en-US Sat, 03 May 2025 13:46:43 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7539948926 Sat, 03 May 2025 13:46:43 -0700 /review/show/7539948926 Niamh gave 5 stars to Before We Hit the Ground (Kindle Edition) by Selali Fiamanya
Beautiful ]]> Review7073189770 Tue, 10 Dec 2024 04:51:51 -0800 /review/show/7073189770 Niamh gave 5 stars to This Immaculate Body (Kindle Edition) by Emma van Straaten
Funny, sharp and unsettling, This Immaculate Body asks big questions and offers no straightforward answers. I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

The prose is lucid, beautiful and incredibly readable. Alice's voice is perfectly pitched and controlled. She's creepy and unreliable, yes, but also thoughtful and intelligent in so many ways, and strangely hopeful. It's quite a remarkable achievement to create a character who's at once so disturbing, frustrating and endearing. And that, I think, is the great achievement of this book. Through the lens of an unhinged narrator and obsessive love story, Emma van Straaten digs into big questions around loneliness and shame. Both in our strange cultural moment, when our intimate lives are so mediated by tech, but also as a universal feature of human life, intersecting with race, gender and trauma. She beautifully weaves together so many small cruelties and kindnesses, both in Alice and the people around her. It's all so messy and moving and human.

I can't wait to see what Emma does next. ]]>