librarymouse's reviews
393 reviews

This novel is a great introduction to Murderbot! It is a very enjoyable narrator! It's motivations lean towards protection despite having a hacked Guardian drive that doesn't allow them to be compelled to do so, and it comes to care for the crew it's been assigned to. This series reminds me of Becky Chambers, though I believe Murderbot Diaries was published before the Wayfarers series. Queerness in outerspace with a nonhuman narrator, of whom humanity isn't expected is the way to my heart. I especially love the aro-ace coding of the narrator. I know robots as allegories for a-spec people is a tired stereotype, but I enjoyed reading it, nonetheless, having Murderbot's lack of external sexual organs line up with his interior experience of attraction was neat!

This book was funny and informative as Gabrielle Moss explored the history of 80's and 90's teen fiction. It was enjoyable, but I sometimes felt myself drifting while I was reading as the dates, characters, and titles blended together. There are a lot of dark themes in mass market teen fiction.

I read Hope Was Here for the first time in 5th grade. I got in so much trouble for writing my name on the wall because the school was a place I didn't want to forget and that I didn't want to forget me, the same way Hope does in the book. She was smarter about it than I was.
As someone who doesn't generally enjoy Christian fiction, Hope Was Here is one of the few books I read as a child, with strong Christian messaging, that has held up to be enjoyable to my adult self. This novel has great messaging encouraging individuals to take a part in their systems of government in order to make the change they want to see in the world. Addie is so deeply funny and relatable to me, especially her reaction to having gone on a date with GT. I love a book where an odd woman gets to be loved as she is. I cried at Hope getting a dad, and I cried even harder when GT died, leaving her having had a dad for far less time than she deserved. This book is a great work of realistic fiction.

I came into this wanting something similar to The Night Circus. While this didn't quite live up to expectations, I did enjoy the read. The ending felt somewhat disconnected from  the rest of the novel - unrealistic in the context of the reality the novel sets up for us as readers, and at points it felt as if there wasn't enough page time allowed for readers to come to care for the characters in any deeper way. 

The incestuous rape plotline was unexpected and added to the treachery in disgusting and interesting ways. I would have preferred the novel be more of a character study than ending with Charlotte as a zombified avenging angel, working for a devil, but readers (beggars) can't be choosers.

While reading In an Absent Dream, I'd wondered what happened to Mockery. This addition ties up the lose ends of the novella well and answers the question of what happened to Lundy and her friends that made her return to the world of her birth for the first time. The Goblin Market is a complicated place. It's not made for everyone to live in, and it's not made for everyone compatible with it to live in forever. This side quest explores how sometimes the concept of fair value can lose its meaning when an individual loses themself, and it shows the cost of a life lost in the "eye for an eye" fairness of the market. They're children with minds full of adventure and a strong belief that the market would protect them. It's also interesting to see more of the archivist as a person who can and does fail in her overseeing of The Goblin Market. 
On a related note, the concept of fair value has infiltrated my subconscious. I consider purchases and trades under the idea of "is the price of this worth the amount of time it took me to make the amount of money I'd used to purchase it," and "are the items we're trading worth the same value we're willing to take/share." It makes purchasing and bartering more fun, and I wish I lived in a place where bartering was more prevalent.

Thank you to V. Castro and NetGalley for the digital ARC. I'm sorry I didn't like the book.

 The short stories throw readers directly into the deep end of what should be the climax of a story without any of the build up. It makes it hard to care about the characters and leaves the settings feeling indistinct.

This reads like fanfiction. The plural first person POV, the in-depth description of characters' outfits and bodies, and the pop culture references all culminate in the distinctive voice of online fandom spaces. I really enjoy horror set in liminal spaces, and I was looking forward to the titular story, but I couldn't get through the rest of them to get there. Story one, "The Carnival of Gore" was not well written and felt unnecessarily horny. I couldn't suspend my disbelief for a dying man being aroused by the same type of creature whose bite may have killed him, in such a short amount of page time. Story 2, "The Four Horseman Inn" was fine, for the most part. Not particularly memorable. I don't understand why they let the zombie in, in the middle. There was nothing to make me care about the characters or their plight. Story 3 "Bruja Barbie and her Ken" is a smutty stalker reverse harem. Specific pop culture references and inverting the male gaze in a way that allowed it to stay just as toxic made this an  unenjoyable read. I gave up 2 pages into Story 4 "The Last Halloween." I couldn't follow the plot outside of the general understanding of it being a bacchanal.   

Having a diverse variety of lived experiences and desires available in literature is important and there is an audience for this book, but I am not it.

