Review: Natural Beauty

Title: Natural Beauty

Author: Ling Ling Huang

Genre: Contemporary/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (major), sexism, misogyny (mentions, from antagonist), sexual content, death, medical content, medical trauma, sexual assault, pregnancy (mentions), death of parent (mentions), vomit, cannibalism (mentions), bullying (mentions), drug use (dubious consent), unreality

Back Cover:

Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.

Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.

Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and gives her a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.

A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.

Review:

I’m always down for media skewering the beauty industry. The damage the pursuit of beauty does to to the body and the psyche, consumerism masquerading as self-care, a mantra of “wellness” that only adds more work and stress to your life while claiming if you just did it right you’d never have a negative emotion again … these are all ideas that I find fascinating and compelling and I love to explore.

Unfortunately, that’s not really what I got with Natural Beauty.

Don’t get me wrong, it tries! It absolutely tries really hard to say a lot of things. But I think the problem was that it was try to cover way too many things in a book that isn’t nearly long enough. In addition to the commentary on the beauty industry, it also tries to talk about the value of music, beauty as social capital, the nature of beauty itself (through both physical beauty and music), complex relationships with parents, the inherent power dynamics of money, possibly sustainability – and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head.

One of the primary drivers of the book is a fascinating form of body horror serving as a counterpoint to Holistik’s beauty mandate, which was a wonderful idea and a form of body horror that I don’t see a lot, so I appreciated it both as a body horror fan and a beauty culture skeptic. But for it to have been done well, it needed to be a slow burn. And Natural Beauty is emphatically not that. In fact, in the first two-thirds or so, the bit that should have been the tense, gradual build-up to the true horror at the end, the changes happen rapidly – and our unnamed protagonist barely seems to notice them anyway, simply commenting on how her body has changed and going on about her business. What seems to be the message of the book has to struggle for page time among flashbacks to the protagonist’s past, her thoughts about piano and music in general, and interactions with her coworkers.

Then about halfway through, the focus slowly begins to shift. In case you couldn’t figure it out from the back cover or the first few pages of the book, there’s something very weird and very suspicious going on at Holistik. The story shifts away from the protagonist’s body and the idea of beauty and towards finding out exactly what is happening at Holistik. But even that is unsatisfying because the answers we eventually get don’t actually tie up all the questions that I had. (What about the deer? What about the hand cream?) The book gets weird, and not in the unsetting way I enjoy, but in a way that feels overdone and unbelievable. I was halfway through reading a particular scene before I realized it was supposed to be the climax and not just another outlandish even in the series of outlandish events that was the last third of the book.

The narration is straightforward and passionless, which is not always a bad thing, but in this case served to keep at a distance any emotions that would have made it impactful. It also made it really difficult to judge which scenes were actually happening and which were some kind of drug-induced unreality sequence. And as I mentioned previously, the body horror aspect could have been fantastic if it was paced better. But what really made it so disappointing was the fact that it couldn’t keep a focus. It started off with the beauty industry and the costs and dangers of being beautiful. But it seems afraid to go too deep into it or lean too hard into the horrifying, revolting underbelly. Whenever it approached anything particularly grim, it would back off to talk about music or the protagonist’s parents or her past. Then it shifted to “let’s find out how fucked up this company really is!” with the bonus that the protagonist wasn’t even particularly interested in this line of investigating, but got dragged along as her friends started to pry. Then at the end it abruptly switches back to body horror and beauty culture, skipping over the actual change that would have made me actually feel something about it and relying on the protagonist’s passionless commentary and opinions about how just entirely not participating in beauty is good, actually.

I wanted this to be something more than it was. I wanted a literary horror commentary on the beauty industry, beauty culture, and how the modern mandate of “wellness” just sells women more work and more reasons to appeal to the male gaze while convincing them it’s actually “self-care” and “empowerment.” What I got was an admittedly well-written but poorly paced and unfocused story about a young woman who got caught up with a really fucked up beauty brand. The ideas were strong and the concepts had a lot of potential. But the execution, at least in my opinion, didn’t do them justice.

