Avoticat

My favourite type of book is pretentious literary fiction, but I'll read almost anything

2539 points

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My Taste

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

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Open Water

Caleb Azumah Nelson

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19h

Open Water

Caleb Azumah Nelson

Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists -- he a photographer, she a dancer -- trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.

Avoticat commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

jenniferPagebound

Community Feedback Requested: Upvotes/Downvotes vs Likes

Hi everyone, we're considering making quite a big change to Pagebound and want to get the community's opinion - please leave your feedback here!

We have debated for a long while the merits of upvotes/downvotes vs a pure "like" system. We deeply believe in community moderation and community curation, and felt that an upvote/downvote system would provide the tooling for such community moderation.

In practice, we've also seen a lot of downsides with this system. While there's no guidance for how to use downvotes, many people use it as a "disagree" button which can make people with unpopular opinions feel unwelcome to share their opinion (for example, if you share that you dislike a beloved character, you may receive downvotes).

Moving to a "likes" only system would hopefully foster an environment where opinions are discussed rather than silently judged, and people are less anxious to engage in the forums.

In the past there have been some very strong opinions both for and against downvotes - let us know what you think below

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Avoticat finished a book

Just Between Us: A Graphic Novel

Adeline Kon

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this gorgeous debut graphic novel, a teenage girl tries to fall back in love with figure skating without falling for her competition. Lydia Chen knows how good she is on the ice. Technically perfect, she’s been the one to beat since her debut years ago. Except now, something is missing in her performances—a spark that’s been gone for a while. Between the constant training, appealing to sponsors to fund her, and the pressure to perform, Lydia’s passion for skating has disappeared. When her rival Elaine Yee starts training at the same rink, Lydia’s struck by the emotion in Elaine’s routines and unwillingly finds herself getting closer to her as they compete for a spot in the Olympics. As the tension between them comes to a head, Lydia’s about to find out how a competitor can become an ally and figure out how to feel alive on the ice again in this tender, compelling, and beautifully illustrated debut graphic novel.

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Avoticat

Thoughts from 81% (page 258)

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Just Between Us: A Graphic Novel

Adeline Kon

72%

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Just Between Us: A Graphic Novel

Adeline Kon

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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.

Avoticat commented on kinglee's review of Pieces of Me

kinglee

Jul 31, 2026

Pieces of Me

4.0

Enjoyment: 4.0Quality: 4.0Characters: 4.0Plot: 4.0Audiobook: 4.0

Pieces of Me is a book unlike any other I have stumbled on which is a shame. I would love to see more books tackle misunderstood illnesses like DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). Instantly, the author pulls the reader into Dylan’s story, leaving the reader curious and feeling for the MC.

McLaughlin does a wonderful job of getting Dylan’s emotions across. Her worry feels like it is leaping off the page, begging the reader to share the burden of everything she’s trying to navigate. It’s heartbreaking to watch her go from wanting a diagnoses to wondering if she really did want one.

Where Pieces of Me really shines is in Dylan’s journey of finding acceptance. Starting with the diagnoses and shifting to the numerous hard moments the diagnoses then brings up. There really is a beauty in watching this hard journey of finding oneself and learning to accept this new part after news like that.

Seeing Dylan struggle isn’t the only person we see struggle, there are a number of people in Dylan’s life that care deeply about her and as she is struggling, readers get to see glimpses into how it affects them as well. Everyone is doing their best to supportive Dylan while also going through their own process of acceptance.

Pieces of Me is a story about Dylan as she navigates her diagnoses with DID and what is unearthed from that diagnoses, but really it is a story about acceptance and finding ones strength when times are hard. It is a read that will tug at heartstrings and serve as a reminder of how resilient people can be.

Avoticat is interested in reading...

Pieces of Me

Kate McLaughlin

The next gut-punching, compulsively readable Kate McLaughlin novel, about a girl finding strength in not being alone. When eighteen-year-old Dylan wakes up, she’s in an apartment she doesn’t recognize. The other people there seem to know her, but she doesn't know them – not even the pretty, chiseled boy who tells her his name is Connor. A voice inside her head keeps saying that everything is okay, but Dylan can’t help but freak out. Especially when she borrows Connor’s phone to call home and realizes she’s been missing for three days. Dylan has lost time before, but never like this. Soon after, Dylan is diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and must grapple not only with the many people currently crammed inside her head, but that a secret from her past so terrible she’s blocked it out has put them there. Her only distraction is a budding new relationship with Connor. But as she gets closer to finding out the truth, Dylan wonders: will it heal her or fracture her further?

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Avoticat

Aug 04, 2026

The Dictionary of Lost Words

2.0

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

While I feel that I understand what the author was trying to do, I feel it fell short of that goal. While the focus was words, I do not feel that Williams has any real love for them or at least was not able to convey that emotionality in words. It was additionally a fairly boring read, and Esme was not an overly interesting protagonist to follow. She was someone who was acted upon far more than she ever acted, a truly passive protagonist. I wouldn't really recommend this book.

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The Dictionary of Lost Words

Pip Williams

Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the "Scriptorium," a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word "bondmaid" flutters to the floor. She rescues the slip, and when she learns that the word means slave-girl, she withholds it from the OED and begins to collect words that show women in a more positive light. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages. Set during the height of the women's suffrage movement with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Based on actual events and combed from author Pip Williams's experience delving into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary, this highly original novel is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.

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Avoticat

Thoughts from 73% (page 309)

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Avoticat

Thoughts from 80% (page 339)