Continuing with Latine Heritage Month, here’s a novel that came on my radar last year when it was released. Literary fiction isn’t my go-to, but I do love some magical realism sprinkled in, so I was interested. What resulted was something deeply impacting. The Volcano Daughters pulls no punches, and yet cares so deeply for its protagonists—and for everyone whose voice is silenced.
Graciela grew up in El Salvador, among their family of Indigenous women. But when the cronies of a rising dictator steal her away to be his oracle, she’s torn away from everything she knows and loves. In the dictator’s palace, she meets Consuelo, her stolen sister who is also indentured in the palace, made to sit by as the government dabbles in faulty magic and formulates a plan to commit genocide on her Indigenous community. Now young women, Consuelo and Graciela free for their lives, both thinking the other dead.
Darting between America and France, Consuelo and Graciela fight to forge new lives for themselves. But can they ever leave the past behind—or each other?
My main gripe with literary fiction at large is that it’s a breeding ground for novels that are unrealistically miserable in the thought that misery and depression automatically make it “deep.” I’ve read enough of said books and been in fiction workshops long enough that just the thought of sadness being equated to depth makes me want to throw up in my mouth. Is The Volcano Daughters a sad, literary novel? Yes. And yet the sadness is there to tell a powerful story, not just to sell. It’s the story of silenced women, but also a story of resilience and sisterhood and so much more. It’s what literary fiction should be.
After this novel, I’m sure I’ll read more from Gina María Balibrera, but…god, in the right headspace, for sure. The Volcano Daughters is a heavy novel, and for good reason. I didn’t put these trigger warnings there lightly. But Balibrera’s prose is seriously something to behold. Just as Consuelo and Graciela view the world through the lens of artists, so too does Balibrera. Every detail is truly luscious; the many places that The Volcano Daughters travels through are realized in such vivid detail that I swear I could almost smell the air. No stone is unturned, and no metaphor is treated lightly—Balibrera puts even the most minor details under a microscope and crafts them into the most lush language, almost bordering on poetry in the more metaphorical moments.
There’s something so special about the way that Balibrera treats Consuelo and Graciela as characters. I hesitate to call them fully tragic characters, but their lives are largely dictated by one tragedy after another. Yet no matter what happened to them, I always sensed that Balibrera would have something waiting for them at the end. It wasn’t an ending that was tied up with a nice bow, but it was a speckle of hope on the horizon. They were still suffering, but their justice was just out of reach, but still visible. Had she gone too far in one direction, it would’ve felt like needless plot armor, especially in the climate(s) that Consuelo and Graciela lived in; too far in the other, and it would’ve strayed into trauma porn territory. Balibrera treats her characters in the most realistic and yet the most caring way; though they have endured so much and have so much more to endure, she makes you cling to that sliver of hope, gives you glimpses of incremental lives that they might live in a few years’ time, because it is all that is left. As somber of a book as this is, I did appreciate that there was a very tangible inkling of better days to come.
What seems to hook most readers about The Volcano Daughters is the ghosts, which…yeah, that’s what hooked me too. But it’s one of the most original and compelling aspects of this book; in between the present narrative, the story has frequently interjections from four ghosts: Consuelo and Graciela’s other sisters who were murdered during the genocide. Like the other characters in this novel, they’re so vibrant and full of sass and wisdom in equal measure. Their role is often to come in and drag the reader back to the embarrassing reality when somebody’s inner monologue gets too self-absorbed or when someone’s telling the story wrong. (Nobody can quite agree what’s really right, and that’s what makes them so funny.) At times, the humor didn’t quite land (I found it hard to believe that a ghost who got killed in the ’30s would use “Boom!” as an exclamation like it’s the 2010’s), but they all had such distinct voices that I could almost let it slide. Yet they are also there to be incorporeal forces of justice, metaphysical representations of the voiceless, the forgotten of history who have been brushed aside. They are the deliverers of the justice they never got, and they form the emotional backbone of The Volcano Daughters.
The part that the ghosts emphasize for me is how Balibrera examines the theme of storytelling and whose stories are told—and the power structures that ensure that some stories are either untold or told incorrectly. Names are deeply important: every murdered Indigenous woman is given a specific name, whereas the dictator of El Salvador is only referred to as “El Gran Pendejo”; similarly, El Gran Pendejo’s entire regime operates on stories, ones that are told to reinforce a racist narrative. Graciela acts out stories about marginalized people in order to further the United States’ racist stereotypes of various groups. And yet here are the ghosts, who take the story into their own hands to deliver the complicated, messy, yet real narrative. The ghosts are there to be the voice of every marginalized person who has ever been deliberately erased from history, every marginalized person who has had to bear the pain of having their history warped and their country slandered. Both the ghosts and the central sistersare stars of the novel because they are precisely the kind of people that history forgets. The Volcano Daughters tells us that history surrounds us—and that there will always be someone to tell the truth.
Overall, a deeply moving and emotional novel of sisterhood and distance that serves as a righteous megaphone for those who have had their voices stolen. 4 stars!
The Volcano Daughters is a standalone and Gina María Balibrera’s debut novel.
Today’s song:
I loved her episode of What’s In My Bag? and I love this song!!
