Review: Not Your Villain (DNF)

Title: Not Your Villain

Series: Sidekick Squad #2

Author: C.B. Lee

Genre: Superhero

Trigger Warnings: Heights, needles (mention), motorcycle crash (brief, no injuries), body horror (mild)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series and this review does contain spoilers of book one, Not Your Sidekick.

Read To: 21%

Back Cover:

Bells Broussard thought he had it made when his superpowers manifested early. Being a shapeshifter is awesome. He can change his hair whenever he wants, and if putting on a binder for the day is too much, he’s got it covered. But that was before he became the country’s most-wanted villain.

After discovering a massive cover-up by the Heroes’ League of Heroes, Bells and his friends Jess, Emma, and Abby set off on a secret mission to find the Resistance. Meanwhile, power-hungry former hero Captain Orion is on the loose with a dangerous serum that renders meta-humans powerless, and a new militarized robotic threat emerges. Everyone is in danger. Between college applications and crushing on his best friend, will Bells have time to take down a corrupt government?

Sometimes, to do a hero’s job, you need to be a villain.

Review:

I really enjoyed the first Sidekick Squad book, Not Your Sidekick, and since that one ended with revealing a major conspiracy, I had hoped this one would continue that. I wanted to see what happened next.

But it backs way up, to even before Jess got her internship in book one, and does the same time frame from Bells’s perspective. Admittedly there isn’t a lot of overlap, since Bells is at superhero training camp and not in Andover, but it felt really jarring to end the previous book by discovering the superhero organization is the bad guys and then start this book before the characters know that and Bells super enthusiastic about being a hero and joining the organization.

Admittedly, I didn’t get very far into it, but Not Your Villain seemed to lean harder on the dystopian elements of the world, especially related to Bells’s family’s farm. It’s different from a standard dystopian, though, because the government never actually shows up or sends agents or anything, characters just say that the government is doing bad things and that’s it. It’s like there’s a dystopian setting hovering in the background but it never truly touches the story.

Bells is increasing as a character. His shapeshifting is awesome, and I’m kinda jealous because what trans person doesn’t wish they could shapeshift? I think it could have been really cool to have the next installment of the series told from his perspective, so it was really disappointing to find that the story wasn’t continued, it was rewound. I may come back to it – like I said, I didn’t read very far and it may have kept going after the events of book one – but not right now.

The Sidekick Squad series:

1. Not Your Sidekick
2. Not Your Villain
3. Not Your Backup
4. Not Your Hero

Review: Warbreaker (DNF)

Title: Warbreaker

Author: Brandon Sanderson

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, body horror, forced marriage, violence, death of children (mentions), religious bigotry

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 56%

Back Cover:

Warbreaker is the story of two sisters who happen to be princesses, the God King one of them has to marry, the lesser god who doesn’t like his job, and the immortal who’s still trying to undo the mistakes he made hundreds of years ago. Their world is one in which those who die in glory return as gods to live confined to a pantheon in Hallandren’s capital city and where a power known as BioChromatic magic is based on an essence known as breath that can be collected only one unit at a time from individual people.

By using breath and drawing upon the color in everyday objects, all manner of miracles and mischief can be accomplished. It will take considerable quantities of each to resolve all the challenges facing Vivenna and Siri, princesses of Idris; Susebron, the God King; Lightsong, reluctant god of bravery; and mysterious Vasher, the Warbreaker.

Review:

I read this book in 2016 according to my list of read books. I had vague recollections of gods in mansions or something and nothing else, but I remember liking it. And a friend had given me a huge collection of Brandon Sanderson audiobooks, all of which are long, and I was working overtime and figured a 24-hour audiobook would be a good way to get through a 50-hour workweek.

I didn’t really want to DNF this one. There are a lot of good things here, and I generally like Brandon Sanderson’s works. I put it down for a day, read something else, and did actually come back to it, but I didn’t find myself wanting to finish it. I didn’t want to DNF it but I didn’t want to keep reading either.

