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| 0553448188
| 9780553448184
| 0553448188
| 3.64
| 281,850
| Oct 30, 2007
| Feb 02, 2016
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liked it
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My introduction to the fiction of South Korean author Han Kang is The Vegetarian. Published in 2007, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, thi
My introduction to the fiction of South Korean author Han Kang is The Vegetarian. Published in 2007, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, this is my dive bar book club's January 2025 assignment. That and its length--50,000 or so words, barely qualifying this as a novel as opposed to a novella--made this seem like a good way to get back into reading fiction, something I've taken six months off from. This is a three-part novel set in present day Seoul. These sections concern Kim Yeong-hye, a thoroughly average young wife who perplexes all those who come into contact with her by waking one morning and refusing to eat meat. Yeong-hye alludes to a dream she had, the context of which seems too complex for her to explain to anyone. From there, Yeong-hye's ability to care for herself--eating anything, even fruits and vegetables--slip away. Yeong-hye's descent into madness is related by her husband Mr. Cheong, unnamed brother-in-law and older sister In-hye. The prose is exquisite. Very terse but impactful. I could see everything clearly. If I had to name the thing Han seems most fascinated by, it's female anatomy. Anyone anticipating descriptions of food or drink or a guidebook on how to cut meat and dairy from your diet in 2025 will be disappointed. This isn't that sort of book about vegetarians. It's an allegory for how removed we've become from nature, I think. As Yeong-hye's father points out, our ancestors were carnivores and vegetarian diets are something relatively new to the human race, but I think Yeong-hye's dream is to live as a tree lives. I think she'd make a wonderful tree, but unfortunately, wakes up in a woman's body. There wasn't anything in the novel that threw me across the room. Characters react to Yeong-hye's spell in various ways, the men of the novel behaving in an appallingly awful way, while her sister is the only one to try to help. The most compelling character appears in the third section, a psychiatric patient named Hee-joo, receiving treatment for alcoholism and hypomania who by virtue of being the healthiest patient, looks after those unable to care for themselves, like Yeong-hye. I'd have liked to read a novel told completely in her voice, with Yeong-hye and her sister minor characters, but here I go rewriting the Nobel Prize winner ... It feels good to get back into reading and discussing books with those both near and far away, if for no other reason that Han's prose was a tall drink of water with lime. First sentence: Before my wife turned vegetarian, I'd always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way. Favorite quote: When a patient went missing, one possibility was that they had gone down from the mountains and already got as far as Maseok, or the opposite possibility, that they had in fact gone deeper into the mountains. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 25, 2024
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Jan 2025
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Jan 01, 2025
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Hardcover
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| 0812998626
| 9780812998627
| 0812998626
| 3.28
| 101,795
| May 16, 2023
| May 16, 2023
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really liked it
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My 500th book review is for The Guest by Emma Cline. Published in 2023, this is the author's second novel, her follow-up to The Girls. Like that book,
My 500th book review is for The Guest by Emma Cline. Published in 2023, this is the author's second novel, her follow-up to The Girls. Like that book, its power isn't in what happens but what the reader is allowed to imagine happens or has happened. It features many of the characteristics of the so-called "hot sad girl" novel--in which a beautiful but alienated young woman drifts through her existence, often with the assistance of drugs or alcohol--but subverts tropes by making the reader an active participant in the story rather than act on us. Alex (no last name, no ethnicity implied) is a twenty-two-year-old woman whose existence has been reduced to the favors she can elicit from men. After spending almost two weeks living comfortably with an art dealer in his Long Island beach house, Alex is expelled. With no money, no friends (or people willing to remain her friend), and an erratic ex-con she stole from texting her, Alex chooses to live by her wits for six days until she can crash her lover's Labor Day party, at which she's certain all will be forgiven. One of the visceral qualities of The Guest is how Cline reduces Alex's world to the whims of whatever patron she's attached herself to for survival. One social miscue or errant look could mean being forced onto the street. It's never spelled out what this woman's trade is. Alex reaps all the penalties of sex work--subject to the gratitude of her clients as well as their wrath--with none of the rewards, like a bankroll, or a pimp who invests in her. She doesn't use bathrooms as much as she pilfers them, for painkillers first and foremost. It's a feral existence. Often taking place on or near a beach, The Guest meets some of the standards of a summer or beach read, but rather than dispense candy, challenges the reader. This isn't the Hollywood version of a con woman on the make, it's the French New Wave version. Cline follows Alex around with absolute freedom, even if it leads to mundane encounters or repetitive conversations with men capable of little more. Her style is the literary equivalent of natural lighting or handheld camera: clean prose, rejection of plot, and a willingness to go off on tangents. I found this liberating and ultimately, very exciting. First paragraph: This was August. The ocean was warm, and warmer every day. Memorable prose: She hadn’t ruined anything. Misfortune hadn’t touched Alex; it had only come close enough that she felt the cold air of a different outcome hurtling past. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 13, 2023
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Dec 02, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0449213943
| 9780449213940
| B00EJ3APSG
| 4.10
| 493,949
| 1928
| Jan 01, 1987
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it was amazing
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My introduction to the fiction of Erich Maria Remarque is All Quiet on the Western Front. Published in 1929, this was a book club assignment that surp
My introduction to the fiction of Erich Maria Remarque is All Quiet on the Western Front. Published in 1929, this was a book club assignment that surprised me with its power and how intimately I related to it. Remarque was a veteran of the Great War fighting in the Imperial German Army against the French, English and Americans. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1939 but after World War II, moved to Switzerland to spend the rest of his life. It boggles my mind that he survived the meat grinder portrayed in this book only to watch some of his own countrymen launch a global war and genocide within twenty years. The story is the first person account of Paul Bäumer, a twenty-year-old soldier engaged on the western front in France. Several of the men in Paul's platoon are schoolmates and he recounts how they were urged to volunteer by their schoolmasters. He is mentored by an older soldier named Katczinsky who demonstrates a preternatural ability to forage for food, which grows in short supply as the war drags on. Their platoon are shelled by limitless artillery, attacked by poisonous gas, defend their food stores from rats and are sent on patrols into no-man's land where they might jump into a crater occupied by the enemy. The novel is remarkably well-written, with short, illustrative paragraphs that document the life of a soldier. -- We are at rest five miles behind the front. Yesterday we were relieved, and now our bellies are full of beef and haricot beans. We are satisfied and at peace. Each man has another mess-tin full for the evening; and, what is more, there is a double ration of sausage and bread. That puts a man in fine trim. We have not had such luck as this for a long time. The cook with his carroty head is begging us to eat; he beckons with his ladle to every one that passes, and spoons him out a great dollop. He does not see how he can empty his stewpot in time for coffee. Tjaden and Müller have produced two washbasins and had them filled up to the brim as a reserve. In Tjaden this is voracity; in Müller it is foresight. Where Tjaden outs in all is a mystery, for he is and always will be thin as a rake. --Kantorek had been our schoolmaster, a stern little man in a grey tail-coat, with a face like a shrew mouse. He was about the same size as Corporal Himmelstoss, the "terror of Klosterberg." It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men. They are so much more energetic and uncompromising than the big fellows. I have always taken good care to keep out of sections with small company commanders. They are mostly confounded little martinets. -- To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself. -- The parachutes are turned to more practical uses. According to the size of the bust three or perhaps four will make a blouse. Kropp and I use them as handkerchiefs. The others will send them home. If the women could see at what risk these bits of rag are often obtained, they would be horrified. -- Attack, counter-attack, charge, repulse--these are words, but what things they signify! We have lost a good many men, mostly recruits. Reinforcements have again been sent up to our sector. They are one of the new regiments, composed almost entirely of young fellows just called up. They have hardly had any training, and are sent into the field with only a theoretical knowledge. They do know what a hand-grenade is, it is true, but they have very little idea of cover, and what is most important of all, have no eye for it. A fold in the ground has to be quite eighteen inches high before they can see it. Although we need reinforcement, the recruits give us almost more trouble than they are worth. They are helpless in the grim fighting area, they fall like flies. Modern trench-warfare demands knowledge and experience; a man must have a feeling for the contours of the ground, an ear for the sound and character of shells, must be able to decide beforehand where they will drop, how they will burst, and how to shelter from them. While the book is not nearly as graphic as it could've been--Remarque writes far too tersely for long gory descriptions--what did strike me is how recently warfare was conducted by sacrificing hundreds of thousands of teenage boys, with so many killed at once that bodies are left to the rats. This made me wonder what generations a hundred years from now will say about the warfare of today. This would be an excellent book to assign high school students, particularly those considering the military, though I fear it wouldn't make the nearly the impact on invincible young men as it should. p.s. My book club meeting was attended by four other men, a new record. One is a Vietnam veteran and the other a Marine who served in Grenada and Beirut. Both gave the book very high marks. ...more |
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1
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Apr 04, 2023
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Apr 11, 2023
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Mar 24, 2023
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1101903732
| 9781101903735
| 1101903732
| 3.86
| 6,374
| Mar 30, 2016
| Apr 05, 2016
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it was amazing
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My introduction to the fiction of Bill Beverly is his debut novel, Dodgers. Published in 2016, this is a stark, imaginatively rendered, compulsive rea
