thebakersbooks's reviews
281 reviews

This was a skillfully crafted book, but while I enjoyed the prose, I suspect a lot of the philosophical elements of the story went over my head. Like the two main characters, These Violent Delights is gleeful in its erudition and delights in making audiences work to keep up. Put plainly, it was intentionally a bit full of itself, which may appeal to some readers but did not especially appeal to me. I know the off-putting nature of the work at many levels (tone, characterization, etc.) was a device, but I had trouble getting past my surface-level read to appreciate it.

I did enjoy how the author leaned into the main character's marginalizations, allowing his Jewishness and gayness to influence and guide the path of the plot through his actions. (The MC is likely also autistic, although I don't think this is ever spelled out in-text despite being heavily implied, and his internalized ableism also plays into his toxicity as a person.) Like the MC and (I think) the author, I'm Jewish, queer, and autistic; I saw a lot of myself in the MC's thought processes, sense of distance from society, and somewhat rabid commitment to justice. As such, it was fascinating and somewhat alarming to see these played out to their most extreme conclusion through a series of internally logical steps.

It's important to allow characters who aren't straight, cis, white, Christian (culturally if not religiously), and abled/allistic to be flawed, even dangerously and unnervingly so. That's something These Violent Delights did with singular panache. The word 'unhinged' is seriously overused these days, particularly for a term with such madphobic connotations, but I'm tempted to allow it as a descriptor of this book. The development of the MCs' relationship is a particular example, starting off as something to root for and descending over the narrative's course into a corrupt and painful thing to witness. It's horrifying and glorious.

I absolutely recommend this book! However, I'm wary to recommend it too widely outside the Jewish, queer, and autistic communities because it would be easy to remove the nuances of it being fiction and paint it as problematic. From there, it's all too easy to move to a generalization that X bad thing happened in-story because the characters were of Y identity (gay, autistic, etc.) if readers don't go in with enough empathy and/or critical thinking. Basically, DO read the book, but go in knowing it's going to get weird and violent and that those things don't reflect on anything except the fictional characters as individuals.

content warnings: emotional abuse by parents, homophobia, murder, emotionally and physically abusive relationship between main characters, mentions of antisemitism, intense internalized ableism, classism

I'm not sure how I feel about this book. It really delivered on the horror vibes, I enjoyed the main character's development, and the story was a cool take on the "I see dead people" trope. However, the antagonist being a (dead) school shooter who was mentally ill sat wrong with me. Plenty of mentally ill people have terrible lives and go through things like the antagonist did without picking up a gun and turning it on others. Further, whenever there's a real-life mass shooting, individuals and media are quick to point to mental illness as the cause, which is harmful to mentally ill people as a whole and elides the fact that most mass shootings are motivated by political extremism. I think it would've been possible to write this book without adding to the stigma and stereotypes around mental illness and I would've found it a much more enjoyable read. 

However, I'm not sure if I'm overreacting as a person with a "scary" mental illness myself, so I'll give this the benefit of the doubt. It would be a shame to discard a horror novel with a gay Black protagonist, especially when there were so many great things about the book! One of its best features, in my opinion, is the cinematic storytelling—part of what makes this book work so well is that it's very action-packed and visual, to the point where you can see how it would play out as a movie. And as much as I liked Jake as a main character, the story really bloomed for me around the halfway point, which is when he makes friends who listen to and support him. I also appreciated how the main character's family is shown to be deeply flawed yet ultimately loving; complex family dynamics can be difficult to write well, but the author pulled it off admirably here. 

I do recommend this book, with the caveat that it's very necessary to check out a list of content warnings first, even if you're not usually someone who seeks out content warnings. My list below is as complete as I could make it, but it's worth cross-referencing with another one if you can find it. Unfortunately, the author doesn't have one up on his website, but it's likely another reviewer has a similar list. The school shooting aspect in particular could be triggering to this book's target audience of young adults; it wasn't great for me, and I was out of school well before such shootings became a common occurrence.

content warnings: school shooting, gun violence, child sexual assault, physical and emotional abuse of a child by parents, racism and racial slurs, homophobia and homophobic slurs, mention of suicide attempt and institutionalization, intense bullying, spiders and cockroaches

Unsettling, relatable, and tense as hell.

So this is a thriller. Or rather, this is what many thrillers I've read in the past were clearly aspiring to, but they didn't deliver the same punch (view spoiler) Anyway, this is a book for everyone who's felt out of place in the cookie-cutter right-leaning America typified by suburbia, but particularly for people of color who are subjected to microaggression after microaggression while living in the bitter relief of that they've avoided being targeted for outright violence.

