mmccombs's reviews
706 reviews

I was absolutely knocked over by this book! Part book, part poem, each sentence was beautiful and painful and absolutely engrossing. I loved the vignettes, very much like “life flashing before your eyes” while also connecting Ezra’s story to that of their ancestors and family and friends. It definitely felt disjointed and sometimes odd, but in the end I thought that it totally worked. This reminded me of Martyr!, another book I read and loved this year, taking bold swings in form and style to create something stunning and complex. While this will not be everyone’s cup of tea, I thought it perfectly captured our current moment of dissociation, numbness, and coexistence with our past.

Once again, this was so cute and fun and a bonus Halloween treat! I have really enjoyed these more “low stakes” silly missions that let me enjoy Percy’s pov and little Greek myth hijinks without feeling like I need to remember anything from previous installments (or fear that Rick will make me sad again). I think I liked the first one in this college rec letters series a bit more, but this felt like the perfect read for October, full of magic and ghosts and tiny hellhounds for the perfect cozy time!

This is a book that falls in the “it either should have been longer or a short story” category. It didn’t feel long enough to fully develop any of the characters or to build up suspense, but it also felt repetitive and a bit boring. The twist at the end was very fun, so I did enjoy how it ended, but otherwise this was forgettable.

Well… I really think we should not do nuclear war.

In all seriousness, this was probably not the greatest book to read while already spiraling about the climate crisis and increased hostility around the globe, but I do feel slightly more informed and definitely more alarmed about the mere existence of nuclear weapons. I kept coming back to that scene at the end of Oppenheimer when he tells Einstein that that they likely did usher in the destruction of the world with the creation of the atomic bomb, because that felt truer than ever as I went through the book.

Seeing a step-by-step scenario play was incredibly chilling and also just terrifyingly realistic (even though all of the worst possible scenarios were the ones that played out). I did think the writing was a bit over the top, and some of her comments on North Korea seemed just kind of out of place, especially in a made up scenario (like please don’t even quote from Joe Rogan’s podcast even in passing please). After just reading Challenger by Adam Higginbotham, which set a high bar for gripping scientific nonfiction, I feel like the writing and journalism was just not as well organized or paced as I would have hoped. Ultimately, I ended this book feeling entirely upset but also more informed, though unsure exactly where to go from here with this knowledge. Just panic I guess??

In light of recent state executions of innocent men, this book came at exactly the right time. This was well researched, deftly paced and organized, and called into question every aspect of the prison industrial complex: police, prosecutors, judges, trials, journalists, and even eye witnesses. Slepian convincingly demonstrated why wrongful convictions happen and why they are so difficult to overturn even in cases where the evidence of innocence is mind boggingly obvious. I also appreciated that he made his own position (and contribution to each case) very clear, putting journalists firmly in this conversation as well. Also the audiobook experience was wonderful, having real audio from the people he interviewed was very impactful and I felt the emotion in his reading.

Would definitely recommend reading/listening to this as a single piece of the puzzle that is the giant problem of incarceration in the U.S. And as a side note, I just so happened to finish this on the day JJ Velazquez was exonerated which is just another moment of joy to conclude this story!

I just have lost what I loved about the first books I read from Emezi. The first few chapters just felt so overwritten, like endless weird metaphors and sentences that made me feel overly conscious of myself reading a book, if that makes sense. It read like it was trying really hard to be a book that would win an award, and honestly the content was not engaging enough for me to feel that was worth it. Maybe I’ll come back to this  later when I’m in a better mood but for now… eh.

I simply do not care

I think I liked this? On the whole, the story and character development was interesting. Sitting in Eliot’s brain was impactful and I appreciated that her experience with OCD directly impacted the romance/plot, which made everything feel more realistic. I do think it was a bit long and repetitive, I spent a good amount of this internally yelling at them to just talk or kiss already. And I felt weird when the author constantly described the (only) nonwhite character’s skin and eyes as honey/almond/chocolate (basically any food) while every other (white) character is not really described at all. There were quite a few awkward sentences along the lines of “copper arms enveloped me” that could have just… dropped the constant need to remind the reader that Manuel was brown. Got it! He was pretty well developed as a friend and love interest, which made their relationship interesting, but I was very distracted by the writing style. All this to say, I think this was very well done OCD rep and just fine at everything else.

On the whole, I thought this was very well done and made me think of things in new ways. I found the chapters that focused specifically on her unpacking/challenging/rethinking pop culture were the strongest (Game of Thrones, Kurt Cobain and Selena, Viking content), while the more broad essays seemed to lack focus and cohesion for me. I also had a hard time finding the “voice” in this collection, it was sometimes very academic and other times a bit casual, which again fueled that incohesive feeling. I appreciated the creative and intelligent links the author made and I had a good time thinking about them, but I do feel this could have been tighter in some way.

You ever get like 3 chapters into a book and know that it will forever be on your mind from here on out? Everything about this is what I love about reading. The plot was meandery and beautiful, the characters were interconnected in unexpected ways, and the pandemic was obviously important to the story but was more of a springboard for exploration of humanity than being just an “apocalyptic” story. It feels kind of miraculous to have read this after an actual pandemic  (not miraculous in a positive way, just in a “time is a circle” kind of way), the layers of Shakespeare’s plague context, this imagining of a fictional pandemic, and our experience living through one all came together to create even more meaning than was probably originally intended. I don’t think I can say anything more eloquent that hasn’t already been said by more adept reviewers, but I finished this book feeling stunned in the best way.