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Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (6/3/25) – The Death I Gave Him

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Here’s a continuation of my recent sci-fi mood…I’ve been looking to add more sci-fi to my TBR, because I seem to exhaust my supply faster than I can keep up. The premise of The Death I Gave Him being a queer, sci-fi/thriller retelling of Hamlet enticed me, but sadly, this novel didn’t deliver—not on the retelling front, and not entirely on the thriller part either.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Death I Gave Him – Em X. Liu

Hayden Lichfield is intent on carrying out the mission that his father is pioneering—the Sisyphus Formula, a substance that could one day reverse death itself. Enticed by immortality and down on his luck, Hayden throws himself into his work. But when his father is found murdered in Elsinore Labs, Hayden has no idea who to turn to—and who wanted to murder the man who wanted to beat death. Trapped in his room with only his AI, Horatio, to trust, Hayden scrambles for answers, and everyone around him is a suspect. But is it not just Hayden’s friends, but his father that have been lying to him all along?

TW/CW: murder, blood, descriptions of injury, suicidal ideation, grief, death of a parent

Trying to describe whether or not The Death I Gave Him qualifies as a retelling feels like the Ship of Theseus. If all of your characters’ names allude to Hamlet and you set your story in Denmark, but not much else relates to Hamlet, is it still a Hamlet retelling? How much Hamlet does one need to remove for it to still feel like a retelling? Sadly, Em X. Liu is proof that there is a limit to how much you can remove before it stops feeling like a retelling. It’s Hamlet in name only.

Having read Hamlet less than a year ago, I went into The Death I Gave Him with a fairly fresh memory. However, if not for the more obvious name changes (Hamlet becomes Hayden, Polonius becomes Paul, etc.) and the fact that it’s set in Denmark, I really wouldn’t have thought that this was a Hamlet retelling. I’m fine with loose retellings, but I don’t think it should’ve been billed as such. The whole Denmark setting definitely felt like very a “see? This is Hamlet, I promise!” move and wasn’t relevant to the plot whatsoever. I’m fine with loose retellings, but I feel like the similarities end with what I just described above. I’m not sure if this even qualifies as a retelling so much as people named after characters in Hamlet. Also, none of these people were nearly crazy enough to be in a Hamlet retelling. You’ve got to have someone go at least a little insane to have a proper Hamlet retelling. Hayden got a wee bit depressed and existential towards the end, but there wasn’t nearly enough “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” insanity to make it feel like a true tribute to Shakespeare. It just felt like a rather emotionally stunted novel even though it’s based off of something so dramatic. Some tonal liberties are inevitable for any given adaptation, but these ones just didn’t feel true to Hamlet, which made the more obvious Hamlet references feel more like preventative measures to make sure that people remembered that this was a Hamlet retelling.

Having mixed formats (interview excerpts, security camera footage, etc.) can be a great tool to add some additional context—and a unique flavor—to a novel, and I think it works especially well with thrillers, which The Death I Gave Him partially was. However, I don’t think Liu properly executed this format. Granted, it’s difficult to pull off, but when it’s executed well, it adds another layer of mystery to what is hopefully another layer of mystery. The problem Liu seemed to have is that, with the exception of the security camera footage, all of the other perspectives sounded exactly the same. All of the interviews, document excerpts, and “fictional” interludes by Horatio were in the same tense and the same POV, which basically rendered the format useless. Beyond that, these interviews and whatnot were from multiple people, but they all had virtually the same narrative voice. By the end of the novel, it didn’t even matter where the excerpts were coming from—they all sounded the same. If you’re going to pull off this kind of format, you have to make each component sound unique—if everything sounds the same, what’s the point in specifying which chapter is an interview and which one is a fictional account?

Also, none of the characters seemed to have much of a purpose outside of being props, aside from Hayden, Horatio, and maybe Felicia if I’ve being generous. Even though we get a significant portion of the novel through her interviews and written segments, I never even got a specific read on her voice since it was so similar to every other character’s. Paul, Rasmussen, and Charles were just there until they conveniently weren’t. The timeless fun of Hamlet comes from seeing everybody scheming against each other and different motives clashing against each other, but everybody was just rendered into very similar characters with too similar motives to each other for the mystery to really be worth it.

The same was true of the plot. I was committed to The Death I Gave Him because I was excited by the premise and wanted to see how the plot unfolded. I will say that Liu did a great job of setting the scene and cramming us in said locked room of this locked-room mystery. However, very little happened in said locked room—other than a handful of scattered moments, the place was quite slow, and the ratio of information that was revealed to the amount of pages it correlated to was way off—it felt like we only got significant revelations every 100 pages, and The Death I Gave Him is a little over 300 pages. There needed to be much more intrigue and complicating factors and clashing motives for this novel to work as a mystery; what we had was quite lackluster.

All in all, a sci-fi retelling of Hamlet that missed the mark on its source material and its new plot. 2 stars.

The Death I Gave Him is a standalone, but Em X. Liu is also the author of the novella If Found, Return to Hell and several short stories in various anthologies and magazines.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/27/25) – Light Years from Home

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ve had several of Mike Chen’s novels floating around my TBR for quite some time. I’d forgotten that I’d read a short story of his in From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back, and I figured I’d give his novel-length writing a try. Plus, I was just in a sci-fi mood (as I always am). Despite the flaws that dragged down the premise, Light Years from Home was an ambitious novel that blended genres and didn’t shy away from being messy. Whether it successfully cleaned up its messes, however, is up for debate.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Light Years from Home – Mike Chen

15 years ago, the Shao family was thrown into disarray. Jakob, the only son, and their father disappeared. Their father later returned, dazed, disoriented, and convinced that he and Jakob were abducted by aliens. He died soon after.

Jakob has been missing for over a decade now. Sisters Evie and Kass haven’t spoken since the incident, with Evie diving into alien conspiracy theories and Kass throws herself into her work and caring for their aging mother. But when Jakob returns, parroting their late father’s theories about alien abduction, the sisters have no choice to bury the hatchet and reunite. As Jakob’s story grows wilder and the rift between the sisters widens, they must contend with the possibility that all of this may be true—but can Jakob be trusted? And if his story is true, what does it mean for the fate of Earth?

TW/CW: death of a parent, grief, dementia themes, substance abuse (smoking, drinking)

In the acknowledgments, Mike Chen says that this story was initially inspired by “Red” by Belly, and I’m tempted to give it another half a star just because I’ve never heard anyone outside of my immediate family or Pitchfork talk about them. The title also makes me think of The Rolling Stones’ “2000 Light Years from Home,” but that’s a vague enough title that it could be a reference to a lot of things. Although Belly didn’t save every flaw, Light Years from Home is a solid meld of science fiction and realistic fiction.

Light Years from Home has one of the most compelling beginnings of a book that I’ve read recently. You’re thrown right into the action aboard a Seven Bells spaceship in a classic space opera setting. Jakob cradles his alien comrade in his arms as they die, and thus begins his perilous quest back to Earth. But the reader and Jakob are the only people who know about this—the only other character who did (their dad) is notably dead. It would’ve been easy to just have the characters not believe him, but Jakob is already established as an unreliable person—his real life experience sounds suspiciously like an outrageous lie he would’ve told in his college days, which gives the characters both more obstacles to overcome, but more of their messy family dynamic to dissect. In terms of plot, Light Years from Home was a great study in not taking the easy way out—everything was messy and tangled, making for a book that had lots of drama and hurdles to pick apart.

