bratatouille's reviews
204 reviews

I adore literary fiction because I truly do not care if anything happens in a book. I’m so interested in characters and weird relationships that it doesn’t matter to me if the plot is lacking. The concept of the main character allows for the author to dig into situations and areas of human emotion/interaction that is harder to dig your heels into otherwise. It was a quick read, I was taken by the story enough to start and keep going until it stopped. A lot of people found this moving and impactful, but it was really missing that je ne sais quoi for me! I thought we would reach it in the end, but alas.

The first half of this I really enjoyed! This fall into a cultish existence where moral judgement becomes entirely skewed through the seek of something higher is entirely up my alley. The characters were diverse and intriguing. Although slower than what I typically prefer, I was willing to allow Miss Donna her lengthy asides. The use of literary devices throughout the work is expert. She’s wonderful at showing and not telling, which is something I thoroughly enjoy in an author. All that being said, Book 2 sucked. It was over dramatic, frustrating, and parts of the plot felt incredibly lazy. It hinges entirely on the trait of a character that was barely even alluded to in Book 1. If looking at a wiki page or summary of the contents of The Secret History, it would seem like an exciting and wild topsy turvy story of collision after collision within a corrupt group of people. However, at a certain point, the author’s writing becomes so drawn out and irrelevant that you entirely lose the thrill of the interesting events in the expanse of the dull. There are several characters and instances that are thrust into the reader which have no effect on anything in the slightest and also never come up again. The author low key talks shit about the only relevant female character the entire book. The main protagonist is incredibly uninteresting and sort of a dick. Every other character is undeniably a dick and they all suck, but at least they’re interesting. There was so much classism and misogyny that wasn’t really justified by the context. The author? Sort of? Give the same weight of absurdity to both gayness and incest?? So much of this was head spinning. Am I glad I read it? Sure. I can understand, from a wide lens, why this book garners the reputation that it does. However, looking directly at it I shall never read it again or ever recommend it to anyone else.

There is an incredibly niche sub-genre of book that I enjoy, which I lovingly refer to as “crooked girlhood.” These are stories that clearly display the diabolical, perverse, and primal side of a feminine childhood. The unseen oddities of growing up in a panopticon of gender. Jawbone is, perhaps, the clearest example of this that I have found to date. It is feral and horrifying but, also, simply a group of schoolgirls. The story itself jumps between timelines and POVS, which I am not typically a fan of. I struggled with the character names for a good third of the book but this was likely because I was listening as opposed to reading. Ojeda paints unsettling scenarios that have little motive behind them, not to the fault of the author, but because young girls act on whim: there doesn’t need to be more reason than the desire to do it. The story begins with a girl waking tied up, having been kidnapped by her teacher. We follow the stories of both teacher and student that led us here. I found the relationships in this to be incredibly well depicted, but something about the lack of true consequence in any scenario leaves something to be desired. Although the ending is interesting, it didn’t go far enough in either direction of cathartic or appalling for me to feel satisfied. I do think I would read this again, but I wasn’t wowed. 

I adore the way that Taddeo sinks her claws into a reader and drags them along for the ride. Her storytelling is raw and violent in a way that is grotesquely, uncomfortably, human. The topics touched in this range from mildly uncomfortable debauchery to nausea-inducing evils. I can’t say that she handles them with grace, but there is a surprising air of dignity latched into ever sentence in this novel. Joan, our protagonist, goes on a journey that flashes between past and present. This back and forth is occasionally confusing, but is paced in a way that is infuriatingly good. When you become attached to the outcome of one timeline, Taddeo throws you back into the other. Although a large part of the story, sex is never depicted in a titillating fashion. Instead, it reads more like a means to an end or a necessary evil. This is immensely a feminine rage book. It’s not quite on the Gone Girl level, but maybe more unhinged instead of calculated. I can’t deny the surprising moments of clarity where I would see myself reflected in Joan despite how little I cared for her. I would rate it higher for prose alone, but often times I felt that the story would drag or that some sections were strictly unnecessary. After loving Three Women as much as I did, I am in no way disappointed by this follow up work of hers.

