justabean_reads's reviews
1271 reviews

I would like to point out that if you prominently place a cat on the cover of a book, I expect there to be a significant cat character in said book, and there was not. No cats, at all, in fact.

That aside, I really enjoyed this. A young woman finds out her boyfriend is marrying another woman, and she's been the bit on the side this whole time, then dumps him, quits her job, and ends up moving in with her uncle, who runs a used bookshop in a neighbourhood in Tokyo dedicated to booksellers. There she starts to come out of her shell, and falls in love with reading. Much of this is a love letter to twentieth-century Japanese literature, which is a topic I know absolutely nothing about. However, you don't really need to know the books she's talking about (though I think you'd get more out of it if you did, and the translator has a note at the end about which ones can be found in English). Mostly it's just a gentle look at family relationships and friendships, and learning to be your own person. (There's a low-key m/f romance plot towards the end, and sadly she doesn't end up with the bookish female grad student hangs out with a lot).

There's a second book in the series, which I'll probably check out at some point. Really sweet and relaxing, and made me curious about Japanese novels. Though perhaps not curious enough to dive into that rabbithole. I'm also interested in how much context the translator added, because it felt like he explained things a Japanese-speaking reader would probably know, like when the Meiji Restoration was. However, the translator's note at the end doesn't mention that. 

So this is based on The Medium Is the Message by Canadian media theory legend Marshall McLuhan, like really based on. The books are the same shape (which shape is physically hard to read, for the record. We have improved book formatting since the 1960s), has the same chapter titles, the same mix of text and graphics. Joynt is clearly very invested in this bit.

I overall liked the content, though it's difficult at times, dealing heavily with child sexual abuse. I liked all the ways Joynt talked about different mediums and different ways to tell a story, both his own and his great uncle Marshall McLuhan's. There's a lot of media criticism in here, especially about the ways storytelling has been used to enforce conformity, or elide marginalised people and perspectives.

However, The book is so closely tied to The Medium Is the Message, which I never did read and I haven't thought about in twenty years, that I often felt like I was missing half the conversation. I'm not sure who this book is for? But good for Joynt for just going for it, and Arsenal Pulp Press for being game for this odd, odd project. I'm happy it exists, even if I'm not sure I entirely understood it. 

This was a bookclub pick that I probably wouldn't have read otherwise, but I did end up liking well enough. It didn't knock my socks off, certainly, but it was a nice book about small-town life in Nova Scotia during WWI. Our heroine is the only girl in a family of many many boys, who apprentices with the local midwife, a Cajun faith healer with Acadian roots and absolutely the most fun character in the book. There's a lot of great daily life details, and church and sewing circle political battles. When the book is focusing on the small town of a century past aspect, its strongest, and some of the language is very beautiful. It's the author's home town, and you can see how much she wants us to love the place as much as she does.

Sadly, it doesn't quite work on a couple other aspects. The author cites A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 in her notes, but seems to have missed a lot of the point of that book: midwives were mostly ordinary women with a trade they practised on top of their regular lives as part of a community. This is the full magical moon woo take on the topic. It was written in 2006, and reminded me of The Red Tent in its bull-headed insistence on reclaiming women of the past as magical and beautiful and perfect, and nuance and reality can take a hike.

Our Heroine never has a single opinion that would be out of place today. She's from WWI-era rural Nova Scotia, and while I can see her training leading to her being down with abortions and birth control, I feel like not even blinking when running into: lesbians, sex workers, suffragists, Black people, free-love communes, etc, was a bit too much of a stretch for me. The antagonist is the local doctor, who wants to start an obstetrics hospital to serve the region, and is wrong about everything. I will grant that 1915 was maybe not the best period in the history of ob/gyn research, twilight sleep being the hot new thing, and certainly male medical professions of the period (or any period) weren't known for listening to women. However, I am of the opinion that modern, science based medicine is a net positive, and having the dichotomy be: Women doing home birth always good v. medicine and hospitals always bad was... a bit much.

(The author of A Sweet Sting of Salt owes Ami McKay money, because that book is just this book plus lesbian selkies.)