Every single member of the Shao member was on the obnoxious, insufferable side (save for maybe Evie), but Chen did a great job of capturing the complicated family dynamic in the novel. Fifteen years after Jakob’s abduction, the wounds remain raw, and not a single member of the family has recovered from the fallout. Although I wasn’t satisfied at all with the character development of…well, any of the family (I’ll get to that later), Chen did an excellent job of weaving together all of the contrasting beliefs, motivations, and traumas that each family member had. All of them dealt with Jakob and their dad’s disappearance and death, respectively, in wildly different ways, and their coping mechanisms butted heads over the course of the novel. Even though this was ultimately handled poorly at the end, I did also appreciate the sensitive depiction of their mom’s dementia; Chen did a very respectful job of depicting the emotional impact of her memory loss and not being able to recognize her own children.

For all of the focus on the messy Shao family, the promised character development that their dynamic hinged on was not delivered on. There should’ve been plenty of conflict with Jakob reckoning with the man he was on Earth versus the man he was while serving in space with the Seven Bells, yet none of that happened. All of his character development happened off-page, resulting in a character that came off more flatly than I think was intended. Likewise, Kass and Evie were set up for significant development, but nothing happened with them either. Evie’s beliefs were reinforced and she and stayed static throughout the novel, not giving up her fantasies of aliens for the sake of the family. The closest Kass got, if you could call “okay, I guess aliens do exist” character development, was a brief revelation that even though she’s a therapist, that she doesn’t know everything about herself or her family, and that she shouldn’t pretend to know everything. That last half of my sentence amounted to about a paragraph around 50 pages before the novel ended, and it felt like entirely too little too soon. In the end, the character development was a jumble of unfulfilled promises—we got the shells of what could’ve been nuanced characters, but despite the bizarre journey they went on, they came out the exact same as they were before.

Also…I’m sorry, what the hell was that ending? Somehow, it was one of the most anticlimactic parts of the whole novel, and weird in ways that didn’t make sense. Jakob returns to the Seven Bells, but there’s hardly any fanfare or even extended moments of grief from the sisters, even though their brother has just decided to spend the rest of his life in space and never see them again. There wasn’t nearly enough emotion to it, and nor was there page time—this moment only gets around 4-6 pages tops. Instead of an emotional resolution with her daughters, the mom somehow un-dementias herself and remembers everything, and is also eerily content with her only son’s decision to spend the rest of his life in space. It all just felt so rushed and emotionally stunted compared to the rest of the novel, and not nearly as detailed as it needed to be. Weird is the only way to adequately describe it. I felt lost, but also robbed of what could’ve been something so bittersweet. I feel like it’s partially a side effect of none of the characters having any character development, but it felt like such a lack of a resolution. It was practically a non-ending.

All in all, a sci-fi/realistic fiction blend that embraced messiness in both plot and character, but had significant trouble with cleaning it up. 3.5 stars!

Light Years from Home is a standalone, but Mike Chen is the author of several novels. He has contributed short stories to From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and the full-length novel Brotherhood to the Star Wars universe. He is also the author of We Could Be Heroes, Vampire Weekend, Here and Now and Then, A Quantum Love Story, and many more novels for adults.

Today’s song:

NEW MARY IN THE JUNKYARD WOOOOOOOOOOO

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/20/25) – Rebel Skies

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Update: I do have something nice to say, so I’ll say something. Beyond the heinous Studio Ghibli AI trend (and if anybody here thought that was “cute,” even when the White House twitter did it, get thee away from this blog), people tend to narrow Studio Ghibli down to a very shallow, cutesy aesthetic that discounts the heart of Hayao Miyazaki’s incredible visions. Rebel Skies was one of the few pieces of media inspired by Miyazaki that clearly gets him—rich worldbuilding with whimsy and darkness in equal measure. Yet even if you take that comparison away, Rebel Skies is a YA book to be reckoned with, full of heart, spirit, and skyships.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Rebel Skies (Rebel Skies, #1) – Ann Sei Lin

In the Sky Cities, no one is more revered—and feared—more than Crafters: those who possess the power to draw magic from paper and make creatures come to life. Kurara, a young servant aboard a flying ship, has barely honed her powers, only using them for party tricks. But when her best friend, Haru, is revealed to be a Shinigami—a creature made of paper—and grievously injured, Kurara flees to a skyship in order to find answers. There, she hones her Crafting with Himura, an ornery Crafter with secrets of her own. As she gets to know the motley crew of her ship, Kurara discovers that Haru’s identity isn’t the only secret that’s been kept from her—and that there are enough to bring down the Empire.

TW/CW: fire, animal death, torture, death, descriptions of injury

Ann Sei Lin seems to know as well as anyone that we need a bit more whimsy in YA fantasy. The edgelord stuff has gotten boring. It’s fantasy, come on now! I get that if magic was the norm, people might not be impressed by it, but there has to be some wonder in your life, right?

First off, the worldbuilding was tons of fun! Though the Studio Ghibli-inspired elements are plentiful, if I had to summarize the world of Rebel Skies, it wouldn’t be with that. If anything, it’s more of a steampunk version of Kubo and the Two Strings. You’ve got Nausicaä-esque airships and floating cities (which both felt very Philip Reeve as well) combined with paper-based magic, and all of the possibilities you can think of along with it—paper animals, paper people, and monstrous paper beasts. (Oh, and the paper animals can talk. Gotta toss some talking animals in there.) I’m not usually one for steampunk, but this isn’t your garden-variety “slap gears and tiny hats on everything in Victorian England and call it a day” steampunk—not only is the world inspired by Asian cultures (mainly Japan), the blend of magic and machinery married easily, and often whimsically. Though the colors I imagined trended towards rusty and earth-toned, Lin couldn’t have made her world more vibrant—and multilayered; not only were there base-level divisions between the people who lived on the ground and the people who lived in the sky, there were all sorts of customs, stereotypes, and quirks that were given to each, which in turn influenced how all the mismatched patchwork of characters interacted with each other.

For me, it doesn’t get much better than the worldbuilding informing the themes of the book. Not only did I love all of the intricacies of the paper magic in Rebel Skies, I love how Lin used it to explore the theme of autonomy, and especially the lack of it. Kurara herself has been ordered around as a servant, and she sees the same thing being done to the magical beings around her; she sees how Himura treats Akane, his shikigami fox, and questions whether or not he’s really so content to devote his entire existence to serving Himura. Add that to the visceral trauma of discovering that her best friend is made of paper and has been seemingly puppeteered from afar, and the reigning empire is performing cruel experiments on its shikigami, and Kurara’s ultimate motive to both her personal journey and her journey to wrong the rights of her world lies in autonomy, and having a reciprocal, ethical relationship to her magic. It’s an excellent metaphor and an excellent addition of nuance to the worldbuilding—if the world relies on unbalanced relationships, how can I shift them so as not to do to others what others have done to me?

You all know by now how much of a sucker I am for a good found family story, and while Rebel Skies didn’t completely fulfill that promise, I love the group dynamic between all of the characters. Even though the subplot of Sayo and Kurara warming up to each other felt a bit rote, I liked the progression that their characters had. Kurara and the rest of the pirates were lots of fun, and they gave the skyship a lively, lived-in feel. I’m also a sucker for the trope of older, gruff characters taking excitable younger characters under their wing; Himura was a solid addition to the canon, but I feel like he’s hiding too much to truly be a mentor to Kurara. I’m interested to see where it goes in Rebel Fire, but my gut says that it’s going to be some kind of subversion. We’ll see. Either way, Rebel Skies’ motley crew lived up to its description, making the setting all the more lively and adventurous.