There are three main perspectives in this book. There’s Siri, youngest daughter of the rightful king in exile in the north, sent to marry the god-king of the enemy; Vivenna, the oldest daughter of the rightful king who desperately wants to save her sister; and Lightsong, one of the “gods,” people who returned from the dead with the gift of prophecy, who really wants to convince everyone that he’s not a god at all. There are also a few pages here and there from the perspective of Vasher, a mysterious man with a lot of magic and a sentient sword. Each of these characters has distinct aims, side characters, and situations, and I’m going to tackle each of their storylines individually.

Siri: The classic “independent headstrong princess forced into dangerous new political situation and adapts better than expected.” Not a bad character in and of herself, but her situation (being trapped in the palace and kept from a lot of information or other people) made her parts a bit boring, even though it was through no fault of her own. She did learn a lot about the god-king, though, which kept me interested enough.

Lightsong: He’s a loveable asshole kind of character. He’s a dick and takes nothing seriously, but he’s funny and self-depricating in a way that made me like him anyway. His parts were some of the most politics-heavy (more on that in a minute) but they were still my favorite of the three, which is a testament to how much I liked him as a character.

Vivenna: Highly unlikeable as a character. She’s full of religious prejudice and idealistic patriotism and self-aggrandizing righteousness while believing she’s simple and humble. A short list of things she can’t seem to wrap her head around includes people preferring keeping their children alive over upholding some vague patriotic ideal, people preferring degrading or immortal jobs over starving to death, and people having different religious ideas than her but not being sad about it. It would be one thing if she started out that way and then living in the “heathen city” helped her change, but she resists understanding, acceptance, and change every step of the way. She is sure she’s 100% right about everything and is completely baffled when no one else likes it when she sets them straight. The mercenaries that worked with her were pretty awesome, but her stodgy self-righteousness overshadowed all the good things in her sections. She also got the most page time.

Vasher: This is the guy I wanted to see more of! The story opened on him breaking out of prison and I thought, here’s my epic magical Brandon Sanderson protagonist! And he has a sentient sword, this ought to be good! I had no idea what Vasher’s goals and motivations were but I wanted to find out. But I didn’t. He got hardly any page time and his main purpose seemed to be “ooh, there’s a creepy mysterious bad guy in the background! He’s not doing a whole lot but you should be scared because he’s there!” And honestly, he and his talking sword deserved more.

I’ve made no secret in my reviews that I am not generally a fan of books about politics. Political machinations are just not interesting to me. So I really struggled with the fact that there is a really cool magic system in this book and yet 90% of the plot is about politics. The god-king’s country is probably going to attack Siri and Vivenna’s homeland. Siri was married to the god-king to try and delay that. Vivenna is attempting to thwart the country’s war efforts and “help her countrymen” who live in the capital. And Lightsong is reluctantly getting involved with political machinations among the gods. Magic exists, but the only time it’s used for anything besides causing political problems or Vivenna’s moral crises is when Vasher is on the page.

I love the ideas here. What Siri finds out about the god-king is fascinating, Vivenna could have had an interesting character arc, I actually enjoyed Lightsong as a character, and the magic system is fantastic and complex without being confusing. There are a lot of really great things in this book that I think I could have loved in a story with less of an emphasis on politics and either less of Vivenna’s perspective or a less hateable version of Vivenna. I might come back to this eventually – after all, I’m pretty sure I liked it the first time around. But right now it’s just not doing it for me.

Review: Elysium Girls (DNF)

Title: Elysium Girls

Author: Kate Pentecost

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, death of parents, natural disasters, blood, forced institutionalization (mentions), murder (mentions), bullying, terminal illness

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 29%

Back Cover:

In this sweeping Dust Bowl-inspired fantasy, a ten-year game between Life and Death pits the walled Oklahoma city of Elysium-including a girl gang of witches and a demon who longs for humanity-against the supernatural in order to judge mankind.

When Sal is named Successor to Mother Morevna, a powerful witch and leader of Elysium, she jumps at the chance to prove herself to the town. Ever since she was a kid, Sal has been plagued by false visions of rain, and though people think she’s a liar, she knows she’s a leader. Even the arrival of enigmatic outsider Asa – a human-obsessed demon in disguise – doesn’t shake her confidence in her ability. Until a terrible mistake results in both Sal and Asa’s exile into the Desert of Dust and Steel.

