justabean_reads's reviews
1269 reviews

This was the one Mandel published before Station Eleven when she was still with a small press. It's extremely her. Of her newer books, it probably has the most in common with The Glass Hotel, in her interest in exploring morality versus legality, in the jumbled timeline, and for the shipping company subplot. We follow a man who slid into being a corporate drone to get away from his family's criminal tendencies, but the escape ends up not being sustainable. This is not told in any kind of linear fashion, or with any clear cut answers about what the right choices might be (though clearly some are pretty dubious). I liked the humour, and the way that Mandel gently prods at her characters, and never lets them rest easily. Less gay than her more recent stuff.

Mandel has said that her next book will connect back to this one, and I'm really looking forward to finding out how. The surviving characters could go a lot of ways (and being Mandel, she doesn't need to use just the surviving characters). 

Novella set in a post-climate-collapse University of Alberta, Edmonton. Mohamed could (and hopefully does) teach a class about how to use a setting to tell a story, without letting world building bog you down to the point of distraction. The characters deftly establish how we got here, where here is, and what the stakes are, without ever spending much time on exposition, and while making the story about family conflict, and (basically) deciding whether or not to go to college. The relationship between the main character and her mother was particularly well-drawn and painful, depicting abuse without excusing it or coming up with an easy solution, especially in a society with so little room for error. It's also about different kinds of community, and solidarity, and never turned out to be totally bleak. (Though I am concerned about the bike.)

There's a certain level of body horror, which actually lands the science fiction trick of being a legitimate piece of world building, while also opening up discussion of agency v. biology, among other things. And it never felt like too much story for the length.

I understand people didn't like the second one as much, but I will be tracking it down eventually. 

I've only ever seen the Dev Patel movie of David Copperfield, but was still able to follow what Kingsolver was doing with this. I suppose, at some point (possibly while I still remember this one) get to reading the original, but even without much familiarity, I think this stands as a novel in its own right.

It's the same story, more or less beat for beat (though with the latter third somewhat rearranged), but about a kid growing up in Appalachia in the 1990s, with a dead father, a mother with substance abuse issues, and a brutally violent step father. I was impressed that it never felt like it was forcing the story to go somewhere for the sake of fitting the original, but kept its own integrity as a novel. Some of the translations were a delight, though, so I do think at least having seen a movie version would be value-added. The character voices were lovely, and I liked how it stuck with the hope and class solidarity of the original.

I think Kingsolver was both stretching her muscles, and making a point about what kind of people are worth making art about, and who/when/where can be the subject of a Great Novel.

Smarter people have probably said more interesting things about this one. TL;DR: Really enjoyed this, happy to be on the hype train, still haven't read Dickens.

I maybe didn't read the blurb on this one, and was not expecting it to be targetted at the corporate world (also upper management in the civil service). It's very much written in business-speak, and putting on a facade of "hey, pragmatically, not fucking up Indigenous relations is going to save you a lot of time and money. (And also is the right thing to do, morally.)" Which was not an angle I'd really run into before, though I can see the value of meeting people where they are, and maybe getting the results you want, even if people aren't acting from the best motivation. The Josephs give this as a course also, and have the friendly getting their point in sideways thing nailed. So I guess it was more of an Interesting Cultural Experience than a great read? I might revisit it if I'm ever a corporate executive, lol.

I really liked the dystopian community setting, and the lovable oaf narrator was a joy to spend time with, but I'm over murdered wives. (Especially in books by male authors.) I should've read the blurb more carefully. I just skimmed it, and thought he was going to be looking for his missing wife, and then was like "Oh no!" when she bought it a quarter of the way through. Nope.

(I am not consistent on this point, as I did enjoy the D&D movie, which had a central murdered wife, which I know was a deal breaker for some, but the vibe hit different for me.) 

