moonytoast's reviews
268 reviews

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati

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adventurous dark emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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You Just Need to Lose Weight: And 19 Other Myths about Fat People by Aubrey Gordon

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informative reflective

4.0

this is my coming out as a maintenance phase girlie

while this touches on a number of things already discussed by aubrey and michael in various episodes of their podcast, i think it does a great job as the maintenance phase: extended mythbusters edition and i appreciate the importance it calls to intersectionality and inclusion of further reading suggestions like fearing the black body. definitely recommend for those actively doing the work to unlearn their anti-fat bias and the myths we have been told about diet culture!!!!
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Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

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adventurous funny tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Loveable characters? Yes

4.5

the most emotionally charged and tense action-fueled installment in the murderbot diaries so far and i enjoyed every single moment of it 
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Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

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adventurous challenging tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

emotionally devastating…. 11/10
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Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

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adventurous funny mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Loveable characters? Yes

3.5

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Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

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challenging emotional hopeful slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Press for providing me with a digital ARC of this book! (Please ignore the quite embarrassing fact this is several months late.)
 
Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts is a slow, tense yet tender exploration of a family separated in the wake of a dystopian future eerily similar to our contemporary United States and the bond between a mother and the son she had to abandon. It is the definitive dystopian work of this burgeoning decade, pulling intensely from a number of current issues facing America, including the push for book bans in both school and public libraries in the name of protecting children, growing anti-Asian sentiment exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the history (and present) of removing children from their families as a means of political control. While it does suffer from rather heavy-handed exposition for a sizable chunk of the novel, Ng's most recent novel still shines when it focuses on the power of words and the tenuous dynamic between the protagonist, Bird Gardner, and his mother. 
 
The novel is told from two perspectives, Bird Gardner and his mother, Margaret Miu, as they go on a journey to reunite and understand who each other has become in their absence against the backdrop of a growing, odd little rebellion. Bird can barely remember life with his mother before she was taken by him due to her violations of PACT—Preserving American Culture and Traditions—which allow for children to be removed from their homes and separated from their parents in the name of preventing the spread of "dangerous" or "un-American" views. Suddenly, Bird receives a mysterious postcard from her, which sends him on a quest that has him traversing the hollow shells of public libraries and the streets of New York City to find his mother. When he finds her, Margaret shares why she had to leave him and, afterwards, all the testimonials she's gathered of other parents whose children were taken under PACT. The two slowly rebuild their bond as Margaret finalizes her act of defiance and an old promise to a mother: tell their stories. 
 
As always, Celeste Ng's prose is beautifully rendered. She has such a knack for creative, compelling metaphors that serve to conjure a distinct image and tone throughout all her books. It makes moments of tenderness, of violence, of hope all the more guttural to the reader. 
 
"Her cries wordless sounds, hanging in the air like shards of glass." 
 
My one qualm, as stated earlier, is that the novel is particularly heavy-handed with the exposition towards the middle half of this book once Bird and Margaret are reunited. I think it is important to delve into the backstory of Margaret to understand her willing naivety and the way her perspective on PACT shifts once her own words became a calling card for anti-PACT sentiment and protests against the re-placement of children. However, it grinds the momentum to a halt with extended flashbacks which, at moments, feel more like a history textbook. Unfortunately, the narrative and Bird's perspective as a child who cannot remember the Crisis strains against the idea of "show, don't tell" and struggles to convey exposition in a seemingly organic manner. 
 
I think dystopian fiction lives or dies by its conclusion and Our Missing Hearts is no exception. I remember reading both 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 in my senior year of high school as part of a dystopian unit for my AP Literature class. I enjoyed both, but I always preferred the latter due to its more ambiguous, but still hopeful ending. I will not spoil the ending of this book for those who have not read it, but there is a solid balance of stakes and hope for the future of this United States. It recognizes that part of the success of discriminatory and fascist institutions is individualism and a willing ignorance to the harms being committed against others. Others whose full humanity you do not recognize because they are not within your immediate circle of community. The possibility of solidarity is not entirely lost, though, and the hope and perseverance that the novel closes on is poignant and actually made me tear up while reading. 
 
CONTENT WARNINGS: Graphic anti-Asian racism, on-page violent hate crime (p. 130-131), anti-Asian racial slurs, gun violence/police brutality, physical violence, death, moderate themes of abandonment 
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The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

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challenging emotional tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

 reading this again after probably a decade is such an odd experience... i would 100% agree that it holds up after all these years and arguably has gotten more poignant with age


one note: i think katniss is genuinely in love with peeta by the end, but is too emotionally constipated from childhood trauma to be able to recognize that or admit it to herself. the moment peeta realizes and she tries to say it wasn't all pretend feels very heath ledger in "10 things i hate about you" and her inability to untangle that web or real-or-pretend she created in the arena feels so heartbreaking when you remember the fact that, at the end of everything, katniss is a child.
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Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

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adventurous funny tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

murderbot ur so right….. armor doesn’t have pockets 😢
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The Whispering Skull by Jonathan Stroud

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adventurous funny mysterious
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No

3.5

it's interesting to see the minute or explicit divergences that the show made from this book (compared to the first book in the series)... i think i generally appreciate the changes they made to increase tension/enhance the internal conflict george is experiencing post-exposure to the bone glass
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Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

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

4.0

 Thank you to Netgalley and Tordotcom for providing me with a digital ARC of this book! 

Untethered Sky is a solid, engaging fantasy novella inspired by Persian and Arabian folklore which details the story of a young girl, Ester, whose mother and brother are lost to the brutality of a raging manticore. In this world Fonda Lee constructs, there is only one natural predator that can rival and potentially cull a manticore: the roc, a giant falcon featured in Persian myth. Ester then resolves herself to a life of hunting and killing manticores by training to become a ruhker, a highly skilled roc trainer. 

Told from the first person perspective of Ester, the story follows her as she slowly develops a trusting relationship with the adolescent roc she is tasked to train named Zahra and shifts from apprentice at the Royal Mews to a fully-fledged manticore hunter. The trusting—yet deeply tenuous—relationship between Ester and Zahra is the cornerstone and highlight of the novella. Lee plays heavily on this concept of the relationship between humankind and nature through the complex dynamic ruhkers have with their rocs. Ruhkers build an intensely personal attachment with their rocs while also maintaining the understanding that these are wild creatures who cannot be owned or reciprocate such attachments. 

Despite its length, Untethered Sky is full of complexity and a luscious, intricately carved world tattered by the existence and destruction of manticores. This is my first foray into Fonda Lee’s work and I’m impressed by her concise yet deeply evocative writing style here. The prose never feels understated and deftly conveys the complexity of Ester’s narrative journey which culminates with her killing the heterochromic-eyed manticore... at a cost. 

A sharply earnest coming-of-age fantasy story about finding one’s calling, the power of mythical beasts, and how our love for a wild animal cannot restrain them—yet we care for them anyway. 

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