Following Pakistani main character Ronnie on the twisted wellness journey that led her to leave her abusive aunt and move to Arizona with a white girl she's known for a few months, Kismet starts with unnerving hints of something rotten in Sedona and spirals with gorgeous smoothness into a community mad with xenophobia. I don't know which I enjoyed more: the commentary on white entitlement or the not-even-that-exaggerated look at wellness culture's flaws and appropriation of non-white cultural practices.

I had so much fun watching Ronnie grow into herself over the course of the story even as everything around her spiraled into fascism. I loved the ravens' POV and how Ronnie's prophetic dreams kept her from being entirely separate from the quasi-spirituality of Sedona's citizenry. I absolutely recommend Kismet to readers who enjoy thrillers, mysteries, and savvy brown women navigating the hostile terrain of white suburbia. Akhtar is definitely a new favorite author of mine!

content warnings: anti-Pakistani racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, murder, semi-graphic descriptions of corpses, physical and emotional abuse by a family member, gaslighting

I didn't realize how long this book was until I'd started reading (wasn't really feeling focused enough for a long fantasy) but Beneath the Citadel caught my attention and held it to the end. Author Destiny Soria's worldbuilding is innovative and her premise captivating, but characterization and emotional stakes is where her writing really shines. Not every protagonist character is likeable (nor should they be), but each has a clear goal and I ended up rooting for them anyway.

Government corruption, classism, and fighting injustice are main themes of the story. The setting and "magic" system play into these power imbalances, but much of the commentary is beautifully and horrifically applicable to real life. It was also nice that while the book mirrors life in some ways, there is no mention of racism or homophobia in-world. Race never really comes up, and three of the five main characters are queer but never discriminated against because of that. However, one of the characters has a condition reminiscent of EDS, and it's heavily implied that his (off-page) mistreatment at his father's hands is at least partially because of this.

I highly recommend this book to fans of fantasy and anyone looking for a high-stakes heist story featuring a constantly arguing but close-knit friend group. Beneath the Citadel is a new favorite for sure, and I'm off to add Soria's other books to my TBR!

content warnings: mention of parents' deaths; mention of child abuse (physical and emotional)

There are unlikable characters and then there's Ash: the caricature of a gamer nerd who (by his own admission) has left his best friend to be harassed and bullied over and over while he was aware of the situation and did little to nothing to intervene. To be clear, I can and have enjoyed reading protagonists written to be flawed, morally gray, etc., but this was going way too far. When he's injured later in the book, Ash literally needs his female co-protag, Vale, to comfort him about HER OWN BULLYING and him doing nothing to stop it. Mind, some of the "bullying" we witness is literal sexual harassment.

There were so many other issues with this book. The author and the story treated the Indigenous peoples of the area as footnotes in the history of their own land and continually referred to them in the past tense. The writing/editing was poor; sentences would often be repeated almost completely within a page, restating the same information again. There were repeated uses of "lame" and "dumb" to mean "bad," which is ableist. The aro-ace rep in Vale was also basically a caricature; she was the stereotypically sex-repulsed ace and there was never any clarification that there are other kinds of asexuality. I also hated that her parents refused to grasp her not wanting a relationship, even by the end of the book when everyone else had undergone character growth. As an ace (but not aro) person myself, this is not the kind of rep I want.

I did not enjoy this book and do not recommend it to anyone. If you're into survival fiction, there are better stories out there.

content warnings: bullying and sexual harassment by peers; mention of intense online trolling/bullying; aphobia by parents; detailed descriptions of major bodily injury; brief Harry Potter reference

This middle-grade horror was chock-full of chills and spooky summer vibes. It also dealt thoughtfully with themes of loss and grief while building on a powerful backbone of close friendship between kids who've all been through emotional situations both separately and together. I picked it up based on a recommendation that compared it tonally and thematically to Stranger Things, and it absolutely lived up to that comparison!

One thing I especially appreciated about this book was the author's care in choosing the "fears" that the monster uses against its victims. It would've been easy to include things that would be not-fun scary to real-life kids (gun violence, cops, etc.), but while the fears are still real things and sometimes deal with heavy topics (like the main character's mother's recent death), there are comparatively few things that I think would be traumatizing to young readers.

I adored how the characters were written—each human and flawed, but not necessarily in a way that needed to be "fixed." The friends shore up each other's weaknesses and reassure and support each other even while they're all afraid and in danger. Also, it was great to see a male MC who goes to therapy (I think the book uses the word 'counseling') and actually uses the things he's learned without there being any stigma around it or around his grief and anxiety.

The book's ending left an opening for a sequel, and I really hope there is one because I had a great time reading this story and I'm not ready to leave the world and characters behind! I highly recommend this to readers of all ages, but particularly to kids/preteens who are into horror and can handle a moderate-to-high level of scary.

content warnings: loss of a parent to illness; financial insecurity/debt collectors; rats, snakes, and spiders; brief mention of medical needles

Gotta admit, I wasn't expecting so much both-sidesing of the British occupation of India from a half-Indian author. Ninety percent of the book does a solid job of acknowledging the atrocities of British colonialism, but the entire climax consists of the (British) main character being horrified at Indian people around him trying to free their country. A direct quote: "There's no black or white here. You think one side is the villain and one is the hero, but that's not the case. It's more complicated than that." Maybe one can ascribe this to the MC being deliberately written as flawed, but because this issue comes to the forefront at the very end of the book, there's no time to unpack or counter it.