I was mixed to negative about The House in the Cerulean Sea because at it's heart I don't think the book handled the moral conflict of a romance between what was essentially a victim and a perpetrator (which I'm not inherently against, but you need to deal with it if you're going to do it), and I wasn't really comfortable with Klune's inspiration for a fluffy romance being a cultural genocide that happened within living memory. That said, the kids were really cute, and I like the romance itself if I ignored the moral aspect (made easy by the book also doing that), so I wanted to see what happened, and I did want Arthur's point of view.

However, this one really centred how bad the agency was, and how much it was like the cultural genocide that happened here. And it was just so preachy and didactic, and the author was really running with the whole "What if JKR was actually Dolores Umbridge?" line. There's no amount of cute kids and sweet romance that was going to make me finish that. However, if you're willing to put up with all that, and just want Woobie!Arthur, I can recommend the sequel. 

Churchill is a Haida elder who decided in her 90s to give into her kids' and grandkids' demands that she write all this down and publish it. Her family helped her a lot with structure, but Churchill's voice remains very strong.

The first third of the book is an outline of Haida family structure and a history of her family back to her grandmother's generation, travelling between Haida Gwaii in Canada and Tlingit and Tsimshian territories in Alaska. Then follows a general section on the seasonal harvest cycle, and what baskets were used when, a detailed section on how to harvest and prepare spruce roots, cedar strips and materials for dyes, and finally some weaving instructions. It's aimed at a technical audience, and I was certainly helped in understanding by somewhat knowing the culture and ecosystem going in, though my knowledge of basket weaving is minimal. There's lots of pictures, and some diagrams, but if learning to weave, I'd definetely take a class.

I liked it a lot, and found it very informative, though I think some folks could find it a bit dry. 

Again a change of tone. I have now idea how many of these Vo has in store, given how each one is a different reflection on how storytelling works, and how meta those tend to be (without ever drifting into that "Reading is just So Important!" thing that grates), but she pulled this one off, too! I really liked the shifts in perception, and the growing horror elements as the story went forward. Very neatly done. 

(Library finally got the next two books in this series, so I can talk about the one every one else covered ages ago.)

I liked it! It's good that Vo isn't trying to do the same trick every story, because then it turns into this Agatha Christie game of trying to guess the twist, which would get old. This is more building out the world, and a meditation on a different kind of storytelling, specifically how many different ways there are to look at one person, especially when that person is no longer there to tell their own interpretation of a life. In this book there's no focus on folk tales or mythology, it's all painfully personal for the main character. It's slow and sad, and tender. 

A couple of friends are really into Lawson, and I can certainly see the appeal, and this was over all very good, even if this felt a little "first novel bites off more than it can chew."

The story follows a split timeline of a university professor in Toronto looking back at her childhood in a farming community in Northern Ontario, with a very heavy theme of "the tragedy that befell us." In flashbacks, the kids are duly orphaned, and I'm really glad that the novel tells us almost right away that all four survive, because teenagers looking after a toddler and living next to a lake felt like it was going to end poorly. But no, the tragedy isn't the dead parents, and the toddler lives; it's something else. (Which shouldn't have reminded me as much of the Punch parody of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as it did (that cannot be divulged until the very last chapter of this interesting narrative.), especially when I actually liked the way the narrative kept reframing itself.

A lot of this book is about what counts as a tragedy, according to whom, and how that changes with age and shifting perspective, and that part of it was perhaps a little too neatly done. (The characters also keep talking about free land that no one else wanted, and then there's an Indigenous community across the lake, but not any mention that maybe someone did want the land. But the book could've been expecting the reader to draw that line themself.)

Which shouldn't distract from this being a really good book (but apparently did). Lawson's prose is absolutely gorgeous, and I loved her depiction of small town life, especially the kids, who were all delightfully childlike (for good or ill) rather than being too cutesy. It's also often hilarious. The view of the childhood world changes as the main character grows up, but age doesn't always add clarity for her. It's a really great character study of someone so shaped by double blows of family expectation and tragedy that she can't even see what's been done to her, or who she's become. The realisations and coming together at the end felt both satisfying and earned.

I understand her later books are more grim, so may not revisit the author, even though I'm glad I read this one.