My introduction to the fiction of Bill Beverly is his debut novel, Dodgers. Published in 2016, this is a stark, imaginatively rendered, compulsive read. If Don Winslow were more journalist than scenarist, he might write a book like this. It's a road story, not legitimately a Los Angeles one, and I think the novel is far better for it. Sometimes, books set in a specific culture are prisoner to the culture they're trying to portray. They're too confined, waiting to break out or breathe. In setting four young men--two of them children, really--cross country to commit a murder, Beverly gives the novel momentum. And nothing tells us about the nature of a person like a long road trip. In the first of several cues that the author delivers with no elaboration, "East" is a fifteen-year-old in an L.A. neighborhood referred to only as "The Boxes." He's co-manager of a "house," seeing goods in, money out, supervising the entry-level runners standing watch, as well as the customers, dope addicts referred to as the "U." East has seen people shot, but never pulled a trigger himself. Two of his runners fail to provide warning and when the house is raided by police, East watches a young girl die in the crossfire. He's spared a severe reprimand by virtue of being nephew to the organization's boss, Fin. Fin gives East a new job, accompanying three boys on a trip to Wisconsin to kill a judge scheduled to testify against him. Michael Wilson, 20, is a motormouth whose specialty is getting the party out of polite situations. Walter, 19, is an overweight college boy whose specialty is brains. Ty, 13, is a killer, responsible for getting the party out of any impolite situations. He's also East's half-brother and though they share a mother, are not on speaking terms. To keep a low profile, the boys are sent off on the job in a minivan with fake IDs, no contraband and no cell phones, just a number to call for guns when they reach Iowa. For uniforms, they're bought L.A. Dodgers gear. Because white people love baseball. East has never been out of Los Angeles before. In the center seat, he had an overview--he could watch the streets, watch these boys. Michael Wilson's head bobbed as he drove, talking, talking. Talking all the time, to everyone, even himself, a flow: he made music of it, he breathed through it. His sunglasses rode up top, and his head swung side to side, his white eyes dancing this way and that. So busy, East thought, working so hard. Walter, his head was lower down, bushier. He bugled off the seat into the middle and against the door. East had known some fat kids before, smart ones, worth something. But you couldn't work them in the yard. Not outside, a standing-up job. But Walter was getting tight with Michael Wilson. Giggling at him. "Never thought you'd be driving a fuckin' florist's vam," he proposed. Michael Wilson lifted his hands from the wheel. "It don't smell like flowers." East didn't mind the van. He liked the seat, the middle view, the drab shade. The carpet was blue. The seats were blue. The ceiling was a long faded grayish-blue, little pills of lint in the nap. Where he sat, the smoky windows were an arm's length away. They wouldn't roll down; they only popped out on a buckle hinge. That would do. Everything was an arm's length away. The less said about what happens once the boys leave L.A., the better. Dodgers reminded me of Stephen King's The Body (filmed as Stand By Me) if instead of a journey to see a dead body, four boys were going to make a dead body. It's not as poignant and it's not at all nostalgic, but it's not the typical caper either. Beverly seems more inspired by life than TV. This is an extremely polished, well-edited novel. There's nothing cluttering it up, not even the treats I enjoy but that writers can so easily overdo. I can't recall one pop culture reference. I can't recall one call-out to another author. Things happen for a reason. Dialogue is exchanged for a reason. Characters have clearly defined personalities that carry them through to the end. Each speaks differently, moves differently. Character is further revealed by their reaction to the obstacles on the job. We experience new things in the moment East experiences new things. Beverly trusts the reader. We understand what a "U" is without the author stopping to give an urban etymology lesson. He sprinkles the book with John Steinbeck-like flourishes of wisdom, impressions on how the world works and how to get along in it. -- He was no fun, and they respected him, for though he was young, he had none in him of what they hated most in themselves: their childishness. He had never been a child. Not that they had seen. -- All the land--people talked about America, someday you should see it, you should drive across it all. They didn't say how it got into your head. -- The molding a group of boys you'd maybe met yesterday into the people your life depended on. And never to know whether you'd succeeded. Only to await the moments of test. Like this one. -- You could be wrong about anything. -- Perry trusted him. But maybe trust was a trick. Maybe trust was the act that not trusting put on when there was no better alternative. Beverly teaches American literature and writing at Trinity Washington University in Washington DC. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 30, 2023
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Jul 2023
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Dec 29, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1609800915
| 9781609800918
| B00541YEH0
| 3.92
| 43,671
| 1991
| Jan 04, 2011
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really liked it
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My introduction to the fiction of Annie Ernaux is Simple Passion. Published in 1991 and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022 (when the aut
My introduction to the fiction of Annie Ernaux is Simple Passion. Published in 1991 and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022 (when the author was 82), this novella had everything I hoped that it would--rawness, brevity and recklessness. I found Ernaux (translated from French to English by Tanya Leslie) similar to Eve Babitz in at least one sense: I was blissfully unaware whether I was reading fiction or non-fiction. Much too short to be considered a novel but substantive enough not to be labeled a manifesto, this is the first person account of an unnamed narrator in France circa 1989 who recounts her brief affair with a married man. -- From September last year, I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come round to my place. I would go to the supermarket, the cinema, take my clothes to the dry cleaner's, read books, and mark essays. I behaved exactly the same way as before but without the long-standing familiarity of these actions I would have found it impossible to do so, except at the cost of a tremendous effort. It was when I spoke that I realized I was acting instinctively. Words, sentences, and even my laugh, formed on my lips without my actually thinking about it or wanting it. In fact I have only vague memories of the things I did, the films I saw, the people I met. I behaved in an artificial manner. The only actions involving willpower, desire, and what I take to be human intelligence (planning, weighing the pros and cons, assessing the consequences) were all related to this man. -- When he left me more time between his phone call and his visit, three or four days, I imagined with disgust all the work I would have to do and the social engagements I would have to attend before seeing him again. I would have liked to have done nothing else but wait for him. I lived with the growing obsession that something might happen to stop us from meeting. One afternoon, when I was driivng home and expecting him half an hour later, it occurred to me fleetingly that I could have an accident. Immediately: "I'm not sure that I would stop." -- As soon as he left, I would be overcome by a wave of fatigue. I wouldn't tidy up straight away: I would sit staring at the glasses, the plates and their leftovers, the overflowing ashtray, the clothes, the lingerie strewn all over the bedroom and the hallway, the sheets spilling over on to the carpet. I would have liked to keep that mess the way it was--a mess in which every object evoked a caress or a particular moment, forming a still-life whose intensity and pain could never, for me, be captured by any painting in a museum. Naturally I would never wash until the next day, to keep his sperm inside me. I downloaded the Kindle version ($7.99) in preparation of the second draft of my novel. In terms of notes, or the cheat sheet for a cheater, Simple Passion is what I hoped it would be. Its succinctness, lack of conventional narrative and total absence of moral judgment were assets. The focus is how the narrator's life changes in the course of her affair, not the shaping of her experiences into a plot. As much as I enjoy thrillers, this book was different. Ernaux trusts the reader to fill in the spaces ourselves--I pictured the narrator a multiethnic woman in the present day--and I was thrilled to go careening toward a cliff with her. Book/ song pairing (dedicated to Sarah): "The Adulteress," Pretenders (Side 1, Track 1 of Pretenders II, 1981) ...more |
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1
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Jul 11, 2023
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Jul 11, 2023
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Dec 25, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 006265635X
| 9780062656353
| 006265635X
| 3.58
| 2,679
| Nov 07, 2017
| Nov 07, 2017
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it was ok
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My introduction to the fiction of Ivy Pochoda is Wonder Valley. Published in 2017, this is literature (I'd shelve it as fiction as opposed to mystery/
My introduction to the fiction of Ivy Pochoda is Wonder Valley. Published in 2017, this is literature (I'd shelve it as fiction as opposed to mystery/ suspense or crime) that starts off well, with an attention-grabbing prologue and excellent writing. The prose is sharp, almost journalistic, propelling the story forward. Pochoda hops between characters and timelines, but maintains one consistent narrative voice throughout. But as the book went on, my attention waned. Then it became the sort of novel I tend to hate because of how improbable it came off. The story begins in Los Angeles of 2010 during morning rush hour at the four-level interchange where the Pasadena Freeway meets the Hollywood Freeway. Tony is a family man on his second chance after he derailed a promising legal career. Ren is a young ex-con driving a stolen car. Blake is a career criminal who buys prescription drugs off residents of Skid Row and sells them in the suburbs. They bear witness to a man jogging naked through traffic. Tony abandons his car in an attempt to join the mystery man, only to be tackled by cops in MacArthur Park. The naked runner disappears. Jumping back in time to 2006 and the town of Twentynine Palms, Britt is a college tennis player who fled a car accident in which her passenger may or may not have been killed. She ends up in the middle of nowhere, also known as Wonder Valley, a chicken farm whose patriarch leads a loosely structured cult, permitting those lost in the desert to camp at the farm, help with chores and find themselves at his evening group therapy sessions. His fifteen-year-old sons James and Owen search for themselves in their own way. Meanwhile, Blake and his murderous best friend Sam make their way to Wonder Valley, laying low from the law. Pochoda's prose is economical, descriptive and has strong momentum as far as language. This is a novel that deals with complex urban issues with prose anyone who finished eighth grade should be able to follow. I liked that. The best sections are those set on Skid Row, where Ren searches for and then tries to rescue his mother. Here are a few rules to live by: Keep one eye in front, the other in back. Avoid the worst of the addicts. Avoid the slingers. Avoid those out to exploit whatever remains of you. Find the right crew--people who will look after you, who are down but not entirely out, who are trying to elevate, to get housed, to get their medical needs looked after. Find the neighborhood's activists, the men and women trying to make Skid Row a better place, who fight against the thousands of tickets given to the homeless for loitering, for the public possession of their own private property, for jaywalking, who fight for the liberties and human rights of the undomiciled. Confusion set in for me over why characters were where they were. A college athlete crashes her car and then wanders into the desert to join a cult. The son of the cult leader is too sensitive to participate in the chicken harvest, but shoots a hawk out of the sky, runs away and moves in with two hardened criminals. A man is unhappy so he abandons his car on a freeway. Real people murder their spouse or rip off drug cartels, but they're not impulsive enough to abandon their cars and wander Los Angeles on foot. This happens in movies like making a point about how apocalyptic L.A. is. Melodramatic nonsense is what it is. The college athlete would favor community service over hiding in the desert with a cult. The son would probably process his angst quietly through a friendship or mentorship rather than hiding in the desert with criminals. The unhappy man would've driven somewhere in his car rather than abandon it. Those are real outcomes to real problems, but this novel is rhetorical. Pochoda writes about Skid Row in a way that made me believe she had been there, which is commendable. I can't say the book is. Wonder Valley is ultimately a sketchy perspective on Southern California. Characters are uniformly worn down like #2 pencils that have been through too many tests. They're worn down by bad decisions, worn down by their pasts, worn down by the company they keep, worn down by the elements. This is true for people all over the world, but not all people. The human experience is a lot more diverse and so is L.A. Fiction trying to convince me that people are always at their worst is as shallow as fiction trying to convince me people are always at their best. ...more |
