style – the characters are so hyper-stylized that it feels like their features are constantly changing, and sometimes things are deliberately drawn with very little detail, which I just find annoying. The plot is fairly unremarkable, there’s too many characters going on to get too invested in any of them and the character dynamics they’re building are happening to fast for me to get invested, and the cool space nun thing that I was really excited about is basically backstory at this point. But for some reason I want to keep reading. I don’t know what it is about this book – maybe the vivid colors and cool space settings, maybe learning about the weirdness of alien biology, maybe I am somewhat getting invested in whatever’s going on between Grix and Vess. But either way, it was a fast and enjoyable read and I’m definitely going to read the third volume.
See my review of Volume 1 here
See my review of Volume 3 here
Tags: Muslim author, Hijabi author
Trigger Warnings: Violence, body horror, confinement, sexual harassment (minor), injury
Folklorn by Angela Mi Young Hur
Status: Completed
I have been in a reading slump for a while, but this book was so much that I devoured it in two days. I say “so much” because despite it not being unreasonably long, it is unreasonably packed with everything. The narrative slips easily between past and present, real and myth, winding together concrete reality, fantasy, and folklore in a way that somehow makes myths, ghosts, and generational curses feel exactly as real and plausible as the experimental physics the protagonist studies. It’s a narrator going mad and holding conversations with the hallucinations only she can see, and it’s a narrator weaving stories with reality to unravel her family’s past and present. It’s about the immigrant experience – leaving and loss and regretting, starting over, pain and isolation and hopes and dreams and racism and being visibly Other how each individual deals with it. It’s about complicated and painful family dynamics and confronting them as an adult when everyone who formed or was formed by those dynamics has changed or gone. It’s about the power of story and the power of language and what translation does and doesn’t do. It’s about identity and origin and family and past and the threads that can and can’t be cut between our present and our history. This book is so much, it feels expansive and raw and real and amazingly grounded and true, despite all the fantastical elements. It is definitely a unique reading experience but so, so worth it.
Tags: Korean American protagonist, Protagonist of Color, Korean American author, Author of Color, #ownvoices Korean American
Trigger Warnings: Unreality (severe), child abuse, domestic abuse (severe), emotional abuse (severe), racism (severe), racial slurs, child death, parent death (severe), grief, schizophrenia/psychosis, war (mentions), miscarriage/stillbirth (mentions), mental illness
You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity by Jamie Lee Finch
Status: Completed
My fundamental problem with this book is that I completely misunderstood what it was. From the title and the personal bent to the whole idea, I thought it was going to be a memoir, or mostly memoir combined with some self-help-style content. It is neither of those things. The conclusion section refers to it as a “thesis,” and that’s really what it reads like. Even the slightly odd formatting makes more sense in that context. It combines autoethnography (a variety of academic sociological study using the self as subject) with a historical analysis of Evangelical Christianity, trauma and PTSD, the development of Religious Trauma Syndrome as an idea, and pathways to healing. (I’m also slightly uncomfortable with her assertions that healing from religious trauma could heal chronic illness, cancer, infertility, and other physical ailments – I’ve read The Body Keeps the Score and don’t disbelieve in the premise, but it needs some disclaimers that she doesn’t provide.) It is a decent length for a thesis paper but very short for a book, especially a book with such a broad scope. It’s also written like a thesis paper – dense, packed with citations, emphasizing information and facts over storytelling or emotional engagement. It is a good, if academic, overview of the idea of religious trauma and how growing up in Evangelical Christianity can cause it. However, I’m not sure how or why this got published as a general readership book.
Trigger Warnings: Religious bigotry, religious trauma, emotional abuse (mentions), psychological abuse (mentions), anxiety/panic attacks (mentions), eating disorders (mentions), self-harm (mentions), mental illness (mentions), child abuse (mentions)
Bluejay Reads 