larabavery's reviews
34 reviews

Mrs. March by Virginia Feito

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dark funny mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Delightfully deranged. The narrative voice and pacing are close to perfect. Didn’t love the transition into the attempt to explain Mrs. Marsh’s behavior by diving into her past; not that I doubt her trauma affects her, but sometimes I just wish we could let the harms of the past play out in the characters’ present, rather than having to revisit them explicitly. 
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Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories by Agatha Christie

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adventurous funny mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Cozy mysteries with clever resolutions and all the charm (and strangeness) of smalltown life. The characters are definitely “of their time” so the stories are missing some of the interesting, more contemporary ideas about gender, psychology, criminality, etc, but for what they are, they are perfect.
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

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challenging emotional funny informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.75

This feels like Shirley in as close to her own words as we can get, which means the biography is funny, weird, brilliant, and tragic. From her fraught, epic love story with Stanley, her obsessive creativity, her flirtations with queerness and witchcraft: this book has it all from start to finish, and somehow, in all its detail, it manages to be a page-turner. My only criticism is that Franklin seemed to avoid answering so many answerable questions after Shirley’s death. It was as if the book was so close to its subject, it couldn’t bear to go on, leaving the reader wondering about her offspring, the suspected betrayal by her lifelong love, and certain aspects of her legacy. Perhaps we need a sequel!
Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg

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dark funny reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

An encyclopedia of a family, including terms, definitions, asides, examples—such an innovative way to create a portrait of one’s family. Considering the casual, diaristic style, you’d think the narrator would address her own feelings and fears, especially as the threat of fascism looms in the background. But she seems to edit herself out—along with deaths, marriages, and decades of strife—which leaves major gaps in the storytelling for no apparent reason.  Who is the narrator? Why does she gloss over some events, and hyper focus on others? It’s never quite clear, and the absences start to build a standoffish, secretive tone in an otherwise warm portrayal.
Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

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adventurous emotional medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

The book was extremely well-crafted down to the letter, but also somehow one of the worst reading experiences I’ve ever had? It was like someone put a bunch of Jonathan Irving, Russell Banks, and Ann Patchett novels into a blender and then arranged the pieces into a book about bowling. Characters waltz in and out, demanding attention, only to never be seen again. Storylines are picked up and dropped randomly. Each paragraph is like an obnoxious musical theater kids constantly nudging you, asking you to acknowledge how clever they are, and the frustrating part is that they are really good, but you’re tired of clapping, and tired of reading about how great bowling is, and all your friends have been killed or abandoned in earlier chapters, and you just want it to end. I wish her well, and she is very good at writing sentences, but I will never pick up another book by this author in my life. 
Erasure by Percival Everett

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challenging dark funny inspiring reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

The book feels like an experiment Percival Everett needed to conduct before he found his footing in later works. Some passages sing; some read as creative writing exercises meant for no reader but himself. Sometimes the satire and self-awareness of Everett’s narrator yields powerful, funny insight about the struggles of being a Black artist in America; sometimes it just comes off as pretentious. When the book rests in the story of Monk’s family, taking grief and complex relationships with parents head on without doing cartwheels around meta-fiction, the book is at its best. 
A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman

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informative lighthearted medium-paced

3.5

Well-researched, deeply sensual factoids; lyrical prose verging on suffocating. Touches on but does not engage with any of the larger implications of what our senses mean to us biologically, psychologically, or how they change over time. Structured in dollops of research and/or anecdotes that, at least for me, go “in one ear, out the other” because they are not connected to a larger narrative or argument. 
The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel

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adventurous challenging emotional funny informative reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Why am I gripped by the fate of a lesser known historical figure, whose story I already knew? Why do snatches of the childhood of an English blacksmith’s son make me think of my own? Why did it take me five months to get through this book, and why did I weep when I finished it? This conclusion to the Wolf Hall series—and the whole trilogy in general—is less like reading a novel and more like entering another world. But it’s not effortless; you are never passively reading this story. You feel a part of it. You are carrying the weight of a consciousness, filled with everything from the price of wheat to the implications of replacing Catholicism with a new world order to the stink of the Thames. When you finish this book, you are not just closing the cover on a fictional world, it feels like you are letting go of someone you know. 
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

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reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

In the same vein as Rachel Cusk’s outline, Kitamura’s narrator’s primary role in this novel is to be an astute observer of language in the creation of power dynamics, especially to those related to gender. The narrator’s profession as a court interpreter at The Hague places her in a perfect position to do this, both at the trial of a war criminal, and in her personal life, as a lonely visitor on a one-year contract, trying make connections and see if she belongs. Her observations about each conversation and exchange are measured and nuanced, and their detailed precision about flirtation, fixation, and performance is a pleasure to read. However, the scenes are also detailed to the point of stretching the reader’s attention away from the present action until slack. The ending, as a result, feels disconnected from the deep self-awareness the main character had cultivated through each interaction. What little tension developed in each scene was abandoned by time or indecision or just flat out left unresolved—it seemed such scenes were included for their essayistic insights about different forms of intimacy, but considering the untethered, cliche ending, did little to change the character. I don’t mind an essayistic novel that serves its theme above all else, so I enjoyed the slow, absorbing journey, but was left unsatisfied by its disregard for narrative structure. 
I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A winding, layered reflection on the power of belonging and love, and all the decisions one makes to seek it day to day. Though the timeline wandered through the narrator’s memories and the landmarks of Norway and Denmark, I never felt disoriented about where I was in time or space. His obsessions were unsettling, yet communicated in a chaotic clarity. Sometimes this book was like a poem; a series of deeply immersive images and scenes that the narrator was subject to, rather than unfolding as a result of his choices. Though these images were beautiful, the path his life has taken seems to confuse the reader as much as it confuses him. His motivations often felt obscure.