Tag: october

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 10/19/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: the chances of being pursued by Brian Eno wielding chopsticks are low…but never zero.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 10/14/25

“Lay My Love” – Brian Eno & John Cale

While digging a bit about a song that I’m not even mentioning until next week, I stumbled upon something entirely different. All of those Pitchfork Best Songs of [insert decade] lists (this was from the ’90s one) are very subjective, but sometimes I appreciate looking at them simply by virtue of finding out about something new. Last week, it happened to be a collaboration between Brian Eno and John Cale from 1990, Wrong Way Up, and “Lay My Love” in particular. I was excited by the prospect of Brian Eno already, but man…I have been sucked in. I’ve listened to this one an unhealthy amount of time. It just swallows you whole in the best way possible!

By the ’80s, Brian Eno had built a decade’s worth of entirely ambient music, and there seemed to be no return for him to the more conventional (if you can call it that) rock of his earlier career, abandoning his own vocals almost entirely: in 1989, he told an interviewer that “I’m sure I could, if someone held a gun to my head, crank out a record of songs, but at this point in time I know it wouldn’t be any good.” And given the intensely argument-fraught recording of Wrong Way Up (Cale alleges that Eno once came at him wielding chopsticks, but Eno has insisted that Cale fabricated this), there’s a good chance that in another timeline, this album may not have seen the light of day after all. And yet there they were in 1990: Eno and Cale, frequent collaborators since the 1970’s, making an album consisting of just that.

You’d think that after abandoning singing for so long, Eno would appear rusty. In fact, he’s the exact opposite. “Lay My Love” feels like the distillation of the best qualities of his off-kilter vocals. Even though he’s known for his more removed, uptight vocal quality, this track presents him as warmer than he’s ever come across. It’s a song that makes you believe every word: as he sings “I am the yearning,” you can hear the pleading in his vocals, layered upon themselves ad infinitum. Cale’s rousing violins add an upbeat swing amongst the dizzyingly layered instrumentals. It’s an all-consuming slurry of glimmering sediment and flotsam, all warmed by the sun’s rays, equal parts hymn and experimental electronic music. Eno peppers in some of his most delightfully surreal, offbeat lyrics (“I am the termite of temptation”) with ones that make sense in some unarticulated part of your soul (“I am the wheel/I am the turning”). Above all, you really do feel as though this love is being laid around you like a blanket. It feels like the kind of song to soundtrack a quiet montage in a film of a house being built, or moss growing on a log: gradual, and yet hopeful in its certainty. You know that the love is coming around to you, and when it does, it will be as joyous as every note bursting from this track.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers – this seems precisely the kind of song that would soundtrack Sibling Dex and Mosscap’s quiet adventures through the woods.

“New Generation” – The London Suede

As far as the Britpop Big Four goes, The London Suede (known as just Suede in the UK) is the last frontier for me to explore; I’ve heard some of their songs sporadically and loved them (see: “Metal Mickey”), but reading The Last Party: Britpop, Blair, and the Demise of English Rock sparked some more interest in them. Add that to Neko Case’s episode of What’s in My Bag? and I was instantly hooked on “New Generation.” Along with “Lay My Love,” this song’s up there with the songs that I’ve been listening to an unhealthy amount of times. Who am I to deny my Britpop girlie urges?

I really should be a huge fan of The London Suede, given how influenced they were by David Bowie, but then again, not everybody influenced by Bowie is automatically good, of course. Brett Anderson and company seemed to worship the ground he walked on, which resulted in their melodramatic style and soaring vocals. Dog Man Star, which I’ve heard is an excellent album, was said to be inspired by a lot of Bowie’s early ’70s material, which makes perfect sense—”New Generation” feels like fanfiction set in the Hunger City of Diamond Dogs, and I fully mean that as a compliment. If Anderson’s vocals and just-so placed swoop didn’t tip you off, “New Generation” is high on the drama, but that’s part of why it works so well—it’s a strangely dystopian song that’s fit for draping yourself dramatically across the bed, full of distance and yearning. Anderson’s really doing some vocal somersaults here—he said himself that it’s one of the most difficult songs for him to sing—and amidst sepia-toned lyrics of disaffection and substance abuse, his vocals are outstretched arms beckoning for someone to swoop in and extricate him from it all.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Shamshine Blind – Paz Pardo – “‘Cause like all the boys in all the cities/I take the poison, take the pity/But she and I would soon discover/We take the pills to find each other…”

“Wreck” – Neko Case

Today on incredibly specific comparisons: “Wreck” by Neko Case sounds almost exactly like this meme to me:

Maybe I do need to listen to more Neko Case after all. I’m a fan of the New Pornographers, but I really haven’t dived into any of her solo work, save for the misfire that was her cover of “Madonna of the Wasps.” You win some, you lose some. But this song, off of her new album Neon Grey Midnight Green (that’s got to be one of the better album titles I’ve heard in a while, for sure), easily falls into the win category.

For a beat, the a cappella intro lulls you into a false sense of security before dropping you headfirst into a churning, breathless whirlpool of head-over-heels romance. I can’t deny a love song that feels like you’re gleefully sprinting through a verdant field at full speed—there’s a bit of Hounds of Love Kate Bush in there somewhere in the unabashed drama that Case peddles: “I’m a meteor shattering around you/And I’m sorry/I’ve become a solar system/Since I found you/I’m an eruption/A wreck of possibilities/A volatility of stars/My clothes can’t hold together.” (Another shoutout is due to “Do I look like the sun to you?/Do I blaze freckles onto your face?”) And right after this, she breathlessly cries “And I know I can’t burn this bright forever!”—right about there, I imagine her smile splitting with reckless glee, a princess dress ballooning into endless layers of silk and tulle, a cry of nothing but sheer joy. It’s an easily addictive ode to absolutely drowning in yearning, and desperately wanting the echo to have an answer.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Stars Too Fondly – Emily Hamilton – “Do I look like the sun to you?/Do I blaze freckles onto your face/I bet I, bet I, bet I do/I’m a meteor shattering around you/And I’m sorry…”

“Alien Being” – The Magnetic Fields

There’s something truly beautiful about the fact that this song only has 10 likes on YouTube and a single comment that reads “being gay is awesome and you gotta try it!!!” Amen, brother.

The House of Tomorrow EP was released very early on in The Magnetic Fields’ career, and from 3/5 songs that I’ve listened to from it (this, “Either You Don’t Love Me Or I Don’t Love You” and “Love Goes Home to Paris in the Spring”), it’s clear that they’d all honed their talents very early. I suppose it helped that Stephin Merritt was in several bands before this, but it’s still very indicative of what a masterful songwriter he’s come to be. It’s also clear from the start that he’d started dissecting unhappy relationships very early on. The lyrics of “Alien Being” aren’t quite as laden with metaphor as they usually are, but they’re monotonous and repetitive—which feels like precisely the point. Almost all of them end with “nothing at all” (“You talk a lot about nothing at all/”Watch TV shows about nothing at all”), adding to the layered, grainy drone of the synths in the background. It’s a perfect encapsulation of being around someone who makes you feel like you’re talking to a wall—no feelings, no opinions, no independent thoughts, no nothing. Good thing Merritt has a lot of those things.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Here Beside the Rising Tide – Emily Jane – “You have no feelings/I think you are an alien being/You won’t let me in/I think you are an alien being…”

“Time in a Bottle” (Jim Croce cover) – Lucy Dacus

The X-Men fan in me and the Lucy Dacus fan in me were both screaming when I found out that this was a thing…I don’t even have any sentimental feelings towards the original, but I just saw the title and got activated like a sleeper agent. Say what you want about the later Fox X-Men movies, but there’s one thing that they did best, and that was make immaculate slo-mo Quicksilver sequences with great needle drops.

I maintain that Forever is a Feeling bordered on being a disappointment, but I’m softening to some of it—especially now that we’ve gotten an expanded edition: Forever is a Feeling: The Archives. It’s mainly demos and live versions, but it had the poignant track “Losing” (should’ve been in the album, that’s my two cents) and this Jim Croce cover. Dacus’ tender, delicate fingerpicking style was practically made for this cover, as was the overall aesthetic of the album, combining acoustic guitar with gently swelling strings. I just can’t get enough of how she treats the guitar as an instrument—the way she plays on “Time in a Bottle” makes it feel like it’s not simply an instrument but a waltz partner. Her rich voice is on full display with this cover, making every note ring out with the yearning I’ve come to love her for. It’s tender in its sparing instrumentation, but her voice fills out all the empty spaces, creating a cover steeped in love and longing, just like the best parts of Forever is a Feeling.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

When the Tides Held the Moon – Venessa Vida Kelley – the tender feeling of this cover would fit right in with this heartfelt, moonlit romance.

