incipientdreamer's reviews
570 reviews

 DNF @ 200 pages

Habeck had such an interesting idea and she executed it in the most boring and literary snobby way imaginable. The prose was awful to get through, I couldn't help cringing at some of the quotes and I had the formatting for this. I kept waiting for this to make me cry but I just felt tired and frustrated. Wren, the wife, feels like a manic pixie dream girl and so does the husband. I had high hopes for this but throughout the book, I could not help but compare this to Julia Armfield's Our Wives Under the Sea. A book that was poignant, and emotional dealt with loss and grief in half the number of pages with double the amount of skill. 

 For a debut novel, this is really really good. Literary Speculative Fiction is one of those niche genres that either works wonderfully for me or either crashes and burns. I really enjoyed the nostalgic and melancholic feeling this invoked in me. Scott Alexander Howard's writing is very beautiful and also easy to read. The premise of the book is also very ingenious and it gave me all the Studio Ghibli Your Name vibes I was hoping it would give me.

The story is full of emotions and very readable and short which makes for a quick fun book. I really liked how Howard played with the concept of time travel and the ending was very satisfying in the end as well. Would love to see a film adaptation of this someday. One thing that I should mention is that there are no speech marks to mark dialogues which I assume was a stylistic choice to make the book sound more "literary" but it might bother some readers. Really glad I read this and really glad the library had this so soon after release. Will be keeping an eye out for this author. 

 *sigh* Leigh Bardugo is yet again trying to feed us the Darkling agenda. In this case, we have Vanilla Darkling aka his main sin is being an edgy typical YA love interest. Which you might say is better than how problematic the Darkling was but I dissent.

I heard the phrase "Bardugo signs a 6 figure deal to write whatever the fuck she wants" and "standalone historical fantasy set during the Spanish Inquisition" and I came running. I should have tempered my expectations after the fiasco that was Hell Bent. Bardugo seems to want to write this style of romantasy that appeals to the current market and is good for her, go make bread. But I'm afraid this isn't for me.

Discussing my issues with the new style of Bardugo's work with a friend and I believe the issue is in how she tries to give these dues ex machine endings that end up being sickly perfect. These endings just do not work with the edgy and dark vibe she is going for in her stories. It ends up being unsatisfying and like too sweet cakes, mostly frosting and no flavor. Apart from my issues with the ending to this (which just FYI was just another rehashing of the S&B ending), I had issues with the simplicity of the plot and the characters. It only got good around the 80% mark and then fell back into the same maddeningly frustrating blandness. I have read a hundred other stories like this one before. There is nothing that I can do to separate it from the hundreds of mediocre YA fantasy books that come out every year. I kept waiting for that "oof" moment where I would be blown away by Bardugo's plotting (and I know she can be great at that, she wrote the Six of Crows books and Ninth House (no we are not mentioning Hell Bent in this house)) but it never happened and I just continued to be disappointed more and more with every chapter.

The characters are bland and I am already forgetting them. The romance was cliched and made me roll my eyes. The writing was okay but not her best, I had a hard time focusing and didn't have much motivation to continue it. It tries so hard to be a political fantasy as well and fails epically at it. We are info dumped about random important dudes and then they make sneaky moves that aren't very sneaky and are totally extremely obvious. The one chapter that made me sit up (chapter 43 I believe) was amazingly written and I could feel the breaths of Bardugo's genius in it (view spoiler) and I felt myself thinking that yes, this is what I want more of. Sadly, that was the only chapter that actually made an impact on me and is the cause of 2 stars, not 1.

So will I be reading Bardugo's future books? Honestly, I can't say. I might pick them up if the hype is infectious but will have a lot less patience in the future. In all fairness if this wasn't a Bardugo novel I probably would have DNF-ed this less than halfway through. 

 Blew my mind away. Tchaikovsky might be my new favorite scifi author along with Martha Wells. The imagination and the buildup are unlike anything I've read in a long long time. It is reminiscent of old school scifi behemoths but also so so unique.

The evolutionary worldbuilding of the spiders is slow and the 3rd person present tense narration did annoy me at times but the payoff is just brilliant. I am very glad I stuck with this book till the end because it was extremely enjoyable, and it's always a lovely surprise to discover something so fresh in this age of being flooded with media. The writing is really good, with lots of very hard-hitting sentences that had me putting aside my book just to mull over how brilliantly crafted it would be. Avrana Kern's bits were still my favourite, the first chapter is one of the best-written pieces of literature I have ever read. Tchaikovsky pulls no punches with Children of Time and yet for a book as dense and full of the ugliness and desperation of humanity it ends on a very warm and hopeful note. I was not expecting and might have come across as a bit twee, but Tchaikovsky managed to land that ending. I am surprised this wasn't nominated for the Hugo the year it came out, because it checks all the boxes in my mind.