Face-to-face with a brutal, unforgiving landscape, Sal and Asa join a gang of girls headed by another Elysium exile-and young witch herself-Olivia Rosales. In order to atone for their mistake, they create a cavalry of magic powered, scrap metal horses to save Elysium from the coming apocalypse. But Sal, Asa, and Olivia must do more than simply tip the scales in Elysium’s favor-only by reinventing the rules can they beat the Life and Death at their own game.

Review:

On the outside, this book looks awesome. Title? Awesome. Author’s last name? Awesome. Cover? Awesome. A demon in disguise and a girl-gang of witches making magic-mechanical horses to take on Life and Death? Awesome.

The reality of the story is, unfortunately, less awesome.

Above all, it is slow. It’s not even a slow burn, it’s just slow. Sal is hated by the whole town for having visions of rain that didn’t come true (which, first of all, she was nine years old at the time, and it seems cruel and petty for the entire town to turn against a literal child for believing something untrue). She thinks she’s finally going to be able to prove herself to the town when Mother Moreyna names her as her successor, but then it turns out Mother Moreyna just wanted a successor for the optics and she isn’t going to actually teach Sal anything. Then Asa shows up, who also has magic because he’s a demon.

Sal does many things that I think could have counted as a “terrible mistake” that would get her exiled, especially if the town decides to be strict and petty – which they definitely seem inclined to do. I kept waiting for one of them to finally make the people kick her out so we could get on with the awesome part of the plot. And it just kept not happening. Sal kept puttering around town wishing people would stop hating her, Asa tried to decide if he should do the mission he was sent for or not do it and stay with the humans he’s so interested in, and nothing happened.

There were a fair number of plot hooks (what actually happened to the murdered guy who used to live in Asa’s house? Why does Sal keep getting visions of rain? What is the point of Asa’s mission?), and I think they might have been enough to hold me if I wasn’t expecting something totally epic that the first 29% of the book didn’t deliver. It may get more awesome later on, and I’m not discounting the idea that I might pick this one back up when I’m in the mood for something slower or have the patience to wait for the awesomeness to start. But right now I don’t, so I’m leaving it here.

Review: The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan (DNF)

Title: The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan

Author: Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller

Genre: Sustainability

Trigger Warnings: General ecological disaster angst

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 6%

Back Cover:

In 2013, when friends Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller launched the first Facebook Buy Nothing Project group in their small town off the coast of Seattle, they never expected it to become a viral sensation. Today there are thousands of Buy Nothing groups all over the world, boasting more than a million members, and 5,000 highly active volunteers.

In their island community, Clark and Rockefeller discovered that the beaches of Puget Sound were spoiled by a daily influx of plastic items and trash washing on shore. From pens and toothbrushes to toys and straws, they wondered, where did it all come from? Of course, it comes from us–our homes, our backyards, our cars, and workplaces. And so, a rallying cry against excess stuff was born.

Inspired by the ancient practice of gift economies, where neighbors share and pool resources, The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan introduces an environmentally conscious 7-step guide that teaches us how to buy less, give more, and live generously. At once an actionable plan and a thought-provoking exploration of our addiction to stuff, this powerful program will help you declutter your home without filling landfills, shop more thoughtfully and discerningly, and let go of the need to buy new things. Filled with helpful lists and practical suggestions including 50 items you never need to buy (Ziploc bags and paper towels) and 50 things to make instead (gift cards and salad dressing), The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan encourages you to rethink why you shop and embrace a space-saving, money-saving, and earth-saving mindset of buying less and sharing more.

Review:

I’ll admit, I was a little skeptical about this book. I really really like the idea, but it seemed like something that should have been an article and not a full book. But I didn’t even get into the content before calling it quits – although from the way the beginning is written, I don’t think it’s going to be that groundbreaking.

It started with the authors talking about how they realized the extent of plastic pollution, and then going into facts and figures on plastic pollution, microplastics, greenhouse gases, and all sorts of other things that are going to destroy our environment. That seemed kind of unnecessary to me – if you’re picking up a book like this, you probably already know the problem and want to consume less.

