eren_reads's reviews
413 reviews

I didn't enjoy this one as much as the first book as I didn't find myself reflecting as much during my reading of this book. Despite that this was still an enthralling book. Ferrante has a talent for getting into the nitty gritty of human life.

This book was compulsively readable. I found myself reflecting on my own relationships with girls when I was younger and how all consuming those young friendships can be. It was exactly what I wanted from this book.

This is definitely my least favourite Annie Ernaux book. Whilst there are some glimpses of what I find so insightful in her other works it was less prevalent than in her other works.

Will have to reread this poetry collection to fully grasp how I feel about this collection.

Oh boy, this book. Up until a certain point I thought this book was going to get a 2.5 rating from me because there wasn't anything offensively wrong with it. I found the writing to be lacklustre and I didn't find there was any particularly nuanced discussions about sex and sexuality, more just surface level descriptions. 

Additionally, as other reviewers have noted most of the women are from the African diaspora rather than living in the continent. I was hoping that there would be more stories from women who actually lived in the continent.

The only other issue I had before I got up to the point were I had to change it to a 1 star was there were a lot of references to cheating on people and being an affair partner with little analysis of why they made those choices that would have made the inclusion of these things more insightful.

However, when I got to Baaba's story I had to bring it down to a 1 star.

In her story she talked about engaging in a 'threesome' with a friend and her boyfriend that happened when her friend was intoxicated and sleeping, so clearly sexual assault. This story either shouldn't have been concluded or should have been properly addressed by the author, which does not happen in this book.

Who knew that such a short book could hurt you?

This was a really good introduction to the concept of degrowth but I was hoping that there was going to be more about the implementation of degrowth and what a world under that framework would look like.

This is very beautifully written but I think I might have missed something in either the translation or the cultural distance between me and the text.

This was an incredibly harrowing memoir that also gave me a great deal of insight into a period of time in China's history that I only really had a surface level knowledge of.

Whilst I enjoyed the idea of this book, reading works of female writers/speakers/poets who are Latine, I found that the excerpts of the writing were too short especially when, in general, the introduction to the writer was longer than the actual excerpt itself.