jayisreading's reviews
524 reviews

Written with tenderness, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion is a queer coming-of-age novel that gives the reader a glimpse into the life of a Pakistani American girl in New York City during the 1980s. Throughout this novel, the protagonist, Razia, is constantly at odds with her family's traditional values, especially when she starts to grapple with her queer identity. The novel is as much a novel about being queer as is it is a novel about being Muslim and being a part of the Pakistani diaspora. Rehman highlights the difficulties that many children of immigrant households face in trying to find themselves while dealing with clashes in culture, religion, and tradition. I found that Rehman did a wonderful job exploring the thorniness of it all, and the conflicted feelings that continued to grow in Razia as she grew older.

My main complaint about the novel is about the ending, which I thought was rather abrupt. I felt Rehman could have taken time to build up to the ending she presented, but it ended up being rushed and I felt like I was left hanging.

This was a really great exploration of what it means to be queer, Pakistani American, and Muslim, though, and while some of the characters (including Razia) got on my nerves, I found that I was mostly touched by the earnestness of the story.

This was such a fascinating and disturbing read, especially in the way it reframes what motherhood can look like. The protagonist, Damaris, is a childless woman who adopts a stray female dog that she cares for like a human child to the point of obsession. While this sounds charming, the book is anything but, as it dives into the question of what it means to be a mother (and even what it means to be a bitch), as well as the deep issues that Damaris projects onto the dog that leads to terrible events.

Quintana doesn't shy away from describing the uglier aspects of human nature, such as the way jealousy, insecurity, and anger can consume us entirely. As a result, The Bitch definitely reads as more ruthless to the point of some probably finding the book completely cruel. Much to think about, but it's definitely not for the faint of heart (nor would it be a book I'd recommend for animal lovers, especially dog lovers). I didn't love or hate this, and if there's one complaint I have, it's that I wish some ideas were fleshed out a bit more.

I really wanted to like this one more than I did. I really liked the characters, the premise was fascinating, and it had other elements that made me think, "Wow, this might be one of my favorite books this year." Unfortunately, I found the execution rather messy, especially towards the end when too many perspectives started coming into play.

I understand authors who just want to tell the story and leave it up to the reader to figure things out themself, but I felt that Candon needed to give the reader a little more to work with. I found that I was confused more often than I would have liked. I stuck with it, though, because I was really drawn to the world (at least what I was able to make sense of it) and the characters. The characters were wonderfully complex in all their flaws, and I especially loved the disability representation.

But to return to my issues, I found that I was mostly frustrated while reading this book, which isn't exactly the mood you want to be in. When certain ideas were introduced, I wanted to learn more about them, but Candon often moved on and left me hanging. I felt that I was given a lot of fragments but they didn't quite fit together to create a full picture. Maybe I wasn't as engaged as I should have been (even though I'd say I was in my attempt to follow what's happening), but things didn't pan out the way I hoped.

This book might work better as a reread, so I might give this one another try in the future, especially if it turns out this book is part of a series.

I read The Goldfinch over five years ago and didn't particularly love or hate it. I thought it was a compelling Bildungsroman of sorts that was well-written, but I wasn't particularly attached to the characters or the story. I decided to reread this novel to see if my opinion changed (and I was in the mood to pick up a chunky book back when I started this).

My opinion certainly changed, but it was for the worse. This book did not age well by any means with all its racism, ableism, and classism. Tartt certainly writes with eloquence, but her writing is steeped with issues that left me cringing and frustrated. Something that caught my attention was the near absence of nonwhite characters in New York City, of all places, unless they were "the help." I'm not sure how I didn't catch this years ago, considering how glaring these details were.

I also found it even harder to sympathize with the protagonist, Theo, during this reread. The messiness of grief was well presented—even if it was a bit extreme with the addiction and alcoholism—but I was really unhappy with how Tartt went about Theo's relationships in such a dismissive way. He was so wrapped up in his own world that it negatively affected how he treated the people around him. Pippa is objectified in a Manic Pixie Dream Girl kind of way, while Kitsy was treated terribly. The queer experience that Theo had with Boris also went completely unaddressed, which makes me wonder why Tartt bothered adding this detail other than to shock the reader.

A disappointing reread, to say the least.

This was a really well-researched book on a phenomenal Black Briton, Ignatius Sancho. I remember coming across his name in my music studies, but this book was an eye-opening read into what his life was like as a Black man in eighteenth-century England. If you're looking for a deep dive into a fictionalized account of a historical figure, this novel may be for you.