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1
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Feb 27, 2023
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Mar 04, 2023
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Dec 24, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1250788420
| 9781250788429
| 1250788420
| 3.40
| 2,634
| Jun 01, 2021
| Jun 01, 2021
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it was amazing
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My introduction to the fiction of Christine Mangan is Palace of the Drowned. Published in 2021, this is an example of a novel I paused reading to chec
My introduction to the fiction of Christine Mangan is Palace of the Drowned. Published in 2021, this is an example of a novel I paused reading to check what other books the author had written so I could add those to my reading docket. I wish there was a bell I could ring when this happens. "Fiction-General" might be a more appropriate shelf for this than "Mystery/ Suspense," but the novel is evocative, mysterious and strong enough that I kept turning the pages even without a lot of tricks and turns. Some writers need plot to keep me engaged while others can do so by the imagery they conjure and strangeness their stories generate. Mangan belongs to the latter. The story centers on Frances Croy, a writer whose debut novel was published to great acclaim, but whose three subsequent books have received diminishing praise. Frankie, single and childless, has grown apprehensive about her future. She is upset by a harsh critique in a weekly magazine she's unfamiliar with by a writer who identified themselves only as "J.L." Frankie was seething by the time she attended a party and socked a woman in the mouth. She checked herself into a clinic but tiring of the rigamarole there, fled London for Venice, where the family of her best friend Jack own a vacant palazzo where Frankie can work on the last novel remaining on her contract. On her way to the market to buy vangole from one of the fishermen, Frankie is approached by an enthusiastic young Brit named Gilly Larson. Gilly claims to have met Frankie before and allows her to believe that she is the daughter of one of her editors. She persists on meeting Frankie for a cup of coffee sometime and despite her best efforts, Frankie concedes. Alone in the palazzo with the exception of the family's housekeeper, Frankie hears footsteps on the second floor and assumes it to be her neighbors, though Jack has no knowledge of any tenants. Gilly sounds a few warning bells but for lack of anyone to spend time in Venice with, Frankie befriends her. During the recital, Gilly appeared indifferent--or oblivious, rather--to the looks her presence was garnering from the men who crowded the bar on the other side. She was tall and thin and young, and that always counted for something in the world, Frankie knew. It was enough, at any rate, to ensure a casual glance, a roving eye. But this was something different, as was, it seemed, Gilly. There was the way that she spoke--loudly, not so much that it annoyed but enough so that it aroused interest--and there were the gestures that went along with her speech, wide and sweeping, without concern for the space of others around her. And behind it all, a confidence, a certainty, in the way she spoke, in the way she moved, that belied her youth. That was it, Frankie realized. She had never before met anyone so self-assured at her age--other than herself--and so she knew firsthand how it made one unique among peers, however unintentional. Frankie stifled a smirk. It was strange to think of how differently these same attributes were viewed with age. Now, instead of confident, she was labeled stubborn. Instead of independent, she was a spinster. The most frustrating part was that she didn't feel any differently than she had at Gilly's age, only a bit less manic, a bit more calm, and yet the world insisted that she was entirely changed from her younger self. Palace of the Drowned doesn't embrace its potential as a thriller until the 65% mark but its strength is that without crime or violence or sex, Mangan fully invested me. Venice isn't described as much as it is imbibed. The way she sets not just places or people but a rhythm of life and almost a different way of dreaming in the City of Bridges put its hooks into me. I wasn't sure what direction the novel was going to take. Though set in October 1966, with only minor changes the story could take place in virtually any decade. In a credit to its protagonist, the writing is muscular and propulsive. If it were a Golden Girl, it would be Dorothy. Gilly. That was what she had called herself. Frankie thought it had a ring of falsity to it. As did her story about their supposed introduction. Gilly, with a hard G. It was too juvenile, too hard to believe that someone had willingly bestowed it as an actual given name. As Frankie took another sip of wine, she allowed that it wasn't the girl herself so much as the girl's recognition that had unsettled her. A reminder that while she might play at disappearing into Venice, her vanishing act could never truly be complete. There would always be someone who knew her--and who knew about what had happened at the Savoy. The two were synonymous now, intrinsically linked. No matter how much she detested the thought. Frankie gave a small shake of her head, cursing under her breath. If only she had never read that damned review. In other novels, I'd be fidgeting if an author digressed into Venice or cafe society for half a book and might abandon it out of boredom, but not Palace of the Drowned. Mangan could've set the novel in a phone booth and I'd have hung in there with her. The writing is so confident that I felt myself in good hands, certain this was leading somewhere. My only criticism is that Frankie is so caustic and has so little control of her emotions that she's freaking out in public, begging why her friend Jack (a heiress, a woman) is so devoted to her. It's a minor ding in a book that is fantastic from cover to cover. I'm looking forward to reading Mangan's debut novel as well as her next. ...more |
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1
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Aug 03, 2023
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Aug 04, 2023
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Dec 23, 2022
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0374108994
| 9780374108991
| 0374108994
| 3.71
| 3,477
| 2011
| Sep 27, 2011
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did not like it
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My introduction to the fiction of Héctor Tobar is his 2011 novel The Barbarian Nurseries. This has garnered a few comparisons to The Bonfire of the Va
My introduction to the fiction of Héctor Tobar is his 2011 novel The Barbarian Nurseries. This has garnered a few comparisons to The Bonfire of the Vanities and that might be true if nothing happened in The Bonfire of the Vanities and the characters all got along. I abandoned this at the 16% mark. The craft is excellent in regard to prose and character detail, but Tobar colors his characters with 64 Crayons when 24 would've been plenty. As a reader I got details, details and more details told to me, but no story. I wish I could give this a higher rating because the novel is clearly about something, much of it the Mexican housekeeper/ nanny class in Orange County. I would've liked a novel that focused mainly on the stoic housekeeper Araceli and revealed her background and character through a story. I don't need a car accident or domestic crime straight out of a Dick Wolf-produced TV show, but I can only catalog so many details about so many characters without a story, and 422 pages of this is a lot to ask of me as a reader. Tobar popped onto my radar by virtue of his debut novel The Tattooed Solider that appeared on a list of the 20 best L.A. noir. My library didn't carry that one, so I gave The Barbarian Nurseries a try. ...more |
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1
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Nov 15, 2022
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Nov 15, 2022
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Nov 15, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0517118580
| 9780517118580
| 0517118580
| 4.23
| 110
| Jan 01, 1969
| Oct 23, 1994
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it was amazing
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This is my re-read of James M. Cain's classics, compiled here in one hardcover volume. The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity are novella
This is my re-read of James M. Cain's classics, compiled here in one hardcover volume. The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity are novella-length works each 88 pages in length, while Mildred Pierce draws 222 pages. Some contemporary authors struggle to finish one story in less than 400 pages, so I was able to read all three of these in a week. Cain is my Vitamin C for the generic and often dull assignments of book club, where the selections satisfy some of the requirements of a book and little else for me. Cain, on the other hand, doesn't write books, he writes stories. My kind of stories. Stories loaded with lust, greed, morbid self-intentions and Los Angeles, in this case, Depression-era Los Angeles, when the American Dream was blown to dust and it was every man or woman for themselves. It was anything goes. Cain though shows great discipline in not giving over to the hard-boiled adornments some of his contemporaries did. Mildred Pierce isn't a hard-boiled novel at all, even though a fine one was lurking there in the weeds for him to exploit. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) [image] Because there is no literal postman or ringing in the story, I always assumed that "the postman always rings twice" must've been something Cain heard and simply thought would make a terrific title. Upon reread, I think the title has a meaning that does apply to the story, one dealing with fate and how everyone takes their turn to pay. Written from the point of view of drifter Frank Chambers, I didn't relate to how quickly things escalated between Frank and his boss's wife Cora, even from a standpoint of lust and greed. I did love how Cain painted the lovers psychologically, with Frank not only wanting but needing to ramble on down the road, while Cora knew the wanderer's life was not for her. Something had to come to a head. Cain suggests that the only judges on earth are a jury of your peers, and your own conscience, with the former being much easier to fool than the latter. I cracked up a little then myself, and put my head on her shoulder. "That's just where we are. We can kid ourselves all we want to, and laugh about the money, and whoop about what a swell guy the devil is to be in bed with, but that's just where we are. I was going off with that woman, Cora. We were going to Nicaragua to catch cats. And why I didn't go away, I knew I had to come back. We're chained to each other, Cora. We thought we were on top of a mountain. That wasn't it. It's on top of us, that's where it's been ever since that night." There's a beautiful motif in this novella of a swim in the Pacific Ocean as a sort of natural lie-detector test, able to divine the truth from Frank and Cora: do they love each other enough to save the other from drowning, or is fear of each other what binds them together? The surf not only establishes that this is a Los Angeles story but is a wonderful device on the part of Cain. [image] Double Indemnity (1936) [image] I struggled more with this novella than I did with The Postman Always Rings Twice to suss out why the narrator--all-American insurance salesman Walter Huff--would descend into a vortex of sex and murder with his client's wife, the awkwardly named Phyllis Nirdlinger (changed to Phyllis Dietrichson for the classic Billy Wilder film in 1944). A hobo I can see coming in hot, but a respectable insurance salesman with everything to lose? Walter tells the reader he's seen so much mayhem in his profession that none of it is real to him anymore, but it doesn't seem plausible to me. Cain ultimately writes a darker and more vivid character in