And for all the period detail and love of place, it did feel like McKay was including historical events because she had to, rather than examining the impact they might have had at the time. We get both the Halifax Explosion and the Influenza pandemic, which were all-consuming horrors of the era, and the characters just sail through them, and then never really look back or seem impacted by that time everyone died. She does a bit better with WWI, and how having most of the young men gone changes the town, and worrying about the safety of friends and brothers, but on the whole I wanted more depth.

I've heard the author's other books are more or less the same idea, so probably won't look into any of her other novels, though her memoir looks interesting.

Should reread the Martha Ballard book. (I just learned, and am appalled to know, that there's a mystery novel with Martha Ballard as the main character where she uses her medical knowledge to solve crime, and this is a bestseller in the US, and probably the main way most people have encountered her. *wanders off to cry*) 

This was on the USian National Book Award's shortlist, and people were aflutter that a spec-fic book had made it there (they were also excited about Orbital, which is neither SF nor speculative fiction, so you never can tell). I'm trying to read more in translation, and hadn't done anything from Arabic this year, so picked it up from the library. It was... fine?

It's set in a post-revolutionary world in conversation with 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, from the point of view of a newly-minted book censor, who's charged with banning any book that doesn't fit through the narrowest of government restrictions. He lives in a beige and restricted world, and the exposure to actual literature is deeply shocking, and then enthralling, and then causes reality to bend, or maybe that's just his mind breaking. The more he reads, the less clear it is if what's happening on page is actually happening, which is of course the point.

The author is a Kuwaiti bookseller, who has to deal with this kind of censorship on the daily, and meant this book as a way to look at the opposition. Given that, I would've liked the censor (who is never named) to take a little longer to fall head over heels in love with reading. It felt like it was too easy, and too immediate a change in him, where I would've liked to see more struggle. However, he's also several generations into regime brainwashing, so it would make some kind of sense how unprepared he is to encounter colour. I did like how each time he reads a new book  (Zorba the Greek, Alice in Wonderland, 1984 itself) he starts seeing the world through new language, and new terms. It does a great job of underlining how censorship is meant to restrict thoughts more than anything. (Good interview with the author and translators.)

There's a secondary plot about the censor's imaginative young daughter, and the struggle to suppress her expressiveness in order to save her (and himself) from re-education, while increasingly realising the cost. The struggle to not destroy her in the act of protecting her is one of the strongest lines in the book.

I'm not sure why it didn't hit me harder than it did, but for some reason, the whole thing felt more analytical than real in a way that didn't completely land for me. 

More Hugo reading. I think I picked this because it was advertised in Locus, and the cover was really pretty. Thus the selection bias that rules our lives.

I will say for a book called The Wings Upon Her Back, with a picture of a cybernetic wing on the cover, I did expect the heroine to be able to fly for more than the first two pages of the novel. She was not. There were flashbacks, running parallel timelines of how she got into and out of this mess, but the flashbacks ended before she got wings. No flying.

That aside, I enjoyed this! The mess she was in was getting sucked into an authoritarian regime by following a charismatic leader, and then slowly understanding that every single thing she'd done in the last twenty years was bad actually, and trying to work out what to do next. Also, there were gods, which may or may not have been aliens, and a wonderfully creative mix of technology and/or magic dumped onto what had been a pre-industrial society, and maybe Star Trek was right about that being bad.

It sure is a time to be reading about fascism, and how spiritual abuse can be used as a cudgel to keep people in line, and how far a vulnerable young person will go to prove her devotion to the monster she's in love with.

So it's pretty dark. We meet the underground movement fighting to bring back some semblance of justice, who are also a hot mess, we see torture and destruction and things that can never find atonement. There are some very cool set-piece battles. I liked how the narration was pinned to one character, but was a shade on the side of omniscient, knowing what she was feeling even when she wouldn't admit to it, and how that gave a bit more room to explore a character who started out so locked into her worldview that she was unable to see reality when it punches her in the nose. (The writing style reminded me a bit of Genevieve Valentine.)