Somehow, so much and absolutely nothing happens in this book. It's beautifully written and decorated with desire and viscera. Lumen is a complicated, sympathetic character - a little girl fed myths and legends and allowed to play in fairy rings, and then expected to grow into an adult unbelieving of magic. This novel encapsulates that coming of age feeling, in which nothing goes right, everything hurts, and you have to constantly resist the desire to peel open your skin like a fruit to see if there's a realer version of yourself hiding underneath. I adore strange and creepy little girls being written as such and allowed to revel in their existence as is. Lumen may not be a good person, but as she reflects, we may not really know who we are without others upon whom to reflect ourselves, and not all that is kind or loving is good.

This book is incredibly cute! I like to think that when the pet shop flooded, the tank that the lonely pink axolotl and their soup can bed cracked was the tank belonging to their future partner. This is the first example of post humanism/eco crit book explicitly critical of humanity that I've seen with children as the intended audience. Great Eco-conscious message, and the 978 baby axolotls are adorable in their uniqueness! 

In Every Heart a Doorway, Lundy came across as bitter and unlikable as a character. In In An Absent Dream, we get to see what made Lundy that way. Young Catherine Lundy is nothing like the adult version we meet, trapped in a child's body. I don't know that I could have made a decision other than what she tried, in order to be able to live in a world that felt like home, but not have to give up the sister she'd come to love - and through her the family she'd finally come to appreciate. Moon is such a lovable character, and I'm glad the McGuire gives us closure on her life, in that she's grown into a self-sufficient adult working with Vincent at his pie shop. We get to know she's safe and on a good path, rather than on her way back to becoming a bird again.
The archivist is such a good parental figure, and she's so human throughout the initial stages of the story, that her turn at the end, having to enforce the rules of the market despite her love of Lundy was all the more heartbreaking. Lundy meeting Eleanor West at the end was a very interesting start to the story we knew going into the novella. In Every Heart a Doorway it reads as if Lundy had tried to reverse her aging to trick her world, with malice. To know it was a decision made out of love makes her character all the more tragic.

Thank you to NetGalley and Matthew Sullivan for the digital advanced reader copy of Midnight in Soap Lake. This novel is just as gripping as Sullivan's first, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore. Sullivan has a fantastic talent for building monsters of incredible magnitude and then tearing down their facade to show the terrible, vulnerable, and complicated people beneath.

As a librarian, I had complicated feelings about Miss Nellie. She is a terrible librarian, censoring books, harassing patrons, and bullying her staff. She's also horrific for allowing her lech of a brother to harass Sophia. However, as a character, Miss Nellie with all her power tripping and judgement, complicated by her kindness/protectiveness towards Preston makes her and her motives through the progression of events before and after Esme's death highly suspect, adding to the suspense around Tree Top. Parts of the actual conspiracy in the town remain unanswered, which, while frustrating, realistically illustrates bureaucratic corruption in small towns like the fictionalized version of Soap Lake.

Abigail and Esme are both compelling narrators. It's hard to read about a character growing up, and coming to love them as they become themselves, knowing all the while how and when they're going to die. Somehow, despite the novel starting with the discovery of Esme's body, I still found myself rooting for her to grow up, get out of Soap Lake, and for George to find help for her in time. Children are often hard to write realistically, but George felt like a real kid, in all the nuance that entails. The detail written for the supporting characters, especially Kevin, Krunk, Sophia, and Silas, and a few moments with Dr. Carla, made them just as easy to care about as Abigail and Esme. Not necessarily easy to love, but the way Sullivan molded them made me care about what happened to them. The only one who fell flat was Eli, but that's mostly because he spent 3/4 of the book out of the country and out of Abigail's life - and because he REALLY lives for the science, not seeking to harm others, but also not seeming to have easy access to his empathy either.

Pastor Kurt's fall from grace (get the pun?) is an interesting one. He ruined his life and destroyed his future in order to keep Silas out of jail, ultimately resulting in Silas's death, the death of the one kid in town with the hope of getting out of there, and forced himself into indentured servitude. And it was ultimately all for nothing.

I didn't particularly like the ending. Returning to Esme was interesting, but the timelines of the alternating perspective had already just about reached her death. It just didn't line up well with the rhythm of the rest of the novel and the dreamlike quality of the chapter did the book a disservice. Sophia's chapter didn't make much sense other than to say that the town still underestimates the marginalized and she's learned how to use that to her advantage. It didn't tie up any loose ends, and it didn't add anything. I read it twice. It just feels like it ends too abruptly, lacking the closure that made Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore such an engaging read all the way through. However, I do understand how integrating actual non-conspiracy law enforcement into the conclusion would be complicated given Daniel killed McDaid and Hal for orchestrating the myth and murders of Tree Top. I think what I wanted was more, not a return to the past to close the novel.

Also, what did George drop in the desert?