As someone who read voraciously in my childhood and longed for some kind of bridge between middle grade and the too-broad age range of YA (12 to 18 is so arbitrary and baffling, you’ll not hear the end of it from me), Rebel Skies automatically won me over. It’s categorized as YA, but it feels right in the middle of MG whimsy and adventure and more YA stakes and themes. Kurara, even as a teenager, has a childlike sense of wonder, and although some of her interactions came off as slightly more childish than her age, it hits a charming balance of innocence and discovery that feels like the ideal bridge between the age jump between the two categories. As a longtime YA reader, it hits a natural sweet spot, but in its balance of darker, more YA elements with the same kind of voice as older MG, Lin has written a book that could serve as both a younger YA reader’s introduction to the genre and an easy pleaser for the YA reader.

That being said, the one major flaw in Rebel Skies is that I didn’t see why Himura’s POV was necessary. He was a solid character, but this novel was clearly Kurara’s story. I enjoyed hearing his voice and Lin wrote it well, but I don’t think his input to the story served a purpose other than giving his side of events…that we’d already been shown through Kurara’s POV. We get that Kurara’s been slow in her training, and then Himura repeats it as such. We do get plot information that we wouldn’t have otherwise gotten from Kurara, but if that’s the only reason that Himura gets his own chapters, then what’s the point? There could be multiple interesting ways for Kurara to get this information that could deepen or complicate the relationship she has with Himura—she could overhear a conversation or sneak a look at some of his documents, for instance, and he could catch her in the act, adding more conflict to the plot. Again, he was a perfectly fine character, but aside from the interludes, Rebel Skies wasn’t meant to be a dual-POV novel. It’s the Kurara show, c’mon!

Overall, a memorable fantasy book with lush worldbuilding, a lively cast of characters, and a unique voice that balances middle grade adventurousness with the more matured nuance of YA. 4 stars!

Rebel Skies is the first book in the Rebel Skies trilogy, followed by Rebel Fire and Rebel Dawn. Rebel Skies is Ann Sei Lin’s debut novel.

Today’s song:

I’m totally new to BCNR, but I saw them open for St. Vincent the other night, and they were great performers!! this was probably my favorite of theirs.

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/13/25) – The Knockout

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I always feel bad whenever I come back after period of hibernation only to come back with a negative review. I just have to get it all out sometimes! I’ll probably have something nice to say by next week.

Say it with me, kids: just because a book has diverse representation doesn’t erase the flaws in its writing! Sadly, The Knockout was not the one-two punch that the title promised: it tried to hard to sound hip and teenager-y, and nosedived spectacularly.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Knockout – S.A. Patel

Kareena Thakkar knows her power. She’s been building up her skills in Muay Thai, and she’s good enough to qualify for the US Muay Thai Open—an event that could take her to the Olympics if she wins. But even though it’s where her passion lies, Kareena is divided between her Muay Thai world, her peers’ desires for her to be traditionally feminine and act the way a good Indian girl should. With her ill father and the Olympics on the line—as well as a cute boy, Kareena must decide which world she’d rather stay in—or if she needs to divide those worlds after all.

TW/CW: bullying, terminal illness, misogyny, medical content

Look. I read YA frequently, knowing that it’s a market of books about teenagers mostly written by adults. Even by that standard, I haven’t read a book so deeply how do you do, fellow kids? as The Knockout in some time. I wanted to badly to root for Kareena, but her insufferable voice—and by extension, Patel’s writing—made it a real ordeal.

Kareena’s voice was the most glaring issue that The Knockout had. Firstly, she didn’t sound or act like a 17-year-old. If anything, between her language and her maturity, she sounded closer to 13 or 14. The kind of stiff, teen movie comebacks she doled out to her bullies were nowhere near the kind of experience a person would have at 17—especially someone who had been through as many struggles as her. In my experience, what you need to do when writing teenagers (or any character who’s younger than you) is to emphasize how you (or your peers) remember feeling—what you’d prioritize, what was important to you, how you would react to situations, etc. Writing like a teenager is about the emotion, because there are a lot of them running around your brain at that age. Sure, it’s hard to nail the voice, and granted, I don’t have the age distance from Kareena that Patel has. But there’s lots of easy ways to not do it, and some of those are a) extensively leaning on what you think is “hip” slang, and b) automatically skewing the character’s voices as young as possible within the teenage range. Between the unnecessary censorship of cursing here and there and her childish outbursts, Kareena was not believably 17. Additionally, Patel’s insistence at integrating what she thought to be “current” Gen Z slang was painfully bad. If anything, it dated The Knockout leagues more than making it relevant. It’s not the teenage experience, but instead the teenage movie experience, simply parroting what adults think teenagers sound like. It positions itself as current and relatable while never encapsulating what it was like to be a teenager, making what should’ve been the heart of the novel hollow.

As with Kareena’s supposed 17 years of age, I was never convinced of the stakes in The Knockout. When Patel established how good Kareena was at Muay Thai, all it did was make Kareena feel unnecessarily overpowered. I normally only say that about fantasy or sci-fi novels, but she was just too good to the point that every fight she did seemed to be a fleeting moment of struggle before she absolutely pummels her opponent. This continued throughout the duration of the novel. Even though Kareena had the Olympics on the line, I never once got the sense that this was hard for her. Her training seemed to be the only time she struggled—other than that, she just flew through the US Muay Thai open without a problem. If she actually experienced tangible setbacks within her practice or the Muay Thai open, I would’ve been more motivated to root for her. Yet everything seemed to be handed to her on a platter, making the stakes feel almost nonexistent. I knew from the start that Kareena would get everything that she wanted, and while I appreciate the value of having diverse characters succeeding in their narratives, it made for a book with no stakes.

Bullying is a major plot point in The Knockout, but I don’t think that Patel succeeded in making all of it completely believable. As far as Kareena getting bullied by her other Indian-American peers for not being “Indian” enough went, that was one of the few parts of the book that was successful; unlike the main plot, it gave Kareena’s struggles some tangible weight. However, I wasn’t fully convinced that her doing Muay Thai was something so outrageous that she thinks that she’ll be bullied by the whole school for it. I get that it’s not a traditionally feminine sport, but with the way that Kareena talked about Muay Thai, you would think that she’s coming out of the closet. Even with the cliched interactions between Kareena and her peers, I just couldn’t imagine her being bullied for it, and not just because if someone were to slam her into a locker, teen movie-style, she’d slam right back. Kareena being a Muay Thai champion didn’t feel nearly as dirty as a secret as Patel lead us to believe, which made some of the novel’s more personal stakes less believable as well.

Additionally, I have mixed feelings about the romance between Kareena and Amit. It didn’t fully sidetrack the book for me, but I wasn’t fully invested either. I did like that Amit was instrumental in helping Kareena reconnect with parts of her Indian culture, but I don’t think he had much of a personality beyond what he did for Kareena. They seemed to have almost all the same interests, and Amit didn’t have anything to distinguish himself other than not doing Muay Thai. He was just a blank slate with similarities to Kareena baked in so that there could be some instant “chemistry” between the two of them. The only tension in the romance was when Kareena met his more traditional family, so the tension didn’t even lie with him—it was all outside factors that threatened the integrity of the relationship. The only differences I can really think of about Amit and Kareena is that he comes from a more traditional family and he’s…well, a different gender. That’s it. He wasn’t a person, he was just a boyfriend. I do think that this kind of story is good with a romantic subplot, especially considering that it’s YA realistic fiction, but like almost everything else in The Knockout, I could not get invested whatsoever.