Review: Fleishman is in Trouble

Title: Fleishman is in Trouble

Author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Genre: Contemporary

Trigger Warnings: Sexual content (a lot), divorce (major), infidelity, abandonment, fatphobia/body shaming/disordered eating/moralizing about food (frequently mentioned), mental illness, terminal illness (mentions; not protagonist), medical content (mentions; because protagonist is a doctor)

Back Cover:

A finely observed, timely exploration of marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition from one of the most exciting writers working today.

Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this.

As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place.

A searing, utterly unvarnished debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an insightful, unsettling, often hilarious exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of our great wariness and our great hope.

Review:

I still occasionally talk about the AP English Literature class I took my freshman year of high school. As I wrote in 2022, “Every single novel I had to read for the class was about divorce, marital infidelity, or divorcing over marital infidelity. All of these novels were the ‘literary’ kind. And I hated every. single. book.”

Fleishman is in Trouble is a literary, largely plotless novel about a middle-aged man going through a divorce and having a lot of sex to try to deal with it. So I bring up this literature class yet again to emphasize how astonishing even I find it that not only did I pick up this book, and not only did I finish it, I actually enjoyed it. (Up until the end, which I’ll get to in a second.)

These characters and this world feel like the embodiment of a “live your best life,” “#girlboss,” “you can have it all” aesthetically-pleasing rich-girl Instagram account. You know the type. The primary characters in this book (a New York City doctor divorcing his millionaire publicist wife) are aggressively unrelatable to me (a secretary living on 75% of the national average salary in the Midwest). It has very little in terms of a plot. But the thing that this book does so well, and that made me eager to keep reading despite all these factors that should have made it feel exactly like the books I hated in AP Lit, is that it so perfectly captures the tensions of living your “best life” in the modern world. You’re already stretched to your breaking point but the mandate of self-actualization demands you do more. You hate these people and everything they stand for and yet you must also fit in and earn their respect, if not admiration. You’ve been dealing with burnout for so long that you can’t even recognize that’s what it is. You simultaneously feel that you’re doing the bare minimum and that you’re doing too much. You just want those closest to you to recognize – not even necessarily appreciate, just recognize – how much time and effort you’re putting into keeping so many different things running – for them! – but all they ever seem to notice is the things you don’t do.

I have a lot of feelings about modern life, how doing it “perfectly” requires multiple conflicting things to be true at the same time, and how keeping on top of everything you’re “supposed” to do won’t result in a feeling of accomplishment or peace but in constantly feeling stressed and behind. And this book puts those feelings into words better than I ever could. In fact, I think making the story about rich people living dramatic lives in New York City is actually a better choice than something more easily relatable. Big lives enable the problems to become bigger, more obvious, almost caricatured to make the point. And it works.

Toby and Rachel are both not great people for different reasons. They’re both victims but they’re both victims of their own decisions. Their multiple penthouses and multi-million-dollar deals set them a world away from most things relatable to the average reader. But if the question is relatability, I will always choose Rachel. Toby has his own struggles and his story isn’t bad. Rachel throughout the book is portrayed as a monster. And though she’s definitely not as terrible as Toby thinks, she’s not a good person. But despite possessing wealth that I can only dream of, despite having the type of high-powered job that I neither want nor am likely to get, she was still relatable. She was relatable in being a person doing too much in a world that always demands more, and in being a woman and primary breadwinner in a heterosexual relationship that is unequal not due to any particular malice on the part of her male partner, but because the system of heterosexual relationships is inherently unequal and he has never bothered to consider how he might be passively benefitting at her expense.

The other thing that this book does wonderfully, but more subtly, was explore both sides of this kind of relational destruction. Even through the filter of Toby’s hurt and rage, I could still easily understand Rachel’s thought process and emotional state. But with Toby as the protagonist, I also saw his thought process. It was, above all, a failure to communicate on both sides. But it did do an interesting job of illustrating how even though it can feel like this person is just overtly refusing to meet your needs, chances are they also feel like you’re refusing to meet their needs. (Although the communication scholar in me wants to yell at them that if they were better about communicating what it actually was they needed they could avoid a lot of problems.)

