screamsbeneath quoted Martyr!: a Novel by Kaveh Akbar
Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream the antidote. What if everyone was more conscious of this? How would it charge, make more urgent, their living?
she/they Love and compassion are acts of resistance. Forever in recovery; learning to be a better human.
I read far more than I realized. I’m trying to find better words to describe the feelings manifested by the books I read, so my reviews may be more feeling oriented than objective.
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76% complete! screamsbeneath has read 40 of 52 books.
Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream the antidote. What if everyone was more conscious of this? How would it charge, make more urgent, their living?
In this prequel novelette to the critically acclaimed THE WATER OUTLAWS, nine-year-old Li Li is introduced to a web of …
Poet Akbar (Calling a Wolf a Wolf) explores the allure of martyrdom in this electrifying story of a Midwestern poet …
A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the …
@wynkenhimself I feel like we need so much more positive representation of thriving elderly folks. Maybe it exists and it’s not on my radar, but it was the best part of this book!
I suggested this for #SFFBookClub, and so I gave this a reread so I could enjoy it again. I love the way this novel takes Hollywood and its obsession with stars and all of its racism and homophobia, and mixes it with fey magical realism. Overall, it's definitely a book whose strengths are in its setting and its writing, rather than in a tight plot, but I still love the characters.
In particular, probably my favorite part of this book are the constant turns of phrase that bring in fey elements at unexpected times. You're just reading along and then you get hit with a line like "The cameras were better now, I told myself. They had tamed them down, fed them better." Silent movies steal people's voices. Film stars are (ambiguously but also maybe literally) stars in the sky and wield their star power. Names are sacrificed, or …
I suggested this for #SFFBookClub, and so I gave this a reread so I could enjoy it again. I love the way this novel takes Hollywood and its obsession with stars and all of its racism and homophobia, and mixes it with fey magical realism. Overall, it's definitely a book whose strengths are in its setting and its writing, rather than in a tight plot, but I still love the characters.
In particular, probably my favorite part of this book are the constant turns of phrase that bring in fey elements at unexpected times. You're just reading along and then you get hit with a line like "The cameras were better now, I told myself. They had tamed them down, fed them better." Silent movies steal people's voices. Film stars are (ambiguously but also maybe literally) stars in the sky and wield their star power. Names are sacrificed, or hidden for protection. These pieces give the story some extra teeth and a darker edge of danger that always feels present at the margins. The extra ambiguity over what's real in a story about movie magic is delicious.
I have mixed feelings about parts of the end, especially with the trip to San Francisco. I think this is probably the part where the novel loses me a little bit. The pieces work well, but the pacing is a little jarring. It's nice to have a moment to come full circle to Luli's sister, the reveal of art outside of Hollywood that Luli has been too tunnel-visioned to see, and the continuing contrast of the realness of Tara and other places with the fey world of movies. I like the depth that this journey adds, and I'm not sure where else arguably in the novel that it would go.
"What so great about being seen?" Tara demanded. "What's so important about that?"
She might have had the words for it, but I didn't. They locked up in my throat, about being invisible, about being alien and foreign and strange even in the place where I was born, and about the immortality that wove through my parents' lives but ultimately would fail them. Their immortality belonged to other people, and I hated that.
One thing I saw in this reread was how much the book played with "being seen": fey bargains to get seen in pictures; pressure about being seen in "wrong" ways; being mis-seen as Mexican instead of Venezuelan; being asked to make do things to be seen as straight and married; the fear of being seen as crossing class lines or being seen as queer and butch.
@picklish@books.theunseen.city Your review is spot on with my experiences and articulates my feelings much better than my own. The setting was perfect for fey magical realism and for the theme of being seen and how complex that is depending on one’s embodiment within context of a societal lens (and all the nuanced facets within).
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‘A Singapore-based speculative fiction zine. Soliciting submissions for our inaugural issues
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When people are obliged to keep an eye out for threats, their eyes tend to be sharp. That's what women's intuition means, if you ask me: being unconsciously alert for dangerous men.
Aiza has always dreamt of becoming a Knight. It's the highest military honor in the once-great Bayt-Sajji Empire, and as …
So happy I finally started this. Never had a book validated my love for narrative video games so much! I also finally understand why people enjoy Easter egg references in a book. When done well they are interesting bits of lore to the story for those who don’t know, and a deepening touch point for those who do. It’s also not just about nostalgia dopamine, but it actually serves to provide that depth without alienating others.
I generally enjoyed this, but not as much as I hoped I would gives how much I love Nghi Vo. That’s not to say this was bad compared to their other works, just that the characters didn’t grab me nearly as much. I felt the true strengths here were the setting, an early 20th century Hollywood where the magical realism is so honed in, most of the time it almost feels like poetic analogies of reality. I think this time period is under represented in fiction, at least in my sampling, and I found it refreshing; especially with queer representation, we were always here, just beyond the sight of society.
The main character was well developed, I could sympathize with their motives, and their decisions followed their persona. I just don’t relate to people that are reckless while having it all, which of course is an oversimplification because at what …
I generally enjoyed this, but not as much as I hoped I would gives how much I love Nghi Vo. That’s not to say this was bad compared to their other works, just that the characters didn’t grab me nearly as much. I felt the true strengths here were the setting, an early 20th century Hollywood where the magical realism is so honed in, most of the time it almost feels like poetic analogies of reality. I think this time period is under represented in fiction, at least in my sampling, and I found it refreshing; especially with queer representation, we were always here, just beyond the sight of society.
The main character was well developed, I could sympathize with their motives, and their decisions followed their persona. I just don’t relate to people that are reckless while having it all, which of course is an oversimplification because at what cost does having it all come at? I think it revealed to me how much more I will prefer safety to recklessness (or rather expressing your true self in the face of oppression), so I learned more about myself, albeit in an uncomfortable way. The rest of the cast didn’t do it for me and were there to support the MCs narrative, which I believe was intentional, it was always about the MC.
I think the real draw here is the setting and how it’s in conversation with historical (and modern) social power structures and the cost not only existing as a marginalized person of society, but what success looks like and at what costs does it come?
FAR BENEATH the surface of the earth, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of …