That being said, I did find that the pacing was a little too slow for my taste, though things suddenly felt rushed towards the end. It also took some time to get used to the language, as Joseph wrote in a manner that was emulating how people during this period talked.

All-in-all, though, the story was told well. Joseph is also an actor, which comes through in this novel with some of its dramatic elements and how the story unfolded.

I found The Night Flowers boring, unfortunately. Switching perspectives between two women, Laura and Jean, the two eventually work together to try and solve a cold case. And, for some reason, Herchenroether decided to throw some supernatural moments that didn't quite work for me. It was distracting more than anything.

I felt as though Herchenroether was just constantly feeding me information, to the point where I wasn't sure what to do with all of it, other than hope that it all comes together at the end without it being too muddled. Laura and Jean read as characters with random traits and back stories slapped onto blank figures, crafted in a way that made them seem more complex than they actually were. I think what made their characterizations fail was that they felt disconnected from the plot and even their motives.

Herchenroether isn't a bad writer by any means, but I think there was a lot left to be desired in this novel with the way it was executed.

This was a tough collection to read. by which, I mean that it was dense. Perhaps as one could guess from the title of the collection, money is a central theme, and Bertram thinks broadly of what money means: to pay for something and to owe someone (or be owed), its ties to capitalism, and more. Other themes appear throughout this collection, such as the role of the body in relationship to gender, race, etc., as well as technology.

Bertram experiments a lot with form, and I actually really enjoyed it most in their "World Map" poems, which were done in collaboration with the graphic designer, Yaya (Thirada) Chanawichote. Another form of experimenting—and a really fascinating one, at that—is Bertram's use of AI in some poems. It definitely raises questions about what our relationship is with technology, and I'd be curious to know what more Bertram has done with this.

Again, this was a challenging collection, but a really thought-provoking one. I'm going to have to revisit it.

I don't read novellas very often, in part because I always find myself wanting more than what's allowed for something to be called a novella. Even Though I Knew the End was one of those instances. I was really drawn to the characters and the tender relationship between the main character and her partner. I was also impressed by the amount of worldbuilding Polk squeezed into this novella, which, again, makes me wish more could have been done.

All things considered though, this was a tightly written novella, with some good old-fashioned noir vibes with a hint of the supernatural. It was much more fast-paced than I expected, but Polk got their story across well. 

I enjoyed LaCour’s YA novel, We Are Okay, when I read it years ago, and I thought she did a wonderful job with her quiet exploration through grief. I haven’t read her other novels since, but when I found out that she was publishing a novel for an adult audience, I admit I was skeptical but interested to see what she would bring to the table.

Yerba Buena ended up being another dive into grief, about two teenage girls (who grow up over time in the book), and a tender queer love that blooms between those two characters. While my memory of We Are Okay is a bit fuzzy, having read it so long ago, I did feel as though I was reading a repackaged and messier version of it. LaCour was ambitious in her attempt to merge two different storylines into one. Unfortunately, I didn’t think she succeeded here, because the two stories were too different (even if the overarching themes were similar). It also didn’t help that the way she had the two characters’ stories merge was through a “love at first sight” moment. I found that with the attempt to have two distinct storylines, LaCour lost sight of fleshing out her characters into something more. I think this book would have been more successful if attention was placed on either Emilie’s or Sara’s storyline (probably the latter’s, if I’m honest), or even having two novellas that connected to each other.

I do want to praise LaCour for her beautiful writing, though, which was apparent even in We Are Okay. Relatedly, I thought her descriptions of Southern California (specifically the Los Angeles area) well-crafted. Despite the grief that exists in this book, you were still able to feel the warmth of the Californian sun.

I was really looking forward to this collection of short stories, especially as someone who enjoys some haunting atmospheres. Enríquez does a great job crafting an eerie Buenos Aires and some very dark plots for her stories, though I found some were more convincing than others. Unfortunately, I felt that something was missing in these stories and I really struggled to stay focused on this collection. I want to say the issue might be that almost all of them fell flat at the end for me. It could be that the author wanted to leave an air of mystery at the end of these stories, but I found that she was a bit unsuccessful on this front. It should also be noted that the short story, “Kids Who Come Back,” has a lot of transphobic slurs that I thought were entirely unnecessary and didn’t serve a purpose to the story (and, in fact, ruined it).

I’m still interested in reading Enríquez’s other works, but this collection was a bit of a letdown.