moonytoast's reviews
268 reviews

 Thank you so much to Netgalley and William Morrow for providing me with a digital ARC of this book!

Chorine is a searing, deranged coming-of-age story and an apt depiction of the horrors at the intersection of girlhood and competitive athletics. It's wild and unapologetically, viscerally raw. The story follows Ren Yu, a young girl obsessed with water and the mythology of mermaids who–under the devastating weight of competitive swimming–devises to shed her human form and transform into her true self: a mermaid. Her ascension into her true self is a brilliant vision of body horror.

There’s such a depth and complexity to Ren Yu that the narrative style captures and lures the reader in like a siren… I started reading this book and it’s so easy to fall into the story and completely forget a world exists outside of the one Jade Song constructs. Ren's first person narration is interjected throughout with literal messages-in-a-bottle from Cathy, Ren's friend and fellow swim team member, further detailing the relationship between the two of them and providing more insight into the timeline leading up to Ren’s grand transformation. Song's prose is strikingly evocative and one of my favorite aspects of this book. (Don't ask me how many whole paragraphs I have highlighted on my e-ARC.)

There something twisted yet beautiful about the ending—Ren Yu achieves her escape into the water and finds the home she has always desired, but at a cost. In that sense, it’s almost reminiscent of traditional mermaid folklore where the ending is not always entirely happy.

In conclusion: GIVE! ME! MORE! DERANGED! COMING-OF-AGE! TEEN! GIRL! NARRATIVES! 

Natalie Haynes is slowly becoming one of my favorite authors and I'm glad to say I enjoyed Stone Blind as much, perhaps more, than I expected given my experience with her other works regarding Greek myths. She has a particular style that I really love where certain perspectives within the narrative will seem to engage in conversation with the reader of the story, both here and in A Thousand Ships.

As someone whose first encounter with much of Greek myths was in Percy Jackson & the Olympians, I think the way that Haynes conveys these stories is quite engaging and serves to reframe the narrative around Medusa and the Gorgons as supposed monsters as well as the standard perception of Perseus' quest to retrieve the head of one of the Gorgons. Here, Medusa is a living, breathing character whose immortal Gorgon sisters are also made human through their fears and anxieties about protecting Medusa from harm... and the raw devastation in their failure to do so. In a twist of our common understanding of the Greek myth, Haynes paints Perseus as a coward whose accompliments are solely due to excessive aid from multiple gods on behalf of Zeus. Here, he is a coward that uses the Gorgoneion at the mere inkling of conflict or obstacle to his goals and unabashedly revels in the mass death it causes, regardless of whether the victims are guilty or innocent of some slight against him. It is a far cry from the story told in Percy Jackson, but I think that it holds much more truth about the way men acquire and wield power. 

Once again, Haynes manages to weave together a beautiful tapestry of myth and breathes new life into this story of a woman repeatedly violated by the whims of the gods. (Also: Haynes is an excellent narrator and I definitely recommend listening to the audiobooks of her work if you're an audiobook reader and love Greek myth retellings!) 

My current ranking of Hayne's work that I've read: 
1. A Thousand Ships
2. Stone Blind
3. Pandora's Jar 

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

Camp Zero is a promising work of literary dystopian fiction that interrogates the intersection of gender, socioeconomic class, and climate change in the remote setting of the Canadian Arctic, where the motivations and reasons behind the camp’s creation are more disreputable than they first seem. The story is told from three points of view: Rose, a young woman working as an escort with the hope of securing a future for herself and her mother; Grant, a young man trying to escape his wealthy family background; and White Alice, a group of women tasked with a scientific expedition in the far north of Canada.

Set in the near-future of 2049, the worldbuilding of Camp Zero feels well-grounded both conceptually and visually in how Sterling paints a picture of Earth in the wake of global warming. It integrates a vision of how the worsening climate crisis would impact different groups, particularly from a class standpoint. The Floating City and Meyer’s idea of creating a settlement for Americans in the Canadian Arctic to escape the ravages of the climate crisis feel evocative of the proposals we’ve seen in recent years coming from the uber-rich about space exploration and colonizing the moon. We repeatedly hear and witness the wealthy elite absolve themselves of the consequences of the climate crisis, while characters like Rose and her mother live on the meager scraps left behind and lose everything in the wake of extreme weather events.