And then they fell into capitalism’s most common problem – blaming the individual for systemic problems. Sixty percent of greenhouse gases, they say, are caused by consumers indirectly though the manufacturing process. This is not the fault of the manufacturers not switching to more eco-friendly methods, this is the fault of consumers for buying the goods.

Which I guess might be a slightly better argument if everyone in the world was independently wealthy and could make a conscious choice to only support eco-friendly options and live the wealthy minimalist life and etc., but most people’s reality is a bit different from that. Putting the blame on consumers and not where it belongs – the capitalist owners of the production process choosing to use destructive methods – doesn’t do anything but give ordinary people guilt for needing to purchase things to survive.

I think I’m going to be able to figure out how to give to my neighbors and purchase less without Rebecca and Lisel’s 7-step program. I’m very active on my local Freecycle group, and I’m already in the process of cutting down the things I have to purchase (I currently make all my own hair and skin products and my own toothpaste). If I decide I need what’s in this book, I bet I can find a summary online. But what I really don’t need is more unhelpful, counterproductive, unhealthy guilt about what I have to purchase to survive.

Review: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (DNF)

Title: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Author: V.E. Schwab

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Body horror, survival sex work, homelessness, forced marriage, sexual content

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 33%

Back Cover:

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever–and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.

Review:

I enjoyed the beginning of this book. It mixed Addie’s past in a small village in rural France, what brought her to the deal for immortality, and her early days of learning to live with being forgotten with her present 300 years later in New York City, much better at living with being forgotten and still trying to have relationships and leave an indirect mark on the world. Blending her past and present gave an interesting perspective of a girl who was dramatically independent for the 1700s but perfectly normal in 2014, an artist cursed to never leave a mark on anything.

The boy who remembers her doesn’t come in until 30% of the way through the story, and I think that’s why I enjoyed reading so long. I knew it was coming and I had the anticipation of that dramatic bit where everything Addie knew about the limits of her curse was thrown on its head. Beyond that, there is really no plot to speak of – it’s more of a slice-of-life story, just with a protagonist who’s immortal and unrememberable.

But once she meets the boy, all the anticipation (which is from the back cover, not even the story itself, since Addie has no clue it’s going to happen) disappears. There is some curiosity as to why this one person remembers her when no one else in three centuries does, but I didn’t find it enough to carry the story.

Not that Addie is a bad character. She’s a perfectly good character. But she’s mostly interesting for the one choice she made to get cursed with immortality and forgottenness and her circumstances of living with that than for anything else about her. Without the tension of “what will happen when she meets this boy who remembers her?” (the answer is very anticlimactic), it loses most of its interest for me.

When I put this book down at the end of the workday, I intended to keep reading, but when the time came to open an audiobook the next morning, I found the promise of my collection of unstarted books more appealing than this one. It’s not a bad book, but it just wasn’t one that grabbed me.

Review: The Girls from Alcyone (DNF)

Title: The Girls from Alcyone

Series: The Girls from Alcyone #1

Author: Cary Caffrey

Genre: Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Violence, bullying, child abuse, slavery

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 6%

Back Cover:

Sigrid and Suko are two girls from the impoverished and crime-infested streets of 24th century Earth. Sold into slavery to save their families from financial ruin, the girls are forced to live out their lives in service to the Kimura Corporation, a prestigious mercenary clan with a lineage stretching back long before the formation of the Federated Corporations.

Known only to Kimura, the two girls share a startling secret—a rare genetic structure not found in tens of millions of other girls.

But when their secret becomes known, Sigrid and Suko quickly find themselves at the center of a struggle for power. Now, hunted by men who would seek to control them, Sigrid and Suko are forced to fight for their own survival, and for the freedom of the girls from Alcyone.

Review:

I was expecting a lot more of scifi mercenary girls action and adventure out of this book. Girls with special genes sold into slavery to a mercenary organization, then escaping and fighting for their own survival and the freedom of the other slave girls sounded like a dramatic action adventure to me.

But it started off slowly, with Sigrid and Suko as children on the planet Alcyone, at the “school” Kimura Corporation set up to train their slaves to be mercenaries. Sigrid struggled to learn things and was bullied by the other girls for it. Suko was pretty goood at the lessons but was friends with Sigrid anyway. Sigrid missed her family and wished she could see them again. Suko hated her family for selling her into slavery. That was the extent of the story that I got through.