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (10/14/25) – Scout’s Honor

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

To close out Latine Heritage Month, here’s a novel from an author I haven’t read in years! I’d totally forgotten about Lily Anderson since high school. I remember liking Undead Girl Gang a lot when I was younger, so I figured I might give her (somewhat) newer novel a chance. Scout’s Honor is a novel that leans into both the adventurous and the sensitive, a tale of sisterhood, coming of age, and carnivorous interdimensional monsters.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Scout’s Honor – Lily Anderson

Prue wants nothing to do with her family legacy. A third-generation Ladybird Scout, she is part of an elite circle of women trained to hunt Mulligrubs, interdimensional beasts who feed off of the emotions of humans—and sometimes their flesh, when they get hungry enough. After her friend was killed in a deadly Mulligrub attack, Prue swore off the Ladybird Scouts for good. But when a new crisis pulls her back into the fray, Prue must decide if her legacy is worth preserving—or if she needs to go her own way.

TW/CW: PTSD themes, panic attacks, violence, gore, loss of a loved one

Maybe the real Root is the friends we made along the way, amirite?

Though I can’t speak to the accuracy of the representation (Prue has PTSD), Scout’s Honor had such a deeply sensitive depiction of trauma. If the acknowledgements are anything to go by, Anderson drew a hefty amount of it from personal experience, and that authenticity shone through emotionally on the page. Narratively, you’re only fed breadcrumbs of Prue’s trauma (until you aren’t), but I feel like it mirrored Prue’s difficulties with confronting her past. There’s a lot of detail afforded to how she experiences panic attacks and how her trauma has manifested in the three years since her trauma began. Beyond that, Prue had such a poignant arc, and so much of it revolved around her trauma; the entire reason she returns to the site of her trauma is to find a way to forget it (to physically remove her ability to See the Mulligrubs via a special tea), and yet it shows her that no matter what, she can never forget the past: the only way to truly heal is not to easily overcome it, but to face it. It was such a poignant take on trauma and healing, so kudos to Anderson for that!

I also loved how Scout’s Honor tackled its themes of sisterhood! In an organization like the Ladybird Scouts, where a value like sisterhood is prized above all else, it’s bound to be perverted; any value put on that high of a pedestal is bound to be used for ill intent, which it often is in this novel—case in point with Faithlynn. But I loved how Anderson talked about what sisterhood really is—uplifting difference yet embracing commonality, and truly helping each other when we’re down. There’s Faithlynn’s sisterhood, which is just a word she can toss around while putting down the other girls around her, and there’s Prue’s sisterhood, who accepts the less conventional Ladybird Scouts like Sasha and Avi into the fold and celebrates their individual strengths in order to solve the problems throughout the novel. It’s a heartwarming exploration of the topic and a lovely depiction of how it can so easily be twisted—and an indictment of any woman whose path to success is only built on putting other women down (and in the path of danger).

For the most part, the world of Scout’s Honor was a treat! Though the worldbuilding wasn’t anything groundbreaking, there was so much surrounding the lore and the structure of the Ladybird Scouts that I loved dissecting and exploring. Anderson really nailed all of the idiosyncrasies and minute rules of this organization, from their front in the real world to the work they did behind closed doors. Anderson truly nailed the feeling of being a part of a tight-knit, insular community sworn to secrecy—there were so many laws and bylaws that had to be dodged, almost as much as the Mulligrubs, throughout the novel. Although I enjoyed the classifications of all the different Mulligrubs, I would have liked some more explanation as to how they came to Earth in the first place, and exactly what kind of dimension we’re talking about when Anderson calls them “interdimensional,” but that’s more of a me thing—the novel doesn’t necessarily need it since the worldbuilding of the primary location is already well-established.

My main issue with Scout’s Honor, however, lay in the pacing. Despite most of the emotional sections of the novel landing appropriately, Anderson didn’t seem to know how much time to allocate to certain scenes, which ended up making the pacing quite lopsided. Until the climax, it also lessened the stakes quite a bit; even though the mulligrubs are a very real threat in this universe, almost all of the battle scenes were over in what felt like the blink of an eye. If not for Prue’s trauma surrounding them, I wouldn’t have felt the tangible threat of them at all—aside from the aftermath, the characters seemed to deal with the Mulligrubs, no matter the size or strength, like that. On the flip side, although I love some character building, there were long stretches when not a ton happened, and hardly any of it serviced the plot or character development—there were just long stretches of banter that didn’t show anything that hadn’t already been established. Anderson is a strong writer for the most part, but the pacing dragged Scout’s Honor down for sure. It was really the only thing keeping me from rating it the full 4 stars.

All in all, a novel brimming with heart and heinous monsters, let down by pacing but lifted up by its depictions of trauma and sisterhood. 3.75 stars, rounded up to 4!

Scout’s Honor is a standalone, but Lily Anderson is also the author of The Only Thing Worse Than Me is You series (The Only Thing Worse Than Me is You and Not Now, Not Ever), Undead Girl Gang, The Throwback List, Killer House Party, and several other novels for teens and adults. She has also contributed to the YA anthologies The (Other) F Word: A Celebration of the Fat and Fierce, That Way Madness Lies: 15 of Shakespeare’s Most Notable Works Reimagined and All Signs Point to Yes.

Today’s song:

been unhealthily obsessed w this for the past few days…

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 10/12/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: shoutout to the Welsh for carrying alternative music at the moment. Also, I continue to eat up 99% of what Horsegirl does, and Michael Stipe appears in (somewhat) unexpected places.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 10/12/25

“Body as a River” – Cate Le Bon

Y’all. MICHELANGELO DYING! It’s a strong contender for my favorite album of the year at this point. I’m trying my best not to listen to it to death, but it’s so hard when this album has hidden sonic surprises every time I go back to it.

Since 2019, Cate Le Bon’s music has felt like an ever-expanding, tactile landscape. Listening to her last three albums feels like running your hands over a model village of an alien world, full of all manner of silken, rubbery textures charting out a world that only Le Bon has access to. Thankfully, she’s chosen to share that world with us, and her musical cartography has made me all the better. Michelangelo Dying in particularly made me feel like I was plunging through a sunlit creek, watching the sunlight dapple through the water onto my skin, watching pebbles, plants, and silvery fish dart through the current alongside me. As she maps out the prognosis of a personal heartbreak, she transforms her knotted mess of pain and grief into a vibrant swath of glistening sound; “Mothers of Riches” bobs up and down like birds vying for a mate, and “Ride,” with the help of John Cale (!!!), meanders into a searing climax and shows off Le Bon’s vocal and emotional range.

But it’s “Body as a River” that swept me off my feet and into the frigid creek waters—or the river, I guess I should say. Or maybe not: after all, “My body as a river/A river running dry.” There’s only a riverbed to speak of now, for Le Bon, a once rushing energy force now diminished by pain. It’s one of those songs that you instantly surrender to. Awash in thrumming pianos and guitars and saxophones so warped and bubbly that they cease to become instruments, Le Bon drags you along with the proverbial current. You can’t do much other than release yourself to the thrall of the music—and I’m glad to do it time after time. The entire album feels watery, but this feels like this musical concept pushed to its extreme; it all burbles and rushes like a waterfall, Le Bon’s voice layered, echoed, and pulled apart in all directions to linger in the feeling of exhaustion and transience. Her lyricism dwells in the real and the surreal in equal measure: “Do you see her/Falling on the wishing bone/Dripping like a candle?/In the pages lost/I’m holding on to sorrow and lust.” It’s a song that makes me glad to be alive in a time when, if you look hard enough, artsy people are honing their craft beneath the shadow of the mainstream, free to let their unique sound flow free like water. We don’t deserve Cate Le Bon.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Ephemera Collector – Stacy Nathaniel Jackson – “See what you like/I read what I write/And it’s never without shame/My body as a river/A river running dry/And I’m sick all the time…”

“In Twos” (Demo) – Horsegirl

Phonetics On & On has had me in a chokehold ever since it came out on Valentine’s Day. Like Cate Le Bon’s new music, it just gives me so much joy that there are so many artists out there making music true to their quirky selves, and music that’s so catchy and creative at that. Somehow, even the demos are almost on the same level as the final products of the album—both versions of “Julie” were worthy, scratchy precursors to one of the album’s most introspective moments.