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles! Apparently today marks ten whole years since I started with this blog…granted, it was a pretty far cry from what it is today, but it’s a marvel that I’ve kept it going for this long. Thanks for tagging along, everyone! 🫡
In my ongoing quest to read more translated books, I’ve stumbled upon a lot more Japanese books about cats than I anticipated. Granted, they’ve varied greatly, but it’s a pattern. Not that I’m complaining—I’ll read most anything involving cats! Which is partly why I decided to read The Full Moon Coffee Shop. It sounded downright whimsical, and to some degree it was, but ultimately, that quality was dulled by the formulaic nature of…well, pretty much everything else.
The Full Moon Coffee Shop is no ordinary café. It only appears during the night of the full moon. Its waitstaff are talking cats, and you can never order what you want—they only serve you what you need. And if you find yourself in the Full Moon Coffee Shop, you’re in need of direction in life. Weaving together the interconnected stories of five unlikely strangers, the Full Moon Coffee Shop may be the answer to their burning questions—and the healing they desperately need.
TW/CW: cheating/affairs, sexism, grief
One of the biggest letdowns in reading: finding a book that seems super cute and whimsical, and then said whimsy is there in name only. You can’t just give us an incorporeal coffee shop manned by talking astrologer cats and then be so unconvinced by your own whimsy! God.
The worst thing that a cozy book can be is preachy. Having a low-stakes novel centered around life lessons, healing, and character growth doesn’t mean that you have to have a Learning Moment™️ worded like a PSA every few chapters. It’s a pitfall that’s easy to fall into with cozy fiction, but it’s one that takes away the magic for me. For novels that are meant to be about taking quiet moments that are often taken for granted and giving them more weight and value to the narrative, having everything explained to you seems so contrary to what “cozy” means to me. I just resent books that try to show character development decently, and then ruin it all by assuming that the reader doesn’t have the capacity to figure out what just happened and regurgitating it word-for-word. This was the main problem with this novel—it assumed so little of the reader and spelled everything out in the least subtle way.Every chapter of The Full Moon Coffee Shop pulled a “And what did we learn today, kids?” moment at the end without fail, and it just got so tedious so quickly. It just felt so preachily worded and repetitive, dulling any emotional impact this story could’ve had.
I feel so conflicted when talking about the writing of The Full Moon Coffee Shop. I read it in translation, so I really don’t know who’s to blame for the quality of the writing. I don’t know if Mai Mochizuki’s original text was dryly written to begin with or if Jesse Kirkwood’s English translation somehow dulled some of Mochizuki’s writing style and rendered it blander than before! I have no clue! Gaaaaaaaah! In any case, The Full Moon Coffee Shop was written so stiffly for a book that billed itself as so whimsical. The characters’ inner monologues all feel very rote and one-note and there’s hardly any sensory descriptions to immerse the reader in the setting. The writing let me down the most when we were introduced to the coffee shop itself, the most unique part of the novel; while I enjoyed the concepts of everything, from the celestial-themed desserts to the talking cat waitstaff, it was all described with the sparsest possible detail, the bare minimum word count to get the reader to visualize a new image. The Full Moon Coffee Shop is a slim novel, so it’s not like more detailed descriptions would’ve made it overly long—I was barely immersed in both the real-world and magical settings. The same can be said for the characters, who were barely developed beyond a problem they needed solving. The writing just felt like the bare minimum of describing…well, everything.
For me, one of the main issues with The Full Moon Coffee Shop was just how formulaic everything was. I had the same issue with What You Are Looking For is In the Library, a similarly cozy book about finding direction in life, but in that case, the stories were so repetitive and short and seemed to be saying the exact same thing, so my patience ran thin much earlier than with this novel. Once again, cozy doesn’t necessarily mean predictable—it should mean something that’s low-stakes, not repetitive. The Full Moon Coffee Shop felt like hearing the same story three times over; character is dissatisfied with life, character discovers coffee shop, character gets their natal chart read, character has a revelation and magically figures out how to fix their life. Rinse and repeat for 200 pages. You can see how tired that got. I appreciated that Mochizuki at least attempted to switch things up for the last story, but it didn’t do much to my interest in the story. All that changes is that it’s framed through the characters thinking that the coffee shop experience is a dream. Sadly, that amounted to little more than a perspective change and a switch to a handwritten font. It just got so repetitive and boring after a while, and even though the stories focused on different problems, Mochizuki rarely had anything new to say.
I hadn’t read a ton of reviews of The Full Moon Coffee Shop going in, but it seems a lot of people had problems with the heavy emphasis on astrology. The presence of astrology in and of itself wasn’t an issue for me, but it was more how said astrology was woven into the novel that got on my nerves. “Woven” is a generous word—even as someone who’s at least sort of into astrology, I felt absolutely sledgehammered over the head with every minute detail of it. After a certain point, The Full Moon Coffee Shop just became Astrology for Dummies. You know that meme of the kid pretending to read the Bible, but there’s a Minecraft book peeking out of the Bible? That’s what it felt like. It’s less of a novel and more somebody talking at you about the natal charts of complete strangers for 200 pages. I guess it might be beneficial to assume that your reader doesn’t know much about astrology, but Mochizuki got so bogged down in explaining every minute detail of every character’s astrology that the real meat of the story got lost. For me, it took away from the heart of the story, which should’ve been getting insights into the characters and their healing journeys. I feel like astrology easily could’ve been a fascinating aspect of the novel if not for how unsubtly it was shoehorned in—there could’ve been a chance to give it some narrative significance rather than spending 50 pages explaining astrology to the reader like they’re 5 years old.
