jayisreading's reviews
505 reviews

Michell expertly crafted a delicately tense novel following Sae, the protagonist, who tries to figure out what happened to her missing husband after the collapse of a building (drawing inspiration from an actual Seoul department store collapsing in 1995). I admit that I wasn’t expecting too much from this book when I started it, but I found myself utterly drawn to Michell’s stark commentary on truth and history. South Korea’s history is an incredibly tumultuous one that she explores in this novel, and the question that reverberates throughout this novel is who gets to tell that history.

Excavations shifted around time but was primarily set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, yet Michell provided incredible insight into how South Korea was shaped since the end of Japanese colonialism in 1945 by drawing attention to political tensions between the people and the government (as well as companies) across time, but especially in the 1980s. This novel was as much a story about Sae trying to uncover the truth about her missing husband as it was about learning what truth and justice mean to South Koreans in relation to their history. For those familiar with South Korean history, it comes as no surprise that truth has incredible power, and the fierce fight for the people to hold onto that truth is an ongoing one, and, as Michell revealed, often comes at a pricey cost. In addition to this layered exploration of truth and history, there was another theme woven into the story about motherhood. I admit that I wasn’t as interested in this aspect of the novel, though I still recognize and understand it to be a crucial part of the story; I couldn’t imagine the book without the attention Michell gave to motherhood.

The ending felt slightly rushed, in my opinion, but it wasn’t unsatisfying or anything. I will say that I felt like something was missing from this novel as I was reading it, but I honestly can’t place my finger on what that might be. Overall, though, I think the pacing and atmosphere were well done with the right amount of quiet tension carrying the reader from start to end. I’m pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed this more than I thought I would.

This was such a raw collection of poems that took physical and emotional pain to another level, with Chatti reflecting on the harrowing experience of finding a tumor found in her uterus and dealing with excessive bleeding. Woven into this narrative are thought-provoking ideas about faith (specifically Islamic) and womanhood that, again, consider the pain that comes with them. I found Chatti’s exploration of the complexities of shame and suffering in relation to womanhood especially compelling, and I thought it was interesting how she successfully conveyed this with such precision while also simultaneously evoking the messiness of it all. Furthermore, there was a really interesting theme throughout this collection that showed an intimate connection between the speaker and the Virgin Mary that I wish I better understood but couldn’t quite make sense of.

These poems were so distinct and personal, so much that it almost felt invasive and I felt a bit out of my depth as someone who is neither a woman nor religious. However, it’s a collection I’m glad to have read to continue to see how poets are more than capable of evoking such strong imagery and emotions.

I was entranced by Shafak’s emotional storytelling and thoroughly impressed by her exceptional research for There Are Rivers in the Sky. It was a little difficult to get into the novel for about the first third of it, but I found myself completely invested by the halfway mark, especially when I started to see how the three characters’ perspectives were interwoven, all of which was remarkably done with the start of a water droplet. Shafak’s writing is lush and beautiful, and I was amazed how she breathed to life three remarkable characters in very vivid settings. With that said, I did find Arthur’s perspective the most interesting to read out of the three characters, perhaps because it gave the most insight into Mesopotamia. I do have some mixed feelings about the fact that I found Arthur’s story the most compelling, though, especially given the issues around extracting artifacts from other lands. Furthermore, Arthur may be devoted to the inquiry of Mesopotamian culture and history, but there is a sort of white savior narrative that comes through especially in the latter half of the novel. Of the three perspectives Shafak provided, I found Narin the least interesting, mainly because I thought it was the least developed. I find this a bit unfortunate, considering that Narin is Yazidi, and with the attention Shafak gave to her people in Arthur’s and Zaleekah’s stories (albeit less so in the latter), I would have expected far more.

Despite these qualms, I do think that Shafak wrote an incredibly intricate story that wonderfully synthesized a diverse range of topics and themes that will give the reader much to think about. The novel is a bit harrowing and reflects some of the atrocities committed by people across centuries, particularly in modern times, but I thought Shafak approached this thoughtfully and in a meaningful way.

Note: Many thanks to the publisher for sending me an ARC. 

