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: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Title: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Author: Kim Fu

Genre: Short Stories/Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Vary by story; see end of review for list

Back Cover:

In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.

Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.

Review:

Admittedly, I have not read a ton of short story collections. However, in my limited experience I’ve never encountered a short story collection where every single story is spectacular. But Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century contains twelve stories that are weird, vivid, occasionally disturbing, brilliant, and unforgettable.

Some of them were disturbing or just plain weird (“Sandman,” “Scissors,” “Bridezilla”). Some inspired a lot of emotions, sometimes very intense ones (“Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” “Time Cubes,” “June Bugs”). Some of them left me feeling like there was some meaning just beyond the written words that I wasn’t quite getting (“Liddy, First to Fly,” “Twenty Hours,” “In This Fantasy”). And some were just perfectly good short stories (“#ClimbingNation,” “The Doll,” “Do You Remember Candy”). But all of them were great in their own way.

Personally, I love the off-kilter feeling of the normalized weirdness in magical realism. And even though many of these stories don’t fit into strict magical realism territory (there are several that could be better categorized as science fiction, horror, or even contemporary), they all have that same vibe. They are infused with a feeling that everything is a little strange, a little off, a little not quite what you expected and that you’re the weird one for thinking it’s strange. If anything connects these stories, it’s that feeling, and I loved it.

If I had to pick a few favorites, I would go with “Sandman” (surprisingly emotionally compelling despite being very weird in concept), “Do You Remember Candy” (is there a word for the grief of losing something you haven’t actually lost yet? Because that’s what this story inspires), and “Time Cubes” (vividly sad with a dark but bittersweet ending). (June Bugs” does get an honorable mention for its heart-poundingly realistic depiction of the more subtle kind of abusive relationship.) But like I keep saying, there are no bad stories here. All of them are great in their own way. This short story collection is definitely worth reading.

Trigger Warnings:

• Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867: Parent death, unreality (minor)
• Liddy, First to Fly: Body horror
• Time Cubes: Mental illness, suicidal ideation, suicide
• #ClimbingNation: Death, sibling death, grief
• Sandman: Unreality, body horror (kinda)
• Twenty Hours: Death, romantic partner death, murder, gun violence, infidelity (mentioned as hypothetical), blood (mentions), body horror (mild)
• The Doll: Child death, death, suicide
• In This Fantasy: Domestic abuse, death, blood, murder, infidelity, unreality
• Scissors: Sexual content
• June Bugs: Domestic abuse, emotional abuse, toxic relationship, guns, insects
• Bridezilla: Animal death, ecological disaster (mentions)
• Do You Remember Candy: Loss of senses, strained parent-child relationship

Review: The Ever Cruel Kingdom (DNF)

Title: The Ever Cruel Kingdom

Series: The Never Tilting World #2

Author: Rin Chupeco

Genre: Fantasy/Post-Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, fire, cannibalism (mentions), violence, suicidal thoughts (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: 35%

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of book one.

Back Cover:

After a treacherous journey and a life-shattering introduction to a twin neither knew she had, sisters Haidee and Odessa expected to emerge from the Great Abyss to a world set right. But though the planet is turning once again, the creatures of the abyss refuse to rest without another goddess’s sacrifice.

To break the cycle, Haidee and Odessa need answers that lie beyond the seven gates of the underworld, within the Cruel Kingdom itself. The shadows of the underworld may hunger to tear them apart, but these two sisters are determined to heal their world–together.

Review:

I went into my Currently Reading shelf on The StoryGraph to clear out a few books I’d finished, and I was genuinely surprised to discover that I had started reading this book. And that, I think, is the most damning criticism I could give it.

Book one, The Never Tilting World, was good. Not spectacular, but good. I was curious enough about the world and what really happened to break it that I was willing to pick up this one. But it didn’t grab me.

To be fair, not all of this was entirely its fault. This wasn’t a “Must read it now!” read so much as a “This could be interesting.” And picking it up so long after book one, I had a difficult time reorienting to how the magic worked and the details of the world. This would not have been an issue if I’d read it directly after book one.

