justabean_reads's reviews
1276 reviews

This is gorgeous! In the wake of the death of Leavitt's wife (who used medically assisted death after a lifetime of chronic pain), she spent two years trying to process her anger and grief through her art, in ways strange, incoherent, abstract, and profoundly moving. Pages and pages divided into a grid for a comic, then filled with colours and a handful of words. Sometimes the colours have meaning, sometimes you find out what that is much later, or when Leavitt herself figures it out, or never. It's raw, and honest, and I love how it refuses to neatly package up what Leavitt felt, or leave her at a comfortable end point.

If you're on an even keel, I imagine this book would be impactful and moving. If you're currently dealing with grief, it's absolutely gutting.

Back on my Hugo Bullshit, with this year's hyped science fiction romance adventure novel. Our heroine is a con artist trying to rip off a rich boy who knocked up and dumped her sister. She's doing this by seducing him, leaving him at the altar, and then cashing out on the pre-nup. The only problem is that his sister is hot! And also in trouble with the mob.

I was excited about this because I loved Fraimow's novella Suradanna and the Sea, which was a really fun yuletide fandom last time I did yuletide, and I generally like heist romances. Unfortunately, this was fine, but not really anything special. It was pretty easy to call the turns, the romance felt surface level, the relationship between the sisters could've been really crunchy, but ended up thin, with a lot of moralising and assuring the reader what the MC was really feeling. I'm also not sure she stuck the landing, having set up the situation as dire, then ducking out of it all in a slight of hand I didn't entirely believe. Pretty sure the mob would've just murdered the shit out of everyone involved.

It was fun following the various set pieces, all in very pretty outfits, and if you're looking for a light adventure that's got a lot of style (but not much else), I'd recommend it. I also appreciated a Yiddish-speaking Jewish woman of colour in a space adventure. I just wanted there to be more to it. 

However long into being interested in queer history, especially queer history around WWII, I finally got around to reading this! I'm glad I did, if for no other reason than to learn that the lesbians in the Free French Army women's barracks on Downing Street took over their canteen and turned it into a lesbian bar. Pass it along.

I also really appreciated the long interview with the author, which had been done in 2005, and was included in the afterwards, as there was a lot about how the book had been written, translated and published. Specifically that when her husband took it to the US, the original publisher insisted that he add a line of narration about how the point-of-view character Did Not Approve of These Goings On. And that those changes, though Torres agreed to them, were one of the reasons she never wanted the book translated back into French: she didn't want the women she'd fictionalised to think she judged them. (Before she died, she published her actual war-time diaries in French, though I think she still changed the names.)

On the topic of the actual book: I really enjoyed it. I could've lived without the point of view character being so judgy, so it was good to know that was a publisher's mandate, as she's throwing a lot of casual homophobia and biphobia around, both at the main characters, and at the handful of gay men who wander through. The narrator herself isn't as much of a character though, and most of the story is about the women she shared a dorm room with, and the adventures they had between the founding of the Free French Army's women's auxiliary and the invasion of Normandy, whereupon they moved back to France. Most women were young, some of them too young to be in the army, with a handful of more experienced women, and a lot of drama. We get very little about their war work, as the story focuses on inter-personal drama and romantic adventures (with each other and outside of the barracks).

It's fully entertaining, and I can see why it was a runaway hit in the '50s. Not just because there's quite a bit of vaguely-described sex (lots of sensations and emotions, not much in the way of mechanical detail), but also because of how well drawn the characters are, how they're allowed to be messed up and difficult, but you still root for them to find happiness. And survive the war, which not everyone does, for a variety of reasons. The book doesn't sugar coat either the physical danger of being stationed in London during the Blitz or V1/V2 attacks, or the emotional isolation and difficulty of living in a strange land with all of your family in peril, of being young and afraid and prone to making huge choices off the cuff. There's also dubiously consensual underage sex, self harm, substance abuse, descriptions of domestic violence and a brush with incest, but I again don't think they're dealt with sensationally, but rather as things the women were dealing with.

I'm glad to have finally read this, did not disappoint. I'd like to find Torrès' other books at some point, though By Cecile (a post-war Colette expy) is the only one still widely in print. Are her war-time diaries translated into English, does anyone know? 

I'd say this was timely, but I think it's more that this kind of thing keeps happening, which is probably what vermette also thinks! It's very of the moment, but that moment being any time in the last twenty years, at the very least. (Indeed, between typing this in a draft, and hitting post, the whole Colby Wilkens thing happened.)

Two Metis sisters reckon with their white mother being a pretendian (white person pretending to be Indigenous), and with that being revealed in a national newspaper. They're also very much dealing with their own personal trashfires, and all the trauma that their mother's bullshit brings back up. It's told in short point of view chapters between the sisters (one an pottery artist in Winnipeg, and one an Indigenous Studies professor who just moved back home after fifteen years away), with a lot of flashbacks to growing up in an unstable household, and attempts to reconcile themselves to what's happening.