“In Twos” was a faintly melancholy bridge before the album really got up and started doing the dance from the end of Fantastic Mr. Fox, but it was one of the highlights for me in terms of songwriting. It was already a spectacular track, but somehow, this lo-fi, larval stage of it is almost better than the studio version. Practically, I feel like the lower key would’ve probably been more difficult to sing, but it feels more resonant and more fitting with the lyrics, a gentle, wistful ramble through crowded city streets. The spare instrumentals on the studio version made the melancholy more tangible, but on a personal level, I just love the more garagey sound that this demo has, chock-full of a more restrained version of the sounds of Versions of Modern Performance. Despite the wistfulness, they can never take the jangle away from Horsegirl.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers, #2) – Becky Chambers – “Every car that passes by drives to you/Overlooked by any face just passing through/Your footprints on the street, they walk in twos/Every good thing that I find, I find I lose…”

“Disconnect the Dots” – of Montreal

Isn’t it so wonderful to look back on a musician’s sound to see exactly where the good stuff gestated? “Disconnect the Dots” is already the good stuff in question, but I swear it’s like peeling back a layer of age to see the future of where of Montreal would go in the next four years. I can practically hear an embryonic version of the anxious thrum of “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” in the bouncing bass of this track and the ever-so-slightly off kilter, catchy dance music of The Sunlandic Twins. “Disconnect the Dots” comes right as Kevin Barnes had stepped off of the precipice of their potential; the lyrics haven’t gotten as English major delightful yet, but this feels like one of their dance songs, so it doesn’t really need those lyrics quite yet. What it does have, however, is Barnes saying “Come disconnect the dots with me, poppet”—I really should’ve seen “poppet” coming a mile away, but it’s such a quirky little additive to the song that exhibits a weirdness in Barnes that could never be suppressed.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Of Monsters and Mainframes – Barbara Truelove – only a book as bonkers as this could be befitting of a song like this…

“Rock ‘n’ Roll Flu” – Super Furry Animals

“Rock ‘n’ Roll Flu?” That’s just what happened when I saw Gorillaz and then realized that I’d gotten RSV a few days later…thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all night.

Super Furry Animals have been all but dormant for the better part of a decade, having not released new material since 2016. Separately, most of the band has been active on different projects, but after an agonizing string of teasers that lasted a solid week, Gruff Rhys and co. announced a UK tour and a reissue of their 2005 album Love Kraft. The (extreme) optimist in me is hoping that they’ll do a US tour (and come to Colorado by some miracle), but…listen, I’m glad said super furry animals have emerged from their hibernation, at least for a fleeting moment. Big fan of whatever Super Furry Animal is in this visualizer too.

“Rock ‘n’ Roll Flu,” a joyous, harmony-driven stomper, was a B-Side from the Love Kraft sessions that has just now been released. Though I haven’t listened to any of the album, it’s got some of my favorite qualities of a good Super Furry Animals song. It’s got an absolutely glistening glam sheen to it; it really seems to shimmer like a just-washed car with a handful of water droplets clinging to the surface. With its spacey instrumentals and the seamless harmonies. It’s one of those songs that seems to encapsulate the art that Super Furry Animals surrounds itself with—it’s the exact kind of song to fit in the backdrop of their universe of bold colors and cartoon creatures on rocket ships.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

You Sexy Thing – Cat Rambo – the perfect soundtrack to a bonkers yet heartfelt romp through the galaxy with a bunch of chefs.

“Your Ghost” (feat. Michael Stipe) – Kristin Hersh

There’s at least five different sayings about what you can do with three chords in a rock song, but some songs make you instantly understand every one of those sayings. It didn’t even occur to me that “Your Ghost” is comprised of only three main chords until I listened to it more closely. That might be a consequence of the cello in the background making it appear more lush and complicated, but it’d be lush without it. That’s that talent of someone like Kristin Hersh; she weaves a narrative so haunting and compelling that you barely even notice how deceptively simple the composition is.

Conflicting sources about this one have said that it’s either about Hersh’s struggles with schizophrenia as a teenager or grappling with the death of a close friend. Either way, the lonely yearning for something just out of reach resonates in every note. The music video, directed by Katherine Dieckmann, captures that feeling of an early 1900’s house with aging decorations that I associate with a solid handful of Hersh’s songs. This time, it’s cast in a more decaying light as Hersh sings of being mocked by memories and visions: “So I pad through the dark and call you on the phone/Push your old numbers/And let your house ring/Till I wake your ghost.” Her lyricism is nothing short of evocative, and the verbs are really doing the heavy lifting—her “pad[ding] through the dark,” and instead of simply waiting on the other line, she “slide[s] down your receiver/sprint[s] across the wire” as she yearns for someone to answer her. Nothing does, but this ghost, whatever it may represent, drives in circles around her in dreams, almost mockingly, as if taunting her with the reminder of mortality. When I first heard “Your Ghost,” I was floored by the fact that Michael Stipe and Hersh had crossed paths, but in retrospect, I really shouldn’t have been. I guess they did run in similar circles, and if you slicked up the production and added some mandolin, this could’ve been a cut from Green. But he proves a fitting duet partner for Hersh, whose voice echoes through the decaying wooden slats of her decaying house and onto a forlorn wind.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez – Claire Jiménez – “You were in my dream/You were driving circles around me…”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (10/7/25) – The Volcano Daughters

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

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.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Volcano Daughters – Gina María Balibrera

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?

TW/CW: rape, genocide, colonialism/imperialism themes, racism, misogyny, miscarriage, violence, murder, deportation/kidnapping

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 sisters are 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!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 10/5/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: ROCK AND ROLL IS DEAD…

BUT THE DEAD DON’T DIE!!!

THEDEADDON’TDIETHEDEADDON’TDIETHEDEADDON’TDIETHEDEADDON’TDIE

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 10/5/25

“Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” – Jeff Tweedy

Man, I’m so glad that this dystopian hellscape hasn’t beaten the joy out of Jeff Tweedy. He saw everything crumbling around us and decided to make an expansive, emotional triple album—Twilight Override—as a kind of musical knight against the forces of darkness: “when you align yourself with creation, you inherently take a side against destruction. You’re on the side of creation. And that does a lot to quell the impulse to destroy. Creativity eats darkness.” Honestly, it’s what we all ought to do—you don’t have to make a whole triple album, but keep on making art, dammit! Admittedly, I’ve only been able to go through all nearly 2 hours of the album once through, and it hasn’t quite sunken in yet (“Mirror,” “Caught Up in the Past,” and “New Orleans” are some of my highlights), but “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” became a favorite as soon as it was released as a single.

It feels, in a warped way, like one of Wilco’s whole albums was: an ode to joy. Sonically, it’s very different from…well, about 75% of that album, but the spirit is so similar and still so necessary. I mean, maybe it’s all just a vehicle for Jeff Tweedy’s commendable Lou Reed impression, but I swear, it just feels like a riotous celebration of joy, of dancing, of togetherness. A triple album gave Tweedy loads of room to pack in even more of his ever-potent lyrics, but something about “‘Cause rock and roll is dead/But the dead don’t die” just makes me so giddy. It’s an ode to jumping around at a concert or in the basement of someone’s house, to getting a little sweaty and dancing next to a bunch of sweaty people, but having a blast together, goofing off, and embracing the mess of it all. From the varied voices that yell out the chorus to Tweedy’s growled “WOOOOO!” at the end of every verse, it’s a song that’s sole purpose was to be played loud and played joyously.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Gearbreakers – Zoe Hana Mikuta – there’s definitely some of the messy, rough-around-the-edges joy in the friendship dynamic throughout this book.

“EVERYTHING” – The Black Skirts

I think I may have miraculously listened to “EVERYTHING” for the first time in the exact circumstances that it was meant to be listened to. My dear friend was driving us home after a concert. The day was fading away, and the only light came from the buildings along the highway and the headlights of the cars on the road. With this song as the soundtrack, it felt like the day was gently closing the curtain, preparing to fold itself into something new, just as this song came on shuffle.

