mmcloe's reviews
232 reviews

When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar

Go to review page

adventurous emotional funny hopeful informative reflective sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

I absolutely love when poets write novels and this is no exception. On a structural level, Asghar is playful and sharp and deeply aware of how words can arrange spatially to punch right into an emotional core - all things I expect from a good poet. 

The novel is exceptional for its blending of the form and structure with the content. Memory is a sometimes comforting sometimes nasty and always slippery thing and Asghar's fragmented, hazy writing captures this effortlessly. I'm especially fascinated by the ways she depicts the trauma of/causing forgetting through textual fading, blocking, and genre shifts. Her writing also does a thorough job of breaking down racism and xenophobia pre and post 9/11. 

I can see why this got put on the longlist for the NBA and I wish it made it further along!
Expand filter menu Content Warnings
Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter's Saga by D.O. Fagunwa

Go to review page

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

4.0

Another recommendation from Marlon James. I think there's a lot to appreciate about the book's balance between universal themes (people coming together and facing odd and difficult challenges) and more regional themes (Yoruba mythology, Nigerian natureculture). I can definitely see how this is an ur text for Tutuola and James and other authors writing in West African fantastical styles, though I prefer the linguistic play of those later authors - I'm not sure how much is a matter of Soyinka's translation. 

Wish this could get the same attention as its European contemporaries like The Hobbit! 
The Years by Annie Ernaux

Go to review page

emotional funny informative reflective medium-paced

4.25

Hadn't heard of Ernaux other than in passing until she won the Nobel so I decided to give this a look! Overall pretty interesting, I learned a lot about French culture and how emergent globalization in the latter half of the 1900s influenced and shaped the country. I found the major throughlines to be spirals of sex, electoral politics, and consumerism. I also appreciated her (sometimes half-hearted) condemnation of French racism and xenophobia - something that France as a country has historically not been great at grappling with. 
Luster by Raven Leilani

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad fast-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

4.75

A very tight and mean and gorgeous novel. It's got me thinking a lot about how we represent ourselves and present ourselves for/through other people, especially our romantic and interpersonal relationships. The novel is, to me, about spectatorship and artist-audience relationships and the blurring of those lines as well as confounding what we mean by "art." I think these themes tease out very smartly the way that Gen Z process intersecting race/class/gender/sexual identities in whatever hell-stage of capitalism we're currently in. A novel for the 2020s, definitely.

Also, Leilani's prose is just masterful. I love how light and bouncy and observant and satirical it is. 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton

Go to review page

adventurous challenging dark hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced
Very challenging read, but necessarily so given the weight of the topics discussed and the resistance to historical flattening of Black lives, especially Black trans lives. Almost every chapter was a wonderfully deep reservoir of scholarly tools and new lenses on old history that were very helpful for me thinking through how different bodies have been treated as fungible and fluid by force and how others have taken that condition and used it to express novel ways of living that are still future-facing today. For all of the author's many references (the book also served as one of the most robust citation and reading list I've ever encountered), I'm surprised there wasn't more of a reference to Puar, especially in the chapter on Christine Jorgensen. It's incredibly interesting to think how a single white model trans woman can be used to overshadow the lives of Black trans women, and I think this analysis would really complement understandings of homonationalism across the world. Much to think about!
Expand filter menu Content Warnings
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Go to review page

adventurous challenging hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced
Essential! Groundbreaking! Still constantly relevant!

I was so drawn to Freire's warmth and empathy as a scholar and his understanding that humans are at their best when we're able to build one another up and imagine new futures free from capitalist oppression together. His citations of other scholars as well as revolutionaries was excellent as well. I'm excited to see how I can apply his pedagogical theory to my own teaching and research work, as well as my interpersonal relationships with my friends and neighbors. 
The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

Go to review page

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

5.0

Absolutely spellbinding - a standout work of the century without a doubt.

Leaves me thinking about the different ways we're tied to one another. How the physical and the social and the digital and the spiritual and the ecological all messily collide, exploding and leaving shards who knows what in their wake. A novel for American absurdity and late capitalism in the beige nooks of burnt out industry.

Gunty references (and is blurbed by!) Raven Leilani. Excited to visit Luster later! 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga

Go to review page

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

5.0

Oh what a jarring and clever little novel that I almost completely fell for if it weren't for Googling one of the footnotes. 

Masterful structuring and writing on all levels. I'm so impressed by how the content of the novel begins to poke holes in "Western" understandings of universal race/class/gender/language identities all while the structure creeps up on us the whole time to totally tear those understandings to tiny pieces. A stunning example of how even well-meaning Western narratives about the Middle East and north Africa can twist and distort the complexities of people's lives so quickly.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings
Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley

Go to review page

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

3.5

I wasn't particularly thrilled by this one. I didn't think the general conceit was very interesting and the whole thing was way too optimistic and uncritical about modern heterosexuality for me. It was funny at parts for sure but a lot of this book read as if the author wasn't sure if they wanted to wrote a Moshfegh novel or something more wholesome. 
Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac

Go to review page

adventurous challenging funny informative inspiring mysterious reflective fast-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? Yes

4.5

Loved it like everything else Oloixarac does. The deep tech references and biological jargon took a while to get used to but ultimately I found the novel to be a interesting portrait of how European colonialism, digital capitalism, the biological surveillance state, and modern mythologies all braid together across time, space, and place. The prediction of blockchain crashes also surprised me.  I wish there were more time to explore the ins and outs of each of the worlds she constructs.