It does also mean spending more than half the novel inside the brain of someone who was ride or die for an authoritarian government, and that was a lot of brainspace to spend with a footsoldier of fascism, especially right now. I think the care and nuance with which Mills deals with her character was very worthwhile, and I'm a huge sucker for characters trying to pry themselves out of their previous worldview, and try to do what they can to make up for past sins, even if redemption isn't possible.

Overall really enjoyed this, if enjoyed is the word, and will keep an eye on what Mills does next. Could've used more actual flying. 

This is gorgeous! In the wake of the death of Leavitt's wife (who used medically assisted death after a lifetime of chronic pain), she spent two years trying to process her anger and grief through her art, in ways strange, incoherent, abstract, and profoundly moving. Pages and pages divided into a grid for a comic, then filled with colours and a handful of words. Sometimes the colours have meaning, sometimes you find out what that is much later, or when Leavitt herself figures it out, or never. It's raw, and honest, and I love how it refuses to neatly package up what Leavitt felt, or leave her at a comfortable end point.

If you're on an even keel, I imagine this book would be impactful and moving. If you're currently dealing with grief, it's absolutely gutting.

Back on my Hugo Bullshit, with this year's hyped science fiction romance adventure novel. Our heroine is a con artist trying to rip off a rich boy who knocked up and dumped her sister. She's doing this by seducing him, leaving him at the altar, and then cashing out on the pre-nup. The only problem is that his sister is hot! And also in trouble with the mob.

I was excited about this because I loved Fraimow's novella Suradanna and the Sea, which was a really fun yuletide fandom last time I did yuletide, and I generally like heist romances. Unfortunately, this was fine, but not really anything special. It was pretty easy to call the turns, the romance felt surface level, the relationship between the sisters could've been really crunchy, but ended up thin, with a lot of moralising and assuring the reader what the MC was really feeling. I'm also not sure she stuck the landing, having set up the situation as dire, then ducking out of it all in a slight of hand I didn't entirely believe. Pretty sure the mob would've just murdered the shit out of everyone involved.

It was fun following the various set pieces, all in very pretty outfits, and if you're looking for a light adventure that's got a lot of style (but not much else), I'd recommend it. I also appreciated a Yiddish-speaking Jewish woman of colour in a space adventure. I just wanted there to be more to it. 

However long into being interested in queer history, especially queer history around WWII, I finally got around to reading this! I'm glad I did, if for no other reason than to learn that the lesbians in the Free French Army women's barracks on Downing Street took over their canteen and turned it into a lesbian bar. Pass it along.

I also really appreciated the long interview with the author, which had been done in 2005, and was included in the afterwards, as there was a lot about how the book had been written, translated and published. Specifically that when her husband took it to the US, the original publisher insisted that he add a line of narration about how the point-of-view character Did Not Approve of These Goings On. And that those changes, though Torres agreed to them, were one of the reasons she never wanted the book translated back into French: she didn't want the women she'd fictionalised to think she judged them. (Before she died, she published her actual war-time diaries in French, though I think she still changed the names.)

On the topic of the actual book: I really enjoyed it. I could've lived without the point of view character being so judgy, so it was good to know that was a publisher's mandate, as she's throwing a lot of casual homophobia and biphobia around, both at the main characters, and at the handful of gay men who wander through. The narrator herself isn't as much of a character though, and most of the story is about the women she shared a dorm room with, and the adventures they had between the founding of the Free French Army's women's auxiliary and the invasion of Normandy, whereupon they moved back to France. Most women were young, some of them too young to be in the army, with a handful of more experienced women, and a lot of drama. We get very little about their war work, as the story focuses on inter-personal drama and romantic adventures (with each other and outside of the barracks).