The final thing I want to touch on as I start bringing what could be a really long review into some sort of ending is not so much something the book does or accomplishes, but a major theme that it touches on. And that is the theme of how relationships threaten female identity. A single woman, unattached, can be herself. A married woman must remove some of herself to make room for her new identity of wife. A mother must remove even more to take on the new identity of mother. Both of these other identities, taken on not because the woman chose to but because of her ties to someone else, have the potential to grow and push out even more of an individual identity – motherhood especially, until there is no more I, only Mother. I did not expect a book largely focusing on the man’s side to come out in such support of the woman, and women everywhere. It’s a deep, subtle exploration that may not even be recognized for people who don’t relate but will be blatant and resonant for anyone who is or has experienced similar feelings.

I went through most of this book ready and eager to write a glowing review (in case you can’t tell from the fact that my review so far has been so positive). There were a couple points where I actually had to stop myself from starting the review before I finished it because I was so eager to share how good this book was. And there’s a reason for that, and that reason played out especially true for this book. That reason is sometimes the ending doesn’t live up to the rest of the book. And when I say “ending” here, I’m mainly talking about the last few pages. The whole long, rambling story up to that point subtly and masterfully explored unique ideas and interesting themes – I hesitate to say “the human condition” because that’s very broad and also somewhat pretentious, but perhaps “the modern human condition” is fitting. And then in the last few pages, this previously rich and subtle book starts jumping up and down waving its arms in the air and shouting, “Hey! Here’s all the themes we’ve been talking about for the past 400 pages! Pretty neat, huh? Here’s an easy and quick answer to these big questions!” It felt jarring and discordant with the rest of the book, like the author didn’t quite know how to end it but wasn’t comfortable leaving the readers with no answers. It also felt cheap and almost dismissive, as if nothing it touches on actually matters because there’s a quick answer. Though it didn’t technically ruin my experience of reading the rest of the book, it thoroughly dampened my enthusiasm.

Sometimes books just come to you at the right time. I can guarantee that if I’d have picked this up even a few years ago, I probably would have found it dull and unlikeable. In fact, a few years ago I probably wouldn’t have picked it up at all. But I think I’m at the point in my life where I can appreciate the thematic resonance of a book about divorce featuring generally unlikeable characters. Despite my feelings about the ending, I still appreciate what the rest of the book had to say. It was definitely a different reading experience than my usual fare, but sometimes looking somewhere new leads to a surprise gem. And this is a book worth reading.

Review: The Everlasting

Title: The Everlasting

Author: Katy Simpson Smith

Genre: Contemporary/Historical

Trigger Warnings: Excrement, death, gore, body horror, death of parent, death of child, homophobia, infidelity, sexual content, attempted marital rape, racism, sexism, misogyny, animal death, pregnancy, adultism

Back Cover:

Spanning two thousand years, The Everlasting follows four characters whose struggles resonate across the centuries: an early Christian child martyr; a medieval monk on crypt duty in a church; a Medici princess of Moorish descent; and a contemporary field biologist conducting an illicit affair.

Outsiders to a city layered and dense with history, this quartet separated by time grapple with the physicality of bodies, the necessity for sacrifice, and the power of love to sustain and challenge faith. Their small rebellions are witnessed and provoked by an omniscient, time-traveling Satan who, though incorporeal, nonetheless suffers from a heart in search of repair.

As their dramas unfold amid the brick, marble, and ghosts of Rome, they each must decide what it means to be good. Twelve-year old Prisca defiles the scrolls of her father’s library. Felix, a holy man, watches his friend’s body decay and is reminded of the first boy he loved passionately. Giulia de’ Medici, a beauty with dark skin and limitless wealth, wants to deliver herself from her unborn child. Tom, an American biologist studying the lives of the smallest creatures, cannot pinpoint when his own marriage began to die. As each of these conflicted people struggles with forces they cannot control, their circumstances raise a profound and timeless question at the heart of faith: What is our duty to each other, and what will God forgive?

Review:

This book was on my “Low Standards” list – books that didn’t seem interesting enough to go on my main To Read list, but looked like I might not hate them and could be useful once I started running out of audiobooks I definitely wanted to read. Then I realized I am starting to get low on audiobooks I definitely want to read and I should start working through the Low Standards list as well. I picked this one at random and completely expected to DNF it.

