justabean_reads's reviews
1271 reviews

Absolutely gorgeous book about longing and family and missed chances. Which is to say it's also sad! Told largely in the second person by an unknown narrator, Chacour fallows the life of a Levantine Christian growing up in Egypt in the 1970s and '80s, and his place in the Francophone community in Cairo, and how he fell in love with another man.

The second person was interesting here, as we don't start hearing "I/my/mine" until near the half way point, and when we do it recontextualises everything that came before. It distanced the reader from what the main character was feeling by forcing a space between him and the reader. It's probably going to be love it or hate it, but I thought it worked, especially with the contrast we later learn, and to the more immediate style of the first person sections.

I was surprised it was a first novel, as the structure and style both feel very mature. I hope Chacour writes more, and that it gets translated into English. 

Very enjoyable if you're into M/F romantasy with most of those tropes, which I often am. It claims to be a gender-flipped take on Beauty and the Beast, which is true only in the loosest sense of that, and is mostly a romance between a mysterious stranger and a princess who sometimes turns into a beast, dealing with both of their families, spread across multiple timelines. It's vaguely set in Ireland in the Middle Ages, minus the Christianity, plus potatoes and chocolate. The potatoes are not explained.

And, look, the prose is not good. It's not terrible, but there needed to be 70% fewer chess metaphors, and probably a similar decrease in adjectives. I don't think the cute banter was nearly as cute as the author thought it was, and do think the heroine should've eaten the hero very early in.

However, I did end up really enjoying how the timelines came together (even if I thought she should've been running all three at once, not A/B for the first half, then A/C in the second), and the romance worked out to a point where the real choices they had to make at the end felt earned and in character. Also, there was a fabulous "Summon bigger fish" moment later in. I'm not rushing out to nominate this for a Hugo Award (though I'd love/hate to see the reaction to romantasy on the shortlist, lol), but I had a good time. 

This was the one Mandel published before Station Eleven when she was still with a small press. It's extremely her. Of her newer books, it probably has the most in common with The Glass Hotel, in her interest in exploring morality versus legality, in the jumbled timeline, and for the shipping company subplot. We follow a man who slid into being a corporate drone to get away from his family's criminal tendencies, but the escape ends up not being sustainable. This is not told in any kind of linear fashion, or with any clear cut answers about what the right choices might be (though clearly some are pretty dubious). I liked the humour, and the way that Mandel gently prods at her characters, and never lets them rest easily. Less gay than her more recent stuff.

Mandel has said that her next book will connect back to this one, and I'm really looking forward to finding out how. The surviving characters could go a lot of ways (and being Mandel, she doesn't need to use just the surviving characters). 

Novella set in a post-climate-collapse University of Alberta, Edmonton. Mohamed could (and hopefully does) teach a class about how to use a setting to tell a story, without letting world building bog you down to the point of distraction. The characters deftly establish how we got here, where here is, and what the stakes are, without ever spending much time on exposition, and while making the story about family conflict, and (basically) deciding whether or not to go to college. The relationship between the main character and her mother was particularly well-drawn and painful, depicting abuse without excusing it or coming up with an easy solution, especially in a society with so little room for error. It's also about different kinds of community, and solidarity, and never turned out to be totally bleak. (Though I am concerned about the bike.)

There's a certain level of body horror, which actually lands the science fiction trick of being a legitimate piece of world building, while also opening up discussion of agency v. biology, among other things. And it never felt like too much story for the length.

I understand people didn't like the second one as much, but I will be tracking it down eventually. 

I've only ever seen the Dev Patel movie of David Copperfield, but was still able to follow what Kingsolver was doing with this. I suppose, at some point (possibly while I still remember this one) get to reading the original, but even without much familiarity, I think this stands as a novel in its own right.

It's the same story, more or less beat for beat (though with the latter third somewhat rearranged), but about a kid growing up in Appalachia in the 1990s, with a dead father, a mother with substance abuse issues, and a brutally violent step father. I was impressed that it never felt like it was forcing the story to go somewhere for the sake of fitting the original, but kept its own integrity as a novel. Some of the translations were a delight, though, so I do think at least having seen a movie version would be value-added. The character voices were lovely, and I liked how it stuck with the hope and class solidarity of the original.

I think Kingsolver was both stretching her muscles, and making a point about what kind of people are worth making art about, and who/when/where can be the subject of a Great Novel.

Smarter people have probably said more interesting things about this one. TL;DR: Really enjoyed this, happy to be on the hype train, still haven't read Dickens.

I maybe didn't read the blurb on this one, and was not expecting it to be targetted at the corporate world (also upper management in the civil service). It's very much written in business-speak, and putting on a facade of "hey, pragmatically, not fucking up Indigenous relations is going to save you a lot of time and money. (And also is the right thing to do, morally.)" Which was not an angle I'd really run into before, though I can see the value of meeting people where they are, and maybe getting the results you want, even if people aren't acting from the best motivation. The Josephs give this as a course also, and have the friendly getting their point in sideways thing nailed. So I guess it was more of an Interesting Cultural Experience than a great read? I might revisit it if I'm ever a corporate executive, lol.

I really liked the dystopian community setting, and the lovable oaf narrator was a joy to spend time with, but I'm over murdered wives. (Especially in books by male authors.) I should've read the blurb more carefully. I just skimmed it, and thought he was going to be looking for his missing wife, and then was like "Oh no!" when she bought it a quarter of the way through. Nope.

(I am not consistent on this point, as I did enjoy the D&D movie, which had a central murdered wife, which I know was a deal breaker for some, but the vibe hit different for me.) 

I was mixed to negative about The House in the Cerulean Sea because at it's heart I don't think the book handled the moral conflict of a romance between what was essentially a victim and a perpetrator (which I'm not inherently against, but you need to deal with it if you're going to do it), and I wasn't really comfortable with Klune's inspiration for a fluffy romance being a cultural genocide that happened within living memory. That said, the kids were really cute, and I like the romance itself if I ignored the moral aspect (made easy by the book also doing that), so I wanted to see what happened, and I did want Arthur's point of view.

However, this one really centred how bad the agency was, and how much it was like the cultural genocide that happened here. And it was just so preachy and didactic, and the author was really running with the whole "What if JKR was actually Dolores Umbridge?" line. There's no amount of cute kids and sweet romance that was going to make me finish that. However, if you're willing to put up with all that, and just want Woobie!Arthur, I can recommend the sequel. 

Churchill is a Haida elder who decided in her 90s to give into her kids' and grandkids' demands that she write all this down and publish it. Her family helped her a lot with structure, but Churchill's voice remains very strong.

The first third of the book is an outline of Haida family structure and a history of her family back to her grandmother's generation, travelling between Haida Gwaii in Canada and Tlingit and Tsimshian territories in Alaska. Then follows a general section on the seasonal harvest cycle, and what baskets were used when, a detailed section on how to harvest and prepare spruce roots, cedar strips and materials for dyes, and finally some weaving instructions. It's aimed at a technical audience, and I was certainly helped in understanding by somewhat knowing the culture and ecosystem going in, though my knowledge of basket weaving is minimal. There's lots of pictures, and some diagrams, but if learning to weave, I'd definetely take a class.

I liked it a lot, and found it very informative, though I think some folks could find it a bit dry. 

Again a change of tone. I have now idea how many of these Vo has in store, given how each one is a different reflection on how storytelling works, and how meta those tend to be (without ever drifting into that "Reading is just So Important!" thing that grates), but she pulled this one off, too! I really liked the shifts in perception, and the growing horror elements as the story went forward. Very neatly done.