I found the worldbuilding and characters extremely compelling—they all feel fully realized and each have their own beliefs and motivations connected to their unique experience within the climate-ravaged world Sterling created. White Alice reminded me in a way of the expedition in Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation with the emphasis on a group of exclusively women and their isolation from the outside world. Their shift over the course of the novel into a narrative of resilience and survival—and their unwavering willingness to kill in order to maintain their home—was fascinating. I also enjoyed Rose as a kind of central protagonist. The more I learned about her backstory and her motivations, I was increasingly rooting for her… not in the sense of rooting for her to successfully complete the task Damien set out for her, but for her to find her own path to freedom.

I think the only real flaw I have with Camp Zero is its somewhat muddled third act. The way these three narratives finally weave together made me so excited, but then I realized I was already about 90% of the way through the book.

Grant’s decision to leave camp, the revelation of White Alice, the destruction of the campsite, and Nari’s escape from Meyer

all felt a bit rushed. I don’t mind the open ending—given the enormity of their situation and the negligible chance that killing Damien would solve their world’s problems, it’s honestly a solid decision to leave the story there instead of trying to perfectly tie everything up with a bow. I just wish that the third act had more breathing room and was a bit more fleshed out to avoid the weird sense of pacing at the end. 

Overall, a great addition to the dystopian genre and I look forward to seeing more from Michelle Min Sterling!

atmospheric, full of yearning and magic…. definitely a top tier YA fantasy book ❤️ 


ALSO FUCK EVELYN WELTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

kinda wish i had read these books as a kid but also thank GOD i didn’t cause they would have consumed my entire being…… i would have been begging my parents for a badass rapier and fencing lessons and buying a giant black trench coat to cosplay anthony lockwood 💀

is there a high likelihood i might still do that now that i have adult money and am obsessed with the show????? yeah

if you want a YA series with solid found family vibes, spooky ghosts, and unique worldbuilding where the government actively exploits children and puts them in imminent danger but it actually reckons with that instead of pretending everything is fine…. [cough] theseriesthatshallnotbenamed [cough]… you should check this out! 

minus one star for a lack of george/lucy friendship bonding moments cause those were some of my favorite bits from the show 

the title is the most interesting bit of this book but it was still a decent, quick read for anyone who wants to learn a bit more about the science and customs around caring for the dead

TEMPORARY DNF — i will be getting back to this at some point but i gotta tap out for a minute cause it’s giving me Bridget Jones’ Diary levels of secondhand embarrassment

RTC… which will come once the HCP Union is able to negotiate a fair contract for their workers. 

Part memoir, part love letter to the natural world, this was such a heartfelt dose of warmth and poetry about a slew of fascinating plants and creatures that the author ties back to her own experiences in a beautiful way. Perfect for fans of The Anthropocene Reviewed. 

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

Once the action finally kicks in after a lengthy stint of character expositions and building the backdrop to this young adult thriller, Five Survive manages to create a compellingly tense story rife with mystery, murder, and aching wound of grief.

I think thrillers live or die by two things: character and setting. Five Survive generally succeeds on both fronts.

The first comes down to how Red Kenny grew on me over the course of the book. She’s a character whose internal monologue was, at times, mildly annoying. (Take a shot every time she says something along the lines, “It can’t be my secret. No one knows about the plan. That’s the whole point.” You’ll be drunker than Simon by the halfway point.) However, there’s something genuine about her…. not in terms of candor, but rather Red’s heart. There's the searing guilt at her core from years of her blaming herself for her mother's death, but the walls she tries and fails to put up to block those thoughts and emotions don't stop her from caring and loving in a deep way. Also, the more she started to buck up against Oliver’s domineering plans for the group, the more I liked her.

The second is how the setting of the RV elevates the thriller from an otherwise 'we're trapped in the middle of nowhere with a killer' story to one where the setting is almost a character in itself. The way they have to utilize items in the RV to protect themselves and attempt to escape--the flimsy mattress and ripped up suitcase for covering the windows--to the way it slowly builds a sense of claustrophobia in the narrative, the characters becoming more and more on top of each other as the night goes on. It forces the author and the characters to be smarter with their limited choices.

Final mildly-spoiler notes: I felt like there where a number of plot twists that were relatively easy to predict, I will give Miss Holly Jackson credit where it's due... THE DOORBELL REVEAL???!?? Even though I already had the inkling about who killed Red’s mother, I literally pushed back my chair and stood up to shout. 

As someone who doesn’t typically reach for thrillers when choosing their next read, I definitely enjoyed this book! (minus one star for some mild romanticizing of cops)