If you asked me, I couldn’t tell you what it’s about. In terms of plot, it’s not really about anything. Hardly anything happens across any of the four stories. But it’s about a whole lot more than plot – life and living, reality, gender, religion, the choices we’re given, the choices we make, and the futility of denying life in favor of the afterlife.

Most of all, though, it’s about bodies and their betrayals – being young, getting old, being female, getting sick, becoming pregnant. And yet it’s also about the joy of being embodied. Our bodies are all we have in this world that is truly, inseparably ours. But it’s a bittersweet joy, as our bodies can betray us in life and we will lose them in death.

I found Tom’s story the weakest of the four. His story is only about the body and its desires and betrayals. He desires a woman who is not his wife but who also doesn’t feel like a choice he can make; he considers his daughter, a body created from his body, and her struggles to accept her own body; he reckons with the betrayal of his body as he is diagnosed with a chronic and degenerative disease. His story was good, but didn’t touch on the themes of gender or faith like the other stories.

Giulia’s story is about the betrayals of her body and gender. Her ambitions and desires are betrayed by her body (her dark skin allows even her inferiors to scorn and disrespect her), her gender (she has no choice but to marry and she isn’t taken seriously in business dealings), and her gendered body (she is pregnant and does not want to be). The choices she is given are limited by her body, and though she resents it, she can only choose.

Felix’s story is about both the body and faith. His job as a monk is to watch the bodies of previously passed monks decay until they are nothing but bones. As he watches the body decay after the soul has left it, he reflects on how his body betrayed him in the past through desire (desire for another boy saw him sent to the monastery) and by aging, and he sees the hypocrisy of people who have given up on life to focus on life after death.

And finally Prisca, too young and female to be treated like a human being, too many desires to accept a lesser role, entranced by faith in a god who promised to take her seriously but let her suffer and die before giving even a taste of the glories he promised.

And throughout all these stories is a fifth character, who never gets her own story but nevertheless provides glimpses through commentary on the other four – Lucifer. Though she only has a few lines here and there, her story was the most emotionally resonant. She seemed to be both a scorned lover and abandoned child, devoted to the point of self-sacrifice and rejected by an unfeeling god. God promised forgiveness and unconditional love to all, but even when Lucifer begged on bloody knees, he denied it to her. And though she hates him, she still loves him, and this contradiction tears at her.

This Lucifer tempts us from god’s path because she loves us. God does not truly love, but would gladly see us deny ourselves, suffer, and die without ever tasting happiness. Lucifer would have us seize the pleasures of our bodies and revel in them. She would not see us suffer at the whim of a god who cannot love.

Did I like this book? I don’t know, but I felt it.

Review: Frankenstein in Baghdad

Title: Frankenstein in Baghdad

Author: Ahmed Saadawi

Genre: Contemporary/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (severe), death, blood, gore, injury detail, fire injury, terrorism, torture, police brutality, child death, war (mentions), sexual content (mentions)

Back Cover:

From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi—a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café—collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he’s created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive—first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path.

A prizewinning novel by “Baghdad’s new literary star” (The New York Times), Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.

Review:

I picked this up because I was intrigued by the concept of taking the “man made of parts from multiple people” idea and setting it in early-2000s Iraq. Plus it was written by an Iraqi author who lived in Baghdad in the early aughts, which is always a benefit for authenticity.

The back cover makes it sound like Hadi is the main character, but he’s really not. There isn’t really a “main character” in this book, just a series of minor protagonists alternating perspectives to weave a story that feels less like a Structured Plot and more like part of real life. (The same thing is true of Celestial Bodies, so I’m beginning to wonder if Middle Eastern novels just have a very different structure from Western novels.)

The main players in this story are as follows:

• Hadi, who makes a living buying junk, fixing it up, and selling it, and who collected pieces of people blown up in car bombings and sewed them into a single corpse.
• An elderly lady who lives next door to Hadi and who refuses to sell her house and emigrate with her daughters because she still believes her son will come home.
• A reporter who desperately wants to be like his powerful, wealthy, connected, asshole editor and reports on the reanimated corpse roaming Baghdad.
• The monster himself, who has the opportunity to tell his story in his own words.