Phyllis, but so much of it ends up being told to the reader rather than shown. In the eighty-five years since this novella was published, I've also seen the femme fatale portrayed as a devil woman enough times that I wanted more complexity to her character. Where this story succeeds for me is Walter's mastery of the insurance business, how that plays into his scheming and how his company knows immediately that Phyllis' husband didn't commit suicide or fall accidentally from a train but was murdered. I stared into the darkness some more that night. I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn't have the money and I didn't have the woman. The woman was a killer, out-and-out, and she had made a fool of me. She had used me for a cat's paw so she could have another man, and she had enough on me to hang me higher than a kite. If the man was in on it, there were two of them that could hang me. I got to laughing, a hysterical cackle, there in the dark. The plot is dependent on so much antiquated technology that it felt as if I'd traveled to another time to read how a murder might be committed in 1936, with telephones and doorbells, train schedules and porters, a dictaphone, the radio or picture show schedules and even a house servant being important considerations. I thought it added to the story's allure, though. Told in Walter's voice, the specter of death hangs over the proceedings from the first paragraph to the dynamite conclusion. Mildred Pierce (1941) [image] Ask me what my favorite novel is, I'd say Mildred Pierce. Is the prose brilliant? Not in any obvious way. Is the dialogue just like how people talk? Not really. Is there something compelling happening on every page? Absolutely. And it is a rare novel I can truly say that about. What delights me is how Cain had every opportunity to write a lurid hard-boiled tale, of a housewife whose husband leaves her in 1931 to raise two children and whose opportunity to open a restaurant simply requires he grant her a divorce. Rather than murder or inquests, Mildred Pierce is haunted by her need for the love of her ungrateful daughter Veda, one of literature's purest and most ruthless sociopaths. This need flattens Mildred as evenly as Frank or Walter's schemes, but it's a scheme of the heart. Leaving Veda alone was something that hadn't entered her mind, but after she cooled off she thought about it. However, she was incapable of leaving Veda alone. In the first place, she had an honest concern about her. In the second place, she had become so accustomed to domineering over the many lives that depended on her, that patience, wisdom, and tolerance had almost ceased to be a part of her. And in the third place, there was this feeling she had about Veda, that by now permeated every part of her, and colored everything she did. To have Veda play the piece about rainbows, just for her, was delicious. To have her scream at her was painful, but bearable, for at least it was that she was being screamed at. To have her lying there on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and not even thinking about her, was an agony too great to be borne. Mildred has none of the privileges that Frank or Walter do. She has two children to raise and two mortgages to pay with no education, no job experience and no one putting any money on the table, in no less than the Great Depression. When a job recruiter tells her she has no chance, I believed her. Mildred has no necessity for sex or money, but the approval of her oldest daughter, a need that builds her to tremendous heights and then threatens to destroy everything she's worked for. Cain has honed his expertise in matters like real estate or hospitality and melded it with a firm understanding of human emotion and the need for love. [image] I'm sure my ardor for these three stories is bolstered a bit by how many times Hollywood turned and returned to them. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 03, 2022
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Nov 11, 2022
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Nov 03, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1631492330
| 9781631492334
| 1631492330
| 3.43
| 2,972
| Oct 16, 2016
| Oct 11, 2016
|
it was amazing
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The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky may be the best book I've read in a while. Published in 2016, this short novel made me laugh more often and at greater
The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky may be the best book I've read in a while. Published in 2016, this short novel made me laugh more often and at greater volume than I did reading Dermansky's previous two novels, which is saying something. Rather than a coming-of-age story or femme fatale story, The Red Car is about a woman who seems to have checked the boxes of adulthood: a college education, marriage, a job she can do from home and even the completion of a novel. Closer inspection reveals she's anything but okay and the way the author edges her out onto a tightrope made for a harrowing read. The story is the first-person account of Leah Kaplan, introduced as a twenty-three-year-old executive assistant to the Human Resources director of a state university in San Francisco. Leah wants to be a writer and while she looks down at office workers, her boss recognized Leah's value as a confidant and friend. Her boss is Judy, a divorcée twenty years Leah's senior whose preference for direct communication doesn't seem to intimidate Leah the way it does others. A platonic love develops between the women but ultimately, Judy encourages Leah to quit her job and go back to school. Ten years later, Leah is living in Queens with her husband Hans, a writer she met at graduate school and married because his student visa was expiring. She tells herself that he's thoughtful and loves her in spite of his codependency and hot temper. Then an email arrives from a former coworker notifying her that Judy has been killed, slammed into while driving the red car she cherished. Leah learns that Judy has left her that car, as well as a letter and some money. When an attractive former coworker puts her airfare on the company credit card, Leah returns to San Francisco for two weeks. She begins to hear Judy's voice, or perhaps her own voice, speaking to her. "You shouldn't always believe the things you tell yourself," Judy said. Judy, there she was again. Talking to me. I did not understand it. I could hear the timbre of her voice, the inflection, but, of course, no one else could hear her. And I didn't actually believe that she was actually talking to me. For years, when I started graduate school, and then, when I moved to New York, I could hear Judy talking to me, giving me advice, taking note of my decisions and offering her approval. Her disapproval. But it stopped once I had gotten married. I gradually stopped sending her emails and I could not hear her voice. She was gone. The stupid thing was that it was not until after I learned that she had died that I realized that I missed her. "Pretty stupid," Judy observed. In the hands of a lot of other authors--those who write books with cute, comforting illustrated covers--The Red Car would've been another novel about a major life event that pulls a woman back to her old neighborhood, her old friends and an old romance she might rekindle, all while processing where she wants to go next in her life. And strangely enough, this book checks most of those boxes. There's a moment where Leah walks by her old apartment in the Mission District and not only meets the woman now occupying her old room, but a woman also writing a novel who nearly shares the same first name. They become intimate, but it's a relationship not built to last. "You see," Judy said. But I did not know what she meant. You see, you are writing? I knew I was a writer. I knew I had written a book and I even knew that it was probably good. I just wanted to keep that quiet. Make sure. Protect myself from disappointment. You see, you are a lesbian? You see, you should have never gotten married? You see, you should have never left San Francisco? It worried me that I did not understand Judy's chiding. If the voice was coming from me, wouldn't I understand my own meaning? I bit the back end of my black pen, which burst onto my hand. I used a napkin to contain the ink. "You're pretty," the other Lea said. She had stopped writing. She was appraising me. I wondered for how long. My fingers were covered in black ink. "You have a girlfriend," I said. "Damn," Lea laughed. What I loved about The Red Car is the illusory filter that Dermansky applies to everything from the sex to the conversation to the red car. I was convinced that Leah had died on her way to San Francisco and everything there was occurring in her afterlife. The events developing around Leah are at times distant and odd but her irreverence and self-doubt comes through so strong that it gave me something to chomp down on. And as corny as it sounds, this book helped me believe in myself, to stop listening to negative voices in my head and write my book. I read this in about 24 hours but wish my time with Leah had lasted a lot longer. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 30, 2023
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Mar 31, 2023
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Oct 26, 2022
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 006075978X
| 9780060759780
| 006075978X
| 3.75
| 880
| Jul 18, 2005
| Sep 06, 2005
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it was amazing
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My introduction to the fiction of Marcy Dermansky is her debut novel Twins. Published in 2005, I ran to this after my book club assignment for Novembe
My introduction to the fiction of Marcy Dermansky is her debut novel Twins. Published in 2005, I ran to this after my book club assignment for November should've had a Mr. Yuk warning label. (For those interested in hearing a tipsy man roast a bestselling adult fairy tale, DM me for details). Dermansky's debut was the antidote to my book poisoning: a harrowing, nuanced and darkly funny novel about teenagers written for adults. This is the first book I've read in some time that I stayed up past midnight to finish. I couldn't sleep without knowing the outcome. Set in present day, the novel alternates between the points of view of two identical twin sisters, Sue and Chloe, growing up from the ages of thirteen to eighteen in suburban New Jersey. Blonde haired and blue eyed, their parents are both divorce attorneys who wear matching suits and never get down on the floor to wrestle with the family's standard poodle, Daisy. Working all the time, they keep the girls and their sullen, introverted older brother Daniel well provided for with money and little else. Sue, born four minutes later and 1/8 inches shorter than her twin sister, steals cash from her mother's wallet and later, knicks her father's credit cards. Given to emotional outbursts when she doesn't get her way, her parents are afraid to discipline her. All Sue feels she wants or needs is the love of Chloe, who begins to develop headaches placating her sister's erratic demands. For their thirteenth birthday, Sue has arranged they get matching tattoos. Later, at their surprise party, Chloe is thrilled when the most popular girl at school, Lisa Markman, whispers to her that she likes Chloe better than Sue. My entire life, no one had ever singled me out in this way. When we were younger, my parents used to call our names so fast it sounded like one word: Chloeandsue. Strangers would point to us and whisper: Look at the twins. We were constantly told how pretty we were, together, but somehow on my own, it wasn't the same. I wasn't interesting. At school, Sue and I were in all the same classes, and she always sat next to me. Everyone took for granted that Sue was my best friend and I was hers. We were considered the same person, undistinguishable, even when Sue threw pens at boys or hopped through the halls like a kangaroo. But I was not Sue. I was not Sue. Lisa Markman, whose father is a retired star NBA player, attempts to peel Chloe away from Sue. She invites Chloe over for a party which Sue insists on crashing. Playing their version of Spin the Bottle, all the boys choose Chloe for their three minutes in the closet. When Sue drags Chloe home, her sister bargains with Sue by offering to switch clothes if they can return to the party. The first boy who takes Sue in the closet thinking she's Chloe gets punched in the stomach. If Sue can't have her sister, no one will. Chloe's stress intensifies as her appetite diminishes. Wanting to be liked by someone other than her twin, Chloe leaves Sue to go to the mall with Lisa and her friends. Their brother Daniel, who Sue considers obnoxious, agrees to drive her to the mall in an effort to spend quality time together. Sue confronts Lisa Markman and deciding no one else will have her sister, fires