I also dislike that, while the author made the deliberate choice to make gayness/same-sex relationships accepted (or at least tolerated) in Britain, she made it so they were outlawed in India. This is frustrating because in real life, queer people had a place in precolonial Indian culture and that only changed with the imposition of western morays as a result of imperialism.

Besides these considerable flaws, the book was also poorly paced. The first book was told from main character Danny's perspective, while this one was split between Danny, Daphne, and Colton; I suspect attempting to juggle three POVs is a large part of what weighed the pacing down for the first half of the book. In my opinion, steampunk worldbuilding and an interesting story concept do not make up for the above, and as such, I do not recommend this book and I likely will not finish the series.

content warnings: several mentions of colonial violence, some systemic; anti-Indian racism throughout; killing an animal for sport (by antagonistic character); homophobia and threats of forced outing of gay characters 

I only managed to read two books during Pride Month and I'm so glad this was one of them! The titular 'vagabonds' are those who live (or have been pushed) to the fringes of society in Nigeria, so naturally this includes many queer people. While all of their stories resonated with me, I enjoyed the POV of Gold, a trans girl, the most because it explored fear and grief, but also family bonds and enduring love when trans people's narratives are too often limited in fiction.

Vagabonds! is a compilation of stories/character POVs laced together by the narration of a legendary being: Tatafo, trusted assistant to mythical Lagos, the corrupt embodiment of the city by the same name. I really enjoyed how the author intertwined fantasy and contemporary in this convoluted, genre-bending book. The many perspectives were never confusing or tedious to read. Also, don't be put off by the amount of Nigerian/Lagosian lingo if you're not from Lagos! I had to look some words up for clarity, but most are easily determinable by context clues and pausing to google a few things only added to the experience, in my opinion.

It's rare for a book to live up to the amount of hype I've seen for this one, but Vagabonds does so admirably and with style. Sometimes dreamlike, sometimes piercing, this is one of the most exciting books I've read in quite a while and one I highly recommend. (Do look up the trigger warnings, though; I intended to list some here, but my notes are in a library ebook I returned and haven't been able to re-check out due to the massive wait list.) Between the lyrical prose, the fabulist worldbuilding, and the vibrant cast, this book is a must-read. 

This was actually a re-read as I'm planning to finish the series now that all three books are out. I enjoyed Timekeeper even more on my second read; I'm sometimes slow to absorb worldbuilding details, and reading this again allowed me to fully appreciate the steampunk setting. It was also nice how the story focused on friendship and family connections at least as much as romance.

I found the story and setting more compelling than the characters, but I liked Daphne a lot and I think she's going to have a bigger role in the sequels, so I'm looking forward to that. Also, I appreciated how the author dealt with PTSD (the main character was in a job-related accident pre-book, and the mental repercussions affect him throughout the story).

As far as tone and content go, I'd consider this 'light' steampunk (at least in Book 1)—if you've read and enjoyed the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfeld, you'll likely enjoy this. I recommend Timekeeper to fans of steampunk and historical fantasy, and/or for anyone looking for a unique adventure.

content warnings: accident-related PTSD, grief related to the loss of a parent, emotional neglect by a grieving parent 

4/5 stars

I didn't realize that this book was about a fat queer girl when I picked it up, so that was a lovely surprise! (Note: I think the MC and love interest are lesbians, but I can't remember if they define their identities outright, so I'm sticking with 'queer.') The main character is a white 17-year-old who gets an internship at her favorite clothing store, hoping to use it as a stepping stone to break into the fashion industry. She runs a plus-size clothing blog, to the dismay of her health-food-blogging mother. The only speed bumps in the MC's summer are a) her best friend's boyfriend, who's taking up all her time; and b) Jordi Perez, the cute photographer hired as her co-intern.

This was a really cute, summery story full of first love and friendship both new/unexpected and old/renewed. It touches on body image issues, but I appreciate that the MC herself never has problems around food or eating (aside from her parents trying to push health food on her because her mom runs a food show/blog.) Your mileage may vary, but I have a history of disordered eating and this book didn't trigger me at all. It did, however, make me want a burger.

I recommend this book to fans of upbeat contemporary novels with emphasis on romance. It was a fun, quick read with (to my 30+ perspective) a believable teenage voice and an often-hilarious cast of characters.

content warnings: internalized fatphobia, fatphobia/food shaming from parent(s), mild body-image issues related to fatness