The monster’s story is almost entirely told as audio that the monster recorded onto an audio recorder and gave to the journalist, and that takes up a large chunk of the middle of the book. Beyond that, most of his story is told through other people seeing or hearing about his actions. The reporter has the most page time by far, but that makes sense since he is the most connected and in the best position to get the most parts of the story.

Each of the main protagonists in the story could be a complete character-focused story on their own.

• Hadi is suffering from a past tragedy and trying to hide the dubiously-legal steps he’s taking to deal with it, the emotional toll leaving him struggling to work even though he’s running out of money.
• The elderly lady refuses to move out of her dangerous neighborhood to live with her daughters because the picture of Saint George she has on her wall has told her that her son, who never returned from the war two decades ago, will soon come home.
• The journalist has been taken under the wing of the editor of his magazine, and desperately wants to be like him – whether that means cozying up to people he hates or abandoning his friends to get ahead.
• The monster doesn’t know why he’s alive but he knows he has a mission, and undertaking that mission has brought him many disciples with different opinions of how the mission should be done and what the monster’s ultimate purpose is.

In a lot of ways it feels like several smaller stories based around the protagonists’ character arcs were put into a single volume and somehow wove together to form a bigger picture of tumultuous early-aughts Iraq and a Frankenstein’s monster loosed on the streets of Baghdad. It’s like some sort of artwork in multiple pieces, where every piece is a complete image in and of itself but when you put them together it forms another, bigger image.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is a well-told story, I’m very impressed with how it weaves together multiple character-focused stories to form another complete story, it has a lot of commentary about early-aughts Iraq that I think I would find more meaningful if I had been aware of world news in the early aughts, and it did keep me interested enough to read the whole book. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it when it comes to entertainment, but it was creative and engaging enough – and regardless of my personal opinion, I think it does have objective literary merit.

Review: Celestial Bodies

Title: Celestial Bodies

Author: Jokha Alharthi

Genre: Contemporary

Trigger Warnings: Pregnancy, childbirth, death, death of children, child abuse, adult/minor relationship, incest*, toxic relationship, slavery, infidelity, spousal neglect, ableism, animal death (mentions), sexual content (minor)

*Note: I added incest as a trigger because many characters in this story marry their first cousins, and we in the West would categorize that as incest. But it’s clear from the book that not only is that not considered incest in Oman, marrying someone from your family is often preferable to marrying a stranger. I listed incest as a trigger tag because I know most of the readers of this blog are from Western countries, but I’m also trying to be sensitive to differing cultural norms.

Back Cover:

In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present. Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth.

The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer.

Review:

I am not entirely sure what I just read. Celestial Bodies is vastly different from my normal reading fare, and I don’t know that I really understood it. It’s densely populated with characters, time jumps back and forth, and the story of this one family gets woven against the backdrop of a changing Oman and the tensions between tradition and modernity.

From the back cover, it seems like the story will focus on the three sisters, Mayya, Asma, and Khawla. And that’s where it starts – with the man Mayya loves never acknowledging her, her marriage to someone else, and the birth of her first child, a daughter she names London. But then it branches off to follow other people at other points in time.

Mayya’s husband Abdullah is the only one to narrate in first person as he reminisces about his childhood with his nursemaid and his abusive father, his marriage with Mayya, and their children, and interacts with his daughter London as an adult. The rest of the story is told omnisciently, with third-person narration seamlessly slipping between Khawla, Asma, the three sisters’ mother and father, Abdullah’s nursemaid, London as an adult, and many other more minor characters (including Asma’s husband, Abdullah’s nursemaid’s mother, and Mayya’s father’s lover) that provide history and context to this family’s saga.

Time is a fluid thing here. The story slips seamlessly between what I’m calling the “present” – the time where Mayya has just given birth to London and Asma and Khawla are getting ready to be married – and the past and the future. It delves into childhoods of parents and grandparents, then slides ahead to decades beyond the “present.” There are no temporal anchors here, and I’m only calling one part of the story as the “present” because that’s where the book opened.