And admittedly, I didn’t get very far. It’s very possible that it could have picked up and gone into the mercenary action/adventure that I was hoping for. But neither the plot, the characters, or the setting was grabbing me right out of the gate, and considering I’d not finished the five books I’d picked up prior to this one, I was getting pretty good at putting down books that didn’t grab me.

I’m not saying this is a bad book – it has a 3.6 average rating on the StoryGraph, some people obviously must. It just didn’t grab me early into the story, and it had the unfortunate distinction of being number six in a string of highly un-satisfying books. In different circumstances, I may have read more of it. I may even come back to it eventually. But for right now, 6% is enough.

The Girls from Alcyone series:

1. The Girls from Alcyone
2. The Machines of Bellatrix
3. Codename: Night Witch

Review: Sawkill Girls (DNF)

Title: Sawkill Girls

Author: Claire Legrand

Genre: Horror

Trigger Warnings: Injury, body horror (mentions), death, death of parent, grief, car accident (mention)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 23%

Back Cover:

Who are the Sawkill Girls?

Marion: The newbie. Awkward and plain, steady and dependable. Weighed down by tragedy and hungry for love she’s sure she’ll never find.

Zoey: The pariah. Luckless and lonely, hurting but hiding it. Aching with grief and dreaming of vanished girls. Maybe she’s broken–or maybe everyone else is.

Val: The queen bee. Gorgeous and privileged, ruthless and regal. Words like silk and eyes like knives; a heart made of secrets and a mouth full of lies.

Their stories come together on the island of Sawkill Rock, where gleaming horses graze in rolling pastures and cold waves crash against black cliffs. Where kids whisper the legend of an insidious monster at parties and around campfires. Where girls have been disappearing for decades, stolen away by a ravenous evil no one has dared to fight…until now.

Review:

I honestly thought I might come back to this one and not leave it as a DNF. But I put it down at the end of the workday and couldn’t find any motivation to turn it back on the next morning. It’s just missing a je ne sais quoi that I can’t put my finger on.

Which is weird because, as has been my theme lately, there are a lot of things here I should have liked. Marian herself was set up as a solid and relatable character – the anchor for her family, talking on the emotional burden of her mother and sister so they don’t destroy themselves and being given no space for her own grief. She was immediately compelling.

Hers is not the only point of view in the book, though. There’s also Zoey, daughter of the police chief, best friend of the most recently disappeared Sawkill girl, and certain that social queen bee Val killed her. And there’s also Val herself, who is beautiful and cruel but also bound by birth to a shadowy evil that makes horrible demands of her. Each of the three perspectives had something to offer – an outsider perspective from Marian, investigating and an insider perspective from Zoey, hints of the truth from Val – but I didn’t find myself really invested in any of them.

The really intriguing part of this book is the plot. Girls keep going missing on Sawkill Rock and have been for decades. They are presumed dead but no bodies have ever been found. Zoey is convinced it has something to do with Val and her family, she just needs proof. She’s not wrong, but there’s something else, something supernatural and horrible, that has its claws in Val. And there’s tantalizing hints that the island of Sawkill Rock itself may be somewhat sentient and want this evil gone.

That is a really solid start and an intriguing idea. If the book had been more plot-focused, I probably would have enjoyed it much more. But it really wanted to be more character focused. The characters were perfectly fine – more fleshed out than would have been needed to carry a plot-driven story, but not full enough to carry a character-driven story for me. Even Marian loses a lot of what I liked about her after an accident has her preoccupied with some supernatural stuff happening with her senses. The characters were just not enough for me to grab onto in a character-focused story.

I really wish this had been more plot-focused, because the plot idea was interesting and I would be curious to see how it plays out. But the book is fairly long (13 hours as an audiobook) and moving too slowly to keep me engaged. There are really good ideas here, but for me, the execution just didn’t work.

Review: Rage Becomes Her (DNF)

Title: Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger

Author: Soraya Chemaly

Genre: Feminism

Trigger Warnings: Misogyny (severe), sexism (severe), suicide (mentions), eating disorders (mentions), sexual assault

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 20%

Back Cover:

Women are angry, and it isn’t hard to figure out why.

