storyorc's reviews
643 reviews

Loved the unsettling imagery around Pet, especially the descriptions of how it emanated threat without any physical change. Impressively balanced with its protective side, and how it needed help getting out of the painting in the beginning. That was a masterful way to allow Jam to see it as something approachable. Its transformation at the end gave me tingles as well.

Sometimes this utopia - especially its motto and how incredibly sensitive and patient Jam and Redemption are with each other, like trained therapists - struck me as over-idealised and made it hard for me to buy into the kids as real people. Could just be a depressing failure of my imagination though.  I am not entirely certain what the function of setting such a story in a utopia was though, unless a warning to stay vigilant even when you seem safe? Cool take on a utopia though, with the Angels and Monsters blurring the line between real and mythic. That, I took as a well-crafted warning against mythologising your heroes.

The subject matter went to dark places without flinching, but with great care, and delivered an incredibly nuanced take on vengeance (especially considering its branded middle grade). Thoughtful, bold, and loving.

My favourite quote was Pet's reply to Jam asking if it would rather be feared than oggled at: "It [fear] has its advantages when you are a thing that does not fit."

Beautiful, disgusting writing. Barely a chapter went by when I wasn't highlighting some line about tucking her love for her serial-killer father "into the spaces behind her back teeth and between her knuckles". Even traditionally positive feelings are treated to the same body horroresque description as the evil in the Crowder house (and when it comes to the evil, Gailey does not hold back). These layers add up to a relentless, growing dread despite the book's small-town pace.

I am also on my feet cheering for women's wrongs. Vera is neither an angel nor a demon, but the moments when she flirts with the latter are delicious after seeing her endure pages and pages of bullshit. Even when her reactions are perhaps a little disproportionate. Good For Her vibes.

Just Like Home does suffer a little from feeling like the uneasy marriage of two books, however. One, haunted by her serial-killer father, and her need to defend the parts of herself that were shaped by his love, and a second about the monstrous love of her mother. The 'haunting' of the house does weave the two together, but I still would have rather read a book firmly focused on Vera and her father. Probably the same morbid curiosity that drives people to true crime content.

In terms of the will-they-won't-they supernatural element,

I adored the subversion of Vera embracing the House in its raw, hideous form. Still, I can't help feeling the haunting was stronger without the anthropomorphisation, especially since humanoid form seemed to confer no benefits. One massive complaint is that Vera needed to have let it into her mouth at the end! Seriously, it was right there - the ultimate embrace, the most disgusting option. Already seen it happen to mom. Open wide.

Was not expecting the mystery element of why Tsukuru's friends cut him off suddenly to be so gripping but it kept me turning pages despite the book's slow pace. And yet I also applaud Murakami for not drawing it out unnaturally, but instead just deepening the initial explanation with Tsukuru's every further step into his past. 

Many beautiful turns of phrase - often on the edge of purple prose too, yet Tsukuru was such an observant, detail-orientated protagonist that they never felt like the author breaking character to squeeze in a pretty sentence he thought of. Shocked at how I didn't even grow weary of the train station comparisons.

Along with his compelling imagery, Murakami also smoothly peppers in insights to the human condition that had me stopping to think in the middle of a paragraph. My favourite is near the end in the Kuro section where Tsukuru reflects (paraphrasing) that human hearts are not only bound by harmony but an understanding of each other's vulnerability, fragility, and pain. 

I was warned Murakami's writing had misogynistic elements but that assessment lacks nuance. It is clear Murakami cares for his female characters and spends time making them complex people. Unfortunately, he is still falls at the final hurdle due to an over-emphasis on the female body - for example, an emotional, meaningful hug is somewhat ruined by the bizarre choice to describe the woman's breasts as full of 'vitality'. Female characters are not reduced to their sex appeal, but it is disproportionately in-focus.

My issues with the narrative itself are that I failed to fully connect the subplots with the main one, and that the

ambiguous

ending felt like a cop-out. As much as I appreciate the character growth in

deciding he could survive Sara rejecting him when they met up

, the writing's tempo felt like it was building to that final confrontation rather than that moment of growth in and of itself. I honestly half-suspect Murakami just did not want to write it at that point. I enjoyed the subplots of Haida's father's story and what becomes of Haida himself but I kept expecting it to have literal relevance to the main plot - Haida or the sleep paralysis explaining some of Shiro's happenings, or the curse making a reappearance. I can see the threads of thematic relevance (and construe some tinfoil hat theories) but struggle to draw any additional insight or meaning from them.