I wanted to categorize this as magical realism, because it has a strong magical realism feel, but there is no magic in this story and nothing supernatural besides traditional superstitions. The audiobook is only 8 hours and per the StoryGraph it’s 250 pages in print, but Celestial Bodies somehow feels like a sweeping family saga anyway. There isn’t a plot, just life, the tangled timelines illustrating the interconnectedness of family and how past influences present influences future.

I am not sure I understand this book. It packs more into its 250 pages than should be possible, and balances such a massive cast of characters that it did get a little confusing at times. But it’s deftly woven and somehow kept my interest despite a complete lack of plot in the usual sense. I absolutely see how it won its awards.

Review: When We Believed in Mermaids

Title: When We Believed in Mermaids

Author: Barbara O’Neil

Genre: Contemporary

Trigger Warnings: Suicide, suicide attempt, drug use, alcohol use, alcoholism, rape, child sexual abuse/pedophilia, sexual content, natural disasters, death of parent, abortion, drowning (mentions)

Back Cover:

Her sister has been dead for fifteen years when she sees her on the TV news…

Josie Bianci was killed years ago on a train during a terrorist attack. Gone forever. It’s what her sister, Kit, an ER doctor in Santa Cruz, has always believed. Yet all it takes is a few heart-wrenching seconds to upend Kit’s world. Live coverage of a club fire in Auckland has captured the image of a woman stumbling through the smoke and debris. Her resemblance to Josie is unbelievable. And unmistakable. With it comes a flood of emotions–grief, loss, and anger–that Kit finally has a chance to put to rest: by finding the sister who’s been living a lie.

After arriving in New Zealand, Kit begins her journey with the memories of the past: of days spent on the beach with Josie. Of a lost teenage boy who’d become part of their family. And of a trauma that has haunted Kit and Josie their entire lives.

Now, if two sisters are to reunite, it can only be by unearthing long-buried secrets and facing a devastating truth that has kept them apart far too long. To regain their relationship, they may have to lose everything.

Review:

It’s bizarre to me that after such a long string of not finishing books, several of which have a lot of things that I really should have enjoyed, this is the one I finish. I don’t generally like contemporary, it is almost entirely plotless, and I can’t come up with a single reason why I wanted to keep reading. But I did, and I finished it, and it wasn’t bad.

This one was a recommendation from my sister-in-law – who, like my mother-in-law, has very different reading tastes than me, but to be polite I try to at least attempt to read all their recommendations. Besides, sometimes they’re actually enjoyable. Perhaps it was the lack of other things on my phone at the time (and the terrible work internet preventing me from downloading anything else from the library), perhaps I wanted to know how the several tiny mysteries worked out, perhaps I was drawn to the complicated human-ness of the characters. I still really have no idea why I finished it, but I did, and though I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it, I can see that it’s well-written and well-told.

I think the most remarkable thing about this book is the characters. Though I didn’t find them particularly likeable, they are portrayed in a remarkably real moral complexity that I don’t often find in books. No one is all good or all bad in this story, and Kit is forced to reckon with the fact that she loves people who hurt her and idolizes people who made awful, disastrous mistakes. As the truth of what actually happened to Josie and Kit and Josie’s childhoods slowly comes out, more and more shades of gray enter the picture.

That’s what I appreciated most about this book – the moral complexity that avoided painting any of the characters with an all-good or all-bad brush (with one exception). Even abusers and neglectful parents were viewed through the very real complexity of simultaneously knowing they did horrible things to you and loving them deeply. It was, in many ways, validating to my own complicated feelings about parents who I think do genuinely love me and who I think I love but who did horrible things and let horrible things happen to me.

There’s not much of a plot to speak of. Kit goes to New Zealand to try and find Josie. Josie lives her normal, ordinary life in New Zealand with a different name. Ordinary, everyday things happen, but not much that one would call an actual plot. The real heart of this story is the characters, their pasts and presents and emotional complexities.

I can’t honestly say this was entertaining or even an enjoyable reading experience. It was slow, full of extended flashbacks, and emotionally intense in many places. But it was vividly, intensely real, and I think that’s why I did finish it.