It's fully entertaining, and I can see why it was a runaway hit in the '50s. Not just because there's quite a bit of vaguely-described sex (lots of sensations and emotions, not much in the way of mechanical detail), but also because of how well drawn the characters are, how they're allowed to be messed up and difficult, but you still root for them to find happiness. And survive the war, which not everyone does, for a variety of reasons. The book doesn't sugar coat either the physical danger of being stationed in London during the Blitz or V1/V2 attacks, or the emotional isolation and difficulty of living in a strange land with all of your family in peril, of being young and afraid and prone to making huge choices off the cuff. There's also dubiously consensual underage sex, self harm, substance abuse, descriptions of domestic violence and a brush with incest, but I again don't think they're dealt with sensationally, but rather as things the women were dealing with.

I'm glad to have finally read this, did not disappoint. I'd like to find Torrès' other books at some point, though By Cecile (a post-war Colette expy) is the only one still widely in print. Are her war-time diaries translated into English, does anyone know? 

I'd say this was timely, but I think it's more that this kind of thing keeps happening, which is probably what vermette also thinks! It's very of the moment, but that moment being any time in the last twenty years, at the very least. (Indeed, between typing this in a draft, and hitting post, the whole Colby Wilkens thing happened.)

Two Metis sisters reckon with their white mother being a pretendian (white person pretending to be Indigenous), and with that being revealed in a national newspaper. They're also very much dealing with their own personal trashfires, and all the trauma that their mother's bullshit brings back up. It's told in short point of view chapters between the sisters (one an pottery artist in Winnipeg, and one an Indigenous Studies professor who just moved back home after fifteen years away), with a lot of flashbacks to growing up in an unstable household, and attempts to reconcile themselves to what's happening.

At times, the sisters reactions felt a little too polished, or maybe "well-placed" would be a better way of putting it. They're both believably flawed people, but it sometimes felt like they had done all the right things a little too well, and I would've maybe liked their relationship with their mother to feel more compromised. However, I can understand why vermette wanted a clean line between them. Certainly the message around double standards that judge Indigenous people more harshly, regardless of acting perfectly or not, was loud and clear.

I really liked positioning each sister in a different but ultimately complimentary relationship with her culture, one making art in a traditional way informed by archaeology and traditional stories and hands in the dirt, and the other studying narratives and theory, and trying to write her way into history. It was really neat to see them coming at their lives from those angles, while at the same time just feeling this deep hurt at what their mother did. Really thoughtful, well put together book. Also, had great family vibes and relationships between sisters, which I love too.

This is set in the same family as vermette's previous trilogy, but you don't need to have read that to follow this. Was nice to have queer and non-binary characters just chilling in the story.

The audio format did throw me a bit, since it wasn't quite a full cast drama, but it wasn't quite not that either. However, I'm here for Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers. 

I've never read LMM before! But since this was a book club pick, it was a nice excuse to give her a go. Since someone else picked the book, I ended up going in completely cold. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I ended up with a romance both in the modern sense of the word, and the sense of the romantic movement, or since this was in North America, perhaps Transcendentalism would be more accurate.

Our heroine is set forth in the most convincingly miserable existence in small-town Ontario some time in the 1920s, where conventionality and family judgement literally control her every waking hour, and the only beauty in her life exists in her imagination and nature books written by a Mysterious Author. Right away, we get hit with this wall of unhappiness, which was the most convincing description of being at a dead-end and out of options since Persuasion, except our heroine here doesn't even have a busted love affair to regret.

Then she goes to the doctor to ask about a touch of angina, and finds out she only has a year to live. At this point, it became incredibly easy to call all the turns, but it's not like one minds that kind of thing. I minded a little more that this was apparently LLM's ode to how much she enjoyed that one trip to Muskoka. The middle of the book is about seven straight chapters of descriptions of how pretty cottage country is, and it might have been great in 1926, but that was before Odes to Cottage Country became a genre, one that I unfortunately categorically dislike.

However, the romance was very sweet, and I like the tropes around "very unhappy person gets showered with everything she didn't know she wanted and learns to be happy." Also as a portrait of small-town ignominy, it was a lot of fun.

(Also, has anyone read The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough? Because I really came away feeling like she'd read The Blue Castle because it had a lot of reflections, though perhaps they were just playing with the same set of tropes. Oh, looked it up, and apparently there was a plagiarism accusation. Interesting.)