Asymmetry by Lisa Hallifay
Sometimes, books have “reading group” questions at the back, and most of the time, I don’t know about these sections until I get to the back of the book. This is one of those books where I wish I’d read the questions before going into it. They’re a little spoilery, but they would have given my brain something better to chew on than the things it did chew on while I tried to figure out this book. I would say it’s a good book, well […]
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
Were we all a little burned out on dystopic YA fiction for a while there? Yeah, and the movie studios sure didn’t help. Yet here in 2020, something about a pandemic has made dystopic fiction that is specifically YA a lot more appealing though, so who better to reignite my interest in the genre than Susanne Collins herself? Did I get so obsessively into the Hunger Games trilogy back in ’12 that I neglected to finish my Masters thesis on time and had to take […]
Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval
I picked up this book because I wanted something atmospheric. When daylight savings hits and I stop experiencing sunlight I get into these funks and all I want is deep base and prose the blurs the line between poetry and description, and narratives that aren’t but could be. I found this book on a list of books similar to Annihilation, so if you liked the atmosphere woven through that story, and want something with even less coherent narrative, this is it. You’ve found that weird […]
Wilder Girls by Rory Power
I’ve confessed before that I have a habit of buying books based on their covers. I totally bought this book based on the cover. I read the summary and I was like “hm.. it’s probably YA” and I don’t tend to buy YA these days, but then I said “I don’t care- that cover art!” So, it is YA, and like the cover, it’s very, very good YA. I’d say it wears it’s inspiration from Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation trilogy proudly, and does a lot of […]
Zazen by Vanessa Veselka
Zazen’s protagonist, Della, exists somewhere between memory, fever dream, and mental illness. She’s flamed out of her doctoral work and is working at a vegan restaurant, the child of wannabe west-coast revolutionaries and surrounded by people she loathes for the way they wear their politics in everything they do. To say Della is surrounded by Social Justice Warriors is a bit of an understatement. She yearns to do more than just talk or just shop according to impossible principles, and she loathes the status quo. […]
