kingofspain93's reviews
289 reviews

Chokshi’s writing is beautiful, which is not a compliment I get to give often. my experience of writing that attempts beauty, especially in prose fiction, is that it is boring or alienating. Chokshi has both the vocabulary and the imagination required to pull it off. the story itself is fine, though it drags in the second half and I couldn't help drawing comparisons to the infinitely superior The Secret History. still, The Last Tale of the Flower Bride surprised me with its creativity and world-building and ended sweetly. I would read more by Chokshi based on how much I enjoyed this.

edit: nvm apparently everything else she's written is young adult so I'm good. write more real books please.

this feels targeted at parents who are scared that without early and strong pro-tree messaging their child will become a logger or a CEO of a coal company. I like my nature kids books more sure of their own subject matter (Desert Babies, for example). the art in Thank You, Tree is nice and I like the page at the end that lists the tree species. I think that's the kind of thing that gets kids interested in natural science, not thanking trees “for joy” or whatever.

soft and warm art, with lots of cute details happening on the page for you to notice and discuss with a little one. I like the comforting message reaffirming the peacefulness of sleep and the steadfastness of parental love. I’ve had a real lack of cute tiger literature recently so this hit the spot.

this was exactly what I needed. Keene starts by helping the reader clarify their values, after which a lot of the seemingly insurmountable challenges of planning a wedding start to seem more manageable (and certainly more meaningful). I love women who use spreadsheets. god knows you'll need them. great great book.

I love Doppelgänger stories, and this was not a good one. King has high points, and a couple of genuinely scary moments, but it ends up being his usual monster-of-the-week plot. I'll say this: as soon as it became clear that a shapeshifter was responsible for the murder I lost a great deal of interest. it would have made for a more compelling and challenging story if it had actually been Terry, if he had actually been in two places at once (consciously or unconsciously), or at least if it had been ambiguous. Americans love the serial killer mythos because it means they don't have to grapple with how evil every man is. the rapist and killer is never some drifting bogeyman; it is in fact always the model father and husband, the dude who is loved by the community, etc. I hadn't seen the Doppelgänger used to explore this before and unfortunately I still haven't. King just doesn't know how to capitalize on the frightening scenarios he can devise and instead always falls back on the typical universal good v. universal evil story he has been telling his whole career.

I think bullet pointed reviews are the sign of someone looking to react rather than synthesize and I usually avoid writing them. this time there are a bunch of consistent terrible issues with King's writing and I just wanted to exorcise myself of them so here goes:

Atwood writes about the frightening socialized immaturity and emptiness of men quite well, but her supposedly radical-leaning female characters (Moira and the narrator's mother) are flat. similarly, when talking to the Commander Offred argues not that women's autonomy was overlooked in the construction of Gilead but that “love” is the thing that's missing. seriously? the world-building is impressive but the articulation of sexist degradation comes across as more conceptual than felt. I am a dude so doubtless I am missing nuance but this didn't connect with me.

it doesn't help that I read the (much better, much scarier, much more beautiful) Manacled first, or that I was reading Fall on Your Knees (which has insanely good character-driven writing) at the same time as this. The Handmaid's Tale felt like a shadow compared to those two books.

every now and then I read a book so beautiful that it fixes old hurts. Fall On Your Knees takes sadness and evil and love and delivers it all like a raw aching dream. MacDonald manages her huge cast of characters with immense skill and humanity. like Dostoevsky she redeems the novel as a medium. I love these girls with all my heart.

doesn't follow any annoying rhyme scheme or predictable structural conventions, just throws a bunch of top-tier art at you in pretty colors and ends with little games where you are encouraged to name and count things on the page. feels engaging and not condescending. if I'm asking my kid to name the color of the flowers I want the flowers to look like a wobbly Monet. and every animal is so so cute.

this was useful and without it I don't know when I would have realized that you can get a baby to fall asleep independently. the author is fucking annoying though. her attempt at personality is a fire hose of clunky pop culture references, coffee jokes, and strained metaphors. she's like one of the parents who got way too into Facebook and it changed every conversation you ever had with them again to a deeply depressing experience where you struggled to recognize anything that once allowed you to be emotionally vulnerable or intellectually curious with them. if this were cut down to the 20 pages of content it contains it would be great.

it's fine. the rhymey ones need to work twice as hard to have soul and this one doesn't. when I was a kid there was a scene in the move Wakko’s Wish where a mime was sad because he didn't have a real vehicle (he's a mime) and so he didn't get to go on the adventure for the wish or whatever. it was supposed to be a joke but the thought of someone being left out made me really sad for him. anyway that's how I feel about the poor fucking armadillo.