I can never know if any of the translations of the lyrics online can ever really evoke the original intent and feeling of the song (apart from the chorus, “EVERYTHING” is sung entirely in Korean), but the power of real evocative music is that sometimes, you can feel the intent and the heart without understanding the lyrics. It’s such an effortlessly intimate and tender piece. There’s something sleepy-eyed about it, like a voice note to your lover before you go to bed while you look at the stars. Even the gentle reverb of the guitar feels yearning somehow. And though the first half of the music video does admittedly feel a bit like those dead wife montages in movies with the blurry filter, it really does fit the atmosphere of “EVERYTHING”—fading, rose-colored memories drifting through your heart.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

To Be Taught, If Fortunate – Becky Chambers – the dreamlike quality of this song could easily be applied to drifting through space…existentially, of course.

“Sweetness and Light” – Lush

I just can’t get enough of shoegaze. Part of it is, for me, that I love a song that feels tactile. (I can’t make any concrete promises, but I’ll probably be talking more about that quality next week with another album that came out in September 26th alongside Twilight Override.) Sometimes the lyrics hit me, but I can’t get enough of bands that set out to make songs that aren’t just songs, but fabric swatches of color, texture, and atmosphere. Shoegaze was the epicenter of that quality, in my opinion—just take the rich, all-consuming soundscapes of bands like Spiritualized or Slowdive. Either way, I’m just glad there were so many students of the Cocteau Twins School of Atmospheric Music.

If anybody was studying especially hard there, it was Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson, the driving forces behind Lush. Though their lyrics are…hmm, about 30% more comprehensible than the average Cocteau Twins song, they’re cloaked in a vibrant, pink and purple glow of feedback and layers of reverb that feel like thin sheets of cocooning around you. Miki Berenyi’s vocals are borderline angelic, crystalline against the vivid, tapestried echo swirling around her. It feels like being caught in a bubble trail—almost like a Minecraft one, complete with that whooooosh (you know the one), but if we’re talking video game graphics, it’s always pixellated at the edges, but they’ve rendered in layers of sparkles along the surface of the water, glistening and bluish. It’s enchanting. Chances are, somebody’s eventually going to remaster that music video, but I say it needs to be kept as grainy as it was in the ’90s—Lush, in both music and in visuals, is nothing if it isn’t fuzzy and grainy.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Stardust Grail – Yume Kitasei – I guess this cover does almost have the same color scheme as Gala, but there’s a lot of vibrant, cosmic imagery here that would be befitting of Lush.

“I Follow Rivers” – Lykke Li

You thought I was done talking about Japanese Breakfast? Well…technically, yeah, I am. For now. But this song was a holdover from the songs they played before the show (along with “Telegram Sam” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” so…automatically based).

Strangely, I had some inkling of who Lykke Li was; she’s there with Waxahatchee in my mind. I always saw her lingering in the recommended portion of my iTunes library in middle school whenever I played St. Vincent or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs over and over, standing next to a legion of women I halfway knew. Her name was always there. Granted, the only other thing I know her music from is…uh, whatever this was, but my point is that I’d end up hearing one of her songs eventually. That eventually came, as I said, at the Japanese Breakfast show, and I’m glad that it snuck up on me like it did. I love how the intro just builds and burbles—it gives me the same antsy anticipation as the intro to Blur’s “Swamp Song,” though what comes after couldn’t be more different. (I guess they both have bodies of water. That could explain where they diverge.) Maybe I got nostalgia-baited by the very early-2010’s indie production, slick and cavernous, but I love that cavernous quality of “I Follow Rivers”—everything, from Li’s voice to the guitars, which sound piped in from the bottom of a cave lined with icicles. Tarik Saleh clearly clicked with the vibe of this song when directing the music video—it’s all very watery, but frosty and icy. The same goes for the breathless protagonists of the videos—”I Follow Rivers” is a sprint down the winding path of a river, leading who knows where.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Sing Me to Sleep – Gabi Burton – “Oh I beg you, can I follow?/Oh I ask you, why not always?/Be the ocean, where I unravel/Be my only, be the water where I’m wading…”

“Chateau Blues” – Spoon

The Spoon drought since 2022 (or 2023, really…lest we forget how good their cover of “She’s Fine, She’s Mine” was) has certainly been felt, and it looks like we may feel it for a little longer…but not much longer. Britt Daniel has confirmed that they’re working on their first album since Lucifer on the Sofa, but it’s not finished yet. While recording the sessions, Daniel and company decided that two tracks—this one and “Guess I’m Fallin’ In Love”—needed to stand on their own from whatever else they’re currently cooking. And any new Spoon is bound to be good Spoon—and these songs certainly are!

Sometimes, I don’t know how much I miss a band until they release new music. We really did need “Chateau Blues”—we needed Britt Daniel, we needed those crunchy, bluesy guitars, and we needed that relentless indie rock spirit. This track has a sandpapery edge to it, but it’s a timeless piece that could’ve come straight off of Lucifer on the Sofa, squeezed right next to “The Hardest Cut.” But if this is indicative of where they’re going next, I’m intrigued—they’ve seemed to pare their sound down to a grainier texture, calling back to their blues and rock forefathers that they frequently reference. And man, I’m here for it. If anybody else did that spoken-word “Where you wanna go today? I’m down on the drive, c’mon, get in 😏” interlude, I’d be totally annoyed, but Britt Daniel has built up such a genuine, troubadour-like stage presence that I didn’t even bat an eye. That’s just pure Britt Daniel right there—and so is “Chateau Blues.”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Light Years from Home – Mike Chen – “If it’s a moment in time/How come it feels so long?/And it’s a moment in time/You’re paid in full/How could it really be so wrong?”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (10/29/24) – The Book That Wouldn’t Burn

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

The ranting hour is upon us…yet I didn’t hate the book I’m reviewing today. It’s not abject hatred, more just frustration. Maybe I am a good-for-nothing Gen Z-er with no attention span, but I feel like if you don’t get into much concrete worldbuilding until the halfway point of a nearly 600-page book, that’s a real crime in your writing. Unfortunately, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is guilty.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn – Mark Lawrence

At a young age, Livira was kidnapped, then rescued and delivered to a sprawling city. Within that city was The Library, a building with layers upon layers inside, containing an archive that spans thousands of years. Now focusing on the education she never had, Livira will discover secrets that will change her world forever.

Evar has lived his entire life trapped inside of the bowels of The Library. Hunted by monsters, he was orphaned at a young age, and his siblings have slowly been picked off as well. With no escape in sight, he spends his days desperately looking for a way out—and he cannot see one until he finds a lost girl named Livira.

TW/CW: kidnapping, loss of loved ones, blood, violence

DNF at 44%.

I know I often gripe about long fantasy novels taking eons to get to the point, but this pushed it to the extreme. All of the rave reviews kept swearing that there was some massive payoff to the excruciating trek that was this book, but the intangible promise of something wasn’t enough to keep me going. The Book That Wouldn’t Burn felt stuffed to the brim with plot lines of no substance or development, and it’s not like the book was too short to be cut down. 571 pages. There were absolutely some chapters that had no business being there.

Suspense and worldbuilding are story elements that normally aren’t confused, but it seems that Lawrence got them mixed up in the construction of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn. It’s one thing to have a crucial element of your world be a secret—that was what the novel hinges on, and from the looks of it, understandably so. This technique is mainly for elements that will change the way the reader and the characters perceive the world. Lawrence’s problem was that he applied that to almost all of the worldbuilding. We get a brief glimpse of the outside world, but not much is known save for the divisions between humans and sabbers (a hostile, dog-like species), and that there’s a Vaguely Medieval Epic Fantasy Town™️ outside of The Library. I get that the focus is on The Library, so what’s the point of establishing any of it if it’s not going to be of any consequence later on in the book? Granted, I didn’t finish it, but the way it was written was so hasty. I did get some semblance of how The Library works, but it was too little too late. If you dangle some reveal over the reader’s head the entire time, you should at least have some information about the world to scaffold why you should care. To some extent, I can see that since all of this was foreign to Livira, but that’s not an excuse to barely describe anything!