We are underpaid and overworked. Too sensitive, or not sensitive enough. Too dowdy or too made-up. Too big or too thin. Sluts or prudes. We are harassed, told we are asking for it, and asked if it would kill us to smile. Yes, yes it would.

Contrary to the rhetoric of popular “self-help” and an entire lifetime of being told otherwise, our rage is one of the most important resources we have, our sharpest tool against both personal and political oppression. We’ve been told for so long to bottle up our anger, letting it corrode our bodies and minds in ways we don’t even realize. Yet our anger is a vital instrument, our radar for injustice and a catalyst for change. On the flip side, the societal and cultural belittlement of our anger is a cunning way of limiting and controlling our power.

We are so often told to resist our rage or punished for justifiably expressing it, yet how many remarkable achievements in this world would never have gotten off the ground without the kernel of anger that fueled them? Rage Becomes Her makes the case that anger is not what gets in our way, it is our way, sparking a new understanding of one of our core emotions that will give women a liberating sense of why their anger matters and connect them to an entire universe of women no longer interested in making nice at all costs.

Following in the footsteps of classic feminist manifestos like The Feminine Mystique and Our Bodies, Ourselves, Rage Becomes Her is an eye-opening book for the twenty-first century woman: an engaging, accessible credo offering us the tools to re-understand our anger and harness its power to create lasting positive change.

Review:

This book has a lot of promise, a lot of research, and a lot of good ideas. But ultimately for me, it inspires too much rage.

I am not a woman. However, I am woman-shaped (my general term for presenting mostly feminine, having most people who look at me put me in the “female” box, and having political issues that affect “women” usually affect me as well) and was socialized female as a child. I am aware of and have personally experienced most of the reasons women and girls are angry that Soraya Chemaly talks about in the first 20% of this book. I myself am full of anger. And having all the reasons I am angry laid out in book form with sources on how much it hurts people made me furious. It made me want to burn down society while knowing that there’s nothing I can do and I’d likely only burn myself down in the attempt.

This is an absolutely intense read. I could only read it in small doses. I’ve said that before about intense books about trauma and such, but those “small doses” were in the 2-hour range. With this book, I risked getting out my phone at work to switch books because I could only handle about half an hour before I wanted to strangle the whole of society with my bare hands.

If I had read this as a physical book instead of an audiobook, I might have skipped around, moving forward to the point where Soraya tells me what I can do with my rage. But audiobooks are hard to skip around in, especially without a table of contents, and this book is already intense. It has really good research and is definitely a worthwhile book, but I am too full of rage to read it without boiling myself to death in frustrated rage. I may come back to it in the future – maybe I’ll find a physical or ebook copy and skip to the solutions section- but for the sake of my own sanity, I’m putting it down for now.

Review: Galapagos (DNF)

Title: Galapagos

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Genre: Classic/Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Suicidal ideation, suicide attempt, divorce, blood (mentions), cancer, murder, incest (mentions), child sexual abuse/pedophilia, whorephobia/slut-shaming

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 63%

Back Cover:

Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry—and all that is worth saving.

Review:

I actually got pretty far though this one. It was definitely weird, but very creative and for a while I was curious about what happened. But then it got repetitive.

This book has a main cast of characters, and what I’m calling “Plot A” for convenience is set in a hotel in Ecuador, narrated by an unnamed person who might be from the future or immortal or dead or all three – it’s up to you to put together the pieces about them. Many of the characters end up dead before the end, which the narrator makes sure to announce early on. Since the narrator is either way in the future or possibly outside of time, there is very little linear structure to the way the story is told. It flips though our main cast in Ecuador, their pasts, their futures, tangents about a few minor characters, and humanity a million years after the 1980s when Plot A is set.

And it actually kind of worked. It was weird jumping between Plot A in 1980s Ecuador during a global economic collapse, each of the characters’ pasts that brought them there, their futures (mainly who they had children with and how they died), and bits of how humanity functions a million years on. The narrator kept stressing that these people at the hotel – including a widow, a con man, a Japanese couple, a millionaire and his daughter, a ship’s captain whose rank was purely decorative, and six native Ecuadorian girls recently escaped from their pimp – were the ancestors of the entire human race, and I was very curious about what happened to the rest of the world.