Despite the formula of The Full Moon Coffee Shop getting on my nerves, I at least appreciated some of the messaging that the cats gave to the characters on how to fix their lives, particularly in the second chapter. However, the advice that the cats gave Mizuki seemed downright weird. I get that she’s not having success in her career, but the cats telling her to get with the times and not write what she loves just seemed so odd to me. There could’ve been something so poignant about success not being everything and her failures only being a small part of her career, but the cats were just talking to her like they were corporate executives telling her to be hip with the kids! Not only did that rub me the wrong way, the story itself seemed to refute the cats’ advice as well. Mizuki ends up finding success when she injects her signature style into a project that she was only doing for the money, thereby finding success in being herself and putting her own personal spin on things! Crazy concept! So why even have the cats tell her that in the first place, if that’s not even the lesson that the novel leads us to believe that Mizuki takes away from it?
All in all, a cozy novel that billed itself as tender and sweet, but ended up being unsubtle, preachy, and unconvinced of its own lessons. 2 stars.
The Full Moon Coffee Shop is the first in the Full Moon Coffee Shop series, followed by Best Wishes from The Full Moon Coffee Shop. Mai Mochizuki is also the author of the Holmes of Kyoto series.
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!
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.
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!
Brief rant: don’t you love it when Goodreads posts the nominees for the “YA Fantasy & Science Fiction” category and…there’s no science fiction books on the list? Not a single one? Thank you Goodreads 🥰
It’s been years since I’ve read anything by Kelly Barnhill; I read a fair amount of her middle-grade novels when I was younger, and there were hits (The Girl Who Drank the Moon) and misses (Iron-Hearted Violet). But either way, the road has taken me back to her adult novella, a chilling retelling of “The Crane Wife” that I thoroughly enjoyed.
In a distant future, a fifteen-year-old girl lives on one of the few remaining farms in the United States, growing cloned crops in order to make a living. Her father passed away when she was young, and now she manages the farm with her mother and takes care of her six-year-old brother, Michael. But when her mother brings home a new suitor, the girl is appalled to find that the suitor happens to be a giant crane—a crane intent on working her mother to the bone in order to produce tapestries to sell. As her mother succumbs to the wills of the crane and her family grows poorer, the girl knows that the only way out is to rid the house of the crane—and she’ll do anything to make sure the bird is out of the farm.
TW/CW: death of a parent, blood, abuse, animal death, child endangerment
It’s been at least seven or eight years since I’ve read anything by Kelly Barnhill, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that when faced with the (quite large) jump from stylistic choices between age groups, she does so with eery grace! The Crane Husband was a disturbing treat, quick but chilling.
I only had a vague notion of the original Japanese folktale of the Crane Wife that this book subverts, but even without that background, Barnhill weaves a haunting, dystopian fairytale like no other. It’s that lovely kind of book that falls into science fiction, but has just enough trappings of other genres to pass as something else. The magical realism element is heavier than the rest, and it rules the book—rightfully so, given the subject matter. But like a good fairytale, Barnhill’s ability to suspend disbelief made The Crane Husband all the scarier—scenes that would have otherwise seemed charmingly quirky or absurd were downright horrifying under her lens.
Barnhill’s writing was what sold how horrific the events of The Crane Husband truly were. The way she captured the voice of the unnamed, fifteen-year-old protagonist as she had to take her livelihood into her own hands in the face of the invading crane husband had such a tangible desperation, making the conflict feel real as all get out. Tension crept out from every word, and I found myself keeping my Kindle in a vice grip as I read. And that tension never wanes—in only 118 pages, Barnhill built up monumental tension that books three times the length have failed to uphold. The Crane Husband really was nail-bitingly eerie, and it was worth it all the way.
The way that Barnhill used this tangibly uncomfortable atmosphere to drive the point of this folktale’s subversion home was also masterful. The main twist in this iteration is, hence the title, that the protagonist’s mother brings home a giant crane who she takes as her husband. And instead of the crane wife wasting away to produce beautiful tapestries, it’s the human mother being forced by the crane husband to churn out tapestries like a machine. Abusive relationships were the main theme of the novella, and Barnhill’s depiction of abuse through this lens felt as authentic as it could be, from the strained, forced silence of the women of the family and the lack of support that the protagonist finds when she tries to seek help. Beyond that, The Crane Husband’s message about suffering for art was equally powerful and important; the emphasis on how the protagonist’s mother works to the point of near-death in order to create something that people will think of as “transformative” was commentary that I wasn’t expecting from the novel, but enjoyed wholeheartedly. Needs to be said.
That being said, my only major problem with this novella was that it directly referenced the original folktale that it’s retelling. Though it was in a flashback scene, it felt tacky and unnecessarily meta to hand it to you right there—and not only that, but basically delivering the twist right at your doorstep. I will admit that I loved the line about cranes making other creatures do the work for them, but at that point, it isn’t even foreshadowing anymore—it’s just whacking you over the head with the twist that it’s supposed to be hiding from you. It made me more than a little mad, but the rest of the novella was so good that I could almost let it slide. Almost.
