baielleebooks's reviews
59 reviews

A book that provides useful emphasis upon the magic essentialism of the relationships one shares to, and with, other people. Laying to rest fantastical projections of people's characters while attempting to connect with them, as well as highlighting the human tendency to mistake familiarity for truth were guiding principles that stuck out to me. 

I liked the structure of the book chapters, it flowed organically and makes revisiting the book appealing as one would know how to orient themselves. And I would return to it when needed!

We stan Tracey Thorn in this household. Tracey has such a singular, expansive talent for exploring the human condition and lived experience. Refined, elegant, funny, ironic, and always pulling you inwards as a reader.

She simultaneously looks back and tells the wondrous friendship she and Lindy Morrison share, while speaking to the macro social issue of women being eclipsed from cultural histories. My Rock 'n' Roll Friend is a delightful read.

Gloriously gay, vitalizing in its humour, filled with unbridled sexuality, and wry yet unencumbered in breaking ground on more difficult themes spanning shame, toxic relationship dynamics, disability, self-destruction, and addiction. O'Connell signs, seals and delivers a rich, catty narrator brimming with his own neuroses in a way only a flaming homo could. He produces a story that is savvy, filled with feeling and human in a way that isn't blandly saccharine, instead packing a punch with sparky social commentary. 

Britney's memoir exposes the brutalism of misogynistic media treatment, the turmoil of troubling personal relationships, and unearths in detail the punitive regimentation of her selfhood under the conservatorship enforced by her father, which she bravely defeated in 2021.
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Yet, all the while, the memoir is ultimately uplifting, hopeful, and displays someone taking a declarative stance in embodying her own feminine power, showcasing a deeply loving mother and an artist who has been so resolute and forthright in the creative control of her decades-long lustrous career. We all wish you nothing but the best, Britney!

Masterful storytelling! This was my first time reading Zadie Smith and she sent my bookish mind catapulting off into another a galaxy. Her narrative voice is dynamic and drew me in, the characters were rich and textured, and each chapter worked in blissful harmony, while also standing independently in the breadth of their plotting and reflexive power. 
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White Teeth powerfully runs the gamut of the human condition, involving themes of passion, friendship, family, conflict, war, history and the reckonings of time. The prose is beautifully composed, funny and outstandingly deft. White Teeth additionally succeeds in reflecting the cultural landscape and modern histories of Britain with wry, critical commentary and is exemplary in the ode to the power of fiction. Brava! Flowers on the stage! Raptuous applause!

While this book contains some great passages and gives multiple cognitive terrains in which to reflect on themes of class, familial conflict and the beauty industry, this isn't the book for me at this time.

Natsuko's voice being centred narratively does not endear me. There is an element of being invited on occasions to her pity party, and her remaining voiceless in the main dispute between older sister Makiko and her daughter Midoriko in Book 1 really irked me. In addition, the structuring of certain tangential and dream-like sequences weren't my cup of tea.

This novel without a doubt objectively has great prose and encourages reflexivity, but call it the wrong time, or the wrong central protagonist, but it's not a plot I wished to advanced with.

Provocative, absurd, and brimming with pathos all at once, Lapvona for me was a darkly brilliant novel, and I drunk in greedily the medieval soap opera of it all, the literary suet dripping from my lips.

This book is really encompassed by its visceral expanse, the breadth of its subject matter tracked with deep thought and reflexivity. The Underground Railroad acts richly as a piece of historical fiction, covering the terrors of the slave trade and racial prejudice of its time in its many guises; colonial legacies, scientific racism, egregious white savourism, the haunting psychic imprints left upon those who suffered, and those who ultimately outran these torturous systems. Knowledge was the most invaulable aspect of the novel.

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Cora was also a terrific protagonist. Her plight, her courage, and Colson Whitehead's rendering of her read so humanely. 

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A critique that arose for me was that, from the story's structuring, I would've expected the railroad to act more as a throughline throughout the novel. In addition, though the passages that captured the intimate worlds of varying characters rounded out the novel and gave it fuller character, there was the occasional tendency where they would dizzy the central plot of Cora's escape and survival, and gave it a slight feeling of delay.

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The Underground Rail's prose was bountiful,  lending vigour and stirring emotion to Cora's arduous journey and the world and people around her. Moving and affecting, this books offers a significant and wide outlook in a cultural milieu still ruptured by acts and systems of racial discrimination.

Charged with passion, robust insight and exuberant descriptions of the most exceptional art pieces, Katy Hessel channels her quintessential enthusiasm from 'The Great Women Artists' podcast to her debut book.

A shadow ball of dark witticisms, compelling characters and gritty action. Reseng was a genuinely lovable protagonist (which is an accoldate I realise I haven't given to many protagonists I've read in books recently lmao!) His social negativity is not try-hardy nor grandstanding, but instead provides a spiky theoretical slant into his psyche and provides a genuinely interesting entrypoint into understanding what drives him to do what he does.
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The Plotters is marvellous in exposing the contemptuousness of its network of assasins, for a supposedly neutral face is always revealed for its duplicity. The gender politics is also a point of interest; the underestimation of women in "the business" is poked at critically, and characters like Mito come through boldly, humourously and poignantly. It is also my firm personal belief that Sumin should've twatted Reseng for how much he bagged her crossed eyes, lmao.
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Critically speaking, there were ocassions where the timing in paragraph or chapter transitions somewhat caught me off-guard, and I didn't always have an ironclad focus in the chainlinking of particular events in the novel.
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Overall, The Plotters is strong in its prose, its characters harmonise with each other marvelously in a kind of deliciously dark and fucked-up choir, and the equilibrium had in the literary credence provided to both psyche and plot was remarkable.