one of their dog's tennis balls at Lisa's face, breaking her nose. Their parents convene a family meeting, concerned that Lisa's father might press assault charges. Chloe takes responsibility for the incident and asks to move into Daniel's room when he leaves for college. Unable to use clothes or makeup to distinguish herself from her twin, Chloe endeavors to become a top student, purchasing school supplies and studying for the SAT the summer before they enter high school. Sue has used their father's credit card to order two unicycles she insists Chloe learn to ride with her. She trashes her sister's supplies and treats Chloe cruelly, obviously hurt as her twin tries to pull away from her. Convinced that being fitted with glasses might cure her headaches, Chloe asks her mother to take her to the optometrist. Sue gleefully sabotages the big day. I listened in disbelief as they walked down the stairs. My mother did not know that she was talking to Sue, who babbled about her progress on the unicycle. I heard the front door open and close. I listened to the ignition of the car. I knew that I had plenty of time to run after them, but I didn't. I didn't want to spend the day with my mother anymore, not if she didn't even know who I was. I could get used to the headaches. I put down my hairbrush, went into my room, and climbed back into bed. But still, I wondered what it would have been like to eat alone in a restaurant with my mother. She once said that she liked to eat steak, but we never ate steak at home. Maybe I could have ordered a steak too. Women at lunch, I supposed, ordered salads. Spinach salad or chicken salad or mixed greens with goat cheese. I lay in the bed with my eyes closed. My headache was slowly going away. I closed my eyes and pictured a steak on a plate, with a baked potato in the side. I put my hand on my stomach and rubbed it. I must have fallen asleep, because I didn't hear the door to the house open and I was surprised to see Sue standing over me, laughing. "She had no fucking idea," she said. I blinked, confused, because I was staring at myself. Sue was wearing my clothes. She had brushed her hair and put on my lip gloss. She even smelled like me; she had put on my perfume. "Now she is pissed," Sue said. "because you are going to be late for your appointment, and she just wanted to relax for a change. On her precious day off." "She is pissed at me?" I said. "She is just pissed," Sue said. "She can't even tell her own daughters apart. She feels like a retard. She had this idea of a special mother-daughter day, only she had the wrong daughter. I would have pulled it off if I hadn't started laughing. She was asking me about the honors' classes, and I told her it was all bullshit." "What's bullshit?" "The idea that good grades make you smart." I got out of bed. "This isn't funny," I said, rubbing my forehead. "I need to go to the eye doctor. I get headaches." "I bet you a hundred dollars there is nothing wrong with your eyes." "You don't have a hundred dollars." Sue's arm snaked around her back. She was touching her tattoo. "Hurry up," she said. "The bitch in the silver Mercedes is pissed." I found my mother reading a legal brief while she waited. "Whoa," she said when we got in the car. "I better get my eyes tested, because I'm seeing double." The plans had changed, and my mother had invited Sue to come along with us. I got in the front and Sue hopped in the back. "That's a terrible joke," I said, putting on my seat belt. My mother nodded. "I'm sorry about the mix-up before, Chloe." I shrugged. Once I let myself get angry, I'd never be able to stop. "Why aren't you sorry to me?" Sue said. The ophthalmologist told me that I had perfect vision. I did not need glasses. My mother seemed relieved when she heard the news. "You are perfect," Sue said. Her voice was cold with hate. At the Italian restaurant afterward, my mother ordered the capellini with shrimp and peas. I don't know why, but somehow, this made me feel sad. There weren't any sort of steak on the lunch menu. I felt too tired to eat, but Sue insisted I finish my Caesar salad. She put butter on my bread and made me eat that too. Twins is everything I want in a novel. I want an author to take me along as she breaks into a home, shining a light on the stuff locked behind closed doors. Maybe we discover a secret or stumble into something the homeowners keep private. Mean things, nasty things. And maybe the homeowner discovers us and we have to run for our lives. This novel is acidic in its wit and as a coming-of-age tale, absolutely harrowing. How any of us survive adolescence, I really don't know. How we find ourselves or find people who will support us is a mystery and probably one reason I read. I've disliked books that flip-flop between points of view and there was the potential here for the Sue/ Antisocial Twin chapters to be far more compelling than the Chloe/ Perfect Twin chapters. Dermansky is such an agile writer that she quickly made Chloe as complicated as her impish circus freak twin. I was so excited for Sue when she found someone who set boundaries for her, but I was thrilled for Chloe when she found something she was good at that boosted her self-esteem. And these are fictional characters that had me so involved in their development. As debut novels go, I was reminded of The Virgin Suicides but only because both novels involve perfect blonde teenagers in the suburbs and Twins is much better written. Instead of gazing at beguiling sisters through binoculars or studying them under a microscope, Dermansky gets up close and personal and gives the sisters the agency to tell their own story. Rather than start with an outcome and force the story to comply to that, Dermansky starts with characters and allows them to determine their outcome. The prose has a savage brevity. The dialogue is a delight. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 21, 2022
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Oct 23, 2022
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Oct 20, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 4.32
| 622,357
| Sep 06, 2016
| Mar 26, 2019
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did not like it
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My introduction to the fiction of Amor Towles in A Gentleman in Moscow. Published in 2016, this is the November selection of the Dive Bar Book Club I
My introduction to the fiction of Amor Towles in A Gentleman in Moscow. Published in 2016, this is the November selection of the Dive Bar Book Club I rejoined. I checked it out from the library today along with an author I wanted to read and gave myself the afternoon for Towles to win my attention. I abandoned the novel at the 13% mark. The story's charms didn't escape me. It reminded me of a Wes Anderson movie if there were no characters to relate to and it was all set design or props--lobby, dining room, furniture, silver, etc. of a grand hotel in 1920. There's a cheerful, chin-up quality I imagine some will find inspiring but left too much of a sugary aftertaste for me. Given the count's sense of noble gestures, I didn't understand why when given his lifetime house arrest by his Bolshevik inquisitors he didn't request a blindfold and cigarette and a firing squad. A production like that seems like it would've fit his character well. I don't think fantasies like this set during a bloody revolution are healthy, like drinking diet sodas are not healthy. Not my material. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 20, 2022
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Oct 20, 2022
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Oct 12, 2022
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Paperback
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| B000FC0VBQ
| 3.78
| 144,058
| Apr 12, 1934
| May 27, 2003
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liked it
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Tender Is the Night is actually--believe it or not, I did graduate high school--my introduction to the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read this for
Tender Is the Night is actually--believe it or not, I did graduate high school--my introduction to the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read this for a Dive Bar Book Club I've joined, partly to spur me into reading authors like Fitzgerald. I only finished the first third. When the story transitioned away from Jazz Age starlet Rosemary Hoyt and onto the author surrogate Dick Diver, I started to skim. Most of you will recognize these symptoms. I didn't connect to the material at all. There's magnificent writing here but "story" I missed. I'll try Fitzgerald's short stories.
...more
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Notes are private!
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Oct 05, 2022
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Oct 06, 2022
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Sep 19, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| B0DT32KYZX
| 3.50
| 3,773
| Apr 1982
| unknown
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really liked it
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L.A. Woman is the first book I've read without realizing it was fiction. Published in 1982, it's the first person account of Sophie Lubin, daughter of
L.A. Woman is the first book I've read without realizing it was fiction. Published in 1982, it's the first person account of Sophie Lubin, daughter of a film studio violinist who grows up in Los Angeles of the 1960s and devotes herself to partying on the Sunset Strip. Author Eve Babitz, writing about herself. But rather than indulging in sex, drugs and rock 'n roll (hi-jinks would be the technical term), Babitz is all about the lo-jinks, sketched as if she were your Auntie Eve, and with panache, taste and several glasses of champagne tells us about her family and friends, slipping in her own exploits, just not very cohesively. I loved it. -- Just bothering to go someplace other than Santa Monica was incomprehensible when I could just wake up every morning at dawn, yank on my bathing suit still on the floor from the night before when I'd yanked it off, hurry down to Hollywood and Gower to catch the 91S bus down to Hollywood Boulevard and then Santa Monica Boulevard to Beverly Hills and transfer to the 83 going straight out to the beach until finally there I'd be, at 8:00 A.M. or so, able to feel the cool sand get warm as the morning sun glazed over the tops of the palm trees up on the palisades while waves of ocean crashed down day after day so anyone could throw himself into the tides and bodysurf through eternity. -- In my day, growing up in Southern California meant you didn't grow up, at least not like girls did elsewhere. Having not grown up myself, like Lola, I know what it was exactly -- what it is -- to be a woman-looking person in your twenties with none of the trials and tribulations bogging down your whole life, driving you from one predictable crisis of adult life to the next until it's too late. I, like Lola, was unable to take adult life seriously in my twenties at all and in fact sometimes I wonder, when I look at adult life even now, how on earth I got myself anywhere past my teens. -- When Lola first went to live in San Francisco with Sam, she married into a time and place which had nothing to do with her. It was WWII and she had to completely abstain from speaking German--any German at all--since the whole country including herself couldn't hear it without boiling over, and though she was used to occasionally dropping German flourishes into her everyday speech, she no longer dared even for fun. Plus, in San Francisco, a woman from L.A. had to resign herself to hats and gloves and stockings because no woman could go out wearing a belly dancer outfit for fun. Women were respectable. Perhaps the real reason Lola married Sam wasn't to be polite or to oblige her mother, but really because she thought she ought to do something that wasn't fun -- to strengthen her character -- something womanly like sacrificing her life. But then I still couldn't see why anyone would marry Sam just to get character. -- The truth was, I couldn't act at all, because anytime I had to say someone else's words, they turned into marshmellows sticking my mouth into lumpy resistance, refusing to blithely tumble into the air like they should even in Beckett and not just Shakespeare or Noel Coward, for whenever I had to speak anyone else's words I put up a fight. My word, I deep down thought, were just as brilliant and original as theirs (more original inf act, since everybody had heard their words, whereas they were just finding out mine that very moment). I was just a lousy actress, in other words. -- The Oriental was a "neighborhood" theater, only since the neighborhood was West Hollywood, the neighbors were Jack Nicholson and Stravinsky. I ran into nuns from Immaculate Heart in line too, and married couples, people