marywahlmeierbracciano's reviews
828 reviews

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

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challenging slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Assembly by Natasha Brown

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challenging tense fast-paced
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.5

This haunting book is sure to get you out of a reading slump.  Calculated and spare, it follows an accomplished Black British woman in finance as she navigates workplace misogynoir, a medical diagnosis, and her relationship with her boyfriend—a white man of old money.  In sharp, evocative fragments, she contemplates the part she plays in the system that disenfranchises people like her but even more so interrogates the complicity of her boyfriend’s family.
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Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

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challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No

4.5

In rural Iceland, a young man loses his best and only friend while cod fishing in the polar sea. They both loved poetry, had memorized verses to recite over long journeys. Now the boy feels lost and struggles to find the will to live. With exquisite language, allegory, and an intense sense of place, the comparison to Cormac McCarthy is entirely appropriate.
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Consider the Turkey by Peter Singer

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challenging dark informative sad fast-paced

4.75

Peter Singer's book on the journey of the factory-farmed turkey is mercifully concise as it contains such horrible truths about the plight of these beautiful birds.  Even I, as a vegan, was shocked.  Singer gets right to the point and doesn't waver.  He even offers an option for those who "must" have turkey at their holiday meal: i.e., a pasture-raised heritage breed, rather then the white broad-breasted monstrosity humans have bred for profitability.  If you're going to eat them, please inform yourself of all in which you are complicit.
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Everything Is Poison by Joy McCullough

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challenging medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Much like her debut, Blood Water Paint, Joy McCullough’s Everything Is Poison is inspired by a real historical figure, sidesteps romance, and packs a powerful feminist message.  Adapted from a stage play, this novel follows a group of women running an apothecary in seventeenth-century Rome, interspersed with haunting vignettes in verse.  Aside from providing remedies for a variety of ailments and maladies, their mission is to help those who have nowhere else to turn—from domestic violence or an unwanted pregnancy, perhaps.  This is a book about honoring and continuing the legacy of the women who came before.  Readers of Dana Schwartz’s Anatomy should check it out.
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I Dream of Joni: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots by Henry Alford

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informative slow-paced

4.0

I very much enjoyed Henry Alford’s humorous voice and commentary in I Dream of Joni, a book that is about Joni but also about what she means to people, including the author.  Moments of Joni’s life are told in nonlinear snapshot form, with a linear overarching structure concerning her in relation to her daughter.  It’s a unique and personal book about the kaleidoscope that is Joni Mitchell, and it doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff.
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The Tea Dragon Tapestry by K. O'Neill

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relaxing slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Loveable characters? Yes

4.5

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elseship: an unrequited affair by Tree Abraham

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emotional reflective slow-paced

4.5

Elseship is an account of a complicated relationship for which there is no name.  Tree Abraham falls in love with her housemate, who does not feel the same, and after this love is professed, the two remain housemates and maintain an intense friendship that is more than friendship.  In this work of creative, lyric nonfiction, Abraham’s incredibly intimate musings and confessions are interspersed with photos and illustrations concerning the first year of this relationship, all loosely organized around the eight Greek words for love.  I found it fascinating and compulsively readable.
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The Tea Dragon Festival by K. O'Neill

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hopeful relaxing

4.75

Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe

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challenging dark funny medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

After hundreds of years of self-cultivation, two snakes—sworn sisters, now immortal—take on human forms.  For one, the goal is to become the perfect woman; the other is more interested in getting high on life—all while keeping their true selves secret.  Their fierce love for each other borders on erotic, and it never fails to bring them back together after decades apart.  They reunite in present-day Singapore, made semi-dystopian by government overreach.  This darkly funny novel boldly confronts assimilation and celebrates queerness and found family.
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