I wanted to like Evar, but in the end, his situation was more compelling than who he was as a person. That’s because he’s a walking case study in why tragic backstories don’t automatically make a character fleshed-out. We know all about how he’s been trying to claw his way out of the catacombs of The Library and has been hunted by monsters who have killed his parents and many of his siblings…but we know nothing else other than that. Aside from an implied resilience on the virtue of him being able to survive being trapped in a monster-filled maze beneath a library, I know nothing about this kid. We are given exactly zero hints about his personality. I felt pity for him because of his circumstances, but I put down this book knowing nothing about what makes him tick, other than a vague semblance of revenge. I don’t know why he speaks the way he does, I don’t know his habits, I don’t know how he interacts with the world. I wanted to know him! His relationships were solely defined by their proximity to other people (many of whom were dead). By the time he finally met Livira, I couldn’t care less about how they would interact—mostly because Livira got sucked into some Library portal right before anything of significance could happen. 250 pages, about a third of which were devoted to Evar, and I just could not care less.

Now, for why I picked up The Book That Wouldn’t Burn in the first place…The Library. Again, this could be a consequence of me not reading enough of the book, but I think there’s merit in saying that there’s not nearly enough focus on what’s actually interesting about it for the first half of the novel. After the initial revelations that a) Livira now has access to a library the size of a city with archives spanning thousands of years and b) that there are people trapped in a monster-filled maze beneath it, we get…nothing else. There’s much more focus on Livira’s education in The Library, mainly because when she comes there, she does not know how to read or write. That wouldn’t be a bad thing if it weren’t for the fact that these scenes are repetitive to a fault. Remember what I said about this book potentially benefitting from some hedge trimming? This is precisely where I would slim down the page count. I don’t ascribe to the belief that every little thing has to advance the plot, but you’ve got to have something to keep the reader’s interest—it felt like the same cycle of Livira reading, writing, and getting teased by the apprentices. Rinse and repeat for approximately 100 pages. Now do you see why I quit?

The lesson of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is that you can’t hold a book afloat on a concept alone. I wanted to like the premise so much—what’s not to like about a massive, age-old library that’s larger than a city and holds unknowable horrors beneath it? But the scaffolding necessary to keep me interested was flimsy at best. Lawrence’s writing had moments of being clever, but that, along with the shaky bits of information about the library, were not enough to hold my interest. 1.5 stars, because it wasn’t all bad, but I was so painfully bored by a book with a fascinating premise, which is truly a crime.

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is the first novel in The Library trilogy, followed by The Book That Broke the World and The Book That Held Her Heart. Mark Lawrence is also the author of several fantasy series, including The Broken Empire trilogy (Prince of Thorns, King of Thorns, and Emperor of Thorns), The Red Queen’s War trilogy (Prince of Fools, The Liar’s Key, and The Wheel of Osheim), and many more.

Today’s song:

saw the magnetic fields for the 69 Love Songs anniversary tour over the weekend—what an incredible show!!

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 10/27/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: if I had a nickel for every year that I’ve had a bright green Sunday Songs color scheme right before Halloween, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice…bon appetit.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 10/27/24

“This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” – Sparks

Because all you musicians totally want my unsolicited advice, I’ll offer it up: this is peak walk-on music. Imagine the band coming onstage the minute the drums kick in after the gunshot sound effect at 0:35. Come on.

In my glacial but nonetheless exploration of Sparks, I realized that I sort of knew this one—it’s one of their most popular and enduring songs, but I knew it from the cover that Siouxsie and the Banshees did, which should tell you all you need to know about how I was raised (read: a hipster). I think my desire for somebody to use this as walk-on music stems from just how punchily theatrical it is. It demands dynamic movement, silk, and finger guns fired into the audience of an opera house. Even though I’d place it well on the outskirts of glam (somewhere near Brian Eno ca. 1974), it walks that line between pure rock and full-face theatre. The Mael Brothers’ brand is significantly tighter than the spandex that their counterparts were (probably) wearing, but the constrained, cagey feel of it adds to the suspense, however thickly they laid it on—it certainly fits with the anecdote about the zoo animals in the first verse. Yet for the slimness of it all, they lean into how over-the-top it is. Case in point: said Wild West gunshot sound effect during the chorus. Brilliant.

Other than Siouxsie, a fair share of artists have covered “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” over the years. I found out that the most recent happens to be The Last Dinner Party, who…admittedly, other than “Caesar on a TV Screen,” I haven’t exactly liked much, covered it as well, and…eh? The overwhelming vibe I got was that they were trying to go for over-the-top, but, as with…well, everything I’ve heard of theirs, they were trying way too hard. It sounds tight, but there’s hardly any fun in this. And how do you cover Sparks and not make it fun? Siouxsie and the Banshees made it their own—the flow is more dynamic and not as punctuated as the original, but it’s got that theatrical urgency that gives it the oomph that’s necessary to cover the song. The Last Dinner Party restrained themselves so much…and I hate to harsh on them, but they’re missing the whole point! The spirit of “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” is to go dramatic! Go big or go home! I AIN’T GONNA LEAVE!

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Good Luck Girls – Charlotte Nicole Davis – another—but very different—twist on Westerns.

“The Big Ship” – Brian Eno

me when I’m in a “making incredibly soothing but also innovative music” and my competition is Brian Eno:

Brian Eno can really do it all. He glammed up the ’70s with Roxy Music, then struck out on his own and glammed some more…and eventually came to be the person responsible for both coining and creating the genre of ambient music. He’s a master of both the lyrical and the instrumental; Another Green World contains both, but is considered by many to be part of his transition to almost exclusively making solo, instrumental ambient music. Even if he did mold the genre, however, I wouldn’t call “The Big Ship” ambient. Compared to something like “1/1,” it has an unmistakable feel of rising action, as in a novel, instead of the former’s soothing plateau. It’s unassuming at first glance, but judging from the outpouring of emotion in the YouTube comments—and its use in deeply emotional scenes from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The End of the Tour—”The Big Ship” is anything but. Author David Foster Wallace even said this in his posthumous novel, The Pale King:

“This song is making me feel both warm and safe, as though cocooned like a little boy that’s just been taken out of the bath and wrapped in towels that have been washed so many times they’re incredibly soft, and also at the same time feeling sad; there’s an emptiness at the center of the warmth like the way an empty church or classroom with a lots of windows through which you can only see rain in the street is sad, as though right at the center of this safe, enclosed feeling is the seed of emptiness.”

I don’t think I’ll be able to articulate anything about this song better than Wallace. I don’t think anyone ever could—he really did chip away the truth. You feel all of it. You can touch that drained eggshell’s core of emptiness, but you can see the pinprick of light made by a needle at the top. Whatever you imagine the big ship to be, the gradual rise of the song produces imagery that leads you to believe that this ship could be arriving just as well as it could be leaving. “The Big Ship” is a door ajar, but whether or not you see the light retreating or impending is entirely up to the flip of a coin.

In my mind’s eye, there’s a gargantuan, city-sized ferry, perhaps fueled by a pair of unseen wings on the hull. Like a kind knife through melted butter, it cleaves a path through a roiling sea of fog, curls of mist tracing the polished metal like child’s fingers. It moves slowly, glacially, taking its time to pave a path through the billowing clouds, into whatever lies beyond. I love the title of Another Green World, and even though I haven’t yet listened to all of it, I immediately relate to the concept of the Green World in literature; I was introduced through it by Shakespeare and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Athens functions as the world grounded in reality, whereas the realm of fairies, governed by magic, whimsy, and glamour, is the Greener. It is the “false” world, but also the world of innovation and real magic that we strive to create. Like a sprout, it is ripe with possibility, things yet to come to fruition. Perhaps that’s where Eno’s big ship has charted its gentle course.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The World of Edena – Mœbius – somewhere, across temporal boundaries, I can imagine Eno and Mœbius creating art together—the latter to create the brightly-colored, simple landscape, and the former to soundtrack the gentle humming of its engines.