All in all, a timely and truly disturbing retelling that packed a stinging punch with an impressively short page count. 4 stars!
The Crane Husband is a standalone; Kelly Barnhill is also the author of many books for children, including The Witch’s Boy, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, and Iron-Hearted Violet. She is also the author of When Women Were Dragons, her first full-length novel for adults.
Today’s song:
NEW SMILE ALBUM IN JANUARY EVERYBODY STAY CALM
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
As some of you may know, last week (March 20-27) was when the #TransRightsReadathon was hosted in response to a dangerous increase in anti-trans legislation across the U.S. Created by Simi Kern, the goal of the readathon was to give the spotlight to as many trans books and authors as possible to bring them awareness and support in light of the rampant transphobia across the country and beyond. It’s been frightening and heartbreaking to see what’s happening in other states, and I want to support my trans siblings in any way possible. So I’ve decided to include shorter reviews of all of the trans books I read this week—all of which were good!
For as long as they can remember, Aaron and Oliver have only ever had each other. In a small town with few queer teenagers, let alone young trans men, they’ve shared milestones like coming out as trans, buying the right binders–and falling for each other.
But just as their relationship has started to blossom, Aaron moves away. Feeling adrift, separated from the one person who understands them, they seek solace in digging deep into the annals of America’s past. When they discover the story of two Revolutionary War soldiers who they believe to have been trans man in love, they’re inspired to pay tribute to these soldiers by adopting their names–Aaron and Oliver. As they learn, they delve further into unwritten queer stories, and they discover the transformative power of reclaiming one’s place in history.
TW/CW: transphobia, dysphoria, misgendering/deadnaming, homophobia, off-page sexual assault, religious bigotry
Novels in verse always get me when they’re done well, and A Million Quiet Revolutions was no exception. The story of Aaron and Oliver is one that was essential to be told, and it resulted in a beautifully poignant piece of verse!
The growing relationship between Oliver and Aaron felt so genuine, and the combination of pseudo-epistolary format (oh god, that sounded pretentious…) with verse emphasized the way that their relationship transcended barriers of both place and time. The interweaving of the past with the present gave me an insight into a queer part of history that I’m almost embarrassed that I didn’t consider until reading this—better late than never, I suppose. Their voices both leapt off the page, and the easy flow of Gow’s verse made the reading experience feel effortless, drifting like wind—good poetry, to me, doesn’t quite feel like poetry; the rhythm remains, but it doesn’t feel like going line by line in such a rote way.
Above all, the message of this novel in verse is one that’s so important, especially in a time where the narrative of LGBTQ+ people being trendy and new is being pushed so often—queer people have always been here, and we will always be here. Aaron and Oliver’s journey of researching their trans namesakes—cross-dressing soldiers in the Revolutionary War—was one that’s so necessary for understanding our own roots. The key to belonging is realizing that you have always been a part of history, no matter how many pains historians have taken to ignore or deliberately erase the queerness and transness that has always been there. For me, that’s why A Million Quiet Revolutions is such an important read.
Brimming with history and rich verse, A Million Quiet Revolutions is an ode to discovering your own roots, and finding solace in hidden histories. 4 stars!
In this queer contemporary YA mystery, a nonbinary teen with autism realizes they must not only solve a 30-year-old mystery but also face the demons lurking in their past in order to live a satisfying life.
Sam Sylvester’s not overly optimistic about their recent move to the small town of Astoria, Oregon after a traumatic experience in their last home in the rural Midwest.
Yet Sam’s life seems to be on the upswing after meeting several new friends and a potential love interest in Shep, the pretty neighbor. However, Sam can’t seem to let go of what might have been, and is drawn to investigate the death of a teenage boy in 1980s Astoria. Sam’s convinced he was murdered–especially since Sam’s investigation seems to resurrect some ghosts in the town.
Threatening notes and figures hidden in shadows begin to disrupt Sam’s life. Yet Sam continues to search for the truth. When Sam discovers that they may be closer to a killer than previously known, Sam has a difficult decision to make. Would they risk their new life for a half-lived one?
My ultimate hope was that this book would be as well-crafted as its cover, and for the most part, it lived up to my expectations! The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester deftly toes the line between a coming-of-age story and a decades-old mystery, buoyed by a diverse and lovable cast.
Sam Sylvester has a batch some of the most diverse representation I’ve seen in a realistic fiction/mystery novel in a while—aside from having a nonbinary, asexual, and Autistic protagonist (more neurodivergent protagonists, please!!), there were so many different characters that were incredibly intersectional—queer, POC, and disabled characters all across the board, and not just the teen characters too! All of these identities were woven so well into the story, and I loved the journey of self-acceptance and reckoning that Sam experiences throughout the novel as they unravel the mystery of the boy who died in their room 30 years ago.