That being said, I do have some positives for the book. I’ve seen a lot of books, especially YA ones, where the main character has to choose between their traditional culture and the more “appealing” American culture. The Knockout, by contrast, had Kareena be raised by two parents who weren’t connected to their culture in a conventional way—they were flexible with letting their daughter be who she wanted to be without sacrificing their Indian heritage in the process. Kareena was disconnected from her roots in some ways (which she begins to remedy in this novel), but both she and her parents emphasize that there’s no single way to be Indian. I can’t speak to any cultural accuracies, of course, but I loved this as a message for a YA book in this context—there’s no one way to be any identity, be it in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, or anything else. Paired with the expectations of femininity that society puts on Kareena, it’s a wonderful message. I also really liked that Kareena had a combination of multiple interests that weren’t traditionally feminine—in addition to Muay Thai, she’s also passionate about computer science. Sadly, all this was overshadowed by the flaws in most of the novel, but if you took all that away, at least The Knockout has something beneficial to say. I just wish it was said in a less cliched, more authentic way.

All in all, a book with a positive message if you soldiered through it, but was bogged down by childish dialogue writing and characters (even by YA standards) and a lack of all-around believability. 2 stars.

The Knockout is a standalone. She is also the author of several books for teens and adults, including Isha, Unscripted, The Design of Us, First Love, Take Two, The Trouble With Hating You, Sleepless in Dubai, My Sister’s Big Fat Indian Wedding, and the Venom series (A Drop of Venom and A Touch of Blood).

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (3/25/25) – Water Moon

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Even with me being slightly less online than I’ve been in the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of buzz about Water Moon. Enough that it warranted a hardcover copy that was a whole $31 at Barnes & Noble…not even a special edition or anything, just a regular copy. Nevertheless, I wanted to give it a less expensive try, so I got it on hold at the library. Though it didn’t live up to both the $31 or the Studio Ghibli comparisons it warranted, Water Moon was a heartfelt, if a little confused, about the connectivity of people and the choices that lead us to the places we end up.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Water Moon – Samantha Sotto Yambao

Hana Ishikawa is set to receive a very unique inheritance. Her father has given her control over his old shop in Tokyo; tourists and passersby will see a ramen restaurant, but once you look inside, you find that its wares are something completely different: a pawnshop where you can exchange your life’s regrets and unpleasant choices. But on her first day on the job, Hana finds the shop destroyed. Looking for answers, she instead finds Keishin, an American tourist searching for answers of his own. Their search leads them into a strange realm of magic and wonder that may hold the keys to the problems they’re facing…and more.

TW/CW: loss of loved ones, grief, abandonment, mentions of abortion/pregnancy issues (brief), blood/violence, descriptions of injury

Water Moon was a good stab at magical realism; it had some beautiful elements that had me enraptured, but not for long enough. Its fundamental issue is that it wanted to do too much but didn’t have the space to do it. What we have here, messy as it was, at least read well and presented some moments of lovely, whimsical magical realism.

While this novel had some issues throughout with thematic cohesiveness, I do think that the central one (or the one that felt like it was supposed to be central, at least), was a beautiful one—connectivity through the choices we make. Hana’s life is dictated by regret, but she learns, through jumping through fantastical worlds, that it’s the unexpected things in life that bring us together that make life worth living. I especially loved the connection to the Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Detector, something that Keishin has returned to Japan to study—capturing the secrets of this elusive, subatomic particle that can only be observed (if you’re lucky) in an observatory filled with distilled water underground. I’m a sucker for when writers are able to articulate that emotion with science, especially with something as misunderstood as physics; Water Moon did a lovely job of using that as part of the larger metaphor about how lucky we are to experience the unexpected, and how that can bring us together. I just wished Yambao had done more with it, but what we had, I loved.

I also loved the worldbuilding in Water Moon! I don’t think the childlike wonder that Yambao was going for was properly executed all the way, but I love the inherent whimsy that’s integral to holding the worldbuilding together. You travel to these parallel, unseeable worlds found in puddles on the ground, and in those worlds, you find everything from villages dedicated to hanging the stars at night and origami and paper planes with a life of their own. Even with the rather sinister undercurrent that runs through it, the glimpses of the fantasy worlds were almost dreamlike. They had a distinct quality of feeling like the kinds of fantasies you imagined when you were a kid (especially the puddle travel), which enhanced the feel of the world overall.

However, that whimsy only came off in varying degrees. That was due to the writing, which often came off rather rote. Yambao presented the reader with a myriad of fantastical, objectively wondrous elements in this parallel world that Hana and Keishin venture into, only to describe it in the flattest terms. For a magical realism novel, the writing felt almost utilitarian, designed to describe a setting or a phenomenon with the absolute minimum amount of description for the reader to get an idea of what it looked like. Sure, Water Moon didn’t need to be excessively flowery or purple in its prose, but when you have a setting as whimsical and magical as this, more description is necessary.

The same applies to the feelings of the characters—they hardly seemed to react to their settings, only serving to be chess pieces that were dragged around at will when the plot called for it. Keishin at least had something of a personality, but other than him, most of the characters, including Hana, were defined only by what had happened to them. They were defined only by their backstories, and that dictated everything that they did throughout the story—not their motivations or their personalities. All of this, combined with Yambao’s relatively flat writing, made their romance lackluster. Not only did it feel like the classic “oh, our main characters are a boy and a girl, therefore they have to fall in love,” it was just so rushed and un-earned—we didn’t get nearly enough development (or page time) from either of them to merit a full-blown romance. Even though they’d jumped through magical puddles together and visited whimsical worlds, I found myself barely caring for either of them, or their romance.

Back to the subject of themes…I wholly believe that a book shouldn’t be constrained by talking only about one theme. In fact, most every book does that anyway—having a book centered around a single theme without even a handful of sub-themes or topics is practically impossible. Like I (and Yambao) said, everything is connected. Water Moon, however, had a problem with articulating it. Beyond the bit about choices and connectivity, Water Moon wanted to say so much about so many things—motherhood, grief, regret, parent-child relationships—and yet it didn’t know what to say about any of them. A theme was introduced with the same emotional weight as the central theme, it got 50 pages of page time, and then it barely resolved itself. Water Moon had almost no sense of direction, leaving me with a book that didn’t resolve itself in a satisfying or logical way. Ultimately, this felt like a case of too many cooks in the kitchen—it was an ambitious attempt to tackle every theme and give it the same weight, but it ended up in a plot (and characters) that ran around confused for almost all 374 pages and underbaked statements on what it wanted to say.

Overall, an ambitious and dreamlike novel with a world that was a treat to explore, but offered up flat characters and had no sense of what it wanted to do with itself. 3.5 stars!

Water Moon is a standalone, but Samantha Sotto Yambao is also the author of Before Ever After, Love and Gravity, A Dream of Trees, and The Beginning of Always (under the name Samantha Sotto).