“Finding Feeling” – Black Belt Eagle Scout

Ten years ago, Katherine Paul self-released their debut EP on Bandcamp as Black Belt Eagle Scout. A decade later, and Paul has brought this artifact of her career to streaming, letting the world see the infancy of this project. Like Eno, it’s a soothing exercise, sculpted from handfuls of reverb and sparing percussion. Now, I can see the remnants of this sound that later permeated into their debut album, Mother of My Children; it flows as easily as water, but in those early days, they were prone to get caught up in the current and let the same phrase repeat itself for quite some time. It’s not that it’s bad by any stretch of the imagination—Paul just hadn’t hit their stride yet, and didn’t know when to whip out the cutting board to make things more succinct. (“Finding Feeling” repeats itself for the first third of the song…which is six and a half minutes long.) The lyrics lack the artistry that Paul would later learn, but time has proven that her voice has always been as crystal-clear and cooling as still water from the mouth of a glacier. “Finding Feeling” almost describes itself as you nearly get lost in the repetition, but the payoff, though long-earned, is the seed of what would become a soaring talent.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Sea Change – Gina Chung – “I go home in the evening/I don’t feel a thing/I don’t know nothing/I go home in the evening/I don’t see a thing/I don’t have anything…”

“I am a Scientist” – Guided by Voices

It’s baffling that this version of “I am a Scientist”—from the 1994 I am a Scientist – EP—never made it onto the album that the original version did (Bee Thousand); the original, as good as it is, screams “demo,” muted in every way. While I’m all for the scrappy, understated recordings (see: everything Car Seat Headrest did until about 2016), the full band backing the EP version makes it into the triumphant march that it was always meant to be. And what a perfect slice of ’90s indie-rock this is—it’s Pavement from an alternate universe, one where they decided to churn out multiple albums a year for the rest of the foreseeable future. I’m no judge of how good said prolific output is, as this is one of two songs I’ve listened to, but if the talent displayed on “I am a Scientist” and the acclaim that their ’90s albums have gotten, I can only assume that said talent hasn’t dried up.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Flux – Jinwoo Chong – an unraveling mystery between men, generations, television, and time travel. (Was it always successful? No, but I enjoyed enough of it. I’ll always applaud the ambition of it.)

“All You Need is Love” – The Beatles

I didn’t conceive of Sunday Songs consciously to put them on Sunday—the alliteration was just there, and it worked. But this week feels fitting that it’s on Sunday, and I’m glad I stuck this song at the end.

Here. Take a moment to breathe. We have miles and miles of anxiety ahead of us and miles and miles of horror behind us. But that is not all there is in the world. You see the spinning earth at the end of this video, animated in silence, and remember that there is love. Even if they were summoned into a studio, you can see all of the people gathered together, covered in flowers, and remember there is love. Millions of miles gives way to the possibility of endless cruelty, but if you look hard enough, you will know that our planet was never molded from just that. Whatever happens, there will always be love, and there will always be someone to embody love. Take a seat. Let the confetti brush your cheeks, let the sound lift you into the air.

All you need is love. I’ll take this into the week, I’ll keep it against my breastbone like a locket until the silver wears into my skin. Will you?

All you need is love.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Battle for WondLa (The Search for WondLa, #3) – Tony DiTerlizzi – love is all you need.

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (10/22/24) – The Brightness Between Us (The Darkness Outside Us, #2)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

We’re keeping up my sequel streak for the time being, so it seems. The difference between this and The Heart of the World is that I had no idea that The Darkness Outside Us, one of my favorite books of 2021, was even getting a sequel in the first place. That novel rocked my world—it really enraptured me in a way that not a whole lot of books ever have. But it was beautiful as a standalone—it had about as satisfying of an ending as you could ask for. So I was teetering towards hesitantly optimistic when I heard about The Brightness Outside Us, but in the end, I’m so glad I took the gamble; this novel is a different kind of twisty than its predecessor, but it’s worth taking the leap.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Now, tread lightly! This review contains spoilers for book one, The Darkness Outside Us. If you haven’t read it and intend on doing so, read at your own risk!

For my review of book one, The Darkness Outside Us, click here!

The Brightness Between Us (The Darkness Outside Us, #2)

In the 24th century, Ambrose Cusk is on the cusp of the greatest space mission mankind has ever embarked on. After losing his sister Minerva in a troubled gambit outside of the solar system, Ambrose is set to cross the universe itself in order to save her. But when he discovers that he won’t be on the ship—only clones of himself—he is determined to get to the bottom of what his true mission is—and what really happened to Minerva.

30,000 years in the future, the final clones of Ambrose and Kodiak have grown from the teenage clones they once were into fathers of two children. Owl and Yarrow live a peaceful but sheltered existence on the surface of Minerva. Owl yearns to learn what the rest of the planet holds, but her parents are keen on keeping her safe. But when her brother Yarrow begins acting strangely, the family suspects that a stranger thousands of years in the past may have sabotaged their mission.

TW/CW: violence, war, past mentions of child death, animal death, terrorism, intrusive thoughts

It didn’t even cross my mind that The Darkness Outside Us would have a sequel. I went into this novel with trepidation—how do you follow up a novel as twisty, complex, and heartwrenchingly beautiful as The Darkness Outside Us? By splitting the novel in two, as it turns out. I didn’t think that The Darkness Outside Us needed a sequel, but nonetheless, I’m glad I stuck around to see the result—of course Eliot Schrefer would have something fascinating up his sleeve.

The Brightness Between Us reminds me of how much I love a good “space colony gone wrong” story. As I said, I didn’t even think about The Darkness Outside Us getting a sequel, but this novel has the perfect setup for precisely this kind of plot. I should have trusted Schrefer from the start, given how masterful book one was, but wow, the Minerva plot amazed me! There was so much solid, hard sci-fi put into the terrain, climate, and wildlife of Minerva, and Schrefer did an excellent job of keeping the reader in the dark just enough to make everything suspenseful, even when the mysterious bones that Owl digs up in her exoplanet yard only turn out to be from a duck. From the research behind the wildlife, the weather, and the atmosphere, no stone was left unturned, each one its own Chekhov’s gun waiting to fire.

Although Owl wasn’t my favorite protagonist, she fits perfectly for the environment she’s in. Every “space colony gone wrong” needs a character who questions everything; there is always some part of the planet that has been unexplored, and someone needs to be curious and daring enough to want to discover what’s on the other side of the world. It can be even more effective when that character is a child; children are naturally curious, making it more than simply questioning authority—the authority is often their parental figures, and the excuses of them hiding things “for their safety” feel more tangible. Fifteen-year-old Owl was naturally curious, but also paired with her more obedient (at first) brother, Yarrow, giving her more resentment towards her parents. She wasn’t as likeable as Ambrose or Kodiak (I loved seeing them become parents), but they had the home field advantage of book one. But I can recognize when a character is perfect for the plot they’re in, and Owl was the perfect match for the plot of The Brightness Between Us.

After the pummeling of gut-wrenching twists that we call The Darkness Outside Us, the sequel was going to have to pull off a miracle to follow it up in terms of plot. The main twist was so earth-shattering that I thought it would be impossible to come up with anything better. I remain correct—I don’t think anyone, much less Schrefer, could come up with a twist that could top book one. But the main twist that we do have was excellent enough to propel me to finish the book in one sitting—just like The Darkness Outside Us! (The difference is that it was at a reasonable hour this time. I’ve matured since 2021, I promise.) Not only is this duology a love story 30,000 years in the making—it’s a conspiracy 30,000 years in the making! I loved the twist that Devon manipulated the frozen fetuses to develop violently aggressive traits as they grew—it gave even more stakes to an already gripping plot, and it made the days of present future half of the novel gripping as well. It gave the “space colony gone wrong” side of The Brightness Outside Us a truly unique twist—sabotage from 30,000 years in the past, and two versions of the main characters communicating across time to thwart it.

All this talk about the Minerva plot, and I haven’t even touched on the “present-day” Ambrose and Kodiak…oops. I don’t have a favorite child, I swear. The worldbuilding in this half of The Brightness Outside Us was my favorite part; getting a glimpse into the forgotten world that we only knew about in whispers in book one was fascinating. Schrefer’s vision of a world divided into a corporate hellscape of excess and a corporate hellscape of rigidity was one that was mapped out just as vividly as the alien world of Minerva. You really do see how it is that Ambrose and Kodiak got to be how they were at the start of book one. In terms of character development, it did tend to feel like listening to a broken record after book one, but that’s my only minor nitpick—Schrefer made sure that they had startlingly different—and almost as emotional—arcs as their clone counterparts in The Darkness Outside Us. Devon was a fascinating, slippery antagonist, and his sabotage was one of my favorite parts of the novel to witness unfolding.

All in all, a sequel that had a Herculean task to live up to its predecessor, but delivered a miracle in spite of the odds—just like Ambrose and Kodiak. 5 stars!