That being said, although I liked most every aspect of this novel, this really feels like a novel that’s going to date itself. I enjoyed a handful of the references (always extra points for David Bowie), but a lot of the more recent ones—the references to Tumblr, Gen Z slang, internet culture, and a Steven Universe gag every other page, read as very hackneyed and stilted. As authentic as the rest of Sam Sylvester was, those parts dragged down what would have otherwise been powerful and realistic dialogue. Most of the writing did its job and did it well, but the attempt to ground it in the present day only ended up making a novel that’s going to date itself far quicker than it was probably intended to.
Despite that, I’d say that Sam Sylvester is still a must-read—for the excellent representation, for the mystery, and for the coming-of-age story. 3.75 stars, rounded up to 4!
The author of the “vivid and urgent…important and timely” (The New York Times BookReview) debut The Map of Salt and Stars returns with this remarkably moving and lyrical novel following three generations of Syrian Americans who are linked by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they carry close to their hearts.
Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria.
One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.
As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.
TW/CW: transphobia, xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, miscarriage, grief, sexual assault, animal death, loss of a parent
I didn’t go into The Thirty Names of Night with any expectations, but I was stunned by the writing! This novel is one of the best magical realism novels I’ve read in recent years, with writing as rich as a tapestry and a story that’s just as well-woven.
Joukhadar’s writing style was the star of Thirty Names; this is the first of his novels that I’ve read, but he has such a unique talent for finding unlikely comparisons and weaving them into the richest, most obvious but out-of-sight metaphors imaginable. I would never have compared the gray sky on a foggy day to the color of a kitchen knife, and somehow, it was right in front of me. His talent for metaphor suited the emotional depth of this story, as well as the almost fantastical element of the birds in New York—I will never claim to be the expert on him, but if there was any story that was suited for Joukhadar to tell, it’s this one.
That writing also made the emotional core of this story possible. There’s so much to Thirty Names: gender identity, grief, heritage, family, and the body itself, but all of it was handled with such grace and aplomb that made the story feel really, truly real. I might’ve even passed the aspect of the birds by as something that could feasibly happen with how this story was written. Every part of this novel is deeply moving, raw and beautiful, and the prose flows as smoothly as air over a bird’s wings.
All in all, a beautiful, literary tale of connections—to family, to gender, and to the world around us at large. 4.25 stars!
“If you control our sleep, then you can own our dreams…And from there, it’s easy to control our entire lives.”
From the brilliant mind of Charlie Jane Anders (“A master absurdist”—New York Times; “Virtuoso”—NPR) comes a new novel of Kafkaesque futurism. Set on a planet that has fully definitive, never-changing zones of day and night, with ensuing extreme climates of endless, frigid darkness and blinding, relentless light, humankind has somehow continued apace—though the perils outside the built cities are rife with danger as much as the streets below.
But in a world where time means only what the ruling government proclaims, and the levels of light available are artificially imposed to great consequence, lost souls and disappeared bodies are shadow-bound and savage, and as common as grains of sand. And one such pariah, sacrificed to the night, but borne up by time and a mysterious bond with an enigmatic beast, will rise to take on the entire planet–before it can crumble beneath the weight of human existence.
TW/CW: animal attack/animal death, police brutality, body horror
Alright, so the only explicitly stated Latinx characters, specifically of Mexican ancestry, are named…Carlos and Maria? So most everybody else gets semi-unique names, but not them? It’s like Cho Chang all over again…[LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER}
If I hadn’t read Victories Greater Than Death beforehand, I would’ve been more suspicious, but it seems like Anders has gotten a lot better with diversity on that front, but…still iffy. Just saying.
That aside, The City in the Middle of the Night was one of the more inventive dystopias that I’ve read recently, but it fell victim to very convoluted writing. It’s obvious from every page that Anders put so, so much work into creating a fleshed-out world with an equally fleshed-out history—that was a riotous success on her part. The premise of society being divided by a tidally-locked planet felt eerily feasible, and I absolutely ADORED all of the alien life forms on the night side of January—the Gelet were obviously my favorites, but I would’ve liked to have seen more creatures. ALWAYS MORE CREATURES.
However, Anders’ writing choices ended up making parts of The City in the Middle of the Night something of a struggle. The story itself ended up being rather convoluted and tangled, and I found myself getting lost and confused about wait, which side of the planet are we on again? Why are we here in the first place? The additions of a boatload of characters that ended up having very little consequence to the plot at large didn’t help either. This story had the potential to be incredible, but it ended up getting so lost in itself that it became an ordeal to figure out where I was.
All in all, an inventively-conceived dystopia that excelled in worldbuilding but floundered in its writing. 3.25 stars.
Tell me what you think! Did you participate in the #TransRightsReadathon, and if so, what books did you read? What do you think of these books?Let me know in the comments!
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!
I’ve had this book on my radar for a few years now, but I wanted to read it after the ocean of hype died down. I forgot about it for a while, and I found a copy at my college’s library, and figured that it might be worth a try—I read The Humans, also by Matt Haig, and thought it was decent, so I decided to take a stab. I lowered my expectations to average from all of the hype, but The Midnight Library ended up being even worse than I thought—insultingly un-nuanced and a wholly frustrating read.
