justabean_reads's reviews
1271 reviews

(Library finally got the next two books in this series, so I can talk about the one every one else covered ages ago.)

I liked it! It's good that Vo isn't trying to do the same trick every story, because then it turns into this Agatha Christie game of trying to guess the twist, which would get old. This is more building out the world, and a meditation on a different kind of storytelling, specifically how many different ways there are to look at one person, especially when that person is no longer there to tell their own interpretation of a life. In this book there's no focus on folk tales or mythology, it's all painfully personal for the main character. It's slow and sad, and tender. 

A couple of friends are really into Lawson, and I can certainly see the appeal, and this was over all very good, even if this felt a little "first novel bites off more than it can chew."

The story follows a split timeline of a university professor in Toronto looking back at her childhood in a farming community in Northern Ontario, with a very heavy theme of "the tragedy that befell us." In flashbacks, the kids are duly orphaned, and I'm really glad that the novel tells us almost right away that all four survive, because teenagers looking after a toddler and living next to a lake felt like it was going to end poorly. But no, the tragedy isn't the dead parents, and the toddler lives; it's something else. (Which shouldn't have reminded me as much of the Punch parody of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as it did (that cannot be divulged until the very last chapter of this interesting narrative.), especially when I actually liked the way the narrative kept reframing itself.

A lot of this book is about what counts as a tragedy, according to whom, and how that changes with age and shifting perspective, and that part of it was perhaps a little too neatly done. (The characters also keep talking about free land that no one else wanted, and then there's an Indigenous community across the lake, but not any mention that maybe someone did want the land. But the book could've been expecting the reader to draw that line themself.)

Which shouldn't distract from this being a really good book (but apparently did). Lawson's prose is absolutely gorgeous, and I loved her depiction of small town life, especially the kids, who were all delightfully childlike (for good or ill) rather than being too cutesy. It's also often hilarious. The view of the childhood world changes as the main character grows up, but age doesn't always add clarity for her. It's a really great character study of someone so shaped by double blows of family expectation and tragedy that she can't even see what's been done to her, or who she's become. The realisations and coming together at the end felt both satisfying and earned.

I understand her later books are more grim, so may not revisit the author, even though I'm glad I read this one. 

I saw this go by on the library app, and thought "Oh, I like Clarke sometimes!" and a Christmas-related story from her seemed cool. It wasn't until I checked it out that I noticed that it was a short story, padded out with (very nice!) illustrations and authors notes at the back. (And not Hugo eligible, as it was written to be a BBC radio broadcast a couple years ago).

I quite liked it! It's very simple, but the mood is lovely and creepy, and I like how it handles the idea of talking animals. The sentient forest feels very Clarke (and indeed it's meant to be set in the same universe as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, though doesn't need any knowledge of that).

(Not sure why this was a book, but Nenya says that Clarke has been having a lot of health problems, and focusing on longer works has been impossible. At current rate of page-count decrease, I think she'll be publishing postcard fiction next.) 

This was highly, highly recced by a friend, but I wasn't quite sure what I was expecting going in, other than she said it was weird. It was indeed quite weird. 

In small town Ontario, there are bird-women living in the lake, and everyone in the town knows that, and just incorporates it into their life (e.g. unwanted babies are given to the bird women), which is not what the book is about, though one of the characters is a bird woman. What it's about is generational trauma and child abuse. (Though there were so many family backstories on the go, that I got a little muddled in terms of whose ancestors did what.)

A young woman at loose ends has an affair with the local Anglican minister and his wife, being somewhat in love with the wife. It's CanLit: it goes poorly. It's CanLit: incest vibes ahoy! (though no actual incest)

My review feels fragmented, which is also true of the book, but I think that's intentional, and for the most part Hegele pulled it off, the surreality being the point, the bitterly angry feminism carried by the metaphor. My friend said she felt like there was a lot going on that she didn't completely understand, in terms of layers of meaning, and was going to reread it. I think it would probably benefit from that (to keep all the character backstories straight, if nothing else), but I also really liked it as it stood. 

Oh man. I heard this author on the CBC talking about an exhibition that's about to open, and really liked him, so got his latest book, not knowing much context past that he described his style as "Haida Manga" and wanted to honour the ties between Haida Gwaii and Japan (who fish together a lot). He then admitted that it was kind of his own thing more than any specific style of manga, and made a joke about not learning a heck of a lot from the master brush painter who'd been trying to teach him. I would say he did, in fact, learn quite a bit from that guy.

Stylistically alone this graphic novel is breathtaking. And that's before you work out that each "page" is cropped from a huge piece of art that together makes a master picture of the story it's trying to tell. There's a copy of the art as a whole at the end, which made me immediately go back and reread the rest of the book and get a second meaning from it. I'd love to see the original, which is in an anthropology in Berlin, attempting to provide context for the Haida artifacts on display there.

The story itself is a sweeping history of the Haida's contact with Europeans, the biological warfare perpetrated by Helmcken (et al) causing a loss of a massive chunk of the population, German unification, and then narrowing to the stories of two men: a young Haida fisherman, and a Norwegian whaler, J.A.J., who is sent to the Pacific Northwest to bring artifacts back to Germany. Though their paths cross only for a few months, coming to a point, it feels like layers and layers of story are being distilled into their interactions. Honestly, you could probably do a PhD in story structure on this book alone.