And then nothing ever progressed. We got characters’ backstories, sure, and brief vignettes about their life after whatever was going to happen happened, little hints and mentions of what did happen and what humans evolved into a million years later. But mostly it was about the Big Important Point of the book – that human evolution has made human brains so big that they can do stupid and counterproductive things like lie, and invent deadly weapons, and cause economic collapse by stopping believing in the value of currency, and make you feel suicidal, and other such things that could get in the way of popping out babies to continue the species which is the entire point of everything.

On one hand, it’s both accurate and an interesting philosophical idea. Human brains can malfunction in many weird ways that harm our individual survival (I say this as an owner of a somewhat malfunctioning brain myself), we do believe in a lot of imaginary things like currency and gender roles, and reproduction is the entire goal of evolution. However, after a while the narrator harping on this idea got obnoxious. Every time anyone did anything that wasn’t strictly about survival or reproduction, the narrator would go on about how their big brain made them do it and aren’t we glad our brains evolved to be smaller in the future? It also focused a lot on reproductive activity and how exactly our main cast’s genes went on to become the new, smaller-brained version of humanity. Which got a little uncomfortable at times because the native Ecuadorian girls were all minors during Plot A.

It’s not a bad idea, really. I quite enjoyed it for a while. But eventually it got old and I got annoyed. I think this would have worked much better as a short story or a novella to cut out all the repetition that annoyed me. But in its current form, 63% is about all I care to read.

Review: Lamb (DNF)

Title: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

Author: Christopher Moore

Genre: Comedy

Trigger Warnings: Animal death, violence towards children, slavery (mentions), excrement (mentions)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 12%

Back Cover:

Everyone knows about the immaculate conception and the crucifixion. But what happened to Jesus between the manger and the Sermon on the Mount? In this hilarious and bold novel, the acclaimed Christopher Moore shares the greatest story never told: the life of Christ as seen by his boyhood pal, Biff.

Just what was Jesus doing during the many years that have gone unrecorded in the Bible? Biff was there at his side, and now after two thousand years, he shares those good, bad, ugly, and miraculous times. Screamingly funny, audaciously fresh, Lamb rivals the best of Tom Robbins and Carl Hiaasen, and is sure to please this gifted writer’s fans and win him legions more.

Review:

Despite being an ex-christian and no longer believing in Jesus as savior, the existence of the Christian god, etc., I am fascinated by religion. And probably because of being an ex-christian, I enjoy a bit of sacrilege and blasphemy on occasion. Plus, this book came recommended by my favorite ex-christian blogger. So I had high hopes.

However, I had forgotten two things:

1. I am not a huge fan of the comedy genre.
2. I know WAY too much about the Bible and Jesus’ supposed life to be able to suspend my disbelief very well.

I’m also a nerd and expect people to have done extensive research especially if it’s something I know a lot about, but this is unambiguously fiction so I hope I could be forgiving of that one.

Most of the comedy fell completely flat for me. Some of what happened was definitely creative, but I don’t think I cracked a smile once. This, admittedly, might be me and not the book. The main reason I don’t like comedies as a genre is because I rarely find them funny. And at least in the part I read, most of the humor seemed to be based on little boys being little boys, written in such a way that I think it would be more amusing to people who had actually been little boys at some point.

My fundamentalist upbringing balked at young Jesus being portrayed as an imperfect child who was struggling to learn to be human, but the rest of me acknowledged that was a really creative way to portray him. What I couldn’t get past, though, was the insistence that Jesus was in fact the Jewish messiah and fulfilling all the prophecies and whatnot. I know that’s the Christian version of the tale and it takes a lot of digging to get past that in the Christian-dominated West, but that’s not at all accurate. If Jesus existed, which I think he probably did, he likely never claimed to be messiah or son of god. And the Jewish qualifications for the role of Messiah are way different than Christianity would have you believe and Jesus fits almost none of them.

I realize that for most people this wouldn’t be a deal-breaker, or probably even on their radar, but it was an issue for me. (Yes, I have been accused of being pedantic before.) I read books to enjoy them, and I just was not enjoying this one.