Nora Seed has reached what seems to be a dead end in her life. All of her childhood dreams never came to fruition, and now she’s stuck in her thirties with nowhere to go. But after she attempts to take her own life, Nora finds herself in the Midnight Library, where every book on the endless shelves contains an alternate life—lives where she pursued different dreams, different boyfriends, and every other imaginable outcome. As she travels through a multitude of alternate realities, Nora must come to terms with herself and how she wants to live her life—full of regrets, or full of hope?
TW/CW: suicide/suicidal ideations, animal attack, loss of a loved one, depression, panic attacks, animal death, substance abuse, cancer
A recurring thought that came to me while reading The Midnight Library was that it was like if you sucked every ounce of nuance and complexity out of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. I know full well that Everything came out two years after this novel, but my point still stands. In the abstract, the message of The Midnight Library was good, but it had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face, which made for an exceedingly unpleasant reading experience.
The Midnight Library is a case study in the effect of good or bad execution of a story idea. If you have a good idea but don’t execute it well, the idea itself gets bogged down in all of the structural flaws of the writing itself. The message that Matt Haig tried to get across was a good one—focusing on living your life, not getting bogged down with regrets, and giving yourself a chance to change—but it was so ham-handed in its delivery that all of the nuance (of which there was SO much potential) was erased entirely. It was so clear that The Midnight Library was trying to say something, but without any complexity, it ended up spitting out nothing that we haven’t heard before.
For instance, in one life, Nora Seed is a world-famous rockstar selling out arena shows all around the world. However, as Nora progresses through this alternate timeline, she realizes that this alternate self is feeling empty inside, and that fame has left her a barren shell of what she once was. That’s all well and good, and it’s a good message that fame does not automatically equal happiness. But at the end of the chapter, this message was digestibly packaged into a short platitude, right above Nora’s hypothetical follower count on social media. It was almost insulting how it was delivered—what was the point of that when Haig showed it through his writing just a page before? Even if you’re not a writer, if you’re ever taught about writing in school, “show, don’t tell” is one of the first principles that you’re taught. As a reader, it feels insulting to one’s intelligence: I got the message just fine, why be that redundant and blatantly obvious?
Furthermore, a lot of the potential lives, even though they were neatly and obviously packaged to the reader to teach them a lesson, ended up contributing nothing to the plot. When they did contribute, the message was reiterated by the all-knowing librarian, as if I’m watching a children’s show, each episode ending with an “and what did we learn today, kids?” kind of message. The Midnight Library isn’t all that long of a book, but a good quarter of the misadventures through Nora’s alternate lives didn’t serve any purpose, even though that was the obvious intent.
Lastly—Matt Haig isn’t at fault for this first part, but dear lord, do not let the synopsis fool you. This is not a feel-good book. The inciting incident for The Midnight Library is Nora attempting suicide, and that got glossed over so much in the marketing of the book. For the first part of the book, I feel like Nora’s mental health issues, although they aren’t explicitly named, were dealt with respectfully, but once it got to the end of the book, it took a turn for the worse. As if by magic, Nora’s depression is cured, and she now has the will to live again, after glimpsing all of her alternate lives. It really felt harmful—yes, this is a sci-fi/fantasy book, but depression and other mental health issues don’t magically disappear after a romp through alternate realities. Downplaying something as serious as depression and suicide really didn’t sit right with me, and it felt like the ending of the book erased something that should have been acknowledged far more in this book.
All in all, a disappointing book that decided to take its well-intentioned message and knock you over the head with it, thereby erasing all attempts at nuance and complexity. 2 stars.
The Midnight Library is a standalone, but Matt Haig is also the author of The Humans, How to Stop Time, The Radleys, and several other books.
Today’s song:
I like this one even more than Panopticom—I can’t wait to see what else this album brings!!
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
I’ve been a fan of A.R. Capetta ever since I read the Once & Future duology, and when I was looking for a sweet rom-com to read the other day, the opportunity presented itself in this book. I’m glad to say that this is proof that Capetta almost never misses—a tender and sweet (no pun. intended) celebration of queerness and baking!
Syd loves nothing more than baking—especially when it’s at the Proud Muffin, the queer-run bakery at the center of Austin’s queer community. After a nasty breakup, Syd deals with it in signature Syd fashion—by baking all the frustrations and bad feelings out into a batch of brownies. But when Syd’s frustrations works its way into the brownies and causes everyone that eats them to have relationship troubles, Syd has to fix the issue how it began—with baking. Throw in the cute delivery-person, and Syd has to avoid a recipe for disaster…
TW/CW: gender dysphoria
this book: has several jokes about the fact that it’s still possible to have a bad hair day even when you’ve shaved your head
me, having just shaved my head: [chuckles] “I’m in danger!”
I came into The Heartbreak Bakery just for a queer romance to tide me over, and I can now say with certainty that A.R. Capetta never misses! This piece of magical realism is a love letter to queer communities and spaces, and it made my heart so happy.
First off, this is easily one of the most diverse rom-coms that I’ve ever read! Syd is the first main character that I’ve read that’s agender, and the main relationship is between Syd and Harley, another nonbinary character! I think the entire cast is queer—a gay couple owns the Proud Muffin, there’s a polyamorous couple on the side, and there are queer characters of all identities as side characters, and many of them are POC as well! Capetta never shies away from unapologetic queerness, but it particularly shone in The Heartbreak Bakery.