*gestures incoherently*

Really, really impressed by this, immediately went to the library and got Yahgulanaas' previous book. 

(Disclaimer, et cetera.)

You know what I'm rooting for in this series? The hotel reservation system to work right! We're zero for three on a guest arriving and getting what she expects. I have high hopes for the next book, though, as the MC there is meant to be the hotel detective, so there should be other guests, at least.
Anyway! This was another super sweet one, and I was surprised how much I liked the Christmas theme of it all, as I'm allergic to the "one character hates Christmas and learns to love it" trope, which was admittedly not a major theme here anyway.

This time, the future of the lodge is in danger! And the antagonist is the heroine's fated mate, but doesn't believe in fated mates (or Christmas), oh no! It's not quite enemies to lovers, as they aren't sparky and antagonistic, but I liked how they worked through opposing view points, and did not and up in some kind of terrible You've Got Mail non-solution.

I also really liked the heroine, her sister, and their silly-but-heart-warming Christmas/Hanukkah traditions. Probably my favourite of the series so far. 

This is meant to be an oral history of Gamergate, which doesn't interview anyone who participated in harassment, or any of the three primary targets. It also doesn't spend a hell of a lot of time on Gamergate itself, which felt odd to me. I guess maybe it's coming from the point of view that we all saw it, and there's not much to say past, "Well, that was horrible." However, it doesn't really live up to what I was expecting from this book.

Instead, it was about the culture inside the industry, and to a lesser extent fandom, how outside perception affects that, and how much all of that's been built in from the word go. Wolinsky did a great job of putting voices next to each other that added context or pushback without having to interject himself, and this also highlighted how much conflict there is within the community. I really appreciated that he didn't set up some halcyon past Internet age where everyone was nice, though he did talk about how social media has accelerated bullying. It's overall a good look at video game culture, and the conversations in the industry, even if those tend to be somewhat circular, and it's unclear if anything's getting better. Without feeling pinned to the moment of Gamergate happening, or discussing what happened in detail, it ended up feeling unmoored.

(I also want to put out there that the reason that gaming is different culturally than movies, TV, books, sports and their fandoms is in no small part set up cost, time and skill levels required. Like my shitty old laptop won't play any of the good games. Yes, I know Baba Is You and that poker thing everyone is into are also good games, but you know what I mean. And I don't want to spend either the time or the money to get into Dragon Age, or anything more complicated than Zen Koi, or Civilisation IV with the difficulty settings turned off. And it felt weird to me that so many people in the book were genuinely baffled about why games got treated differently than Marvel movies, or whatever.)

At some point, it felt like it was both a little too inside baseball, and not inside baseball enough? 

This one had a lot more go to it than the first in the series, being about twice the length, and having subplots and such. I really enjoyed our grumpy badger mechanic heroine, who just wants a spa weekend to be a fluffy badger princess and get a break from the sexism at work. Esker often writes about women who are too much, and the ways they manage cultural pressures to conform. She's great at the nuances around how that can hurt or shape a life.

I'm also enjoying the trend in this series of not telling us what the other love interest shifts into, and leaving it up to a guess. So far I've been two for two.

The romance was sweet, too, fairly straight forward, but also had a couple reasonable communication problems. I like miscommunication as a trope when it's believable for the characters to be talking past each other, especially if they're both not great at people.

Enjoyed this more than the first one, and you can read it on its own. 

I meant to read this series when it started under the Zoe Chant collective, but then forgot about it, and am finally circling back now that the later books are coming out. (Disclaimer about the author being a friend.)

This was cute! It's not as conflict-driven as a lot of Esker's books other books (which tend to have more shoot outs and fights involving one or more dragon), more a novella setting up the premise for the rest of the books. I liked the hedgehog main character and her mom, and the setting was a lot of fun. The romance felt a little cursory, but I don't think it was meant to be a big huge thing. If you're looking for a super light romance that's mostly holiday fluff (that holiday being Valentine's Day), this is a nice one.

On to the rest of the series! 

I've run out of vermette novels, so I got this as an e-book from the library, and read it on my computer (actually an enjoyable reading experience just in my browser's take on the Overdrive reader. Was expecting that to be a lot more painful!). It's a four-part graphic novel about a Metis teenager who keeps flashing back into her family history, witnessing key events in Metis history.

I guess it functions on two levels, the first being a lesson in Metis history. I again am reminded that I need to just read The Northwest Is Our Mother, because even though there's notes and timelines at the end of each volume, and we get a few scenes with her history teacher explaining events, I couldn't quite keep track of who everyone was. I think vermette did a good job of distributing the information dumps, there's just a lot of names and dates in play. I'm not sure I'd share this as a first  introduction to the history, but I know people use it as a teaching resource.

The second level is as an actual story, which works pretty well despite it being an educational book. I did find the character a little flat to start out with, but I think that was intentional, as Echo was in a new school, had some family issues, and was isolating herself from dealing with the world. I liked how she started to come out of her shell and joined the Indigenous student group, and made connections with her family. I initially thought Echo's action's could've been more integrated with the past, making her more a participant than a witness, but I ended up liking how vermette handled it, and explained why Echo was touching particular moments. It concludes really neatly.

The art's gorgeous. Especially big splash pages in the historical bits, just lovely stuff.