justabean_reads's reviews
1278 reviews

Very cutesy YA space shenanigans, which is exactly as advertised, I'm just not in the mood for quippy new adults making bad choices.

The setting is really interesting, but I could not handle the actual writing. Stuff we already know is constantly repeated, and the obvious is frequently stated. I felt like it was written for someone who's only half paying attention while they're doing something else.

So this has no paragraph breaks or dialogue punctuation, and very few full stops (like one every couple pages). I do not have the energy to parse it.

I've been theoretically reading this for a month now, but I keep putting it down and forgetting it exists. I give up.

It's too bad, as teen!me probably would have adored lesbian knights and a bunch of court politics, but I'm just not that invested.

Speaking of bleak CanLit, I was expecting time travel shenanigans, and I got police state. I love the premise of this: a world where everyone can access the same town either twenty years in the future or twenty years in the past, and some neat mechanisms and worldbuilding around what that's does to a society. (I do have questions like "if the whole world is just infinite repetitions of this one small city with its handful of industries, where do the cars come from?" but the book clearly doesn't care, and I guess I shouldn't either.)

Unfortunately, a lot of the book is about how society's response to the ability to go back and time and change things up is "police state." Which I guess is how it's likely to go, but then the main character spends most of the book as a cog in those gears, and almost every single character is deeply unpleasant and there's a lot of sexual violence (again, because police state). I liked the general shape of the plot, and how the situation resolved, but it was a bit of a grind to get there.

Still, impressive for a first novel, and I'm keeping an eye on Howard and what he does next.

(Narrator was Cindy Kay, so I kept expecting the Singing Hills crowd to show up.) 

Memoir of a kid growing up in extreme poverty in rural Newfoundland, his many health problems, his fucked up family, and absolutely everyone's refusal to accept social services of any kind. (And yes, I get that social services are very flawed and classist, but also the kid nearly died multiple times!)

I want to go back in time and tell this guy's parents about communism. (And, possibly, AA.)

This got the Stephen Leacock Medal for humour, and I think that was largely based on the kid's grandma's amazing Newfie turns of phrase ("You're just about fast enough to catch your death, but not any faster.") Otherwise, it's wall to wall substance abuse, illness and bullying, with occasional nice scenes with the grandma. Very bleak, even for CanLit.

(And now I feel mean for dissing this guy's actual childhood.) 

I did not like this book. Part of it is that I suspect domestic thrillers aren't my genre, possibly because the premise seems very conservative? This is the second year in a row Canada Reads book about middle-class white people has been pitched as "relatable," and the second year in a row where I'm not convinced any human person has ever acted like either of the point of view characters.

Basically, a young woman gets kicked out of her house and becomes a live-in nanny, but something is wrong. In one timeline, the nanny tries to work out what's going on, and the other the wife in the household has a massive trauma reaction to whatever shit went down with the nanny. Which we don't find out about until the last chapter, of course. I admit I'm not currently in the mood for emotionally and financially vulnerable nannies, given recent court cases, so that didn't help. But even without being accidentally topical, it's just a weird weird story, where I didn't feel like I was pinging with the emotional reactions the book wanted from me. The twist at the end was very silly.

Also, are the straights okay? Do we know? Has anyone checked in on them recently? Specifically, the wife is fascinated by the twenty-something nanny, to the point of taking pictures of her while she's sleeping, and while she's nude, and constantly thinking about how pretty she is. But there's never any question of sexual tension between them? Instead it's like "the mother I never had" from the nanny, who also thinks a lot about how the wife looks. I'd have enjoyed this at least 60% more if it was some sort of dark sapphic situation, but alas. 

Absolutely gorgeous book about longing and family and missed chances. Which is to say it's also sad! Told largely in the second person by an unknown narrator, Chacour fallows the life of a Levantine Christian growing up in Egypt in the 1970s and '80s, and his place in the Francophone community in Cairo, and how he fell in love with another man.

The second person was interesting here, as we don't start hearing "I/my/mine" until near the half way point, and when we do it recontextualises everything that came before. It distanced the reader from what the main character was feeling by forcing a space between him and the reader. It's probably going to be love it or hate it, but I thought it worked, especially with the contrast we later learn, and to the more immediate style of the first person sections.

I was surprised it was a first novel, as the structure and style both feel very mature. I hope Chacour writes more, and that it gets translated into English. 

Very enjoyable if you're into M/F romantasy with most of those tropes, which I often am. It claims to be a gender-flipped take on Beauty and the Beast, which is true only in the loosest sense of that, and is mostly a romance between a mysterious stranger and a princess who sometimes turns into a beast, dealing with both of their families, spread across multiple timelines. It's vaguely set in Ireland in the Middle Ages, minus the Christianity, plus potatoes and chocolate. The potatoes are not explained.

And, look, the prose is not good. It's not terrible, but there needed to be 70% fewer chess metaphors, and probably a similar decrease in adjectives. I don't think the cute banter was nearly as cute as the author thought it was, and do think the heroine should've eaten the hero very early in.

However, I did end up really enjoying how the timelines came together (even if I thought she should've been running all three at once, not A/B for the first half, then A/C in the second), and the romance worked out to a point where the real choices they had to make at the end felt earned and in character. Also, there was a fabulous "Summon bigger fish" moment later in. I'm not rushing out to nominate this for a Hugo Award (though I'd love/hate to see the reaction to romantasy on the shortlist, lol), but I had a good time. 

This was the one Mandel published before Station Eleven when she was still with a small press. It's extremely her. Of her newer books, it probably has the most in common with The Glass Hotel, in her interest in exploring morality versus legality, in the jumbled timeline, and for the shipping company subplot. We follow a man who slid into being a corporate drone to get away from his family's criminal tendencies, but the escape ends up not being sustainable. This is not told in any kind of linear fashion, or with any clear cut answers about what the right choices might be (though clearly some are pretty dubious). I liked the humour, and the way that Mandel gently prods at her characters, and never lets them rest easily. Less gay than her more recent stuff.

Mandel has said that her next book will connect back to this one, and I'm really looking forward to finding out how. The surviving characters could go a lot of ways (and being Mandel, she doesn't need to use just the surviving characters).