The Brightness Between Us is the second book in The Darkness Outside Us series, preceded by The Darkness Outside Us. Eliot Schrefer has also written several other books for children and young adults, including the Ape Quartet (Endangered, Threatened, Rescued, and Orphaned), The Lost Rainforest series (Mez’s Magic, Gogi’s Gambit, and Rumi’s Riddle), Queer Ducks (And Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality, and many others.

Today’s song:

EVERGREEN COMES OUT THIS FRIDAY, ARE WE READY?

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 10/20/24

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: we regret to inform you that the All Born Screaming brainrot has persisted for 6 months. It may be terminal. Please stand by.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 10/20/24

“Reckless” – St. Vincent

So. Almost 6 months later, and All Born Screaming remains etched onto the folds of my brain. I already talked about how the climax of this song hit me like a train in my review of the album back in May, but rest assured that time has not dulled its potency. 2024 has been a spectacular year for album intros (see: “IDEA 01,” “Wall of Eyes,” and, I’ll preemptively say it, “Lost”), and All Born Screaming’s “Hell Is Near” rightfully claims its crown in those ranks. But “Reckless” feels like the rightful evolution of it—I’d even to as far to say that it would be stunning as a whole track. Imagine that, combined into about 8:06 of a suspenseful, cinematic build. That’s perhaps the only thing that could make the sonic lightning strike at 2:38 even more explosive. Like a well-shot film, suspense is what drives “Reckless” to its pinnacle of art—every lyric is a footstep down a pitch-black hallway, constantly wary of the faulty wiring in the ceiling that’s ready to burst. Knowing that Clark has opened every setlist for this tour with “Reckless” makes the salt in the wound that SHE DIDN’T COME TO COLORADO ON THIS TOUR even saltier. WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN US, ANNIE? YOU WENT TO IDAHO, FOR GOD’S SAKES!

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Death’s Country – R.M. Romero – “If your love was an anchor/And I am lost at sea/I hear the riders calling/They’re calling for me…”

“Look What They’ve Done To My Song, Ma” – Melanie

I came here from the wonderful show We Are Lady Parts (highly recommended if you need a laugh and also want to see some Muslim punks being badass and very vulnerable on TV); it’s a fitting soundtrack for the bitter disappointment of the band at the end of the first episode of season 2 as they watch their hit song being covered by newcomers, only for said newcomers to get the bulk of the praise and applause from the crowd.

Given this song’s partial legacy of being butchered for commercial jingles (confirmation that corporate executives never listen to lyrics), there’s something predictably depressing about “Look What They’ve Done To My Song, Ma” becoming exactly what the lyrics talk about. In an slow lament that slants towards an older Broadway standard, Melanie sings of how her music has been dragged through the mud: “Look, look what they’ve done to my song/You know, they tied it up in a plastic bag/And then turned it upside down, oh Mama/Look at what they’ve done to my song.” That kind of Broadway feel is the ideal form for this song—it begs for a spotlight on a sordid character with mascara running down her cheeks as she belts her sorrow into a rapt crowd. The more I think about it, I feel like it’s one of the premier victims of the ’60s-’90s fadeout in music—why, why, why would you start turning the volume down right when she hits the most impassioned belt of the whole song? Melanie specifically wrote it about how her producer (who also happened to be her husband) would often halt her creative process in the studio, diverting her from her vision when he saw what he wanted to be a hit.

“Look What They’ve Done To My Song, Ma” has been covered a slew of times over the years, most notably by greats such as Ray Charles and Nina Simone (!!). Sometimes, with a song that covered, it’s simply a matter of fame, but it taps into what might be one of the most universal fears of anyone in the arts: trying to put yourself out there, but then getting your vision sanitized and reshaped for mass appeal. It’s always at the back of my mind. Being unreceptive towards any criticism is one thing, but I’m always afraid of what I put out there being somehow not right for what publishers want. Whatever finished products I eventually publish will have to be rigorously edited, of course, but it would kill me if there were key parts of my stories I had to dilute just so I could sell more copies. Of course, careers in the arts are often…not the most well paying, to say the least, and I almost fear having to succumb to diluting my vision just because of money more than I fear the dilution itself. Would I be able to live with myself? We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. No, if. I’ve gotta have a little faith. If this song—released in 1970—was able to break through the constraints of producers and the music industry at large, maybe it isn’t all as bleak. Melanie did get the last laugh, from what I can tell, eventually gaining more creative control and outliving her husband. Sadly, she passed away this January, but her legacy precedes her. I’ve only been familiar with Melanie for a woefully short time, but I hope she’s resting easy.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Not Here to be Liked – Michelle Quach – “Look at what they’ve done to my brain/Well, they picked it like a chicken bone/And I think that I’m half insane, ma…”

“Final Fantasy” – TV on the Radio

Picture this. You open up Instagram. TV on the Radio has posted an ominous picture of their logo on their page. They’ve been on hiatus for almost a decade. When the world needed them most, TV on the Radio returned…

…just to play a few shows in New York, LA, and London.

They’re at least reissuing Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes for its 20th anniversary and we got “Final Fantasy” out of it. Hopefully the slow creep of the bass and the ominous, razor-sharp lyrics are enough to distract from the fact that we’ve been sidelined…again. I’m just telling myself that they’re cooking up something new, just so I can sleep at night. You can’t just rise from the dead like that only to play…what, nine shows in only 3 locations? Come ON.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Some Desperate Glory – Emily Tesh – “You’ve made a family/Now kill ’em dead/Oh it’s not me Ma/It’s what the TV said…”

“Like Humans Do” – David Byrne

When I heard this in the background of a post on Instagram earlier in the week, I got hooked through the screen—you ever just hear a 10-second snippet of a song and are immediately impelled to download it? It’s so delightfully hooky. No wonder Microsoft chose this song as one of the samples of music for their Windows XP Media Player. It’s now widely accepted as the unofficial “Windows XP Anthem”—the radio edit, that is; Microsoft used the radio edit, which cut out the following line: “I never watch TV except when I’m stoned.” (They replaced the line with “We’re eating off plates and we kiss with our tongues.”) Either way, even though I never got to experience “Like Humans Do” in that context, thank you to whoever decided that David Byrne’s music would be the flagship of Windows XP.

Byrne wrote the song as an imagined perspective of a Martian watching humans interact; the lyrics have a simplistic, domestic calm to them, placidly and warmly recounting the everyday normalities of human life that we take for granted: “For millions of years, in millions of homes/A man loved a woman, a child it was born/It learned how to hurt and it learned how to cry/Like humans do.” With its clanging, light percussion and that classically funky, Talking Heads groove, it’s a jangle that really does embody one of its more delightful lyrics: “Wiggle while you work.” You bet I was IMMEDIATELY wiggling when I first heard this song…and on every subsequent listen. And it feels exactly like the kind of song Byrne would write. It’s in that same vein of Björk’s “Human Behaviour,” but with more of a calm appreciation rather than baffled curiosity on the subject. Relating it back to Byrne’s autism diagnosis later in life doesn’t explain everything, but as with Björk, who said that she “may be semi-autistic” in an interview in 2011, it does make sense for Father Autism himself to take on this kind of subject matter. Of course, you can zoom this lens out to apply this observational mentality to anyone on the fringes of normality, but it does feel like a role I’ve embodied as a neurodivergent person myself. You watch others to learn how to act, and sometimes, you feel like you’re another species collecting enough information to try and blend in. Of course, the freedom comes when you realize that there’s no point in blending in, but for me, at least, there was never a shunning of neurotypical behavior—simply a realization that I would never fully be able to imitate it, and I’d found enough people who understood and words to explain why I am the way I am. “Like Humans Do” feels like the calm epiphany of discovering difference once neurodivergent acceptance becomes reality.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino – listen, I try not to double-dip on book pairings, especially since I paired this book with “Always Crashing in the Same Car” last week. But…the alien observing humans connection is right there!

“Breaking the Split Screen Barrier” – The Amps

Normally, I take a liking to any given Kim Deal-related song fairly quickly. But “Breaking the Split Screen Barrier” wasn’t so instantaneous for me. The beginning sounds like a series of false starts layered on top of each other. The prolonged space between each chord doesn’t just feel like a ruse: they pile up on top of each other so much that you feel like you’re being served three courses of red herrings. And I hate to say that about The Amps! I don’t think I’m that impatient of a listener, but I’m used to them getting straight to the point (see: “I Am Decided”).

