imogenrose97's reviews
490 reviews

Where Shall We Do This Summer explored the complexity of motherhood and the lack of power a mother has once a baby is born. Sita already has 4 children and is nearing the birth of another, as she watches the ways her children interact with the world, how they respond to her anguish, and what they want to do she grows more and more distressed at who this next baby will grow to be once infected with the air of a polluted world. And so she returns to the island of her childhood, where her dad spun magic. The people of the island have awaited the return of the family but when she arrives she is met with stark indifference and the venier of her childhood falls as she enters the big, once white house, now standing in disarray, monsoon rain leaking through a holey roof.
The prose was beautiful but jarring which I think is due to the author writing in English as an Indian woman, it has a different lilt, a different sort of poetry that flowed syrupy with the descriptions of nature so stunning I could not help but paint one. 

 This book promised everything I love about a short story collection but the themes were all discussed in ways that bogged me down and for some reason, George Washington got a mention which was strange and out of place in a collection reminiscent of folklore. 

 I could have continued but I had no passion for the story and though the writing was at times beautiful, it do not capture me beyond this. 

Daisy Johnson is a literary genius. Her work is dark and twisted and you get lost in the gaps between words which suddenly seem more sinister than in any other book. Reading makes you feel grimy, like you've been walking around a city in the heat of summer and are now coated with dirt plastered to your sticky sweat, your nostrils expelling dark snot. Startling until you remember breathing air filled with the fumes of hundreds of cars. Each story was haunting and eerie, my skin kept prickling with goosebumps at lines that slipped through my fingers like cold dark ink. Only to be brought back in the next story. The repetitive shifting between perspectives that could have been the women from the last story, the ghost from within the walls, made you feel like maybe you were going mad too. 

What a spectacular, hilarious and informative book. Each page was packed with beautiful women and Kirsty Loehr did an incredible job of including lesbians of all types and especially laid out the importance of intersectional feminism.
Should be mandatory reading

The writing felt stilted and though I enjoyed the vampires story the characters connections felt emotionless and cold. Maybe it was the translation or maybe that's how it was supposed to read. Her allure taking hold before any emotion could happen.

This is a book about a woman who hunts through archives for snippets of another woman’s life. She spends 10 years in loving, addictive, servitude to her children. Not against her will but as her life’s pulse. 
She leaks milk and tears, breathing within the ticks of her to do lists. Her days are not her own but she loves them, she loves the toil, the simplicity of it. She fiercely loves her children and her husband. But someone else has gripped her. A woman whose voice reached forward and caught the heart of her teenaged self. With a poem that spoke with the urgency of the love her young heart felt. 

I flinched, in general, at my teenage self. She made me uncomfortable, that girl, how she displayed her wants so brashly.

What follows is a search for the pieces of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s life, the task of which can be summed up by looking at her Wikipedia page. Which would not pass the Bechdel test. After two short paragraphs about her life (the first of which is about her first marriage at 15), everything else that is written of her is about her second husband Art. 

This book is a keen. It is the pain of knowing that the worth of women throughout history is linked only to the men that they are around. It is a keen for the lack of letters written by female hands saved. It is for the reduction of a woman’s work to nothing more than homely. It is a keen for the hours that Doireann Ní Ghríofa spent searching for the life of a woman whose poem is taught in Irish schools but whose life was not thought important enough to document beyond that of the men around her. 

This book was so beautifully, painfully written. It broke my heart with the beauty of its prose and the shared agony of women. We peer through the keyhole to another woman who is lost to time. Distorted by dust and kept alive through ties made of the men she knew. 

 

The writing style of Chlorine was intoxicating and heavily influenced my moods when I put the book down. There were so many beautiful quotes that I saved and each scene was so viscerally satisfying. The storyline depicted the internal monologue of girlhood very well. The loneliness and longing for someone to understand you even when you won't even give them the crumbs to start to piece together what is going on in your head. High school felt exactly that awful. It perfectly depicted how it felt like you were dying if you couldn't do something because you were sick, that missing out on that one thing would be the end of your life. Break apart all the things you felt you had achieved so far. The clique mentality of girls and the othering over any tiny difference was painful and so close to the truth of my own experience. 
I found the letters from Cathy's perspective a little jarring and a tad too easy to move the story along. I would have preferred we got them to start with rather than introducing them at a time that felt right. I loved the lesbian relationship. I felt that Cathy loved Ren for no reason, which is the exact depiction of being so young, of falling in love and surviving on glances to sustain your crush. 
What I loved most was that Ren was not in the end made out as mad. She swam away into the creek and was free as a mermaid with her own kind. I loved this release and would very much enjoy a tidbit of mermaid life and how she feels within it.