on dates, lonely movie stars sneaking in to see themselves fourteen times a week, artists wrecked on mescaline who came for the cartoons, people of "the industry" and kids from Hollywood High just down Sunset a few blocks. Before my bell jar gazebo passed the best minds of my generation, to say nothing of the cars. Lotuses and Rolls-Royces and chopped Plymouths and immense convertibles went back and forth, back and forth, before my eyes, with people inside--Afghans, ladies with blonde hair spread a yard on either side of them, and men--elegant men, crisp sophisticated originals (including Cary Grant), James Dean slouchers, mad Marlons, confidential smoothies, awkward European guys who wore sandals with socks, slinky invisible guys whom girls committed suicide over. If you asked me, for the first year or two it was enough. I mean, plus they paid me. -- Sheila, a girl my age who went to L.A. High and lived next to me in the court, worked part time in a travel agency and looked like a Botticelli--and she was worse than me. I mean, when I moved into that court and had tea with Sheila the first day, we decided to list all the men we had slept with--we were both not twenty-one yet--only I forgot their names counting to 50 I remembered, and Sheila got to 150 (she could even remember last names) before she got confused. Stuff like jealousy and outrage and sexual horror tactics like that, which had been used to squash girls like us and keep us from having fun for thousands of years, now suddenly didn't stand a chance because Sheila and the rest of us weren't going to get pregnant, die of syphilis, or get horrible reputations around L.A. -- where an L.A. woman had always pretty much painted the town anything she wanted. The commercial way to write a novel like L.A. Woman would have been to sort everything into conventional "funny women's fiction": Sophie is a Hollywood princess who works at a movie theater box office by day, parties by night, has a fling with hot rock star/ cute movie star while loyal friend who's a writer or some serious person waits for her to grow up (or more accurately, settle down). I think there's AI that can generate a novel like that in the time it takes to watch the most recent Sex and the City reunion and eat a Ben & Jerry's Mini Cup. Sophie Lubin is absolutely a passive character and that does hold the novel back a step for me. She's in the running for the least ambitious person in Los Angeles County, dedicated neither to fame or fortune, or to bottoming out. Either would be "something." The story never "takes off" or "goes anywhere." It won't be for everyone. But as keen as I am for a story, I'm also big on Los Angeles based fiction, and if I take L.A. Woman at face value as a mediation on what an L.A. woman believes an L.A. woman to be, the novel sings. I had guys coming out of my ears like streetcars. Only instead of one coming by every ten minutes, like they were supposed to, the old ones never left so my life grew dense with simultaneous romance. Lovers were like the lantana before the trellis caved in. What separates Eve Babitz from writers who've monetized their address book into a publishing career is that tell-all authors tend to focus on the rats. Babitz is more interested in the maze. Her characters live and breathe, though. These inevitably fall into three categories: actresses or dancers who the industry must replenish, boy geniuses who need care and handling, and the women who support the boy geniuses. Many have used the term "groupie" to describe Babitz but rather than sleep their way through contrived plots and lazy prose, but Babitz's writing is alive. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 21, 2023
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Jan 27, 2023
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Sep 18, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0593356829
| 9780593356821
| 0593356829
| 3.51
| 29,265
| Aug 17, 2021
| Aug 17, 2021
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it was ok
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Published in 2021, Velvet Was the Night is Silvia Moreno-Garcia's follow-up to Mexican Gothic. I challenge anyone to take a look at her bibliography--
Published in 2021, Velvet Was the Night is Silvia Moreno-Garcia's follow-up to Mexican Gothic. I challenge anyone to take a look at her bibliography--nine novels and three chapter books published between 2015-2023--and swipe past. Nearly any author I can name has a book or two I know I'll never pick up, but not so in Moreno-Garcia's case. From fantasy to gothic mystery to thriller, her books are pitched in such an exciting way and this one was no exception, pulp fiction set in 1971 during the Mexican government's violent crackdown against dissident student groups. What I Liked: + Mexico City in 1971. While neither a travelogue nor a hardened exposé of the historical or geopolitical landscape, Moreno-Garcia gets just enough detail across to convey that we are not in Kansas anymore. If this book had been set in New York or San Francisco, or anywhere in the present, I would've likely ignored it, but I was all in for being transported to another place and time. + The main characters--a prim, lonely, somewhat homely young secretary and an equally lonely young thug looking to develop his mind--are obsessed with comic books and rock 'n roll, respectively. Maite devours romance comics with titles like Secret Romance or Susy: Secretos del Corazón, while "Elvis" is obsessed with The King. In the appendix, Moreno-Garcia includes a playlist of American and Mexican pop music. I love when authors do this. + Moreno-Garcia is a talented writer confident enough not to need prove it every page or every paragraph. There were perhaps five or six passages I thought were very cleverly or sensually composed, but 94% of the book moves along without indulging in what John Steinbeck's characters called "hooptedoodle." + The cover art by Faceout Studio/ Tim Green is bananas. [image] + As titles go, Velvet Was the Night is fire. What I Disliked: - Mundane and very boring story. I struggled to finish and skimmed the last fifty pages to do so. Velvet Was the Night defies categorization but in a way that I think ends up being detrimental. It's not cute or bubbly enough to be a romantic comedy, and it's not intense or heavy enough to be a pulp thriller (the cover art strongly suggests the latter). It reads like a rough draft without any spelling or grammatical mistakes. There's just enough violence to turn off readers with a sensitivity to that, but not nearly enough violence to satisfy noir readers. The book steers down the middle of the road. - Maite remains an everyday, ho-hum character. The ordinary woman who gets involved with extraordinary intrigue is a familiar tale, and that's fine. But Maite isn't challenged enough. Tasked with tracking down her missing, glamorous neighbor, she goes through the motions of poking around, but doesn't awaken dormant muscles, doesn't master new skills and only by convenience of the plot comes out of her shell. I'm accustomed to female protagonists being neglected like this by male writers, but given the milieu as well as the author, I was disappointed how lightweight this character is. I have no doubt that Moreno-Garcia loves pulp fiction, but that's not what she wrote. At best, I think it's a script for a middling, somewhat romantic, somewhat suspenseful comic book, with two-dimensional characters and a low-stakes story. Between Mexican Gothic and this novel, her love of books and different literary genres is way ahead of Moreno-Garcia's storytelling. There's some wonderful table dressing here, but not enough of a meal to recommend. As with Mexican Gothic, there's candy at the very end. This alternate cover was illustrated by Jennifer Prince and offers further proof that the author wanted to script a goofy, early '70s comic book, nothing more, nothing less. I wish the novel lived up to even that. [image] Here's a dissenting, five-star review from a hugely popular reviewer on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ! Robin's Reviews > Velvet Was the Night ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 03, 2023
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Jul 09, 2023
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Jun 10, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0063273004
| 9780063273009
| 0063273004
| 2.95
| 3,799
| Feb 14, 2023
| Feb 14, 2023
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it was amazing
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My introduction to the fiction of Robin Yeatman is her debut novel Bookworm. It shares a characteristic with a lot of my favorite novels in that it do
My introduction to the fiction of Robin Yeatman is her debut novel Bookworm. It shares a characteristic with a lot of my favorite novels in that it doesn't fit evenly into any category. Three bookstore clerks might place this on three different shelves. The cover suggests a cute or whimsical romp through reading and love, and if plotting the murder of your domineering husband is cute or whimsical, I imagine it could be. The novel shares characteristics with Patricia Highsmith and Mary Gaitskill, with noir undertones highlighted by an inappropriately creative protagonist. I laughed often. Victoria is an unhappily married woman in her mid-thirties. She's employed as a massage therapist at a spa in Montréal, a job that her mother-in-law landed her and that places no demands on Victoria. Her "important" job is her husband Eric, a promising young lawyer who her parents set her up with five years ago. Victoria has settled into a subservient existence: cooking, nurturing and providing as few distractions as possible for her fussy husband. Victoria's passion, which Eric does not share, is reading. She can often be found with her nose in a book, either at Café au Lait before she has to prepare dinner for her husband, or at home in the evenings while he watches TV. Everything changes the day Victoria sees an attractive man at her café reading the same book as her, a long and torturous account of one man's suffering that Victoria is suffering through as a reader. Feeling an unspoken connection to this stranger, she returns to the café three more times, wearing a carefully selected outfit, in the hope she might encounter Him again. Her book ultimately serves as an icebreaker. The stranger's name is Luke and he makes wood furniture for his own store. Convinced that Luke and she are destined to be soul mates, Victoria's fantasies of some tragic accident befalling her husband begin to multiply. Victoria stared at the back of Eric’s neck and saw how slender it was. How tender and slight, how hurtable it was, with just a few muscles and sheath of skin for protection over the bones. A miracle that he walked around all day without breaking it. Things fell all the time, didn’t they? He walked downtown, by old buildings made of brick and stone. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that, one day, the music would be in sync and a large cube of cement would come loose at the right moment and down, come down to bring his face flat against his chest at an acute angle, his neck bones splintered and divorced from each other, the break so sudden and sharp that the skin at the back of his neck would be pierced and the pearly bone poking out, ghostly white, almost plastic in appearance, protruding from the red hole, visible only for a handful of seconds before being drowned in a bloody pulse, a pulse that slowed exponentially to nothing, with each breath bringing her closer to the end, to the end of marriage, to freedom. She saw herself being told the news—the doorbell ringing, her phone ringing, serious faces, kind voices, a hand on the shoulder. “He didn’t suffer. It was instant. I’m so sorry.