After a few listens, however, you realize how much that slow build pays off. Every instrument has more crunch and crackle than a wadded-up ball of tin foil. In between the gravel and abrasion, Kim Deal murmurs her borderline surreal lyrics into a void curtained by echoing near-abrasion. Maybe I am guilty of being one of those damn gen z-ers with an attention span shorter than that of a minnow, but I think I can be patient—especially when Kim Deal is concerned. It paid off for “Breaking the Split Screen Barrier.”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Brightness Between Us (The Darkness Outside Us, #2) – Eliot Schrefer – “I know you’re not sane anymore/That doesn’t mean you’re fine…”

BONUS: the great Jim Noir has a new album Jimmy’s Show 2, out on November 5th! He released a music video to accompany the lead single, “Out Of Sight,” this week:

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

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

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (10/15/24) – The Heart of the World (The Isles of the Gods, #2)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

The day has finally come…the Isles of the Gods duology has concluded. The end of a (short) era. I’m all over anything that Amie Kaufman writes, and even though fantasy isn’t my top genre, she made me fall in love with her brand of it. Naturally, The Heart of the World was one of my most anticipated releases of the year, and while it fell barely short of book 1, it stuck the landing to become a fulfilling conclusion to a duology full of heart.

Now, tread lightly! This review contains spoilers for book one, The Isles of the Gods. If you haven’t read it and intend to do so, read this review at your own risk!

For my review of The Isles of the Gods, click here!

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Heart of the World (The Isles of the Gods, #2) – Amie Kaufman

Selly Walker has failed.

When she, Leander, and Keegan tried in vain to seal away the gods from the mortal world, they created a conflict much worse than they could have ever imagined. Now, Leander is the mortal messenger of Barrica, goddess of war. Possessed by power beyond human comprehension and puppeteered by a being of unearthly sway, he knows that war is brewing—and that allowing Barrica into the mortal realm would kill him in the process. Selly, now deeply in love, will risk anything to make sure that Leander is unscathed, but little to they know that the rival god Macean has his own Messenger—and that he’s hungry for war.

TW/CW: violence, blood, murder, loss of loved ones, neglectful parent

Man, Amie Kaufman just can’t resist writing relationship dynamics where one becomes all-powerful and the other is Just Some Guy, huh? Not to call Selly just some (gal), but…Aurora Cycle fans, we see it, right?

It’s not like me to rate a solo Amie Kaufman book in the 4-star range. Well, sort of. The Isles of the Gods was a 4.75 for me, but that was easily rounded up to 5. I expected The Heart of the World to be more of the same, and it almost was. Almost. Its fatal flaw was that it took so long to get back on its feet after the chaos and craziness that was the ending of book 1. That was so campy (in an Indiana Jones way) and explosive that it must have been so hard to ground the beginning afterwards. An additional problem is that this book is 400 pages long, which meant that, for the first fifth to a quarter of the novel, it bordered on dragging. Kaufman’s writing didn’t suffer, and neither did the characters, but The Heart of the World took so long to regain its sea legs that it never fully recovered.

From there, however…I have no notes. Even if that first fifth (or thereabouts) dragged in terms of plot, it excelled in terms of character development. Leander’s arc was among the most well-developed of the novel—as it should have been, given that he’s on the cover and all. As I said before, unceremoniously foisting godlike power onto ordinary people and watching them try and grapple with the consequences is Amie Kaufman’s bread and butter. Leander’s internal struggle of being both a puppet of Barrica and being tossed around by the royal family—his family—and being treated like an overpowered chess piece made for some enticing internal struggles. I hesitate to say that his relationship with Selly was a genderbent carbon copy of Kal and Auri, but…the similarities were there. However, what sets them apart is the differences in Leander and Selly’s characters. Unlike Auri, Leander was slick and confident before he he was forced to embody Barrica’s power—thinking he had sway and power was nothing compared to having a taste of uncontrollable, immortal power, and it fundamentally rearranged who he was as a person. Selly, on the other hand, was already out of her depth and new to the relationship, but clung to the glimpse of the real Leander, and knew that she couldn’t risk losing him—or their shared home. I trust Amie Kaufman enough to know that she wouldn’t copy and paste a relationship dynamic, and the more I think about it, the less it feels like a rehash—Selly and Leander were so sweet together, and this wrench in their romance was one that created an intricate rift to explore.

Speaking of Selly being out of her depth…good god, I just want to give her a hug. Lord. Kaufman already gave her a great obstacle in trying to find her way through the palace life and feeling like a fish out of water while trying to navigate impending war. Then she had to resolve the arc about Selly looking up to her dad…who, as was faintly hinted at in The Isles of the Gods, turned out to be using her for her magic, then abandoned her. My poor girlie…either way, it was written so sensitively. After the smoke screen of her dad pushing her to foster her magic fell away, Selly realizes that he’s just been using her as a tool to bolster the family name, and Kaufman was able to hammer in just how crushing that was for her. All her life, she’s been in his service, and all of these years she’s waited for him to return, and you just knew that he only came back to her because Barrica had him and the rest of his crew under her spell. Their reunion was hollow, just like the remainder of their relationship. Once she began to come too grips with it, however, it was beautiful to see Selly assert that she would no longer be somebody else’s pawn—just like Leander. Waiter! Waiter, more parallels, please!

In my review of The Isles of the Gods, I said that I was miffed at the book being tagged LGBTQ+ when all we got was a background lesbian couple that was about the equivalent of that one scene in The Rise of Skywalker. (You know the one.) I couldn’t help but be disappointed. Let me say on the record that I stand corrected! The additional queer queen and consort aside (diversity win! This warmongering queen likes women!), we’ve also got some wonderful queer representation in Jude. Another minor complaint that I had about The Isles of the Gods was that Jude didn’t have an awful lot to do, even though he was one of five of the POV characters. Not only does he have a beautiful, tearjerking character arc, HE’S QUEER! AND HE’S HAS A WONDERFUL BOYFRIEND! After all that this poor guy has been through, I’d say that’s the ultimate reward. I had a feeling that something had to be queerer about The Isles of the Gods, but I’m so glad that Jude finally got his due diligence in terms of character development and focus—and queerness. We love a battle-scarred guy with a secret stash of fantasy books.

Another character arc I loved seeing resolved…Laskia! Along with Leander and Selly, she’s part of the unofficial “spent their lives being moved around like chess pieces” trio, and seeing her come into her power—without the help of Macean—was a beautiful redemption arc. Laskia was driven to villainy by a desire to be loved, constantly shoved in the shadow of her sister Ruby, and like Leander and Selly, she let herself believe that she was in control. For her, the ultimate act of heroism was to become her own person—to steer her own course in life. Looking back, that’s what the whole Isles of the Gods duology feels like it’s been about. The ultimate form of magic is to know your power, to know that you have control of your life, and that despite the pressures telling you to sail one way or another, you’re the captain of your own ship. 🫡

In the end, if there’s anything that Amie Kaufman can write like nobody’s business, it’s a final battle. It was so tightly paced and action-packed that it nearly made me forgive how slow of a start The Heart of the World had. An aspect that The Heart of the World introduces is how the gods and goddesses factor in (Kaufman’s descriptions of which were arresting, as was expected), but it gave stakes to the battle that truly made it feel like thousands of lives hung in the balance. And to conclude it all in an assertion that spending your life grieving will never make any new love grow? And how that grief can feel so desolate that nothing else can grow there? And that remembering the connections that you have in the here and now is how you can move forward? And…and…and…dammit, Amie Kaufman, you did it again. You can only hide behind so many cheery “hi my friends!” before the jig is up. YOU HAVE TO STOP RUNNING A STEAMROLLER THROUGH MY FEELINGS LIKE THIS.

All in all, a duology concluder that faltered slightly in its early stages, but stuck the landing with buckets of action—and many a resonant message to spare. 4.5 stars!

The Heart of the World is the final book in the Isles of the Gods duology, preceded by The Isles of the Gods. Amie Kaufman is the author and co-author of several series for children and young adults, including the Elementals trilogy (Ice Wolves, Scorch Dragons, and Battle Born), the Illuminae Files (co-authored with Jay Kristoff – Illuminae, Gemina, and Obsidio), the Aurora Cycle (co-authored with Jay Kristoff – Aurora Rising, Aurora Burning, and Aurora’s End), the Other Side of the Sky duology (with Meagan Spooner – The Other Side of the Sky and Beyond the End of the World), and many others.

Today’s song:

We Are Lady Parts brought me here…

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