justabean_reads's reviews
1276 reviews

I can see why this was a surprising shift in tone for people going in expecting more of the Ancillary trilogy. It also doesn't have the cool multiplicity of points of view aspect we got with Breq, and the gender stuff in the empire was replaced by other gender stuff. But there's more aliens, so for me it balanced out in the end.

I really enjoyed another outing in the universe with (at least initially) slightly lower stakes. I was describing it as "delightful buddy comedy about a dumb fuck aristocrat's daughter and the rando non-binary criminal she picked up along the way, attempting to do crime" and that more or less sums it up, with "and accidentally interplanetary shenanigans" and "cute f/f romance" towards the end. Competence porn this was not, but I liked being on the trip with someone whose skill set was not at all matched to the situation in which she placed herself, but who more or less figured how to make it work anyway. I liked that it was mixed on the value of loyalty to a family that probably isn't all that loyal back, and trying to navigate toxic relationships. I might have lost track of some of the plotting and counter plotting towards the end there, but it had all the action adventure and fun aliens that the first ones did.

Very much enjoyed, looking forward to my library someday getting Translation State on audio. 

Cool fantasy/horror riff on The Fall of the House of Usher (which I haven't read), now with more mushrooms. In terms of gothic horror with fungus, I think this one overall worked better for me than Mexican Gothic, but I'm not sure it's a subgenre I'm in love with.

I did like the main character, a Ruritanian war veratrine, whose gender was "soldier" because of some historical and linguistic quirks with their culture. I also liked the English Lady of a Certain Age mycologist. And the horse. That's kinda all I got? It was fine. There were some good creepy bits? I'll probably read the sequel because it has mostly the same characters. 

Got this as an audiobook read by the author, which I'd recommend as he's got a great voice. I know very little about the Indigenous rights situation in Australia, or how different voices fit into advocacy there, which was a little disconcerting as I'd be able to place a similar book in Canada. However, going in totally cold, I thought it was a really interesting read, and I liked Yunkaporta's point of view on how to interact with the world. I ended up having to take it slow, as it's quite layered and dense, and would probably benefit from re-reading. 

I'm still a little baffled by the framing device of the story: the point of view is a baby communicating (via the spiritual plane? I guess?) with an elderly woman with dementia. The baby is so young that they're able to remember and understand everything around them, including things that happened while they were an egg, but will soon forget their egg life, and become a regular person? I guess it's a larger point about how similar the very old and very young are? Maybe? And it allowed a fair amount of metaphysical communication, which was quite neat, but in the context of *gestures at recent North American elections* stuff, having an fetus be a person felt a little weird? I'm not sure it added something an omniscient narrator wouldn't have? But Hernandez put way more thought into this than I ever did, and it's not like she's anti-choice.

I did like the main storyline a lot (even if the baby thing was somewhat distracting): a Filipina care worker travels first to Hong Kong then to Ontario, Canada, raising other people's children, and looking after other people's parents. After a series of increasingly shitty placements, she ends up looking after an elderly trans woman, which is very much outside her cultural experience. The relationship between the two women as they get to know each other forms the heart of the book, and is a beautiful commentary on the queer community, bonding across cultures, and the value of queer elders.

I didn't love it as much as Scarborough, and I think being in a down mood meant the ending didn't hit as hard as it should've, but overall I'm glad I read it, and continue to pick up everything Hernandez does. (Which, I indeed have since I finished this.) 

This is meant to be Albertalli processing figuring out that she was not in fact straight, while under pressure from the entire Internet complaining that she was painfully straight. I was curious how that was going to work in a story about teenagers, and if it'd be a coherent story rather than a screed.

Imogen, our high school–age heroine, ends up pretending to be bi to impress her best friend's cool college friends, while over-analysing every single thought in her head in a way that I found intensely relatable. There's also a very cute romance with one of the cool college friends, and the inevitable hilarious reveal that Imogen lied about being bisexual but is in fact bisexual.

The entire Internet telling her she's wrong aspect is embodied by one of her high-school friends, who is obsessed with The Discourse online, and figuring out the One True Way to be queer. This was probably slightly heavy handed, but the book narrowly saved the friend from cartoon villainy by setting up why she had those defence mechanisms in place. Plus, we all kinda know someone who's like that, so fair enough. They're all very young, and felt like it, rather than like adults playing teens.

I'm sure this has kicked off a whole new round of The Discourse, but I thought it was sweet and fun, and made some solid points about the damage done by enforcing the "right" way to be queer. Hopefully the youth appreciated it as intended. 

Intense college flashback to follow. I've always admired Barlow and her work with the Council of Canadians, so it was cool to put it in more context, and see what'd happened with her in the last few years. The book covers her work with feminism, anti-corporate efforts, and water protection, among other causes. It's a very hands-on, with each chapter describing how she got involved with a cause, why she cared, what the movements were able to do, and what work still needed to be done, and the book concluded with a general guidelines for effective activism. It's very much in the "you're not obliged to fix everything that's wrong with the world, but you are obliged to try to fix something" school of thought, and I appreciated it. 

 I liked this better than the first one! Probably because there was less about teenagers falling in love and writing long letters about their feelings, and more amnesia, which always hits for me. It also wrapped the plot up pretty well, and mostly didn't rely on people being total idiots. It probably also helped that there was less "reporting" which had been a weakness in the first book. Though there was a lovely "Stop the presses!" moment, and I generally enjoyed their grumpy editor.

Instead, we get adventures of trying to keep the warring Gods from killing everyone in their way, a lot of city politics, and trying to navigate an occupation. The magic was more at the forefront here, and I liked the expansions on the worldbuilding. Nice to see a series wrapping up in two books instead of dragging on, and I felt like this ended in a good place (even if it maybe two epilogues too many). 

I'm just not feeling like Syd is a real person v. a literary construct, and the book feels like it's being sanctimonious about poverty while simultaneously openly being mad at people being sanctimonious about poverty? IDK, not my vibe. 

This is a beautiful book, a mix of poetry and prose, African and Caribbean languages, a pair of spirit beings travelling across the Caribbean in search of a way to save the world. For some reason, I just couldn't focus on it, possibly just the prose it too floaty and the plot felt so shapeless. I picked at it for two weeks, then gave up.

This won both the Women's Prize for fiction and the Carol Shields' Prize, and I can very much see why. It primarily deals with the early years of the civil war in Sri Lanka, and a Tamil family torn apart as some join the resistance movement, while others want to stay out of the fighting. The book takes the form of main character trying to reconstruct the story decades later, retelling her childhood through her years as a medical student in an effort to de-mythologise them.

The writing is incredibly powerful, and very beautiful, and Ganeshananthan clearly expresses the feeling of having no good choices, while everyone around you makes worse choices. I appreciated how she engaged with the conversations around international movement solidarity, and the sexism embedded in it, but didn't let the book feel like a history lesson. The focus on the narrator's journey and choices is always at the heart of it all. Towards the end, it references events covered in more detail in Sharon Bala's The Boat People, which takes place in the same conflict a generation later, so I felt a lot of resonance there.

I feel like there's a lot more to be said about this book, but I'm running out of review steam. It's good!