The magical realism aspect was also fantastic, and it also culminated into a theme that I thought was incredibly important. I liked the ambiguity of where it came from, but the concept of putting tangible feelings into baking that have a visible ripple effect had me on board instantly. It served to show a great theme: the feelings that you put into anything, be it a project, a relationship, or a batch of brownies, is what you’re going to get out of it. If you pour all of your negativity into something, that’s exactly what’s going to come out of it. The Heartbreak Bakery takes the concept very literally—brownies that make couples break up, cakes that make you apologize, et cetera—but it was a great theme to explore. I do feel like some of the problems being almost immediately solved by the “apology cake” were a tad bit too easy for Syd to maneuver, but I’m glad Capetta made it more complicated—having Marisol eat the cake by accident, for example. (I wish I had a physical copy of the book on hand—some of those recipes looked good!)
My only major qualm with The Heartbreak Bakery was the pacing. I’m all for slower, gentler books, but it felt like the main points of conflict were unevenly spaced. For instance, the final climax of the bake-off felt far too rushed for me; given how much hinged on the outcome, it should’ve gotten a lot more page time than it did. Some of the interim scenes between the main points of conflict should’ve been shortened in favor of the more important, plot/character building scenes. It was a great novel to start with, but I could’ve done with a little tweaking with the pacing and the importance placed on certain scenes.
All in all, an incredibly sweet (no pun intended) magical-realism romance that reads as an ode to baking, queerness, community, and love itself. 3.75 stars, rounded up to 4!
The Heartbreak Bakery is a standalone, but A.R. Capetta is also the author of The Lost Coast, the Once & Future duology (co-authored with Cory McCarthy), Echo After Echo, and several other books.
Today’s song:
man I have so many memories of hearing this song when I was a kid
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
I’m having a nice, relaxing weekend at home (seeing the new Black Panther tonight too!!), so I figured I’d do another tag! I found this one over at Becky @ Becky’s Book Blog, and I haven’t been able to find the original creator, so if you know who it is, please let me know so I can credit them.
Let’s begin, shall we?
🔢 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1 BOOK TAG 🔢
5 BOOKS YOU LOVE
If I had to narrow down my favorites to *just* 5, I’d have to pick Frankenstein, Aurora Rising, Heart of Iron, Madman Yearbook ’95, and On a Sunbeam. Maybe. I think. The first three are fairly certain, but it gets hazy from there, but I still love every single one of these books with all my heart.
4 AUTOBUY AUTHORS
At this point, all of these authors—Amie Kaufman, Becky Chambers, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, and Rainbow Rowell—are ones that I immediately preorder from (or at least put on hold at the library) if they’re coming out with anything new. (anybody else excited for Isles of the Gods???)
3 FAVORITE GENRES
Anyone who’s followed this blog for a while knows that I’m a complete sci-fi fan to the bone. Absolute favorite genre!! After that, I’d say fantasy and magical realism; fantasy was my favorite genre before I got really into sci-fi, but I still love it. I’ve gotten into magical realism more recently, but I’ve read some incredibly memorable books in the genre.
2 PLACES YOU READ
During the day, I tend to read on the couch, and at night, I love to read while cozy in bed.
1 BOOK YOU PROMISE TO READ SOON
I’ve been meaning to read Viciousfor a while after loving the Shades of Magic trilogy, and I just downloaded it on my Kindle, so I’ll be reading this as soon as I can!
+ anyone else who wants to participate! if you see this tag and want to do it, I’d love to see your answers! and if I tagged you and you’ve already done it/don’t want to do it, my bad.
Today’s song:
big thank you to my mom for introducing me to lush on the car ride home yesterday
That’s it for this book tag! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles! I hope you all had a safe and spooky Halloween!! I went to class (and took a stats test) dressed up as Columbia from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (in the pajamas and the Mickey Mouse ears), so that was a lot of fun, even though I didn’t see a bunch of other people dressed up. I guess most of the Halloween festivities happened over the weekend. Oh well.
I picked this book up on a whim while scrolling through the books on my Libby wishlist to see what was available. The cover was already eye-catching (no pun intended), but I didn’t expect for I Am the Ghost in Your House to hit as hard as it did—stunning prose and a poignant, strange story to match.
Pie and her mother have been on the run for their entire lives. They are both invisible—Pie born and her mother turned as a teenager—and have been living in other people’s houses all across America. Their lives are constantly transient, and although Pie has lived in many places, she doesn’t have a place to call home.
When her mother disappears, possibly dead, Pie is left alone. Sheltering in Pittsburgh with a group of art students, she goes in search of her missing mother and a girl she once loved. But if the girl Pie loves can never see her, how can they be together?
TW/CW: kidnapping, off-page sexual assault (past), substance abuse, absent father
For a book I picked up almost purely on a whim, this was such an emotional hard-hitter. From this alone, I’m absolutely going to seek out Moore’s other books—I haven’t read such fantastic, immersive prose in ages, and through Pie, Moore has created a truly unique protagonist and a strange world paired with her.
