mayblegrace's reviews
93 reviews

Veers dangerously close to being performatively progessive at times, but this was a generally charming read. Character work was good. Raksh was obviously the best character. Amina was irritating but written well. I really loved the premise and the part on the island reminded me, weirdly, of a friendlier Annihilation. I did think that like... the complete lack of religious conflict didn't really add much to the plot. It felt like there was something missing. It's a bit like in River of Teeth (the hippo western) where there's like 1 single representative of each sexuality and gender, and while that's all very charming and fun in that it's unusual, I find that at times it can come across as a bit flat. 

Raksh, on the other hand, Raksh drives the entire rating up by a .5 star. He's just not in the book ENOUGH. 

I'm adding half a star for the following line:

This book had a huge premise and even though it was long, it still read like each storyline had been truncated in order to fit between the covers. I can't say i enjoyed the experience of reading this novel. The twins were strange and their behaviour didn't feel plausible, and by that I mean neither set of twins were compelling (yes, TWO sets of twins appear in this book). There were notes of a twisted Romeo and Juliet in the ending, and that had legs as a horror, but instead the teeth were pulled from that and we had a character called Robert finally completing his thesis only to abandon his lover and their child. 

Ok listen, Robert was in love with a woman called Elspeth (who is a twin), and she dies at the beginning and leaves her flat to her nieces, who are twins, and who are actually her daughters, only they don't know that and neither does Robert. The twins come to London. One of them (Valentina) falls in love with Robert and he fancies her too. The twins are like really attached to each other and the delicate feeble one feels trapped so she gets Elspeth (her ghost aunt/mother) to remove her soul so she can be separate from her overbearing twin. So she "dies". 

[If she'd have waited ✋ a measly six months, she could have had her independence WITHOUT killing herself. She was going to inherit a bunch of money and could have just bogged off and left the Overbearing Twin]

Then Robert takes her body out of her coffin and Elspeth is supposed to put her soul back in, but Elspeth goes into her body instead and shacks up with Robert. And then gets pregnant. And then Robert feels guilty, finishes his thesis, and vanishes and we don't find out what happens to him. Valentina just exists as a ghost in Highgate Cemetery and never gets to do anything she wanted to do because she's dead. Her twin is miserable as hell but manages to get a boyfriend (the son of a man with OCD who she kissed and tried to sleep with and also secretly dosed with medication so he could pluck up the courage to leave the flat and go to Amsterdam where his wife went when she couldn't deal with his OCD anymore.)

Oh and there was a switcheroo with the twins because Elspeth was paranoid so she got her twin to test the loyalty of her lover and in doing so the twin got pregnant so they switched the babies and - listen, there was a lot going on in this book. 

The ending was depressing. Niffenegger does this. She writes nice books and then gives them horrible endings. I wasn't impressed. And the writing wasn't as sexy as the Time Traveller's Wife either. At least that had interesting descriptions of paper making. 

Oh. She also didn't manage to evoke London successfully. I felt like I was in Chicago when I read TTTW, but this London felt fake as hell. And I've been spending a lot of time in London recently, so I'd know. 

I really liked this book; I thought it was funny and sharp, and the writing is sophisticated enough to make me feel good about reading it. There were sections that felt really unclear to me, especially when the narrative moved through one of the "fairy tale" sections. I preferred the more observational narrative bits, possibly because i was reading this book in huge gulps, so was approaching the meta sections (but the whole thing is metafiction!!) as something to "get through" in order to reach the main story. That being said, as a whole, this book feels very special and is definitely a good choice if you have a tempestuous relationship with someone you love very much and want to see that dynamic accurately portrayed on the printed page. 

This was very well written and quite funny. The storyline, unacceptable by modern standards, went where I expected it to. The characters were drawn in rough strokes, each member of the Brodie set basically conforming to a stereotype (but colourful nevertheless). Worth reading, but I do think I prefer Stella Gibbons to Muriel Spark. 

Felt like reading a new genre, and saying any more than that would be trite. Well done Ms Hammad. 

The first half of this book was nothing special. It was quite repetitive. The protagonist's determination to leave the village, which began as the primary motivation for her to do literally anything, petered out unexpectedly. I found the dialogue mismatched the time period - it felt very modern, but the book was set in like, some time before electricity and cars.

 The second half of the novel was actually very good. Finally, a book with real monsters in it. So what if they were rip off vampire/werewolves??? At least they were animalistic creatures, as opposed to a sort of vacuous horror that's never properly described. And there was an underlying political commentary that existed ALONGSIDE the monsters!! I was a big fan of the systemic change that occurred at the end [I love a book with a capitalist millowner].

Anyway, I added an entire star for the last 5 pages. The ending was masterfully done, unexpected, and a brave authorial decision. As YA goes, this was a more than acceptable offering. 

I don't, as a rule, appreciate women's revenge narratives, and this novel does contain elements of such. It's very rooted in contemporary culture - there are references to WhatsApp for example- and it doesn't feel like a particularly timeless piece of literature. I liked the character work and appreciated that the protagonist was complex. But I don't really know where the overarching point about mixed race heritage went and think it could have been explored in a clearer way. Not bad, but not something I'd read again. 

About as subtle as a brick to the face, but quite a rollicking read. Fast paced, with insufferable characters and some crippling political commentary. Worth a read if you like American literature and aren't too picky about how delicately an author uses allegory.