“The prose is cool water. Its images are lonely, weird, sometimes horrific, and always arresting.” I think Sophie Mackintosh rather aptly describes I Who Have Never Known Men in her afterword. (A kind of aside, but the afterword in this particular edition is definitely worth reading after reading the novel.) This novel was quiet, yet its message of humanness reverberated in ways I did not expect. Throughout the novel, Harpman asks what it means to be human (specifically a woman), especially after much of what makes a human human is stripped away. No context is given as to how or why a few dozen women were forced into cages at the start of the novel and what allowed them to escape, where they were after they escaped, along with the fact that there’s very little sense of time. To add to the disorienting ambiguity of it all, the unnamed female narrator has virtually no knowledge of what used to be, barely able to make sense of what the older women in the group tell her about life before confinement. Despite this sparsity of information, the novel is utterly rich in content as a result of the narrator’s curiosity about everything from the material to the abstract.

Something that struck me throughout this novel was Harpman’s observation of how humans can be the absolute worst toward other humans while simultaneously capable of showing so much love and care, the complexity of human nature. We see the horrors of how the women were treated at the start of the novel, but even during confinement and especially after escaping, we see such tender interactions between the women. These are all understood even to those who have not experienced conventional human life—in other words, the narrator—who herself notes at the start of the novel: “I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.” It was interesting to watch the narrator unpack newfound emotions and experiences, to continue to make sense of humanness, especially as Harpman whittled away dialogue, characters, and surroundings until the reader is left with a profound sense of loneliness in both prose and narrative, as well as a startling understanding of what it means to be human.

While I realize this novel is entirely speculative, I did find it a little hard to believe that the narrator was able to pick up on certain ideas and concepts as quickly as she did, but it wasn’t to the point that it completely took away from the reading experience. I also find myself a bit torn about the decision Harpman made to provide very little information to the reader. On the one hand, I thought it was incredibly effective in getting her ideas and message across; on the other hand, I did find it a little frustrating being left in total darkness from start to end with a lot of unanswered questions.

Overall, though, this was such a poignant novel that gave me so much to think about. I wish my French was better, because I would love to read this in the original language to really experience the novel’s emotional impact. I did think Schwartz handled the English translation phenomenally though.

I found that these lines from Sonia Sulaiman’s preface really stayed with me while reading this anthology. It also raises a really fascinating question of what “speculative” might mean for different groups, and one that I’ll be thinking about for a long while. Thyme Travellers is a short anthology of speculative fiction written by authors from the Palestinian diaspora, all of whom are (re)imagining a world for their people and motherland in different ways. Like any anthology, some stories stood out to me more than others. Personally, the two that I think are absolute must-reads from this anthology are Nadia Afifi’s “The Generation Chip” and Samah Serour Fadil’s “Gaza Luna.” I felt that both authors beautifully captured the love and resilience of Palestinians in their own unique manner.

I do (rather selfishly) wish a lot of these stories were longer, but I think each author brought something to this anthology that will give the reader much to think about, especially as we continue to push for a world with a liberated Palestine.

This was a far too short graphic memoir (just twenty-four pages!) that draws attention to what it’s like to live with bipolar disorder (specifically bipolar 1). Young approaches being bipolar with great care and honesty, striking a nice balance between the personal and informative to reveal what it means to deal with (hypo)mania in particular. Furthermore, I appreciated that Young dispelled some common misconceptions able-minded people might have about a very stigmatized disability.

I do wish this graphic memoir was much longer and actually had more illustrations. While very much following the comics/graphic novel formatting, I did feel that it was far more text-heavy than expected, and I would have loved to see more of Young’s art style. Aside from these rather minor quibbles, I really enjoyed this nuanced look into being bipolar.

Diaka’s poetry collection is one that I believe was meant for a specific audience. It is one that I am not a part of, which is fine; poems shouldn’t always have to resonate with the reader. Many of these poems focused on experiences that distinctly impacted African women (specifically cisgender, and more on this), particularly the myriad ways misogyny makes an appearance. I was also intrigued by how Diaka used this collection as an opportunity to scrutinize the role of religion (specifically Christianity) in all of this. With that said, while I understand that this collection is deeply personal, I was a little unnerved by the bioessentialist understanding of womanhood in a handful of these poems. I wouldn’t go so far as to cry out that it’s transphobia in action but, rather, an opportunity to further reflect on the complexities of womanhood. One thing that I want to say Diaka did capture very well, though, was the pain and frustration that women face in society due to misogyny.