Today’s song:

so hauntingly beautiful :,)

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (3/18/25) – The Teller of Small Fortunes

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

You know it. You know I’m all for cozy literature. I wasn’t particularly in a moment where I needed cozy fantasy, but these days, I love to space them into my regular reading rotation to keep things lighter, if need be. I’m usually more for sci-fi than fantasy, but I love a good fantasy every once in a while. The Teller of Small Fortunes wasn’t the best cozy fantasy I’ve read, but like a mug of tea, it was great for a momentary hug of warmth and love.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Teller of Small Fortunes – Julie Leong

Tao is an immigrant from Shinara, making a living far to the west in Eshtera. She makes a living off of fortune-telling, but hers are not like the grand tales that people expect from those with Shinn heritage. But Tao’s fortunes have a catch: they are small fortunes, minor events that seemingly have no consequence, but will add up towards a life of crucial choices. She cannot stay for long in one place, lest these fortunes pile up and her customers start to expect more complex predictions. But when she crosses paths with an ex-mercenary and a thief-turned-poet on the road, Tao has to keep a promise to the fortune she gave them: they’re looking for a missing girl, and Tao knows that she’ll be reunited with them. What’s unknown, however, is how it’ll happen…

TW/CW (from Julie Leong): political conflict, death of a parent, parental neglect, racism, grief, alcohol

While The Teller of Small Fortunes wasn’t the best cozy fantasy I’ve ever read, if you’re looking for something sweet to tide you over, look no further! In the mood for found family, cats, spells, and wonky pastries? I’ve got just the book for you.

Given the crowds that I hang around with, it might surprise you that I’ve never actually played DnD. I’ve always been adjacent to people who are into it and frequently play it, but I’ve never played myself. By osmosis, I know enough about it to discern that anyone who loves DnD will absolutely eat up The Teller of Small Fortunes! Somebody with more DnD knowledge could probably sort each character into a class, but I’m illiterate in that department; yet even still, I can tell that it came about in the way that many DnD campaigns seem to: out of love and out of friendship. Leong’s cozy fantasy has the perfect balance of wholesomeness, levity, and more serious themes, and overall, it’s an ode to the friends we find in unexpected places. The contrasting personalities of Tao, Mash, Silt, and Kina made for a delightful found family with goals that often got in the way of each other, but twisted to form a journey across a fantastical land that taught them lessons about identity, friendship, and individuality. It’s just so sweet. Admittedly, it did border on a bit cloying at times (even for me, both with my cozy fiction proclivities and my merciless sweet tooth), but overall, cozy fantasy fans will be more than satisfied. Plus, there’s a cat. Automatic win in my book.

Tao’s character arc and the themes around it were the heart of The Teller of Small Fortunes. This novel focuses heavily on her immigrant identity, but it explored something that I haven’t often seen with these narratives. In order to make a living outside of her home country, Tao has to perform a stereotype—in her case, being a seer. She relies on this preconceived notion of her people all being able to see the future, and knows that she’ll be able to make money off of it, yet she tries so hard to make it define her. On the other side of the coin, there’s the Guild of Mages, who physically want to use her as a pawn, fitting her into their similarly superficial stereotype of what a magic-user should be. Yes, The Teller of Small Fortunes is very much a “be yourself” narrative (I will always hate Disney for making people trivialize this kind of message), but it’s one that’s complicated by the nuance of the aspects of Tao’s identity. For her, being herself is a lifelong fight, held up by several systemic forces of oppression. Her journey is a mental one just as much as it is physical, and it required the same labor, with a satisfying conclusion: the conscious effort by her to not let other people box her in.

However, the writing sometimes got on my nerves. For me, cozy fantasy can sometimes fall into the trap of being almost condescending in its writing style; it veers to strongly into the “and what did we learn today, kids?” kind of storytelling, even if it’s often aimed at adults. There is a marked difference between having a low-stakes plot and dumbing down the language for your audience. The Teller of Small Fortunes didn’t completely fall into making the language overly digestible, but every plot point and side quest (of which there are many) tended to have a very clear, obviously stated lesson that accompanied the ending. Even if said plot points were well-executed—which they often were, especially the scene with the phoenix egg—their impact was often lessened by the regurgitating of what the scene was meant to mean for the characters and the message, as if we couldn’t figure it out. I honestly didn’t mind that these plot points, especially the ending, were wrapped up in notably kind, easier ways—that’s almost a staple of cozy fiction, at this point—but we didn’t have to get their message shoved in our faces on a neon sign. Additionally, as a character, Kina also erred on this side of saccharine—she was sweet in the way that some cozy fiction characters are, but like the pastries she made, it got a little too sweet in a grating way.

I also found the worldbuilding to be quite generic. The Teller of Small Fortunes was one of those fantasy novels that took existing countries, copied and pasted them into the narrative, and added magic and mythical creatures; Shinara was clearly an analogue for China, which, while it was great for the themes of anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia, didn’t make for worldbuilding that was interesting or novel in any way. The same can be said for most of the other places that Tao and the gang pass through—most of them fell under the “vaguely European, I will not elaborate” curse that plagues high fantasy, and the only things that distinguished them, if any, were some of the exports/trades that they had. I will say that I loved the system of the Guild of Mages, and they served as great commentary for tokenization and a distant but tangible source of corruption in the world, but they didn’t have enough of a presence for them to have an effect on the world for me. It all felt very lackluster to me in contrast to the care that was put into the characters. I also would’ve liked more clarification on the regional magic. It’s implied through some of Tao’s background that magic is often associated with/endemic to particular regions (hence the stereotypes of Shinn people being seers/fortune tellers and whatnot), but we don’t get a clarification of whether or not the rule also applies to the surrounding regions.

Overall, a cozy fantasy that had lovely, poignant characters and themes, but was less fortunate in the worldbuilding department. 3.5 stars!

The Teller of Small Fortunes is a standalone and Julie Leong’s debut. Her next novel, The Keeper of Magical Things, is a companion novel set in the same universe as The Teller of Small Fortunes, and is slated for release in October 2025.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (1/7/25) – The Infinity Particle

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

First book review of 2025, and so far, the best book I’ve read this month! Granted, we’re only a week into the month, but it still counts for something, right? loved Mooncakes, which Wendy Xu illustrated, but I had no idea until recently that she had published a solo graphic novel—and a sci-fi one! What resulted was an incredibly emotional read to start the year off with: robot romance and explorations of how relationships make the universe work.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Infinity Particle – Wendy Xu

Clementine Chang is headed for Mars. In the distant future, it’s a place of peace and industry, and it’s precisely the place that Clem wants to start her new life. A clever inventor, Clem has a knack for working with AI. She hopes to continue her education under Dr. Marcella Lin, a legendary AI engineer who inspired her work. But Dr. Lin is not what she seems—and she’s hiding a secret from the scientific world: a lifelike, humanoid AI that she refers to as her son. His name is Kye, and he yearns for a life outside of the one that Dr. Lin programmed for him. As Clem gets acquainted with him, she discovers that Dr. Lin’s intentions in making him were not as noble as she once thought—and that she may be falling in love with her former hero’s creation.

art by Wendy Xu (p. 150)

TW/CW: emotional abuse (past/present)

You know me. I’m a sucker for a good Frankenstein story. Oh, so you brought a conscious being into existence, expected it to be completely obedient to you and your whims, and didn’t expect anything to go wrong? Surely this will not have a domino effect of consequences…

That being said, The Infinity Particle isn’t just a Frankenstein story. We’ve been inundated with stories about AI and the ethics of giving robots human-like consciousnesses since day one of sci-fi’s conception (back to Frankenstein), but The Infinity Particle does what many of those stories try and fail to do: make the story human. It weaves both engineering and the complicated legacies of familial trauma into a story that is ultimately about relationships: that of parents and children, but also of young lovers. It’s a story of breaking cycles and of forging something newer and better out of their ashes. All of it is worth your time.