At times, the sisters reactions felt a little too polished, or maybe "well-placed" would be a better way of putting it. They're both believably flawed people, but it sometimes felt like they had done all the right things a little too well, and I would've maybe liked their relationship with their mother to feel more compromised. However, I can understand why vermette wanted a clean line between them. Certainly the message around double standards that judge Indigenous people more harshly, regardless of acting perfectly or not, was loud and clear.

I really liked positioning each sister in a different but ultimately complimentary relationship with her culture, one making art in a traditional way informed by archaeology and traditional stories and hands in the dirt, and the other studying narratives and theory, and trying to write her way into history. It was really neat to see them coming at their lives from those angles, while at the same time just feeling this deep hurt at what their mother did. Really thoughtful, well put together book. Also, had great family vibes and relationships between sisters, which I love too.

This is set in the same family as vermette's previous trilogy, but you don't need to have read that to follow this. Was nice to have queer and non-binary characters just chilling in the story.

The audio format did throw me a bit, since it wasn't quite a full cast drama, but it wasn't quite not that either. However, I'm here for Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers. 

I've never read LMM before! But since this was a book club pick, it was a nice excuse to give her a go. Since someone else picked the book, I ended up going in completely cold. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I ended up with a romance both in the modern sense of the word, and the sense of the romantic movement, or since this was in North America, perhaps Transcendentalism would be more accurate.

Our heroine is set forth in the most convincingly miserable existence in small-town Ontario some time in the 1920s, where conventionality and family judgement literally control her every waking hour, and the only beauty in her life exists in her imagination and nature books written by a Mysterious Author. Right away, we get hit with this wall of unhappiness, which was the most convincing description of being at a dead-end and out of options since Persuasion, except our heroine here doesn't even have a busted love affair to regret.

Then she goes to the doctor to ask about a touch of angina, and finds out she only has a year to live. At this point, it became incredibly easy to call all the turns, but it's not like one minds that kind of thing. I minded a little more that this was apparently LLM's ode to how much she enjoyed that one trip to Muskoka. The middle of the book is about seven straight chapters of descriptions of how pretty cottage country is, and it might have been great in 1926, but that was before Odes to Cottage Country became a genre, one that I unfortunately categorically dislike.

However, the romance was very sweet, and I like the tropes around "very unhappy person gets showered with everything she didn't know she wanted and learns to be happy." Also as a portrait of small-town ignominy, it was a lot of fun.

(Also, has anyone read The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough? Because I really came away feeling like she'd read The Blue Castle because it had a lot of reflections, though perhaps they were just playing with the same set of tropes. Oh, looked it up, and apparently there was a plagiarism accusation. Interesting.) 

What if you were in the sandwich generation, but neither your parent nor your child remembered you? I think that was more or less where this was going, anyway. I admit that I struggled with it at times, as the book felt very plain spoken and straightforward, but then kept slipping in literary themes, also. Our hero is a non-native man raised on a Penobscot reserve by his stepfather, now living next to but not on the reserve. While his mother is slowly sliding into dementia, his daughter, just across the river, is raised by a native stepfather, and doesn't know the main character is her biological father. 

He doesn't have a life outside of being pulled between all that, and his existence feels stuck in a confusion of identity. He wants his daughter to know him, but understands her mother's reasons for wanting to raise their child in her culture. At the same time, connections of blood can mean connections of inheritable mental health problems. And he has to wonder if her belonging somewhere can retroactively explain his life (since it doesn't seem like anything else can).

We kept meeting characters who reflected back parts of the problem, but never really let him put the story in place. I don't know if the book answered anything it raises, either, nor was it intended to. Rather it worried away at identity, consanguinity, belonging, memory. The prose was very clean and beautiful, and I kept getting caught on single sentences that felt like perfect fractals of the whole novel. At the same time, it was very hard to like any single character because every choice they made felt mired in compromise. (Very sorry to have missed the book club meeting where we talked about this one.)

I picked up Talty's previous book of short stories because I want more.

This book is so good, y'all! I'd previously bounced off Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring because it was very sexual violence forward, and kept meaning to try her again. Then she didn't publish for ten years! So I'm glad that my wanting to read her and my Hugo reading and her new book all happened at the same time.

In a secondary-world Caribbean-island setting, a young man tries to save his country, prove that magic is just science, and not completely sink his relationship with his fiance(e)s and every other part of his life. Also, the magic he doesn't believe in might be happening at an accelerated rate. I really enjoyed our hero, who was such an ADHD chaos child, in a way that showed up both the brilliance and hazards of that. I kept thinking, "Oh. My. God. Do better!" but at the same time really understanding what he was thinking, and why his life kept folding out the way it was.