Review: If You Could Be Mine (DNF)

Title: If You Could Be Mine

Author: Sara Farizan

Genre: Contemporary

Trigger Warnings: Homophobia, rape (mention), pedophilia (mention), execution, death of children/minors

Read To: 6%

Back Cover:

Seventeen-year-old Sahar has been in love with her best friend, Nasrin, since they were six. They’ve shared stolen kisses and romantic promises. But Iran is a dangerous place for two girls in love—Sahar and Nasrin could be beaten, imprisoned, even executed if their relationship came to light.

So they carry on in secret—until Nasrin’s parents announce that they’ve arranged for her marriage. Nasrin tries to persuade Sahar that they can go on as they have been, only now with new comforts provided by the decent, well-to-do doctor Nasrin will marry. But Sahar dreams of loving Nasrin exclusively—and openly.

Then Sahar discovers what seems like the perfect solution. In Iran, homosexuality may be a crime, but to be a man trapped in a woman’s body is seen as nature’s mistake, and sex reassignment is legal and accessible. As a man, Sahar could be the one to marry Nasrin. Sahar will never be able to love the one she wants, in the body she wants to be loved in, without risking her life. Is saving her love worth sacrificing her true self?

Review:

Like most books I read, I picked this one up for concept – being gay is not okay but being trans is, so a girl in love with another girl tries to decide if she should transition (despite not being trans) so she can marry the girl she loves. I’m not usually much into romances, but I’ve been surprised several times this year, so I wanted to give it a shot.

I did not read very far. For what kinda has to be a character-driven book, the first six percent told me next to nothing about the characters. The only thing I know about the narrator, Sahar, is that she liked playing soccer as a kid and she really really loves Nasrin. Nasrin comes off as incredibly shallow – gorgeous and more interested in painting her nails than doing her homework. Sahar stresses really hard that she loves Nasrin, but I didn’t see much to love.

You know what I do know about, though? Sahar’s opinions on the past few rulers of Iran, Nasrin’s father’s pistachio business, and the study habits and relative degree of spoiledness of Sahar’s cousins and Nasrin’s brothers. Because that’s what’s important here, I guess.

It’s very possible that it gets better. I did give up on it really early, and perhaps if I’d stuck it out a little longer I would have enjoyed it. But I kept getting annoyed at all the random information I was given that was not at all relevant to the protagonists, and one of my reading goals is to not finish books I’m not genuinely enjoying. So I’m leaving it here.

Review: Life of Pi (DNF)

Title: Life of Pi

Author: Yann Martel

Genre: Contemporary (the back cover calls it “fantasy adventure” but I disagree)

Trigger Warnings: Death of animals, excrement (mentions)

Read To: 23%

Back Cover:

Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist, Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, a Tamil boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Review:

My husband really wanted me to read this. I was fairly ambivalent about this book, but sometimes my husband’s recommendations are pretty good. Sometimes they’re not, though, and this was one of those cases.

I only read as far as I did because I’m interested in religion, and Pi was from a nominally Hindu family but converted to both Christianity and Islam, so I was interested in his perspectives on religion as a practicing and devout Hindu, Chrisitan, and Muslim all at the same time. That had mostly wrapped up by 20% in, though, and I stopped because I was bored.

There is no plot in this book. Pi explores religion and his father is a zookeeper, and that’s about it. I read the plot summary on Wikipedia, and even after the whole shipwreck and being stuck in a lifeboat with a tiger thing (I don’t feel like that’s a spoiler since that’s literally on the cover of the book), not a lot happens. A lot of the praise I’ve seen for it have called it a philosophical book, and I guess that’s a good thing to call it because it certainly isn’t an adventure or fantasy novel. I’d call it character-driven if Pi himself was compelling – he wasn’t awful, but he wasn’t someone I would want to read a whole character-focused book about.

I don’t understand how this got as popular as it did. I could see it work as a short story, or possibly even a novella – something more focused and less meandering with a little more focus on what the story is trying to be. I bet cutting it down to a two-hour script for a movie did good things for it, too. But this book is nearly 500 pages, and not only does it not have enough plot to fill that much, it doesn’t seem to have any plot at all. I can’t for the life of me figure out how enough people read the entire book for it to become as popular as it did.