This was thrilling and suspenseful, yet somehow simultaneously so boring. The beginning starts off interesting and odd. An unnamed girl keeps reviving eerie calls from her own number that always leaves the same voicemail. She is on a road trip to meet her boyfriends parents and is thinking of ending things with him. Most of the story takes place in the car and cuts back and forth to different memories of the protagonist’s. The middle of the book truly starts to slog. The twist at the end is compelling! Part of me wants to say that it’s impactful, but I struggle with stories that have twist endings. IMO, a lot of the time the twist doesn’t come as a neat unexpected extra flavor of the plot. Instead, most of the book simply feels like a lead into some grand reveal on the authors part. This book definitely felt like that. Frankly, I’m not entirely sure that the ending makes a ton of sense when tracking back through the rest of the story. I spent the entirety of the book with these two characters and i still somehow have no sense of who they are.  🤷🏻‍♀️ It was an intriguing and short enough read. There’s a movie out somewhere now and I kept hearing about it so I’m glad I read it, but I wouldn’t read it again and have zero interest in the film.

I’m having mixed opinions about this. It falls into a lot of the tropes that YA books about desperate, lonely, hard-knock, youths do. This book has been raved about immensely and holds all the magical rivals to lovers tropes I like so I figured it was finally time to submerge. I’m not particularly a fan of war settings, but the magical war was mostly a backdrop for the first half of the story so I was able to ease myself into it. The fantasy level here is minimal, therefore easy to process. The war itself is caused by the gods but, again, is not immediately relevant to the plot until later on. The only other truly magical aspect is the typewriter that allows our protagonists to essentially e-mail. Despite its setting, the story is surprisingly cozy. That being said, don’t get too comfortable. I can’t rave about the writing style or depth of characters, but I suspect this is a stark example of, “Jack of all trades, Master of None: better than a Master of One.” I found myself truly invested once I reached 25% and was giggling and kicking my feet and crying along with our characters. There is nothing truly remarkable about this experience, in fact, I would argue that the beginning is exhaustingly reminiscent of every other YA war romantasy. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the read. The ending felt incredibly rushed as I was reading, but I was under the impression that this was a stand alone novel (surprise! It’s not!) and wasn’t prepared for it to end abruptly with unanswered questions. I’m probably gonna read the next one when it comes out 🤷🏻‍♀️

This is the sort of book that 2014 tumblr me would’ve eaten up and licked the remnants of. It’s lyrical, it’s vulnerable, it’s quirky. However, at this stage in my life? The characters are generic, the story is unfulfilling, and little is learned/gained/shown. I don’t mean to discount the painful journey of infidelity in marriage, but it feels like an uninteresting rehashing of a million stories already told. The writing style is erratic and incredibly stream-of-consciousness, which I did enjoy. It feels a little bit like going through someone’s notes app. Also, this is a personal thing, but not every piece of media needs to treat New York like it’s the paragon of humanity and culture. I’m tired. This was on a Cool Girl book list with some other books I like, but if this is the requirement I think I’ll pass.

I can’t deny that this book was done well. However, that doesn’t mean I enjoyed it. I actually particularly liked the first half, where the horror didn’t stem the monstrous vampiric entity, but instead from the frustrating prison created by social convention for housewives in the early 90s. I wanted to scream and rip my hair out, it was was so realistically horrifying. However, later when there were body horror insect scenes and the vampirism

was a weird kind of oral sex performed on both adults and children regardless of gender,

that was a bit much for me thank you. I found the ending rather unsatisfactory. It didn’t give me the catharsis I was hoping for. The ladies in this book are full of fire and southern hospitality, which I just adore. It goes through all of the expected tropes and touches on culture and race (but *so* briefly). Mostly, I enjoyed the first half of this story so much that I was overwhelmingly let down by the second half.

This middle-grade book uses illustrations and text formatting to create a truly impactful ergodic novel. Almost-thirteen-year-old Elliot embodied the curious insecurity of that time period. The imagery is mildly unsettling in a way that adds to the rundown, small town, unknown atmosphere of the foreign Point Aconti. The story touches on large themes for a middle-grade story and manages to handle them with a touch of bough gruffness and grace. Viva is a wonderful voice to have in children’s literature for both kids and adults. As a sidenote, I adore books where the children who like to read aren’t shoehorned into a mousey and bookish demeanor!