Wendy Xu’s vision of Mars in the distant future is one that I want to live in, which isn’t something I often say about sci-fi novels. The world of The Infinity Particle is a cozy, comforting one. In spite of the more emotional moments of the story, Xu’s setting is one you can get lost in. Rendered in a pastel color palette that’s easy on the eyes, it’s a world full of greenhouses, cafés, and cobblestone paths. Here, Mars is the perfect place for a museum date—except here, the museum features all manner of robots from bygone centuries. Although there are ethical conflicts with some of the AIs (this forms the central conflict of the novel), none of Xu’s AIs are malicious creatures—they’re all in the form of cuddly cats or owls, and in the case of Clem’s custom companion, a cat-moth hybrid. (SENA!! WE LOVE SENA!!) It’s a world I was eager to escape to, and one that I could dwell in forever.

Clem’s motivations were part of what made this story stand out. As she begins to dig deeper into Dr. Lin’s true motives for creating Kye, the way her former hero treats her AI creation begins to mirror how she was treated as a child; the emotional abuse from her mother is very similar to the emotional abuse by Dr. Lin to Kye. The Infinity Particle is a fantastic example of how very far-fetched, sci-fi concept can be used as incredibly emotional metaphors. We have Clem, who is a clone of her mother and was raised to live out the dreams that her mother could not, and Kye, an AI made to replace Dr. Lin’s son and live out her fantasies. Admittedly, the clone part was very on the nose, but the way that Xu delivered with care, giving The Infinity Particle an undeniable heart. In part, The Infinity Particle is a story of how trauma always echoes into the present, and how it can create ripples that both tear apart and rebuild relationships with others.

That shared trauma is part of what made the romance between Clem and Kye one that I was rooting for from page 1. Not only were they the most adorable couple (museum dates! Philosophical conversations in greenhouses!), their shared connection allowed them to help each other in ways that made the relationship blossom. Clem had experience with having to escape from the same kind of emotional abuse that Kye was undergoing, and as they realized that connection, their relationship deepened. However, it wasn’t just that aspect that made their relationship so lovable. Their chemistry was some of the best I’ve read in a YA novel in a long time—they were both such curious and sensitive people, and that combined curiosity not only drove the plot, but the course of their romance. Every shared moment was sweet, but never saccharine—The Infinity Particle was just a warm hug (and a kiss on the cheek) in so many ways, this being one of the most prominent.

However, even though Dr. Lin was objectively in the wrong, I appreciated the way that The Infinity Particle humanized her; never once were her actions condoned, but in the end, she wasn’t a purely evil person—she was a person who slipped so far into grief that she failed to realize how she was treating those around her. She did horrible things that could not be undone, but she was also capable of healing. It’s an incredibly difficult line to toe between acknowledging a character’s humanity and acknowledging that their actions were inexcusable; most media gets it wrong (I am looking directly at Encanto), but in the short time that was given to this plot, Xu did a graceful job of hitting that balance. Dr. Lin did some unspeakably terrible things, but deep down, she is still human. My one (minor) complaint is that this was squeezed into the end and didn’t have as much time to develop as some other parts of the novel, but it was executed thoughtfully nonetheless.

And the epilogue…hnnnnnnnngh do I love a good “the fabric of the universe is made up of love” story AUUUUUUUUGH

All in all, a heartwarming, sensitive, and thoughtful story of love, robots, and what it means to have—and to want—a mind and a life of your own. 4.5 stars!

The Infinity Particle is a standalone, but Wendy Xu is also the co-creator of Mooncakes and the creator of Tidesong.

Today’s song:

I feel like I remember this song about every 5 years and realize how much I’ve missed it…

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (8/6/24) – The Stardust Grail

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Here I was thinking that I hadn’t had a 5-star read in so long, and bam…two in a row! I was expecting to enjoy The Stardust Grail because I loved The Deep Sky, Yume Kitasei’s debut. To my delight, it turned in a much more space opera direction, but not only that—it had one of the most heartwarming sci-fi universes that I’ve had the privilege of experiencing!

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Stardust Grail – Yume Kitasei

Maya Hoshimoto is a grad student, pouring her life into her studies on an Earth university far from her colony home. But what her university doesn’t know is that her extensive background in alien cultures comes from a history of art theft, stealing alien artifacts and returning them to their rightful owners. When a friend from her past offers her one last job, Maya is ready to refuse—until she learns that the artifact in question could mean that her friend’s species could be brought back from the brink of extinction. Plunged back into her old life, Maya now faces her hardest job yet—putting an entire alien species on the line.

TW/CW (from Yume Kitasei): themes of colonialism/imperialism, genocide, chronic illness (migraines), torture, suicidal ideation (brief), violence/gore, torture/confinement, war themes, pandemic

I loved The Deep Sky, but it was more literary than my usual tastes in sci-fi. I went into The Stardust Grail expecting more of the same, knowing I’d enjoy it, but I did not anticipate it being the perfect book for my constant space opera hankering! Heartwarming friendships, intergalactic hijinks, and excellent creature design—I’m ecstatic to report that The Stardust Grail has it all!

You all knew I was going to go after the creature design first. THE CREATURE DESIGN!! THIS IS THE ABSOLUTE CREAM OF THE CROP HERE!! My only issue is that we didn’t get to see all of the alien species that Kitasei set up, but to be fair, with a story jam-packed with rival parties and factions, it would’ve been a chore to have to incorporate every single one of them. (Maybe what we need is a companion novel in this universe? WE NEED TO MAKE IT HAPPEN!) Back to my point—even in sci-fi, it’s a difficult task to make aliens feel truly alien, not just in looks, but in culture, lifespans, and general quirks. The Frenro, and Auncle in particular, felt bizarre in the best possible way. I love a good cephalopod-like creature, but Kitasei did an excellent job of portraying not just xer mannerisms and what made xem unique as a species, but having those in contact with Maya’s more human sensibilities—there’s a ton of cultural confusion, even though they’ve been friends for at least a decade, but both Kitasei and the characters themselves handle it with a humorous grace. I also loved the design of the Belzoar—again, arachnid-like aliens are also tons of fun, but like the Frenro, they had enough distinguishing qualities to separate them from just being giant spiders.

I could go on and on about how much I adored these characters! Even if I didn’t have a soft spot for alien characters in the first place (being marginalized and generally an outcast will do that), Auncle would be my favorite by far—xe was just so delightful in their joyous dialogue and relentless optimism, but xer deep history of tragedy, both personal and in the context of xer species, was handled with all of the respect that it deserved—xe was joyous in spite of it all, because joy is all you’ve got in some cases. (AMEN!!) Maya was a fantastic protagonist—like Auncle, Kitasei did an excellent job of giving the reader the full breadth of her motivations and past that led her to the place where she is now. Her devotion to a fair galaxy and to help the Frenro made for a beautiful quest, and her feeling of outsiderness amongst both humans and aliens resonated deeply with me. (Given the themes of mixed-race identity in The Deep Sky, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was another analog. YES!!!) Wil and Medix were charming and lovable as side characters, and all of the colorful denizens of the galaxy were equally so—not a single character felt flat or out of place.

In her personal review of the novel on Goodreads, Yume Kitasei cites Star Wars—A New Hope in particular—as her primary inspiration for writing The Stardust Grail and much of her other science fiction. The Deep Sky was much more on the literary side of sci-fi, and while I loved it, I’m hoping that Kitasei keeps in this direction for her next few books. (I’ll read anything she writes at this point, but my statement still stands.) As a fellow space opera girlie and an avid Star Wars fan, the passion of both Kitasei’s personal life and her love for those movies shines through in The Stardust Grail. Kitasei took all of the right lessons from George Lucas and company. Not only do we have a vibrant galaxy full of characters who are just as vibrant, this novel hits the right balance of emotional weight and campy, truly fun action. Speaking of George Lucas…another obvious inspiration in the latter third of the novel was the Indiana Jones franchise, and those action scenes were the best kind of fun amidst an otherwise deeply grounded and emotional novel. Never at any point do the emotion and serious themes contradict the aforementioned action, nor the other way around—all of it is earned, and all of it feels like a worthy tribute both Star Wars and other such space opera works.

