bookglutton's reviews
269 reviews

Would absolutely be 5 stars if I wasn’t so preoccupied with school xx Will be revisiting in the future

I was so so excited for this but its so goddamn dense. So many words that they render themselves absolutely meaningless. Such a shame (PS academics! You DO NOT have to write like this!!!)

God i’m so bored

What the fuck?

 First of all, nearly all of the book’s sexually explicit scenes are really SA, but they’re written like what you’d find a contemporary new adult novel.

There was also minimal critical engagement with the novel’s purported themes as well as a glaring absence of ANY engagement with race, which is notable not only because the author initially identifies nearly every character by their race but because Annie is a woman of color who is literally OWNED by a white man who essentially cloned another woman of color to make her…!

This lack of critical engagement I think is in part because the abuse continues until the final few pages, which leaves the reader no time at all to digest and actually think about what they’ve just read. The ending was not only rushed but romanticized: tell me why Annie’s first demonstration of full agency is running to another man…

Annie Bot is It Ends With Us but for people who say that there’s nothing good on BookTok. Dare I say…if I did not know better I’d think it was written by a man. 

Edit: and also why is it that fuckwad Doug who ultimately ‘grants’ Annie humanity? Feels counterproductive 

Elena Knows was fine. But then I kept reading: fine became good in part two and in the third and final part, great. The juxtaposition between different kinds of bodily autonomy was so well done. Who does our body ultimately belong to? Our minds? Perhaps the minds of those who carry our ashes or visit our graves? And what does it mean to be a mother? Is it an identity or merely a role, a noun or a verb? 

Sinaki’s writing is so lyrical but it ultimately slows down what is actually a fast-paced story. It distracts from the rawness of the story, making the characters and their feelings so abstract as to be nonexistent. While I did devour the story, I am left with a taste for something more

Review to come 

The movie is going to wreck me

I appear to be the outlier here. I found Daniel Aleman's "I Might Be In Trouble" well, alright. It's not bad, but it's not great either. Something about it just feels unfinished. I am typically drawn to dark comedies and morally gray stories, but this one felt too...textbook? Almost like it was cosplaying a thriller. The characters, the dialogue, the narration, the writing itself...it all really struck me as stripped down. The characters came across as caricatures and the dialogue read almost immature. What strikes me as very 'YA'  is that Aleman tells you exactly what the book is about and what it's all supposed to mean, leaving not the teeniest bit of the story up to interpretation.  I was not surprised to learn that Aleman's first two novels are YA and that "I Might Be In Trouble" is supposed to be his adult debut. There's also a repeated attempt to break the fourth wall, which was almost good! But Aleman just can't help to *tell* you he's breaking the fourth wall, and so his self-insert comes across less intellectually stimulating and more tacky. 

It's not a bad book overall but it's just not what I was expecting/hoping for from an adult novel. Ultimately, I think what the book really suffers from is a lack of trust in the reader to understand the underlying themes of the story. Perhaps this might work better if it were marketed as a new adult book. I just don't think Aleman as quite yet departed from YA (which is not a bad thing, for the record!)