All the books I read in November that I have thoughts about, but not a lot of thoughts.
Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends as an Adult by Marisa G. Franco, PhD
Status: DNF at 39%
If unhelpful platitudes went to a Psychology 101 class, you’d get this book. They read about attachment theory in class and decided this explained everything – if you have a hard time making and keeping friendships as an adult, it’s just because you don’t have the right attachment style! It’s a very basic overview of the idea, too, not going much beyond what you’d get in psych 101, or even an internet article summarizing the idea. And what advice is included is of the trite platitude version. Stuff like “People are too busy thinking about themselves to notice your flaws” and “To make new friends, you have to talk to new people.” At least in the first 39%, none of it was all that interesting or useful – or even anything I didn’t already know.
Trigger Warnings: Mental illness (mentions), abandonment (mentions)
The Fate of Mercy Alban by Wendy Webb
Status: Completed
An intriguing, twisty mystery of old family secrets that blurs the line between supernatural and psychological. I called most of the twists fairly early, but it was interesting to watch the characters put everything together and fill in all the details. The gothic setting of the house steeped in the dark secrets of an old and powerful family was fantastic, and definitely lent some weight to the supernatural explanation. (Of course, most of it can also be explained with rational psychological answers, so it’s up to you to decide which you want to believe.) I also expected the romance between the protagonist and the pastor to be more of a thing, so having it as a background was interesting. As personally irritating that it was that the entire story was predicated on the family just not communicating about anything (and most of it wouldn’t have happened if the Alban family was capable of having a conversation about negative things), this was a solid story.
Tags: Low Standards
Trigger Warnings: Parent death, death, grief, murder, blood (mentions), violence, unreality (somewhat), suicide, confinement
The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1) by Cixin Liu
Status: Completed
I haven’t read much hard scifi at all, but from what I know, this book is the definition of it. It’s nominally about the threat of an alien invasion, but it’s mostly about astrophysics and particle physics. The whole story is told fairly passionlessly, which I gather is par for the course with Cixin Liu’s writing – or a lot is lost in translation, it’s hard to tell. It’s the first book in a trilogy, and while it introduces some characters and the overarching plot, it’s mostly about setup. It builds the cultural context (mainly how China’s Cultural Revolution led to the events of the story) and sets up a thorough and robust scientific foundation for why this is even plausible. And it was well-written enough that it was comprehensible to someone like me, who barely understood physics even back when I was taking a physics class in high school. It’s one of those books where either the author was a theoretical physicist who became an author or just adores physics, because why else would they do so much research? I don’t plan to continue the series. The story was okay, but hard scifi is just not my thing. When I’m reading science fiction, I prefer more fiction than science.
Tags: Nonwestern Setting, Nonwestern Work, Non-English Work, Chinese author, Chinese protagonist, #ownvoices Chinese
Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, parent death, murder, violence, pregnancy (mentions), guns (mention), death of spouse, suicide (mentions), grief, existential horror, existential despair, confinement, unreality
Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey
Status: Completed
I asked my husband how many times it was appropriate to use the phrase “fucked up” in a review, and he said as many as I need – and this book needs a lot of them. This book is weird and very dark. It’s also legitimately good horror – so far in my horror-reading experience, it’s one of only two books (the other being Dead Silence) where I had to intentionally drag myself out of story immersion to keep from getting too scared. It is also an incredibly fucked-up story about a spectacularly fucked-up family. You can tell at the beginning that something really bad happened in the past, but the more you learn, the more fucked up it is. It’s told like a puzzle. Flashbacks give pieces of whatever happened, and though I guessed the rough shape of it fairly early, the details are essential, and you don’t get enough pieces to put together the whole picture until the very end. Whatever you suspect, you probably aren’t going to guess the sheer depths of fucked up that this story reaches. It also reaches some pretty deep depths of weird, too. The ending is strange, good, and horrible, and made me feel like maybe there was something else here that I didn’t quite understand. I’m still not entirely clear on how I feel about this book, but it is most definitely remarkable (in the sense that there’s a ton of weird and fucked up stuff to remark upon).
Tags: It’s Queer!, They/Them Author, Low Standards
Trigger Warnings: Death, parent death (severe), grief, terminal illness, violence, murder, blood, gore, body horror, emotional abuse, child abuse
Monstress Volume 7: Devourer by Marjorie Liu (writer) and Sana Takeda (artist)
Status: Completed
As I mentioned my reviews of Monstress Volumes 4-6, it’s getting very hard to review these. Each volume is less a complete story in and of itself and more a section of the middle of a single larger story. It’s like picking a random five chapters out of the middle of a novel and trying to review just those. This was especially difficult since this volume just came out and it’s been over a year since I was last immersed in the weird and wonderful world of the Monstress series. I still followed the main points of the story, but I know there are so many details I missed. (I still deeply appreciated the gorgeous artwork, though.) That was especially difficult in this one, as Maika herself took a back seat to other characters, several of whom I just did not recall. I think the best way to read this series is to wait for all of the books to come out, purchase them all, and then read them all back to back so you get the whole story all at once. Knowing that will not stop me from devouring each entry as it comes out, though.
See my reviews for the rest of the Monstress series here
Tags: Amputee Protagonist, Author of Color, Disabled Protagonist, Graphic Novel, No romance, Nonwestern Setting, Protagonist of Color
Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, violence, nudity, body horror, torture, child abuse, gore
Fake by Erica Katz
Status: DNF at 60%
At first, I found myself weirdly interested in the story. I’m not normally much for the contemporary genre and this book didn’t have nearly as much art world flavor as I was expecting, but the FBI interview transcript interspersed through the narrative had me hooked and the little bit of art world stuff there was I found interesting. In many places it seemed to be approaching philosophical thoughts on the nature of art and how the market affects the medium. However. I have a very low tolerance for secondhand embarrassment and a very low tolerance for characters being stupid. And protagonist Emma is full of both. She gets embarrassed over everything, including things that literally nobody but herself is judging her for (although, as someone who also has anxiety, I do kinda get that one). The part that really kills me is that Emma is supposedly 26 and has lived in NYC since she graduated college, but she acts like this is her time out of the family compound. At one point I texted my husband a scenario to see if I just had high standards or Emma was being naïve and oblivious to the point of stupidity. He agreed that she was either hopelessly naïve or willfully ignorant. I wanted to see how it ended, but that desire was eventually outweighed by Emma’s obliviousness and bad decisions. I can only tolerate a character making completely avoidable mistakes for so long.
Tags: Low Standards
Trigger Warnings: Parent death, cancer (mentions), drug use, alcohol use (a lot), infidelity (mentions), panic attacks (mention), anxiety, fire phobia, fire/fire injuries (mention)
Bluejay Reads 