That said, there were some issues in the book itself. Mainly in perspective. The story is still told in the alternating perspectives of Haydee, Odessa, Lan, and Arjun. Four narrators is hard enough to balance in any book, but since all four of them were in the same place doing the same things together, it was really hard to keep track of who was talking. The multiple narrators worked when there were two on each side of the world, but got confusing when everyone was together.

It also didn’t add much to the story. The only thing I remember about the characters from book one was that Odessa’s parts were a first-person account of a descent into madness, and that was interesting. In this one, they were all bland. There was Haydee the energetic sister, Odessa the quiet sister, Arjun, and Lan. This, again, probably would not have been an issue if I’d read this book directly after finishing book one so these people were fresh in my mind. But with several months between books, The Ever Cruel Kingdom didn’t bother to tell me why these people were worth reading about.

But I didn’t pick this up for the characters. I picked it up because I wanted to find out what happened. Why the world broke, why the two older goddesses each have one of the younger and told her that her sister was dead, what the truth really is. But 35% in, we’ve made almost no progress finding out the truth. The only people who know are the two older goddesses, and they flatly refuse to give any answers. I thought from the back cover that they might be going to the underworld and find out the origins of the whole goddess system. But they’re mostly just scrambling around in the desert (the least interesting of the two setting options), trying to get Haydee’s mother to give answers that she obviously doesn’t want to with very little indication that they might try another strategy later. The world was my favorite part of book one, and this one neither explores it nor gives me more information about it.

This isn’t a bad book. I didn’t hate it. If I’d read it right after book one I might have kept reading, and if you loved book one you’ll probably love this one. I just found it uninteresting. If I can forget I started it, I don’t see much of a point in finishing it.

The Never Tilting World series:

1. The Never Tilting World
2. The Ever Cruel Kingdom

Review: Iron Widow

Title: Iron Widow

Series: Iron Widow #1

Author: Xiran Jay Zhao

Genre: Science Fantasy (it’s clearly and obviously science fiction but it feels like fantasy)

Trigger Warnings: Misogyny (severe), sexism (severe), child abuse, domestic abuse, death, death of parents, child death, blood, injury, torture, body horror (mild), non-consentual being inside someone’s mind/having someone in your mind, alcohol, alcoholism, suicidal ideation, sexual content

Back Cover:

Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid’s Tale in this blend of Chinese history and mecha science fiction for YA readers.

The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn’t matter that the girls often die from the mental strain.

When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it’s to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected—she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​

To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way—and stop more girls from being sacrificed.

Review:

I had some reservations about this book going in that had nothing to do with the book itself. The author is a YouTuber that my husband watches (he’s the one who told me about this book), but I haven’t seen any of their videos. I knew nothing about the book besides its back cover. What had me worried is that I put it on hold at my library, which told me that based on the number of people ahead of me it would be about a 17-week wait. Five weeks later, I got a notification that it was ready to borrow. As I told my husband, either it was so good that people were devouring it and finishing it fast or it was so bad that people were giving up fast.

Luckily, the former was the case. This book is fantastic.

It was also very hard to read at many points. Misogyny is something I find it hard to read about, especially when it gets extreme, and everything in the world of Iron Widow is built on misogyny. There is foot-binding in this world. The only use of daughters is selling them off to be wives or die in battle. Chrysalises are the only defense against the invading aliens, and when a man and a woman get into one, only the man will survive.

Zetian is angry and she has every right to be. Her family only cares about the money she can bring in through either a bride price or a war death payment for dying in a Chrysalis. They are only sad about her older sister’s death because she was murdered outside of a Chrysalis and therefore her family didn’t get the payment. Her father and grandfather are violent and abusive, her mother and grandmother are cowed, and she knows they do not love her. If they want to sell her to her death anyway, the death penalty for killing the male pilot who murdered her sister won’t be anything worse.