Review: Onion Skin

Title: Onion Skin

Author: Edgar Camacho

Genre: Contemporary/Graphic Novel

Trigger Warnings: Fire, alcohol use, broken bones, vomit (brief), violence (brief), falling injuries

Back Cover:

Rolando’s job was crushing him… and then it literally crushed his hand. Now he can barely get out of the house, binging TV and struggling to find meaning. On a rare night out with friends, he meets Nera, a woman who lives only in the moment. Dazzled by her hedonistic attitude, Rolando sees a new life opening before him.

Together, these restless youths fix up an old food truck and hit the road for a wild journey. But have they truly found the spice of life? Or has Rolando bitten off more than he can chew?

Discover a bright new star of Mexican comics in this romantic and thrilling tale, stuffed with adventure and delicious food. Onion Skin became a sensation in its native land for its rich narrative, captivating characters, thrilling action, and positively delicious artwork. It’s a feast that will leave readers eager for a second course. Winner of Mexico’s first ever National Young Graphic Novel Award!

Review:

This graphic novel is a quick read and a ton of fun.

It took a broken arm for Rolando to get free of his soul-sucking job, but he ends up feeling purposeless and watching TV all day. Nera lives in a broken-down van in a junkyard, refuses steady employment, and lives in the moment. When their paths cross, Nera helps Rolando loosen up and they start a food truck and hit the road.

I saw a lot of myself in Rolando – playing it safe, sticking to what’s known and expected, afraid of giving up stability even when stability starts feeling more like a cage. Nera is the person I wish I could be – carefree, not planning too far ahead, doing all the crazy and wild and fun stuff she wants to do and taking it one day at a time. And their adventure is one I wish I could be on, as Rolando learns to throw caution to the wind and carpe the heck out of that diem and really live.

My only criticism of the story is that it’s told out of order, starting towards the end and then jumping back and forth between past and present and the end without much in the way of transition or temporal anchor, so sometimes an abrupt scene change would confuse me until I realized we’re at a different spot in the story timeline now.

There’s rival food trucks and unique spices and a lot of delicious food in this book, and overall it’s just so very fun. The art is great, the story is lighthearted and sweet, and I want to be in this story. It’s a quick read and I highly recommend it.

Review: Avi Cantor Has Six Months to Live

Title: Avi Cantor Has Six Months to Live

Author: Sacha Lamb

Genre: Contemporary with Supernatural elements

Trigger Warnings: Misgendering (mention), deadnaming (mention), bullying, depression, suicidal ideation

Back Cover:

Avi Cantor Has Six Months To Live

Avi comes across these foreboding words scrawled on the bathroom mirror, but what do they mean? Is this a curse, a prediction, or a threat from Avi’s emboldened bullies? And how to they know his real name when he hasn’t even told his mother yet?

Then there is Ian—the cool new guy at school, who is suddenly paying attention to Avi. Ian is just like Avi, but he is also all sunshine, optimism, and magic. All the things that Avi doesn’t know how to deal with…yet.

Review:

I know I just posted about a Sacha Lamb story yesterday, but I think I’ve found a new favorite author. I’m not even into contemporary stories that much but everything Sacha Lamb writes is just so good!

This is a novella, so it’s pretty short, but it still manages to draw a wonderful set of dynamic and real characters. Avi is a closeted Jewish trans guy relentlessly bullied at school, depressed, and very much alone. It doesn’t even bother him that he supposedly has only six months to live because he’s not sure how much he wants to keep living anyway. Ian is also a trans guy, but personality-wise the exact opposite of Avi – he’s happy, optimistic, and pulls Avi into his orbit of light and joy and his happy and accepting and magical family. It’s a story about Avi’s relationship with Ian and its ups and downs and it’s affects on his life, and you know, if it takes literal magic to give Avi a happy ending then I’ll accept it.

Despite there being literal magic in this book, it definitely had a more contemporary feel. This is first and foremost a story about Avi healing, and secondly a story about a very sweet relationship. The magic is just icing on the cake. It’s not a story about a relationship fixing someone, but it’s about how much having a support system and people who love and care about and accept you can help.

This is just such a sweet story. Avi is deep in depression but Ian is just so full of hope that it rubs off everywhere. And did I mention the happy ending? It gets dark at times but I love this story so much.

And the whole novella is available online for free here!