Reviews and Comments

Challenging in every sense of the word. The unrelenting abuse inflicted on Jude felt like torture porn. I threw my hands up repeatedly wondering if such extremes were an intentional choice. Alternately exploitative and compelling to explore the mindset of someone so mistreated as well as those around him. Goes on too long. A genuine art experience from a book. I’m grateful for it but don’t need to repeat. Both 5 stars and 0, so no rating.

I like when stories employ sci-fi elements while remaining otherwise ordinary. Here, a mother keeps traveling backwards in time, trying to prevent her son from murdering. Her identity as a mother anchors the narrative, giving it an emotional heft, albeit, sometimes cloyingly. But I skimmed it immediately after to admire the craft of cause & effect. The explanation at the end for time travel was corny.

This just made me sad. Sad that I fell for yet another poorly written superhero story. The premise is so good! A hero and a villain with amnesia run into each other at a support group and decide to help each other. But all the tension and unexpected places this could’ve gone are wasted almost at the start. I skimmed the final battle. Not even worth commenting on the problematic “inclusion” of gayness. 🙄

This mystery series is starting to feel predictable, which can be a comfort and largely why I read one every winter. But I’m tired of the bitchy exchanges with Ruth (they’re not even funny or endearing), the constant need to refer to Myrna by her size and Blackness … The addiction angle in this one was shallow, but at least there’s developments with Jean-Guy, Clara, and Peter.

The tiny annoyances that accumulate in a marriage erupt into a delightful what’s-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander story. Wonderfully petty. A quick read that could easily work on stage, as a Black Mirror episode, or a movie. Eat it up. I need to look up more of Ingalls’ work.

Girl, look: I have an MA in literature. I did not plod through tons of literary theory including French deconstructionists—who here understands Derrida? Shut up! Stop your lying!—for some book jacket illustrator to repackage reader-response criticism and tell me it’s new … Oh! Look at all the pretty pictures!

“The Mountain in the Sea” was my favorite novel of 2023, so I jumped on this. A novella this time—of course I wanted more. Still, Nayler is able to tell a compelling story involving animals, technology, and humanity’s immense capacity for destruction and cruelty. For all the book’s brevity, or maybe because of it, the betrayals are deeper between these characters. The ending is not without hope though.

It’s been long enough between books that I looked up a recap of where we last left Murberbot. Glad I did, because then I was able to just enjoy this one. It’s more of the same, which is what it’s felt like for a while with Murderbot, but that’s OK! Very incremental character development on their part, but the character is interesting enough that I’m happy to spend more time with them.

I read the Archipelago edition which was very pleasing to hold and touch. Its physicality really influenced my good opinion. A simple story contained inside a small book, set on the cramped spaces of a train on the Trans-Siberian railway.

The Author’s Note broke my heart. I’m finding it difficult now to talk about this book and what it reveals about this series and the world(s) McGuire’s created.

I always loved that this series was fantasy with an edge. But the realization of the cost of all that wonder, for both the characters and us readers, cuts deeper this time. Book 8 and my favorite of The Wayward Children series.

This one felt different from Delisle’s other work: more episodic, more editorial commentary, more dad jokes. I didn’t like those bits as much, but as ever, his drawing is wonderful. A little comics journalism and memoir gives us his particular experience in this country where his wife is in Medecins Sans Frontieres. The silent stretches were often my fave, as well as the Water Festival and Buddhist retreat.

Originally written in 2013, this meta novella asks the author to choose between Magic and Literature. Are the two, in fact, the same? Or is Magic a transcendence of Literature? A quick, fun read that’s sitting with me the more I turn it over in my head.

I envy Delisle’s drawing style: clear lines, deceptively simple, limited color palette. This is about his first job working in a paper factory as a teenager in Quebec.