This acceptance of death made her absolutely fearless, and I loved it. The perfect girl is beautiful and silent, moving slowly on her bound feet, obeying every order and taking insults and abuse without complaint. None of the men Zetian encounters have any idea what to do with a girl who has accepted she’s going to die and therefore sees no point in trying to avoid the wrath of men. She is an absolute delight of fury, and I love it when books let girls embrace their rage.

I don’t know if Xiran intended this, but Zetian’s bound feet were relatable disability feels. I don’t have bound feet, but I do have a chronic pain condition that especially likes to screw up my hips, knees, and other joints required for walking, and I absolutely related to the frustration and anger and feeling of being limited that comes with every step hurting, needing a mobility aid like a cane to walk longer distances, and knowing that it will never be fixed. I have no idea how much of what’s in the book is accurate to actual footbinding practices, but it was definitely relatable to my experience of mobility- and pain-related disability.

The themes in this book aren’t really subtle, especially the whole thing about a misogynistic society. I absolutely loved the progression of it, though. Zetian knows that there is misogyny in the world and that she and her sister have no worth outside of supporting, serving, and dying for men simply because they’re women. She starts the book blaming individual men, with the goal of murdering the individual man who murdered her sister. But the book takes her along a journey from “individual men are the problem” to “the system is the problem” as she learned more about the individual men and the system.

And if you’re not here for themes – well, I think you’d be missing out on a lot of what makes this book great, but you do get epic mecha battles, magic with a thin veneer of science used to fight invading aliens, psychic fights in a mental realm, good old-fashioned fisticuffs, powerful prisoners with hearts of gold, underdogs teaming up to give the people in charge a gigantic middle finger, a love triangle that ended in the best way possible, and several amazing twists (only one of which I suspected).

This review is already getting long, and I haven’t even mentioned the rich and complex world-building, the amazing twists, the rich atmosphere, the fantastic relationships between Zetian and the two love interests in the triangle, the minor themes about women who participate in their own oppression, and all the other wonderful things in this book. It’s fantastic. Everything about is dark and gorgeous and burning with fury and flame. I adore this book.

I also recommend checking out the author’s website. There’s character profiles, fanart, and even memes (mild spoiler warning for how the love triangle shakes out, though).

The Iron Widow series:

1. Iron Widow
2. Heavenly Tyrant

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: The Never Tilting World

Title: The Never Tilting World

Series: The Never Tilting World #1

Author: Rin Chupeco

Genre: Fantasy/Post-Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Death, murder, grief, gore, rape/sexual assault (mentions), sexual content (explicit), body horror, chronic illness, physical abuse, emotional abuse, forced marriage (mentions), injury, fire/fire injury, trauma

Back Cover:

Generations of twin goddesses have long ruled Aeon–until one sister’s betrayal split their world in two. A Great Abyss now divides two realms: one cloaked in eternal night, the other scorched beneath an ever-burning sun.

While one sister rules the frozen fortress of Aranth, her twin rules the sand-locked Golden City–each with a daughter by their side. Now those young goddesses must set out on separate, equally dangerous journeys in hopes of healing their broken world. No matter the sacrifice it demands.

Review:

I am having a really hard time figuring out what to say about this book. I think it’s a case of my experieincing self and remembering self differing – I very much enjoyed this book while reading, but looking back I’m having a hard time saying exactly why. I think I mainly enjoyed the world and the plot and the creative mythology involved, because trying to write about the characters, I’m realizing that in retrospect they’re all pretty bland.

There are four alternating perspectives in this book – Haidee and Odessa, the young goddesses, and Arjun and Lan, the goddesses’ love interests and traveling companions.

Odessa, the goddess of the eternal night side of the planet, is the most memorable because of the great first-person narration of a character going mad. She’s not unlikeable at the beginning – when the book opens, she’s sheltered, bookish, trying to rebel a little against her mother’s control, and not at all sure what to do about her crush on Lan. But Rin Chupeco does an absolutely stunning job with first-person narration of a person losing her self and not even realizing as she becomes darker and more unhinged. She became not at all likeable as a person but absolutely compelling as a character.