Also, I wouldn't have minded if the pacing was just a little faster.

My prior exposure to Kaikeyi was limited to the throwaway line near the beginning of each year's Rama's Journey school play where it would be explained that she set events in motion by exiling him so her son could rule instead. To my young brain, Kaikeyi fell into place neatly next to Cinderella and Snow White's evil stepmothers. This book was a welcome chance to have that turned on its head.

I cannot exactly say that I like Kaikeyi as a person but her tenacity and, quite frankly, her success rate definitely had me rooting for her. She is relentless but not often irrational, and it was interesting to follow her through the decades, seeing what parts of herself she kept, and what she evolved. Her dedication to societal progress and her family were great twin motivations because they so often conflicted with each other.

After determination, nuance and tragedy are the words I would use for this story. Patel almost never takes the easy route in letting someone be simply bad and unlovable so Kaikeyi can comfortably move against them. More often than not, the people in her way are the people she loves most, and you feel the schism of her soul with her, especially with her twin and four sons (including Rama). The inescapable tragedy of it all - that she is doomed not only to exile Rama, but to be wrong about it (at least insofar as disbelieving him when he asks her help to fight demons) - hurts the heart. She is not the evil stepmother fate wants her to be, but she is too dutiful to stand aside just because she loves her opponent.

The small reasons I knocked off some stars is because the pacing was a little too ponderous for my taste and because I couldn't follow the emotional journey of Ravana from this startlingly fun inventor and ally to the demon king of legend (especially since most of the change was off-page). These are forgivable, since the texture of the world makes the page count feel less than it is, and spinning a whole narrative from a side character who doesn't even witness the Ramayana's most famous events was always going to be a challenge.

Unfortunately less forgivable to me was the colossal missed opportunity to delve into the ethics of the Binding Plane (Kaikeyi's power to mentally tug on thread-like bonds between people only she can see in order to influence them). In the beginning, this ability had all the hallmarks of being Kaikeyi's fatal flaw - the silent callousness of shaping your closest relationships with a thousand tiny manipulations, the hubris of believing it was acceptable because you were working for the greater good! Delicious. My anticipation skyrocketed when she finds that Rama

performs similar, if more clumsy, manipulations, even on his closest brother, as Kaikeyi did for her twin. They are perfect mirrors; mother and son both so desperate to help people that resort to methods which compromise those peoples' free will.

A confrontation on that front was the ethical climax I was waiting for. The dominoes were lined up perfectly and now they can only gather dust. Many of the closing events of the book were expertly heart-wrenching, but I'm disappointed that it left this on the table.

PS - Shout out to having an ace woman being a loving mother, friend, and partner. Took me half the book to realise she was asexual, not just gay, but we got there in the end.

PPS - For anyone else with only a passing familiarity with Hindu mythology, I'd also recommend looking up what the various versions of the Ramayana say about Kaikeyi for comparison. I had unfairly assumed her warrior skills were invented for the sake of this book's feminist lean, but not so. (I've seen a couple Hindu reviewers object to some aspects of this portrayal of Rama and the gods so outside research is probably a good idea in general to get a more well-rounded perspective.)

After a slow start, this volume contains 3 brilliant arcs - one that implies the current king of England is eating people in the street (and puts his little brother in BDSM gear), one where dear old Chas gets in on the action to stop some body-snatchers, and the return and expansion of my personal favourite new face from Dangerous Habits, the very polite, very demonic 'Ellie'. The First of the Fallen is growing impatient and wishes to use her to get to Constantine, but that only inspires our intrepid anti-hero. Left me looking forward to seeing if Ennis can top the stroke-of-genius deal that saved Constantine's arse last time.

Took a while to get here but the ending is absolutely, devastatingly, beautiful. Just the right amount of bitter to sweet, managed to both subvert and satisfy my expectations for the moon.

Some neat worldbuilding for the pre-Shattering civilisation too. I've always thought of life magic as elves singing trees into houses but the commitment to making everything from buses to beds out of genetically modified lifeforms in order that they can run on life magic is as impressive as it is unnerving. And Father Earth saying hi manages to feel like both a holy experience and finding out there was a monster under the bed the whole time.

Three books with Essun and I will don't have words for the emotional truth and depth to her. Such a sweet ache. I don't even want kids but if I did, I hope I'd love them half as ruinously as her. And be half as relentless in their protection. Everything she gave up in that final confrontation, and her reaction to it, and the line about her and the moon! I feel like I've become a more generous person just being lucky enough to witness her. Hoa chose right.