â€� Her tears, her tears, so many tears, each tear healing an unspeakable hurt. The funeral. The eulogy. All the well-wishers. And then that night, returning to the apartment, she would shower and come to bed naked with her hair wet against the pillow, and she would look up at the ceiling and feel lightness in her heart, and sleep would come for her and sleep would find her so effortlessly all she had to do was to turn to her side with one leg pulled up to her chest the way she had done in her mother’s womb and she would be gone. The candy that Yeatman serves with Bookworm comes in two bags: woman plots to murder her husband, and woman comments on books. I'd be surprised if these topics were foreign to any married woman reading this review. Yeatman doesn't name the book that Victoria loathes, a 721-page tome with a crying man on the cover (likely A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara) but A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, Nutshell by Ian McEwan and Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith become valuable resources for Victoria as she plots murder. She also reads and enjoys Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, The Dinner by Herman Koch and The Sundial by Shirley Jackson. Victoria compares one of her clients to a Stephen King character. She was a tiny woman who resembled Shelley Duvall, with stringy, long black hair and a face that often wore an expression of horror, not unlike Mrs. Torrance’s in the bathroom scene in The Shining. Her name was all wrong: Bernadette. She looked much more like a Maude or a Mildred, or maybe even an Olive, given her appearance. Victoria decided she was too insubstantial to merit three syllables, the name too weighty for her. Bernadette now lay on her back, head wedged in the black circular resting spot on the massage table, and had the appearance of being asleep. In this supine position, her small breasts were flattened to an almost androgynous status. Only the triangular outlines of her brassiere visible through the sheet hinted at their existence. From the moment she was introduced, Victoria understood who Bernadette was. It took only a few moments to see that she was a mouse, a quivering, pathetic creature who had been living with alley cats her whole life. Victoria saw Bernadette as slave to a domineering mother, an obese woman who wore a wig and lay, day and night, on a sagging, flowered couch. She’d hurled demands and insults at Bernadette as a child, and still did. Bernadette was single, had never been paid the least attention by men (unless you counted Uncle Pete, who was dead now, thankfully), and was so lonely she took to people watching using an old telescope she’d found in a box in the upstairs closet. Yeatman does a terrific job of rooting interest in her character and building anticipation of what she's going to get up to next. I rocketed through the book and never hit a dull spot. Nothing is introduced not related to Victoria's twin obsessions and I would've liked a bit more complexity or perhaps another twist to Luke's character that for a moment, I felt was coming. Better than funny, Bookworm is smart funny, with sharp prose and excellent dialogue. The petty cruelties spouses inflict are realized extremely well. I'm looking forward to discovering what the author tackles next. Disclaimer: I've been a Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friend with the author since 2014. She sent me a galley proof of Bookworm to review. ...more |
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1
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Aug 08, 2022
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Aug 13, 2022
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Jun 02, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1250801745
| 9781250801746
| 1250801745
| 3.62
| 2,318
| Mar 15, 2022
| Mar 15, 2022
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My introduction to the fiction of Alex Segura is Secret Identity. Published in 2022, this alternate history of the comic book industry displayed the p
My introduction to the fiction of Alex Segura is Secret Identity. Published in 2022, this alternate history of the comic book industry displayed the pulse that I felt Michael Chabon's lauded The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay did not. It centers on Carmen Valdez, a young, queer Cuban American What I Liked: + Queer, Cuban American female protagonist Carmen Valdez (we are not related) born and raised in Miami and transposed to New York. We're certain to see the comic book industry and detecting from a different perspective with her as our protagonist and I felt we did. + Through page 123/352, the novel is about the creative process, as Valdez grudgingly agrees to help a sheepish co-worker at “Triumph Comicsâ€� named Harvey Stern write a script for the new book their boss has tasked him with. + Panels of the book Valdez & Stern write, a variation on Marvel's The Cat which they call The Lethal Lynx (revised by their boss to the man-friendlier The Legendary Lynx) are dynamite. The artwork is by Sandy Jarrell and lettering by Taylor Esposito. [image] What I Disliked: - Telling instead of showing. Segura's previous work has been in comic books, and his commission to write Poe Dameron: Free Fall for Disney Lucasfilm Press was targeted at the Young Adult market. Those habits bleed into his first adult novel, which spells everything out. We're told what Carmen is thinking and what this, that or the other mean at every turn. This is adult subject matter delivered in very juvenile prose. Here's an example: Marion nodded. Her smile was fake now, too, as if she felt the need to parry. Why couldn't she just befriend this woman, Carmen wondered. Why did she have to instantly assume the worst--that she was some bitter ex-flame of Harvey's? And what did it matter if she was? Carmen didn't care for Harvey that way. Didn't see him like that. Had it been any other day, Carmen would've jumped for joy at the sight of another woman in her profession, someone she could share experiences with and maybe learn something from. But not today. No. Now she just wanted to go home, to lie in her tiny bed in the dark and stare at the ceiling until it was time to do something else. Maybe this type of writing is appropriate for New Adult (18-25) fiction? I didn't get a warning label. - The mystery element feels superficial. Segura's heart seems to be in the comic book industry of the 1970s and the creative process. There was a great novel here about big business, office politics and a visionary who does an end-run around management in the pursuit of invention. The detective material is shaky. Valdez commits a cardinal sin in detective fiction by ultimately telling the cops everything she knows. Private dicks just cannot do that. - Carmen is an idiot. For the sake of plot, she agrees to collaborate with a desperate male co-worker who's kind of "failed up" in their industry, allowing him to receive full credit on The Legendary Lynx, which she writes and he polishes. Carmen agrees to this arrangement because she’s hungry for her break and their boss refuses to let her pitch scripts, but even for someone new to the adult world, it demonstrates a considerable lack of critical thinking skills. - In addition to being an idiot, Carmen does something I notice female protagonists do a lot in fiction and that's apologize. As an I'm going to abstain from rating Secret Identity because my suspicion is that the book is really meant for a New Adult market. It recently won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery/ Thriller category, but I would recommend this for younger readers or those interested in fiction with a comic book writing backdrop. Mystery fans, not so much. Here's a dissenting, five-star review from a hugely popular reviewer on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ! Meredith (Slowly Catching Up)'s Reviews > Secret Identity ...more |
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Jun 20, 2023
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Jun 22, 2023
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Feb 02, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1888451416
| 9781888451412
| 1888451416
| 3.99
| 1,484
| unknown
| Apr 01, 2003
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really liked it
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My introduction to the fiction of Nina Revoyr is Southland, published in 2003. I'm not sure if this was conscious on Revoyr's part, but the rich tapes
My introduction to the fiction of Nina Revoyr is Southland, published in 2003. I'm not sure if this was conscious on Revoyr's part, but the rich tapestry of her book mirrors the John Sayles film Lone Star (1996), in which the skeleton of a vile sheriff reported missing in the '50s is discovered. Who killed him? The question by the new sheriff invites uneasy answers from the town's Anglo, Mex and Black inhabitants, all struggling with how much of their past they should carry and how much they should let go. Revoyr follows that paradigm, but with an L.A. story. In 1994, Jackie Ishida is a third year law student at UCLA. She's summoned by her Aunt Lois to review personal items belonging to Jackie's recently deceased grandfather Frank Sakai. A veteran of the Japanese internment camps of the early �40s as well as World War II, Frank owned a convenience store in Watts. He sold it shortly after the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and Lois has discovered proceeds from the sale--$38,000 cash. According to an early will, Frank intended this to go to a Curtis Martindale, who apparently worked at the store. Lois asks Jackie to locate him. Jackie's search ends with James Lanier, a community activist. He reports that Curtis was his cousin and was killed in the Uprising. He was found dead, along with three other Black boys, in the freezer of her grandfather's store. Jackie is hearing this story for the first time. The community believed the murderer to be an LAPD officer named Lawson, a menace seen taking the boys into the store the night they died. To help Lanier bring a case against Lawson, she agrees to speak to her family about these events and work with Lanier as he runs down some of his people. The more questions they ask, the more answers they wish they didn't know are exposed. His father's generation. That was the way he thought of men that age--fifty-five or sixty. They belonged to his father's generation. The phrase both less powerful than it should have been, and more powerful too, because Lanier didn't know his own father. Hadn't laid eyes on him, in fact, since he was four. So he took his knowledge and ideas of the older men around him and tried to reconstruct an image of his father. Most of the men he knew of that age were either bitter or resigned. They were already grown by the time the Movement came along, many of them crushed, dry and fine, like powder. The bitter ones hated all their dealings with the white world, and abused themselves or their loved ones to forget it. The resigned ones shuffled in the shadows of their lives, looking up only to see the step directly in front of them, or to find the mouth of the bottle. A few stayed optimistic, like Carrier, the finance man at Marcus Garvey, by dint of will or God or just plain foolishness. And the even rarer men even succeeded; who made their way in the world without anger or alcohol, Lanier could only wonder at. One of the things I loved about Southland is how Revoyr, born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and Polish-American father, explores the relationship between a gay Asian law student in her twenties and a straight Black community activist in his thirties. I find most people create like bubbles and rarely step out of them to associate with those who look or think differently than they do. In fiction, characters of different strokes can mix and Revoyr not only tackles this superbly, but rejects turning the relationship into a romance. Revoyr deviates from Jackie or Lanier's storyline to jump back in time. Every other chapter, which is too often. Introducing multiple points of view works for me in some novels, but this wasn't one of them. Reading about Frank's past, his wife Mary's past, Curtis's past, etc., stalled the momentum and made it a real push for me to finish the last 100 pages. Revoyr illuminated historical injustices in a tactful and powerful way, exploring how families were sometimes torn apart, and she does so without melodrama. Susan Straight provides the cover blurb, " ... a remarkable feat ... Revoyr's novel is honest in detailing Southern California's brutal history, and honorable in showing how families survived with love and tenacity and dignity." ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 16, 2022
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Nov 19, 2022
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Dec 17, 2021
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Paperback
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| B0DWTW7VJS
| 3.79
| 168,374
| Apr 01, 2000
| 2001
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did not like it
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Zadie Smith and her debut novel White