Speaking of said serious and emotional themes…as I said earlier, The Stardust Grail has such grace in the way that it handles the myriad of themes that it explores. From Maya’s lasting effects of an alien illness that linger into her life to her experience as an outsider, being raised on a colony isolated from Earth, every topic is treated with the weight it deserves. Imperialism and the ownership of art is the primary theme of the novel, and it’s unabashedly anti-colonial, which I adored. However, it didn’t just say “colonialism bad” and leave it at that—just as in the real world, nothing in The Stardust Grail is without nuance. With dozens of alien species and factions amongst said species, everything is gray, even in the case of their main mission. Would it have been fine if all there was to The Stardust Grail is “colonialism bad?” Sure, I agree. But the fact that Kitasei chose to explore all of the layers to the various conflicts and perspectives made it so much more worthwhile.

All in all, a deeply emotional and heartwarming tale of resistance, friendship across cultural barriers, and retaining joy in spite of it all. 5 stars!

The Stardust Grail is a standalone, but Yume Kitasei is also the author of The Deep Sky.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/28/24) – The Traveling Cat Chronicles

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ve been trying to find and read more translated books, but in my hunt, I’d completely forgotten that I’d put The Traveling Cat Chronicles on my TBR over four years ago. Any story about a cat is right up my alley (yes, I was a Warriors kid back in the day, why do you ask?), but now that I’ve read this one, I’ve concluded that it’s an essential read for all cat lovers—and anyone who’s ever experienced the unbreakable bond of having a special pet.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Travelling Cat Chronicles – Hiro Arikawa, translated by Philip Gabriel

Ever since Satoru rescued a stray cat, from the brink of death, they have been inseparable from day one as cat and owner. Nana, named for his crooked tail that looks like the number seven, loves to spend time with Satoru. But due to circumstances that Nana has yet to comprehend, Satoru can no longer take care of his beloved cat. In an attempt to find an adequate home for Nana, human and cat go on a roadtrip in a van across Japan, visiting childhood friends in order to find a suitable candidate. On this trip of a lifetime, Nana will discover things beyond his comprehension—and a love for his owner that will only grow deeper.

TW/CW: illness, animal injury, loss of loved ones (past)

Goodness…this was the sweetest book I’ve read in a long time. It’s essential reading for anybody who’s ever owned and loved a cat, but also for anyone who has ever felt the sacred connection of a good pet. It’s full of laughs, but tugs at the heartstrings in a perfect balance—it’s a wholly human book, but a wholly feline one as well.

Having a good cat voice in a novel aimed mainly at adults is not an easy task. Especially since this book was first published in 2012, it would have been far too easy to go down the “I can haz cheezburger, hooman?” route and just derail the emotional core of the narrative. But Nana’s voice was hysterical, and not in a forced way at all. It’s clearly the voice of a cat from a longtime cat owner; Nana is very particular about everything, doesn’t like change, doesn’t like being petted the wrong way, and is very picky about his food. When Satoru makes an assumption about his habits, he openly derails the flow of the story just so he can clear the air and admit that no, he does not, in fact, like those mouse toys. What made it so funny was how believable it is—no matter the temperament of the cats you may have owned, you’ve 100% owned a cat like Nana. I found myself thinking of my sweet girl Hobbes, who has a similarly no-nonsense attitude about where and when she’s petted and likes to go after small birds but doesn’t kill them, leaving them to fly around the house and shed feathers everywhere She’s an angel, obviously.

Even though parts of the narrative switch to the perspectives of the human characters, Nana’s perspective was what made the heart of The Traveling Cat Chronicles. Throughout their trip through Japan, I loved seeing all of these new sights through Nana’s feline eyes, whether it was seeing the ocean (very bad) and Mt. Fuji (very good) for the first time or meeting Satoru’s many childhood friends. Perceiving all of this novelty through the narration of a cat wasn’t necessarily new to me, given my reading habits from ages 7-12, but for an adult novel, I loved seeing this perspective with more maturity, but the same amount of humor. Hearing Nana describe things as simple as the music coming from Satoru’s car radio (how does this cat come up with such eloquent metaphors?) to the chatter of the dogs on the boat towards the end of the novel in ways that felt so new, but wholly feline—and for that, I have to give so much praise to Hiro Arikawa; some of it was humorous, but some of these observations felt heartwarming in that they felt real, just the passing thoughts of a smaller animal in a big, big world.

However, Nana’s voice isn’t the entire novel—The Traveling Cat Chronicles also sees the backstories of not just its main character, Satoru, but of the childhood friends and family members that he visits. Nana was the star of the show, but some of these flashback sequences served to deepen the emotional core of the novel, especially in the case of Satoru; from his troubled childhood to his adolescence, we see Satoru’s life through other people’s eyes. Even beyond Nana’s narration, we only ever get glimpses Satoru, one of the novel’s two protagonists, entirely through lenses other than his own. Another strength was that these flashbacks were spaced apart perfectly: frequently enough that we could get fragments of Satoru’s backstory and understand it in concert with the current timeline, but far enough apart that they didn’t strangle the story. And each flashback was emotional in its own right, no matter how momentous or insignificant each vignette was. Each one felt authentic in its focus—in our minds, something as fleeting as sneaking off on a field trip weighs as much as a death in the family, and that was exactly how Arikawa told these stories.

I’ll refrain from spoiling the ending (although you can easily predict it from a few hints scattered throughout the novel), but it doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking—and beautiful. The cat’s-eye view on the events unfolding before Nana make them all the more harrowing, simply because you can’t quite explain these things to a cat, even if they understand in the abstract that something’s wrong. For cats, we are seemingly immortal monoliths until we aren’t—and it’s confusing for a creature that can understand our language, but just barely misses what makes us what we are. But beyond that, it reminds us of the inseparable connections between us and our pets. Our lives are short, but the lives of our cats, dogs, and other animals are even shorter; yet still, the mark that they leave on our lives, just like our friends, is a mark that cannot be replicated or replaced.

As I read the end of The Traveling Cat Chronicles, I was reminded of my Anakin, who passed about two months ago. He’d been in my life since I was a little kid, and by the time he peacefully passed at the ripe old age of 17, I was almost finished with my sophomore year of college. There will never be another cat quite like him, in all of his crusty, screamy, and truly lovable glory. His absence has been harder for me to take than some of my other childhood pets that have passed; when his lifelong companion Padmé died, I grieved heavily, but I had Anakin there to console me. When I came back home for the first time after he passed, I expected to see him in the guest room. Two months later, and I still peer over at the sofa, expecting him to be curled up between the cushions, fitfully sleeping in a pile of his own shedded fur. But that is the mark that he’s left on my life—impermanent, but unlike any other creature. Just as we must look to the small pleasures of life, we, like Satoru and Nana, must appreciate the impact of the smallest lifetimes on our hearts.

All in all, a cat-lover’s dream book which balances humor and heart in equal measure. 5 stars!

The Traveling Cat Chronicles is not part of a series, but Hiro Arikawa has also written a companion book of short stories, The Goodbye Cat. She is also the author of several other novels that have been translated into multiple languages.