The poems carry power, yet I found that I was a bit disengaged with them. The collection read to me as a bit uneven, with the last section feeling out-of-place (though it was also my favorite, funnily enough). Furthermore, with the exception of a few poems, Diaka’s writing style didn’t really work for me, personally. It wasn’t until after I finished the collection and did a little more research into the poet that I learned she does spoken word that how she approached her poems made far more sense. It actually made me wonder if I should have borrowed the audiobook so that I could hear these poems while the words were in front of me for a better experience overall. 

With all honesty, I feel as though I was a bit misled by the synopsis of this novel and was given something a little different. Michaels certainly asks what to make of the relationship between AI and the arts (specifically poetry) through his elderly poet protagonist, Marian, who is invited to co-write a poem with a poetry AI bot named Charlotte. However, I wasn’t expecting so much of the novel to also think deeply about family relations (particularly motherhood), which I’m not entirely against, but it also wasn’t what I signed up for when I picked up this book. Unfortunately, even without this theme around motherhood, I found that this was a pretty uninspiring novel.

I think the core issue is that most of the characters around Marian were rather underdeveloped, almost as if they were only there to serve as vehicles to get certain ideas across or as plot devices. I want to say the most obvious instance of this was Morel, who seemed to be representative of anti-capitalist ideas and a critical voice. Another obvious example is Marian’s son, Courtney, who really seems to just serve as a plot device more than anything. (Also, I’m not entirely sure how he’s so well-adjusted as an adult despite essentially being abandoned by his mother at a formative age?) These faults become especially apparent due to the book being (theoretically) more driven by Marian’s interactions with other characters. In addition, the attention Michaels wanted to give to the relationship between AI and the arts left a lot to be desired. Questions were asked, but there was never an in-depth exploration or reflection of the complexities of this relationship.

I’m also not entirely sure how to feel about the tender portrayal of the relationship between Marian and Charlotte. I did think the way Michaels approached their interactions stylistically to be an interesting one. Overall, though, as someone who has very mixed feelings that generally lean toward negative about AI (especially within the arts), I was rather put off by all of it. 

This is the third work by Yan Ge that I’ve read now, and I think it’s safe to say that I’m just not a fan of her writing. I admittedly struggled to stay engaged with a few of these short stories (especially the final and longest one, “Hai,” which made up about a third of the book) and found most of them rather detached and distant. I do think that I’m missing something crucial here, and it’s why Ge’s prose never quite made sense to me and often read as disorienting and ambiguous. There’s no doubt that this collection has an interesting theme, which is this sense of being elsewhere and feeling like an outsider in more ways than one. I think this was more apparent in the short stories set in more modern times, but I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell you what role the historically rooted stories had in this collection. Perhaps the short story that I found most compelling was “How I Fell in Love with the Well-Documented Life of Alex Whelan,” which was a fascinating deep dive into a parasocial relationship and social media.

Again, I think I’m missing something crucial about Ge’s works, because other readers seem to have gotten a lot out of this collection (and other books by her) that didn’t click for me at all. I’m glad to have given her short stories a shot (and finding at least one that I enjoyed), but it was a bit disappointing that they largely didn’t work for me.

My knowledge of Indonesian history is limited, but I did eventually pick up that the characters and setting of Beauty Is a Wound served as complex allegories for the turbulence that Indonesians faced throughout the twentieth century. Kurniawan wrote an incredibly intricate story with an impressive cast of characters that detailed the very complicated and multigenerational history of Dewi Ayu and her family. Furthermore, the whole story was immersed in the magic realism genre, with Kurniawan making frequent nods to local folklore to further establish its roots in Indonesian culture and history.

With that said, I strongly hesitate to recommend this novel to anyone. It’s not because I thought it was bad but, rather, a result of carrying very mixed feelings throughout my reading experience due to the amount of sexual violence against women and ever-present misogyny. While I realize that the treatment of women is meant to serve as an allegory of sorts for what Indonesians went through (as far as I can tell), there were far too many instances when I felt that the inclusion of a rape/sexual assault scene was gratuitous and served little to no purpose other than for it to be included. It also raises the question of what it means for a male author to write female characters in a symbolic fashion like this, and I’m not entirely sure if there’s an easy answer for this.

Given my limited knowledge of Indonesia, I have no doubt that I’m missing a fair amount of cultural and historical context that might provide greater insight into why Kurniawan approached his story the way he did, and I’d be curious to know what Indonesians—particularly Indonesian women—thought of this novel.