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Zadie Smith and her debut novel White Teeth. Published in 2000, this is an acclaimed book I wanted to love and understand most of, in the way I'd love a badge for David Foster Wallace or Salman Rushdie. No book is for everyone, though. By the 10% mark, I had started skimming. By 20%, I surrendered. Smith's talent in language arts is evident opening this book up to any page and blindly pointing at any paragraph. What's absent is story, as well as a character who wanted something and had obstacles put in her way. White Teeth is a novel I felt I could skip five pages without missing anything other than writing. Smith is as active as Simone Biles cartwheeling all over each and every page: inventive writing, colorful writing, bold writing, witty writing, triple axle writing. I was delighted initially, then reached a point where I wanted all that leaping around to stop and the story to start. I've enjoyed novels where the author pointed her writing out, reminded the reader they were reading a novel, but always because there was a compelling story. Smith writes about one character, and then another character, and then and then and then ... Wondering how this might've happened, I only had to research how old Smith was when she wrote this book. Case closed. Zadie Smith was born in the working class suburb of Willesden in northwest London in 1975. Her mother emigrated to the U.K. from Jamaica in 1969 and married an Englishman thirty years her senior. Smith, who changed her name from Sadie to "Zadie" at fourteen, was fond of tap dancing and jazz singing but deemed writing to be a more attainable career path. She graduated from King's College, Cambridge with a degree in English, several short stories published in the college literary collection and a novel, White Teeth, which she was offered a six-figure advance on when she was 21. Its critical and commercial success made Smith an international literary sensation. She lives in Kilburn, London with her husband and two children. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 17, 2021
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May 18, 2021
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May 16, 2021
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ebook
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| 1949199746
| 9781949199741
| B08C7ZQ55M
| 4.15
| 39,474
| Sep 01, 2020
| Sep 01, 2020
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really liked it
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Deesha Philyaw and her debut short sto
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Deesha Philyaw and her debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Published in 2020, this is a book that grows in richness with each entry. A lot of collections slot the best story first, sometimes using it as the title for the book. My favorite of Philyaw's nine stories were the last, then second to last, then third to last. Each involves a Black woman in America exploring her precarious relationship with the church. Her stories progress from okay to good to great. In Eula, 40-year-old Caroletta rings in New Year’s Eve 1999 in a hotel two towns over with her childhood friend Eula, who definitely does not think of herself as gay and clings to the Christian ideal of saving herself for a good husband, a life goal Caroletta gave up on long ago, much to her lover’s surprise. In Not-Daniel, a daughter visiting her ailing mother in hospice carries on an affair in the parking lot with a married man she meets visiting his terminally ill mother at the same facility. The affair sparked when she initially mistook him for a boy she attended junior high school with named Daniel McMurray. In Dear Sister, a woman writes a letter to her half-sister to notify her that Wallace “Stet� Brown, the wayward father they share with three other sisters, has passed away. In Peach Cobbler, a bright high school senior named Olivia accepts a job tutoring a classmate, the athlete son of the town pastor. Olivia knows the pastor well, having come home for many years to find him eating the prized peach cobbler her hardened mother bakes and listening to her mother entertain the married pastor in bed. In Snowfall, Arletha has relocated from Florida to an inhospitably colder climate up north with her girlfriend Rhonda. Despite being rejected and nearly disowned by her churchgoing mother due to her sexuality, Arletha’s thoughts turn to home. We miss their blue crabs, the shells boiled to a blood red in wash tubs atop bricks over makeshift fires built in the yard. The wash tubs reminded us of cauldrons, full of rock salt-and-cayenne-drenched water bubbling and rolling, mesh bag of seasonings and halved onions and peppers floating on top, along with potatoes and ears of corn. We miss how they stood over those cauldrons like witches, stirring a potion. With sweat beading the tips of their noses and smoke swirling around their hands and wrists, they wielded long-handled spoons to press the frantic, flailing crabs toward their deaths. We miss how they made our Easter dresses and pound cakes and a way out of no way. In How To Make Love To a Physicist, middle school arts teacher Lyra James meets a physicist at a STEAM conference. Naturally compatible except for living on opposite sides of the country, her relationship with her mother and upbringing in the church stoke fears of intimacy and keep her aloof from him. In Jael, a tough, independent 14-year-old named Jael covets the glamourous young wife of their aging preacher, recording her thoughts about this and other personal matters in a diary. Her great-grandmother discovers the diary and is lost in thoughts of what to do with the “wicked� child she’s responsible for raising. In Instructions For Married Christian Husbands, a bakery owner offers a blunt, no-dicking-around how-to guide for married Christian men on how to conduct themselves in an extramarital affair with her. In When Eddie Levert Comes, a dutiful daughter known to everyone as “Daughter� navigates care for her dementia stricken, born again Christian mother, who seems to not even remember who she is and treats her like a nurse while lavishing affection on her youngest son, who can barely stand to visit. Unfortunately the zeal of the newly converted is bewildering to the children of the newly converted. One Saturday night, you’ve got every blanket in the house draped over your head to drown out the sound of your mother’s headboard banging against your bedroom wall as she hollers her soon-to-be-ex-best friend’s husband’s name. And the next Saturday night, she’s snatching the softened deck of playing cards from your hands because “Games of chance are from the devil.� Daughter, with the logic of a ten-year-old, thought she could understand how gin rummy might be from the devil, seeing as how the name of the game had gin in it. But what was wrong with “Knuckles� or “I Declare War,� her and her brothers� other favorite games? Some things changed about Mama A.C. (After Church, as Daughter thought of her). Like banning cards and men from the house. But some things didn’t change. She still told Bruce and Rico to shut their mouths—and Daughter to shut her Black mouth—if they talked too loudly when her stories were on. And the church was no match for Eddie Levert. The O’Jays were still Mama’s favorite group, and Eddie Levert was still her favorite in the group. Mama B.C. (Before Church) would tell her girlfriends Miss Nancy and Miss Lajene, “Eddie Levert can have me anytime, anywhere, and anyway he want it, honey! You hear me?� And they would all fall out laughing. Mama B.C. played O’Jay albums on Friday nights after dinner, if she didn’t have a date or a card party to go to. She’d close her eyes, swing her hips, and sing along with the music. Her dance partners—a Kool cigarette and a glass of whiskey, on the rocks. Johnnie Walker Red was her drink of choice. What I loved about The Secret Lives of Church Ladies--beyond its enticing title, which came after Philyaw published four of these stories with small presses over four years and her editor pointed out a recurring feature—is how no two stories are the same. Her narrators tend to be single, childless women in their thirties or forties attending if not abiding by the church, but each have different educational backgrounds and careers, express themselves differently, have varying attitudes towards sex and face different challenges. Philyaw’s confidence seems to grow with each story and she hits her stride two-thirds of the way in. I think the pastor’s wife was a freak before she got into the church. She real dark-skin with long, thick hair that she wear in a bun under a black church hat, the wide kind with feathers. Sometimes the hat is dark blue, or white on Easter. But I bet when she was 14 like me, she used to have a big Afro and wear tight bellbottoms, like Thelma on Good Times. Like she’s remembering something from a long time ago. And that half-smile of hers. Like her secrets got secrets. And she got them big dick-sucking lips. Twan said that I got them too. But fuck him. Anyway. Everyone calls the preacher’s wife “Sister Sadie.� In my head, I call her “Sweet Sadie� like that song Kachelle’s mama used to play all the time when we were little. But there ain’t nothing sweet about that lady. She dress all proper in a buttoned-up suit when she standing up there with the old as dirt Reverend collecting that love offering. Sweet Sadie ain’t old-old. Her husband probably 105. She probably 40. Her body reminds me of the album covers Kachelle uncle have in his room. Ohio Players, Lakeside, The Gap Band, Parliament-Funkadelic. They got all these ladies, some real, some cartoons, with big titties, big booties, and dick-sucking lips. Sweet Sadie try to hide all that under them churchy suits. But I bet she used to wear coochie-cutter shorts before she met Old Reverend. She might be fooling the church people, but she ain’t fooling me. I know her body is beautiful underneath them suits. I wish I could see it. Before reading this book, I was likely to perceive “church ladies� as women who use the Bible to control or punish others, or who think of themselves as better than those Jesus is still working on. Philyaw portrays “church ladies� as real people struggling with morality like the rest of us, some for better, some for worse, but all human beings. Published by West Virginia University Press, the book became an unlikely finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Tessa Thompson and HBO Max have optioned it for a planned film, with Philyaw writing the adaptation. I'm looking forward to it and her first novel. Deesha Philyaw was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. She received a BA in economics from Yale University and an MA in teaching from Manhattanville College. She settled in Pittsburgh as an adjunct professor at Chatham University and worked as a freelance writer and editor, publishing a book with her ex-husband, Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce in 2013. Philyaw quit her corporate communications job in 2019 to expand her writing consultant service and pursue a writing career full time. She lives in Pittsburgh with her two daughters. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman ...more |
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May 10, 2021
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May 13, 2021
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Mar 06, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 3.64
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liked it
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Jan 2025
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Jan 01, 2025
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| 3.28
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really liked it
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Dec 02, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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| 4.10
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it was amazing
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Apr 11, 2023
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Mar 24, 2023
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| 3.86
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it was amazing
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Jul 2023
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Dec 29, 2022
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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Jul 11, 2023
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Dec 25, 2022
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| 3.58
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it was ok
|
Mar 04, 2023
|
Dec 24, 2022
|
|||
|
| 3.40
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 04, 2023
|
Dec 23, 2022
|
|||
|
| 3.71
|
did not like it
|
Nov 15, 2022
|
Nov 15, 2022
|
|||
|
| 4.23
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 11, 2022
|
Nov 03, 2022
|
|||
|
| 3.43
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 31, 2023
|
Oct 26, 2022
|
|||
|
| 3.75
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 23, 2022
|
Oct 20, 2022
|
|||
|
| 4.32
|
did not like it
|
Oct 20, 2022
|
Oct 12, 2022
|
|||
|
| 3.78
|
liked it
|
Oct 06, 2022
|
Sep 19, 2022
|
|||
|
| 3.50
|
really liked it
|
Jan 27, 2023
|
Sep 18, 2022
|
|||
|
| 3.51
|
it was ok
|
Jul 09, 2023
|
Jun 10, 2022
|
|||
|
| 2.95
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 13, 2022
|
Jun 02, 2022
|
|||
|
| 3.62
|
Jun 22, 2023
|
Feb 02, 2022
|
||||
|
| 3.99
|
really liked it
|
Nov 19, 2022
|
Dec 17, 2021
|
|||
|
| 3.79
|
did not like it
|
May 18, 2021
|
May 16, 2021
|
|||
|
| 4.15
|
really liked it
|
May 13, 2021
|
Mar 06, 2021
|
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