I will for sure be reading the rest of the series, and might even check out more of his short works that've been on my list. 

<blockquote><i>There hadn't been anyone though, and he couldn't see why it was striking him as all tragic and gooey now. Some people didn't get a person. It wasn't a right; it was a gift, and you couldn't go around sniffing about it as if you were <i>entitled</i> to be worried over.
The thing was, it did seem to be a gift that everyone else got at least once.</i></blockquote>

I have no idea how to rate this book. Part of the reason why I took so long to finish this was because I kept putting it off so I would be able to stew in my emotions and think about what this book is trying to say (not very obvious) and whether I'm taking away the right message from this, and what my beliefs on many of these topics are. 

A very big departure from most of Pulley's books, this is not historical fiction and while it sells itself as scifi, I would say it is pretty firmly in the realms of fantasy disguised in the shabby clothes of scifi. Technology and science don't make much sense and are very "just trust me, bro". I did try not to think too hard about it because I knew if I did I would not have been able to stop or get past the first few chapters. It felt like just a speculative world for the author to make her "what if" scenario to discuss the different themes she wanted to talk about. And there were A LOT of themes.

Pulley has so much packed into this book. Gender, ableism, class privilege, xenophobia, sinophobia as well as bodily autonomy. I was worried that it would be too much for a single book to handle and that she would end up making very hard statements on solutions for such complex topics. And while I'm glad she didn't make any such strong statements for frankly difficult-to-solve topics, her two sides weren't super extremes which liked because rarely are humans so easy to sort into boxes. I still had a very hard time figuring out what exactly she was trying to say. Because at times it does come across as this "China bad, china powerful, Chinese people are coming to steal our land and put their dictatorship in our country. The refugees are brutes and savages who will bring their basic religions and cultures into our superior cultures which is why we should let them die." But idk if my own beliefs made it feel like she was trying to say that even if the refugees have different beliefs about gender and power it does not mean we let them die because the purpose of a colony on Mars is to extend the human race?? But also sometimes it felt very settler colony-esque? Who's land is it anyway? The people who have been living here for generations or those escaping from Earth? I would like to believe that land isn't owned by one class of humans and it should be common decency to share it with people who have nowhere to go, but at the same time do those people have the right to claim that land as their own? Isn't that how you get Israel? Like I said it was A Lot and I could not parse what the author was trying to say, but perhaps the point of the book was not to be a Mother Goose story but to make you ponder about this stuff and realize what your own beliefs are and if they are harmful and bigoted.  So I understand how this could very easily fall prey to cancel culture and people with zero media literacy will be ready to sharpen their pitchforks and burn Pulley on the alter of their hardliner beliefs.

At the same time, writing a romance between a white refugee with no rights whatsoever with very leftist beliefs and an Asian non-binary nationalist right-wing politician is something not easy to sell. (Pulley says so in her acknowledgements that her UK publisher refused to publish this book). I did struggle a lot to connect with Gale and I know it was supposed to be confusing and a hard pill to swallow, and the path to them NOT being a huge bigot that wanted to forcibly disable people and was telling refugees to stay on Earth and die, was bumpy (understatement) as hell. But I wasn't the biggest fan of it. Pulley's pairing seems to be a lovable pathetic soft man x morally dubious man with slight psychopathic tendencies that has a path to slight redemption but she seems to be pushing the line with this pairing a lot. Mori was a sexist pig and a manipulative asshole, Kite killed a whole bunch of people and was chill with it, Shenkov was a member of the KGB and now Gale is basically Trump. So yeah...idk what she'll write next. Probably not a decent female character.

I do prefer Pulley when she writes magical realism or fantasy as compared to scifi. This lacked that magical aura that [book:The Kingdoms|54680112] and [book:The Bedlam Stacks|31450615] (IMO her best works), there weren't passages that blew me away or made me want to sob into a pillow. She is really good at writing romantic pining so I did have that funny heart-twisting breaking that I call the "Pulley Effect"; but primarily because of how January Stirling was written. 

The plot twist was also pretty much predictable but I did like that the "villains" weren't two-dimensional mustache-twirling evil. It was nice to see some nuance and that politicians are inherently fucked up and even the good guys are not saints. Despite that

I didn't like that Aubery was killed at the end, I do not understand why they would try to kill River at the end after that whole chapter about how they felt horrible for giving them fake sleep paralysis etc. Like I know they killed their partner for the lols but it seemed like they had "changed"? If that makes sense.