Today’s song:

yeah this has a chokehold on me yet again 🕺

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/14/24) – Dear Wendy

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Hooooooooooooo-whee…rant incoming…they’re good for the soul. Sometimes. I hate to do this so soon after I posted this year’s AAPI Heritage Month recommendations, but I just had to get this review off my chest. I highly recommend all of those books over this one.

God. I really wanted to like this one. Older YA where the characters are in college are few and far-between, and what’s even fewer and further-between is aromantic/asexual representation, much less POC aro-ace representation. I almost DNF’d this one, but I really wanted to stick it out and see if it turned out any better…and tragically, it didn’t. I hate to say it, but Dear Wendy was one of the most stiffly-written books I’ve read in quite a while.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Dear Wendy – Ann Zhao

Sophie Chi and Jo Ephron are both second-semester freshmen at Wellesley College, and they don’t know that they know each other. Sophie runs Dear Wendy, an Instagram account that gives love advice to Wellesley’s student body, and Jo runs Dear Wanda, a much more unhinged parody of the former with joke advice to contrast Wendy’s more serious online persona. The two meet in real life and immediately hit it off—they’re both aroace, and have never met many people, even in the queer community, who have experienced the same things as them. But as their online feud as Wendy and Wanda gets heated, Sophie and Jo must decide if they want to divulge their mutual secret—and risk their real friendship.

TW/CW: aphobia, anxiety, bullying, discussions of coming out/non-accepting parents (brief)

Ooof. Even from an outside perspective (as a non-ace person, but still queer), there’s a noticeable dearth of asexual-/aromantic- spectrum stories, even in YA, which is usually several steps ahead of the game as far as being progressive. So in concept, I’m glad that Dear Wendy exists, and I’m sure it will help a ton of a-spec people find their voices and feel seen. But good lord, this was easily one of the most poorly-written novels I’ve read all year. I’m genuinely baffled that I read the same book as all of the other people who left such glowing reviews. Baffled. Again, speaking from an outside perspective, but I think the a-spec community deserves better than this…

I usually preface my negative reviews with this, but I’ll say it again, because it always applies: I’m willing to give a certain amount of slack to Ann Zhao since Dear Wendy is her debut novel. It’s so hard to put pen to paper, and harder still to get it published, and that in and of itself is an intense labor of love. And I’m so glad that this book exists for some people for its discussions of AAPI, aroace, and gender non-conforming identity. I’m sure it’ll be a book that will mean a great deal to a great deal of people.

But. But.

All that doesn’t fully excuse how painfully stiff Zhao’s writing was. Dear Wendy would have been a DNF for me had I not stubbornly tried to stick it out, just because I was convinced that the rest of the book wouldn’t be a disappointment. I wanted to give it a chance, with the combination of the premise and the fact that it’s Zhao’s debut. I had faith that it would get better, but it never did. For a novel that purported itself to be charming and emotional, the writing felt more like a textbook or a brochure than fiction—never once did any of the characters feel like real people talking. The novel was full of writing choices that just felt downright odd; at some point, we hear one of the main characters eavesdropping on two other characters (about the Social Media Drama™️), and after each of these side characters speak, we get their first and last names—and then never hear from them again. Characters list out song titles like they’re being read aloud by Siri, and all of the attempts at humor are just the characters doing word-for-word reenactments of jokes from Tumblr and TikTok without any attempts to hide the evidence. And for two characters that are supposed to have opposing personalities, their voices blended together in an indistinguishable, bland mess—the only way we can “tell” is through the differences in their fabricated social media personalities. If I wanted to be hit over the head with something that unsubtly, I would’ve stood under the ice dispenser in the dining hall. But through it all, I was just struck by how none of the people acted like people—they acted like social media fabrications of queer people, and the world was similarly dictated through an artificial lens.

Dear Wendy is full of a myriad of relevant topics: aroace identity and acceptance, the suffocation of allosexual culture and the unrelenting pressure to find “the one,” and immigrant parents who don’t fully accept your queerness, to name a few. I’ll say again how glad I am that these subjects are being discussed in literature, because it’s true—we do need to talk about these things! But their delivery, more than not, zigzagged around one of the most time-worn rules of writing: show, don’t tell. Although this is realistic fiction, I feel like it falls into the same kind of mistakes that some sci-fi or fantasy novels make when they deliver information that is new to the reader: they deliver it in unpalatable blocks, making time all but stop in the narrative just so the author can explain The Important Thing™️. This was how most of the discussions felt in Dear Wendy; instead of a new worldbuilding point, it was just the character’s inner monologue, uninterrupted, for at least two pages at the longest. I get that it’s crucial to weave in these points, but there’s a way to do it without harming the flow of the story—once or twice is fine, when there’s a reason for the character to be so deep inside their head, but given that this story was supposed to center around Sophie and Jo’s relationship, there could have been so many more bonding scenes where they talked about this organically! That’s not to say that those scenes weren’t there, but since we were already stuck in inner monologue limbo 50 pages ago, none of the information was new, and therefore, none of the bonding felt like new ground.

In the author’s note, Ann Zhao calls this a love letter to Wellesley College, and that although her experience there wasn’t all good, she wanted to highlight the good in Dear Wendy. Remember what I said about the stiff writing? It applied to the surroundings, too. If her writing style contained…any sort of soul, then that mission statement would have come across. Instead, I felt like I was reading a college website for some parts of the novel. I got so far in to Zhao’s descriptions of the campus and the features of the dining hall that I had to blink and question whether or not she’d been paid to write all this by the college. Look—I’m sure Wellesley is a great place (historically women’s colleges are fantastic!) and I don’t want to negate the love that Zhao had for her time there, but there were so many places where the descriptions didn’t feel, again, like people experiencing their environment—it was just being dictated through a lens so devoid of personality that I felt like I was on a college tour, forced to hear a long-winded monologue about a bunch of landmarks that I’d never see again.

Usually, I’m in favor of a little pop culture referencing once in a while. I’ve never understood the argument that pop culture references in YA fiction take them out of the story. What, is fiction supposed to exist in some kind of culture-less vacuum? God forbid your characters engage with the same media as you do…god forbid you pay homage to the creators that inspired you to put pen to paper, apparently? If there’s anything that actually takes me out of the story, it’s the fake celebrities/artists/social media apps. (I get that a lot of that is dodging copyright, but the point still stands.) The argument has never made sense to me. Sure, dumping them all in a barrage is obviously a no-no, but there’s an art to a well-placed reference, and it’s an art that I appreciate. I have a completely arbitrary Goodreads shelf for books with good music references. (This one almost went on it just for an off-hand mention of Mitski.) But reading Dear Wendy made me understand where the anti-pop culture reference people are coming from. The whole book felt like a front to shove in as many references as humanly possible. Dear Wendy is over 360 pages—it wouldn’t have killed Zhao to cut out the chapter entirely consisting of Jo and Sophie talking about Harry Styles. The only places where the music references in particular felt relevant where when Jo was DJ-ing at the college station, and even then, when she was talking to Sophie about her upcoming song choices, it felt like they were being queued up and read aloud by Siri. Mind you, this wasn’t when Jo was actually DJ-ing—this was when she was talking to her friend. It only would have been worse if she’d said “Remastered version” in verbal parentheses.

And…god. If another book tries to smother me with this many Taylor Swift references, I’m going to chew my kindle in half. It’s already bad enough that even the dining hall TV was showing me news clips about whatever mediocre thing she’s doing…please, I thought literature was supposed to be an escape…

All in all, a platonic love story with all the ingredients for something meaningful and sweet that substituted personality and charm for stiffness and irrelevant references. 1.5 stars.

Dear Wendy is a standalone and Ann Zhao’s debut.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!