Lan, Odessa’s love interest and one of her traveling companions, is traumatized. I really can’t remember much else about her. Well, that and she’s there to provide perspective to how unhinged Odessa gets as the story progresses. Lan led an exploring expedition, everyone except her died, and she has a lot of trauma around that. The trauma is handled really well, but it also seems to be her main personality trait.

Haidee, the goddess on the eternal day side of the planet, is Odessa’s complete opposite. She enjoys engineering and mechanical tinkering, is full of compassion for everything and everyone, and embodies the bright sunniness of her side of the planet without going over the line into scorching desert. She wasn’t a stand-out character, but she was definitely likeable – not a fascinating person or a charismatic personality, but honestly the only character in the book that I would want to be friends with.

Arjun, Haidee’s traveling companion, was definitely the weakest of the four perspectives. That doesn’t mean that he was bad, I just found him less compelling. He was a lot of the “orphan grows up with a bunch of other orphans raised by one adult and gets good at fighting and living a hardscrabble life” stereotype, with a few interesting additions that just barely keep him from being cardboard. He didn’t have much motivation, though, which I think is why he was the least compelling. I also think his perspective got the least page time, but I didn’t count pages to see if that was accurate.

I didn’t hate any of these characters, but it was really the concepts that made me enjoy the reading experience. The magic system is really interesting (even if I didn’t fully understand it), I loved the idea that the world is ruled by women who are supremely powerful goddesses and yet are mortal and every so often must be replaced by their daughters, and there are a lot more layers around the Breaking – when the world stopped spinning and divided into two kingdoms of eternal day and eternal night – and how it happened than appear on the surface. Even the settings are interesting, from a frozen fortress to seas full of krakens, golden cities protected by glass domes to creatures swimming through oceans of sand instead of water, there are a lot of really fascinating and creative fantasy things in this world. For me, the characters were more of a vehicle to explore this world and uncover its secrets, and that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Reading book two isn’t high on my priority list, but I do intend to get to it eventually. The characters weren’t stellar, but they were perfectly okay, and I wouldn’t object to spending another book with them, especially since I have so many unanswered questions about what happened to break the world and what secrets Odessa and Haidee’s mothers are hiding. And the broken world was such a cool setting, I’m excited to explore it more in book two.

The Never Tilting World series:

1. The Never Tilting World
2. The Ever Cruel Kingdom

Review: The Art of War

Title: The Art of War: The Essential Translation of the Classic Book of Life

Author: Sun Tzu (original text) and John Minford (translator/commentator)

Genre: Classic/History

Trigger Warnings: Discussion of war, death, and violence

Back Cover:

For more than two thousand years, The Art of War has stood as a cornerstone of Chinese culture, a lucid text that reveals as much about psychology, politics, and economics as it does about battlefield strategy. The influence of Sun-tzu’s text has grown tremendously in the West in recent years, with military leaders, politicians, and corporate executives alike finding valuable insight in these ancient words.

Review:

I hadn’t really intended to review this book, because I didn’t really have a lot to say about it. Then I encountered this Tumblr post that was so on the nose that I had to write a review just so I could show how somebody else’s words said my thoughts better:

This version of the book has a lot of context and commentary on it, which is good because just the text of Sun Tzu’s book is maybe ten pages. I also think it’s good to read a version with context and commentary, because you get an understanding of what was going on in the world when Sun Tzu (or his disciples or someone writing under that pseudonym) was writing, the historical stories and legends discussed, and its influence on Chinese thought. It also included ancient Chinese commentary as well as the translator’s commentary, and occasionally the translator’s commentary on the ancient Chinese commentary to explain concepts or historical or mythological figures discussed.

All of this is good information to support Sun Tzu’s actual text, which really does read like the Tumblr post. It feels like sitting down and studying the book would lead to good strategic warfare, but at the same time most of the advice presented seems very common-sense – the “if you think you might lose, avoid doing that” kind. But if nothing else, it was an interesting read, especially with all the commentary included.