Moore’s prose is what stood out the most to me about I Am the Ghost in Your House. Magical realism is a hard genre to get right, and writing prose that fits with it can be half the battle, and it’s a battle that Moore absolutely won; their weaving of delicate metaphors into Pie’s voice created such a distinct atmosphere around the whole book, as though we too were nestled in lonely train cars, unable to be seen by anyone but our own kin. I read this on my Kindle, and I highlighted so many passages—Moore’s prose rarely faltered, and it was the perfect vehicle to carry this story.
The worldbuilding behind invisibility in I Am the Ghost in Your House was incredibly thought out as well! With magical realism novels like these, it’s sometimes okay to have changes to a world with little to no explanation—it adds some ambiguity to the story, and if it’s done well, it can add a charm and mystery to the world. Moore, however, has done the opposite. Without infodumping or rambling excessively, they define so much about invisibility, its origins, and more importantly, its limits, in terms that make something so fantastical seem so authentic. It feels like the kind of story that stemmed from a conversation—what would you do if you were invisible? Where would you live? What would you get away with, knowing that nobody’s watching?
Pie herself, however, was what made this novel so emotional and poignant. There’s an intense loneliness to her; after her mother disappears, she has nobody, since her father left her before she was born. Moore’s prose shapes a character with seemingly ordinary struggles—unrequited love and general uncertainty, among other things—into someone so deeply isolated, someone fighting alone, since only a handful of people can even see her in the first place. But as she develops, meeting other people and coming to terms with truths about her family, she finds closure in solace in knowing that she’s never been alone, being able to communicate with visible people and knowing that there are others out there like her.
My only problem was the paranormal investigator subplot. In contrast to how smoothly and deliberately most of the book moved, this spot near the end felt rushed and unfinished, thrown in at the last minute to add conflict where there didn’t need to be. Since it was crammed in the last 20% of the book or so, it didn’t feel like it had any place, other than providing a little more worldbuilding details on invisibility. Given what happens to Pie, the suddenness almost feels genuine, but it seemed to come more from a place of rushed writing than actual feeling.
All in all, a bittersweet and atmospheric piece of magical realism that never falters in its deeply emotional core. 4.25 stars!
I Am the Ghost in Your House is a standalone, but Mar Romasco Moore is also the author of Some Kind of Animal and the anthology Ghostographs: An Album.
Today’s song:
this song just emanates sheer power—there’s truly nothing quite like it
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
I’ve been a huge fan of Anna-Marie McLemore’s books for ages; their prose is always immersive and lush, and their stories never fail to pull at the heartstrings. So I was over-the-moon excited to find out that they had a new book out! I put Lakelore on hold as soon as I could, and I finally got to read it last week. While it wasn’t their best work, Lakelore is still a beautiful tale of the trans experience.
The town where Bastián and Lore live has a secret: under the lake is a strange, unknown world. But they are the only ones who have ventured down into this secret world, and they know something that the other townsfolk don’t know: the world under the lake is blending with the real world. The only way to put the two worlds back in their places is for Bastián and Lore to reunite, but the secrets between them may tear them apart before they reach their goal.
I loved Lakelore, but it lacked the very thing that makes McLemore’s other books so unique—the magical realism aspect. It was there, sure, but it felt so sidelined when the synopsis emphasized it so much. That being said, Lakelore was still excellent, and it’s sure to resonate with so many nonbinary readers!
The representation in Lakelore was truly fantastic! Both Bastián and Lore are Latinx and nonbinary; Bastián also has ADHD and Lore has dyslexia! This kind of intersectional representation is what I live for, and McLemore wrote it all so gracefully! Each aspect of their identities was so wonderfully written, from Bastián’s journey starting testosterone to Lore’s therapy sessions to cope with school having dyslexia. The whole book is a beautiful testament to being the other in some way, and the way that McLemore explores it with Bastián and Lore was fantastic.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Anna-Marie McLemore’s unforgettable prose! Their writing is as strong as ever in Lakelore, and the way their signature, magical writing style told Bastián and Lore’s stories made it all the more engaging, emotional, and tender. It’s the kind of writing that feels like looking at pure, unadulterated magic, instantly transporting the reader to the small town and the mysterious lake at its heart.
That being said, I was a little disappointed with the magical realism aspect of Lakelore. At best, it was underdeveloped; we got glimpses of the world beneath the lake, but it was never quite expanded upon. We saw that this underwater realm gave Bastián’s alebrijes (which I also loved—great metaphor for healthy coping mechanisms!) the ability to move, but other than that, it was very vague, save for the urban legend aspect of it. I guess it’s on me for thinking that Lakelore was gonna be some kind of nonbinary Abe Sapien kind of deal, but even so, I wanted so much more from that aspect after how strong McLemore’s magical realism/fantasy game usually is.
All in all, a fantastic addition to Anna-Marie McLemore’s pantheon that lacked slightly in the magical realism department, but made up for it with the beautiful depiction of a Latinx, nonbinary, and neurodivergent experience. 3.75 stars, rounded up to 4!
Lakelore is a standalone, but Anna-Marie McLemore is also the author of The Mirror Season, Wild Beauty, When the Moon Was Ours, Dark and Deepest Red, Blanca & Roja, The Weight of Feathers, and the forthcoming Great Gatsby remix Self-Made Boys.
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!
The Bookish Mutant 