Hopkinson also did a great job around building a collectivist society with very different gender and relationship norms than ours (also using thee/thou for informal second-person pronouns), while not making it a utopia, but rather that it's a real(ish) world, with slightly different problems and kinds of inequity than the one we live in. There were times where "Okay, they're just all prejudiced against this group, instead," which felt a little on the nose sometimes, especially as the hero was upper class and oblivious, and clearly a lot of people just wanted to clue-by-four him into the next world, though in the end, it worked out into an interesting critique of newbie allies. Always nice to casually get non-binary and trans characters as part of a story, as well.

I also liked the way the book played with reality bending and magic, and ideas around how memory is mailable, and what founding myths could mean. We get a lot of folk stories dropped in, playing with the first hand accounts we get later. I thought they could've been a bit more variable and unreliable, but it made sense with the worldbuilding that they weren't, too.

Probably the best SF/F book I've read this year. Going on the nomination list for sure.

I'd rec getting this on audiobook for those that can do them, as a lot of the book is in patois, and having a Caribbean-born narrator really helped me out with the patterns and rhythms of speech. 

Beautiful hardback from Image, which I picked up from the library because it was pretty (there may be a theme to this post!). This was originally published in several parts in Weaver's Paklis short story anthologies, which I hadn't heard of, but may try to track down. Weaver does the story, lines, colours and lettering himself, and is very good at it.

The story here alternates between a mystery set in 1949, where a female detective is tracking down a serial killer, and two hundred years in the future, following an environmental catastrophe that has forced humanity to live in domes. There's also cyborgs, and some kind of Quantum Leap type time travel involving taking over the life of someone in the past. Maybe? Unclear?

The art might've made a little more sense than the story. In the 1940s, it's strong-lined black and white, with pointillist shading done to look like newsprint. The character design is gorgeous: flowing trench coats and fast cars all around. Meanwhile, the future setting is in colour, but washed out for a world without the sun, punctuated by neon. We see the same character in a futuristic style that echos her 1940s design, and the way colour fades in and out and the style shifts as the world blend is fantastic storytelling. All the female characters wear sensible shoes!

The story made a little less sense to me. I could sort of see the tropes it was working with, but I'm not entirely sure I could tell you what happened, or why it happened. But I also think just coasting on genre vibes worked out in the end. I liked the ways it linked classic noir and cyberpunk noir, even if that could've used a bit more development.

Woof. I only finished this for the sake of not leaving it perpetually in progress on my ereader, but would recommend giving it a skip. Or maybe only reading the first four Worrals books. If I get to the remaining six, I will report back if any are worth reading.

W.E. Johns should not write books set outside of western Europe. (Probably even Spain would be bad, idk. Could be just Northwestern Europe, and the parts of the Anglosphere that don't require writing people of colour.) The first four books were about: a) Worrals & Frecks saving their aerodrome and catching spies, b) Worrals & Frecks stopping enemy spies and rescuing stranded soldiers, c) Worrals & Frecks acting as couriers to aid the French Resistance, d) aiding the French Resistance and helping lift the siege on Malta. All of which I can pretty much get behind. This was about censoring printing presses in the British-ruled Syria, because anyone who didn't like living in a colonial police state must be a Nazi. Queue the "Are we the baddies?" Mitchell and Webb bit, except this book never even thought about asking that question. Also, every single thing about this book was deeply deeply racist, from beginning to end. I cannot overstate how it was just a parade of orientalist stereotypes; Edward Said could've based his entire thesis on just this one novel.

I saw this on the library's Express Reads shelf, and just had to pick it up, less because of the blurb, and more because for whatever reason the library had the deluxe edition with sprayed edges and illustrated end papers, and it was super pretty, and I just wanted to pet it.

Given that I picked it up solely on aesthetic grounds, I'm pleased with how much I ended up enjoying it. It's sort of A Knight's Tale with mechs, but also in space, and also the protagonist is extremely murdery. Actually, pretty much everyone is extremely murdery, except a couple of knights who seem to think they're in a different genre.

I'd have been happy just to go along with handwavy "Jousting Space Mechs," but I ended up really liking the worldbuilding here. The author made a few leaps, but for the most part it made a certain amount of sense as to why they had the mechs and why they were jousting, in terms of internal continuity, and in relation to medieval jousts. The society of the space station was a little less well drawn, with stark class segregation in a way that felt like it could've been more nuanced, and a couple notes felt over the top. However, the story is about  mechs jousting in space, so I'll allow it. (Though I did find the actual jousting a bit difficult to visualise at times.) I was able to call several of the plot turns ahead of time.

I like the angry murder heroine, the and how the other characters use/interact with/misunderstand her motivations, and the ways class structure affects that. She felt more well rounded than the recent crop of angry murder protagonists, and that the plot took that kind of emotional damage more seriously. We get to know a few other characters as well, though the love interest had a few too many Poor Little Richboy vibes. I do live in hope for at least an OT3 with one of the lady knights, but the heroine keeps thinking of her as a sister, so maybe not.

Book ends with a massive cliffhanger, so wait for the next one (I think it's meant to be a duology not a series) if that's an issue. I subscribed to the author's newsletter so I can get updates on when we'll get more story.