ambershelf's reviews
1295 reviews

Time Is a Mother is a poetry collection after the death of Ocean Vuong’s mother. It is a deeply personal reflection of loss and grief, confronting past trauma and its lasting effects. Due to the line breaks, I often had to reread passages to know where one sentence ends and when the next one starts. Regardless, I’m always profoundly touched by Ocean Vuong’s melancholic writing.

The Personal Librarian is based on the true story of Belle da Costa Greene, J.P. Morgan's personal librarian and one of the most well-known, self-made women in the early 1900s. Despite her confidence and grace living in a world of rare arts and manuscripts occupied by men, Belle harbors a grave secret; she is a light-skinned African American woman passing as white.

The plot moves a bit slow until the 50% mark, and I had qualms about how Belle continues to look for validation through her relationships with men, her employer, father, and secret lover. For fictional work based on Belle's courage and sacrifice, I would like to see more portrayals of her relationships with women, especially during the height of the women's suffrage movement. Nonetheless, The Personal Librarian offers a glimpse of the length a brilliant woman must go to survive racism.

Disorientation follows an 8th-year Ph.D. student Ingrid Yang during her last year in grad school, struggling with her dissertation while trying to solve a mystery. Ingrid started in the book as an insufferable WASP-wannabe and began reflecting on her identity as the story unfolded. Elaine Hsieh Chou uses her creative writing and satirical tone to include different perspectives throughout the book while introducing other characters and as Ingrid delves deeper into her past actions. She had so many discussions about cultural appropriation, censorship in academia, affirmative action, model minority, token Asians, white men who only date Asian women and the other way around, etc. Because this book is written as a political satire, making confronting these profoundly personal issues easier. Disorientation is such a thought-provoking read it's uncomfortable in all the best ways.

Let's Not Do That Again is a political satire about Nancy Harriman, a single mom running for Senate while navigating motherhood with her two adult children. I find the humor and sarcasm amusing, and Grant Ginder's assessment of the current political climate in the US is painfully poignant. Unfortunately, the plot follows a highly predictable pattern, and you can see the villains from a mile away. For a novel that focuses on political topics, I was expecting more layers of character development but was left wanting more.

Kaikeyi is a fictional retelling of a Hindu epic focused on the queen Kaikeyi, who is often depicted as an evil, power-greedy woman. The book follows Kaikeyi's journey from growing up in a men-dominated world to having the agency to influence policies and advocate for other women. While it's fantastic seeing non-Greek mythologies making their way into books, I find the characters one-dimensional. Given the first-person perspective, I also had difficulty connecting with Kaikeyi due to the distant narration.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is 1/3 historical fiction, 1/3 mystery/thriller, and 1/3 sci-fi/fantasy told through 3 different timelines and 5 POVs. The setup makes the first 20% somewhat confusing to read, and I was glad I had a physical copy to flip back and forth. Regardless, Anthony Doerr connects the various characters brilliantly, transporting the readers through many worlds. His writing is so masterful it's easy to connect and sympathize with the characters. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful chronicle of how each person finds hope when all is seemingly lost.

Tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton's new technology, Own Your Unconscious, enables users to externalize their memory, access it whenever they want, and share every memory in exchange for others' memories. Each chapter is written from a different character's perspective on how Own Your Unconscious has affected their lives, positively or negatively. Jennifer Egan brilliantly explores different writing styles and narration to paint a fascinating picture of technology's impacts on human relationships, be it longing, love, family, and redemption.

I thoroughly enjoyed how Jennifer Egan utilizes divergent voices based on the characters throughout the book. My favorite perspective is from the "counter", basically a data scientist of some sort; I felt the most connected to the character and his point of view, probably because we're both nerdy haha. Unfortunately, the writing couldn't save the lack of novelty in The Candy House. Other than "memory manipulation", a trope pretty common in recent sci-fi books, I find the discussions on "free technology" repetitive and unimaginative. Due to the ever-changing POV, keeping track of all the characters and their connections is also quite challenging. Ultimately, I don't need to read a 300+ page book to know that social media can be harmful when misused and pull people apart even with good intentions. The Candy House is an interesting read but not a phenomenal one.

Frida Liu had a terrible day. The next thing she knows, her daughter is taken away, and Frida is sent to a newly-established government program to prove that she is a good mother. In this thought-provoking debut, Jessamine Chan brilliantly delineates society's unattainable standards placed on moms by constructing a future dystopia that reflects the myth of upper-middle-class parenting, state-sanctioned violence against women, and family conflicts within an Asian American household. While the pacing is a bit slow for my liking, The School for Good Mothers is an impressive debut with a clever plot and an unlikely protagonist.