glossy_feathers's reviews
183 reviews

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal

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adventurous emotional tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

So good! Love powerful shorties.
No Tomorrow by Luke Jennings

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adventurous tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

Stupid fun.
Authority by Jeff VanderMeer

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Not so enjoyable as the first one. A lot of parts were dragging out. We were introduced to a new main character and his story took the spotlight. It kind of felt disjointed from the first book. This was more about management intrigues and not enough Area X mysteries.
Exteriors by Annie Ernaux

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informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.75

Excellent! Simple and fresh little observations of everyday life. Maybe they seem too brief but the point is in the choice of scenes to write about and thoughts they provoke. And there's no pretentiousness about them.
The Yellow WallPaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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dark fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

So short but so powerful.
Winter Solstice: An Essay by Nina MacLaughlin

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emotional informative reflective fast-paced

3.75

Beautifully written observations and memories connected to winter solstice and time around it. I couldn't identify with all things said but I appreciate author's personal confessions. Parts about certain traditions around winter solstice were great and I especially liked the last paragraph about plants.
The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies

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dark funny informative reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Fascinating story of author's family told through childhood memories backed up with historical research. I'm glad she didn't hold back on some harsh truth. And that snarky humor was just perfect spice.
Although it felt too biographical in the beginning, I got into the style and enjoyed it greatly.

* Uhu (Bubo bubo) was wrongly translated. It's Eurasian Eagle Owl in english, not Great Horned Owl. 
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

I needed to rant about this, so beware.

This is just stupid. Nothing make sense in this book. It's fine on the sentence level but the world building is bad and logic is off. Characters are inconsistent in their behaviour and it's s hard to understand them. Relationships and dialogues seemed forced. Also the pacing is so wierd. Time passes in some akward chunks. 
Speculative fiction is hard to write because you need to be quiet imaginative and inventive but it is important that the speculations are convincible and have some logic behind them. It's not enough to say this is like that or the situation is this. Show it! If it's about climate change that is already happening, things you're writing about need to make reader think that they are plausable in the future if this or that happen like that. The city is polutted - what is polluting it? What political choices allowed this to happen? Why are you referring just to one city? And what is making people stay in the city? Is there some fascist leadership in charge? I need the context to empathize with characters and to get some depth. We get only snippets of this world, both outside and inside the border of supposed Wilderness state. Like people are doing this or that in order to survive in nature but how did they learned to do that coming from the urban area? Just by being outdoors? By instinct? At the end of the book the author is acknowledging some sources of nomadic communities but it didn't feel like it was based on anything real.
At the end I don't know what was the purpose of this book.
And it was longlisted for the Booker??
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

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adventurous dark funny informative reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This was a reread after 15 years. First I read it when I was in highschool and it was in Croatian. That time I was so enthralled by it that it immediately became my favorite book of all time. Now after reading it in English after so many years I can say it still is one of the best books I've read. I started reading a Volokhonsky/Pevear translation but switched to Guilbert Guerney after reading a review here on SG. I would also recommend GG translation, it was so flowy and it felt a bit more natural, also less posh. 
Dead Souls is truly a chronicle of Gogol's time and his masterpiece despite being unfinished. I will be definitely coming back to it and maybe I will have a more comprehensive review after future rereads. 
Love Notes From The Hollow Tree by Jarod K. Anderson

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funny reflective fast-paced

2.25

Ugh, after praising Anderson's first collection this one was a disappointment. He went for human experience in theme this time, still mixed with nature motives, but it did not turn out well. There were some good poems but most of them felt like instagram posts. And punchlines (?!?) at the end of each were so annoying.