Allyyys

156 points

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The Fetishist

Katherine Min

In this hilariously savage, poignant novel by acclaimed author Katherine Min, a grieving daughter’s revenge on the man who caused her mother’s death sets off a series of unexpected reckonings. On a cold, gloomy night, twenty-three-year-old Kyoko stands in the rain with a knife in her hoodie’s pocket. Her target is Daniel, who seduced Kyoko’s mother then callously dropped her, leading to her death. But tonight, there will be repercussions. Following the unsuspecting Daniel home, Kyoko manages to get a rash kidnapping plot off the ground . . . and then nothing goes as planned. The Fetishist is the story of three people—Kyoko, a Japanese American punk-rock singer full of rage and grief; Daniel, a philandering violinist forced to confront the wreckage of his past; and Alma, the love of Daniel’s life, a Korean American cello prodigy long adored for her beauty, passion, and talent, but who spends her final days examining if she was ever, truly, loved. An exuberant, provocative story that confronts race, complicity, visibility, and ideals of femininity, The Fetishist was written before the celebrated author’s untimely death in 2019. Startlingly prescient, as wise and powerful as it is utterly delightful, this novel cements Katherine Min’s legacy as a writer with a singular voice for our times.

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The Vegetarian

Han Kang

Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked images start haunting her thoughts, Yeong-hye decides to purge her mind and renounce eating meat. In a country where societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision to embrace a more “plant-like” existence is a shocking act of subversion. And as her passive rebellion manifests in ever more extreme and frightening forms, scandal, abuse, and estrangement begin to send Yeong-hye spiraling deep into the spaces of her fantasy. In a complete metamorphosis of both mind and body, her now dangerous endeavor will take Yeong-hye—impossibly, ecstatically, tragically—far from her once-known self altogether.

Allyyys finished reading and wrote a review...

Allyyys

4.5

Enjoyment: 5.0Quality: 4.0Characters: 5.0Plot: 4.0

😱

💍

㊙️

Omg. The second half of the book blew me away. What a masterpiece. The story depicts how we all keep our own secrets, even in marriage. You can never truly know somebody, even if you think you do. It left me with a lot to ponder! The plot twists in the second half are insane. Just when I thought things couldn't get crazier, another bomb dropped. I loved it.

Allyyys commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

jenniferPagebound

Product & Dev Update 1/22/25

Hi everyone! I'm back with another product update. We're working full force on the app (which I know many of you are excited about, including myself 😅) and have managed to squeeze out a few improvements to the site over the past few weeks: 1. You can *finally* edit reading dates and track rereads 🥳 we have always been tracking your start/end dates and rereads on the backend, but this feature allows you to see all that data and edit it. You can access and edit these dates by clicking the book status icon and clicking the "add or edit dates read" toggle. 2. You can now leave a written review without submitting a star rating 3. Some UI improvements to reviews (you always see your review first on the Book Page, clicking the stars on the book page does not edit your overall star rating, and some adjustments to the review card that makes reading long reviews easier) Thanks to all who wrote in with feedback, book dupes, and bugs! And a big thanks to everyone for making Pagebound so warm and welcoming - our community is growing and its been so great to see everyone connecting and supporting each other. Happy Reading, Team Pagebound 💜💙

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Allyyys

Reading Update from 65% (page 255)

fates done furies time 😳

Post from the Fates and Furies forum

Allyyys

Reading Update from 65% (page 255)

fates done furies time 😳

Allyyys set their yearly reading goal to 10

Allyyys's 2025 Reading Challenge

2 of 10 read

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Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed.

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Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff

Allyyys finished reading and wrote a review...

Allyyys

3.5

Enjoyment: 3.5Quality: 4.0Characters: 4.0Plot: 4.0

🤯

🌟

💌

I took an incredibly long time to read this but I'm so glad I finished it. The story does a beautiful job of telling stories of the past, present, and future and how stories intertwine. All it takes is one story to engender hope into the lives of different characters living in different time periods. The only thing I would say is it was a bit slow in the middle (which is why I was stuck in a bit of a reading slump) but if you power through you will find that all the details are worth reading.

Allyyys wants to read...

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here

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11w

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Anthony Doerr

When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive. How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds. Constantinople, 1453: An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love. Idaho, 2020: An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans? Unknown, Sometime in the Future: With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance. Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.

Allyyys commented on lucyPagebound's review of The Fetishist

11w

lucyPagebound

Edited

5.0

Enjoyment: 5.0Quality: 5.0Characters: 5.0Plot: 5.0

🍚

🎶

🐡

I was sold on the hook--a Lolita retelling exploring the fetishization of Asian women...and this novel delivered. Beautiful prose with a farcical build up of events at once entertaining and confronting, The Fetishist was published posthumously this year (Jan 2024), but Min actually wrote the manuscript a decade ago and "abandoned" it. Incredible how the novel feels prescient today given post-Covid Asian hate crimes and the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. This book captured so many aspects of my lived experience as an Asian American woman and presented no clear answers, which I actually prefer because it's real. As someone who has spent a long time thinking about these thorny topics--white supremacy, internalized racism, misogyny--and had to make life decisions in a world shaped by it, the multifaceted perspectives and complexities presented on "yellow fever" resonated deeply. It's hard to do that and present a well-written, engaging story that is pulsing with forward momentum. The Fetishist is a must-read for anyone navigating interracial relationships.

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11w

Level 2

100 points

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11w

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Anthony Doerr

Allyyys finished reading and wrote a review...

11w

Allyyys

3.5

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

I felt like something was missing (hence the title maybe?). Characters weren't as deeply explored as I would've liked to see and the ending didn't sit quite right.

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12w

Intermezzo

Sally Rooney

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Allyyys commented on a post

12w

lucyPagebound

Has anyone gotten their hands on this yet?

I'm a huge Sally Rooney fan but more along the lines of her earlier work (Conversations with Friends and Normal People). I didn't vibe as much with Beautiful World Where Are You. I don't know anything about Intermezzo! I saw a profile on Rooney where she said she didn't believe artists had to evolve and she's not afraid to keep writing along similar themes, so I hope that means we're back in the world Normal People vibes.

Allyyys started reading...

15w

The Vanishing Half

Brit Bennett

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect? Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

Allyyys finished a book

15w

Cleopatra and Frankenstein

Coco Mellors

For readers of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends, an addictive, humorous, and poignant debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple's impulsive marriage. Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank's life is full of all the excesses Cleo's lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a Green Card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives, and the lives of those close to them, in ways they never could've predicted. Each compulsively readable chapter explores the lives of Cleo, Frank, and an unforgettable cast of their closest friends and family as they grow up and grow older. Whether it's Cleo's best friend struggling to embrace his gender queerness in the wake of Cleo's marriage, or Frank's financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates to support herself after being cut off, or Cleo and Frank themselves as they discover the trials of marriage and mental illness, each character is as absorbing, and painfully relatable, as the last. As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, entertaining as it is deeply moving, Cleopatra and Frankenstein marks the entry of a brilliant and bold new talent.

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