<b>Not the best thing Pulley has written IMO, also could have used a stronger editor since there were some strange grammatical errors. The political elements she touched upon were interesting but a bit much for a single book. It did feel a lot more original than all those marriage-of-convenience AO3 inspired books that have been coming out recently.</b>

<b>4.5 stars</b>
<blockquote><i>What else was she, really, but another animal body afraid of being alone in the cold?</i></blockquote>
Maybe the real horror was your failing marriage all along.

My first time reading anything by Lee Mandelo, and believe me I have not missed the hype around his work. I went in with very high expectations and ended up being pleasantly surprised. Did not expect so much nuance and depth to this short novella about a crazy experiment where a scientist links her brain to a wolf to experience life through the eyes of said wolf. I really enjoyed the ethical discussions on the science being carried out, especially when it is funded by some big corpa, but at the same time acknowledging the lack of funds for research in academia. The themes on preservation, climate change and sustainable science were all very very interesting and Mandelo gives it the time and respect topics such as these deserve, which is no small feat. 

The main character is extremely insufferable but her exceedingly worse and worse choices make for a fun read. Her issues with her wife and her sense of isolation "no one gets me except for the wolf I kidnapped and put fancy tech in", is also a major part of the book. I do believe she was let off too easy by the end and the book publishing seems to be another chance for her to stroke her own ego. Her pride is the main reason for her downfall, the research she so claims will "better our understanding of how wolves think" is just her selfishness and desire for fame in her field.

This was a pandemic book and you can feel the sense of doom looming just in the periphery of the book, as well as Sean's isolation from other humans. I really liked this part of the Author's Note:
<blockquote>Feed Them Silence grew from that fertile, toxic soil. Ultimately, the novella wrestles with the fears and worries of a singular moment in time—but the emotions and critiques at its core remain, I hope, prescient. I’m sure plenty of other artists will be scribbling their way through closing notes like these over the next decade or more.</blockquote>

There is some gore in the book but most of the horror is psychological and weird. Still something really enjoyable. I will be reading more of Lee Mandelo's works in the future.

 Kill your Darlings

Mona Awad can write. Her books seem to often feature an unreliable narrator and lots of Weird stuff going on, but despite the fogginess of the narrative her characters all have distinct voices. The second thing she does really really well is write raw relationships. The human-ness of ordinary relationships seen through a horror lens is something I never knew I needed but Awad provides with great delight. The way she writes about female friendships, the obsessiveness and the utter brutality with which we love/hate others is just amazing. I think I might have to put Awad on my top fav writers because holy shit the writing is witty, disturbing, tragic and feels so so raw.

Bunny might have made me feel like I was living through a fever dream, but the way the sentences flow off the pages! Despite being very dark, there are some elements of humour sprinkled in that really hit the spot when the story goes its absurdist paths. I am not a big fan of gore, but I seem to love Awad's style of gore, where the gore is more there for texture and less for pure shock value.

The themes of sexuality and friendship and where they blur, the way Awad depicts the artistic process, and her commentaries on classism and racism in prestigious art colleges. The way the book is half satire half horror half plain naked truth is absolutely wonderful. This was the modern Heathers I so desperately needed (Awad even cheekily hints at the movie by mentioning Christian Slater and his bomb in a trenchcoat).

This was the second book I read by Mona Awad; the first being Rouge which was also really good but the pure joy and horror of Bunny remains unmatched. Give me more of Awad's writing, please. 

 Second installment in the Emily Wilde series, and this time Emily and her friends are in Austria searching for a door to Wendell's realm. Otherlands had the same magic as Encycleopaedia but at the same time I felt as if something was missing here. Of course, this was a very minor complaint as I loved the sequel and had the best time reading it. I love romance in my books, but I've come to realise that the perfect book for me is when there is something more to the story than just romance. I loved the slow burn between Emily and Wendell in book 1, and I loved their flirtations here as well, but it felt as if the plot was being propelled based on romance rather than Emily's intellectual curiosity. The curiosity was still there but idk it felt damped here. It was also a bit obvious that Fawcett had written Wendell to be a bit too OP, hence having to remove him from scenes so everything couldn't just be solved by hand-wavy fairy magic.

But I am nitpicking, this was still an enjoyable read and I will be reading further books in this series. I think my issue is simply to do with how Wendell's proposal was handled and with Emily's choice at the end. It seemed fitting but at the same time, I wasn't very satisfied. 

 Probably not the best place to start with Goddard's work since I lacked context which probably would have made this a lot more enjoyable experience. Nevertheless, this was still pretty enjoyable, the writing wasn't something astounding but I was interested in the protagonist and his fate. I would love to read The Hands of the Emperor but at 1k pages it is a behemoth that terrifies me. Some day...