sometimes i found this boring, other times raw and tender and more than once i thought it was quite surface level???? a very weird mix of emotions but i thought that amy’s account of their “great big family undoing” was just her being a bit over dramatic. i felt like the promised tension between the two sisters to be quite underwhelming, idk maybe amy was too young to understand the scope of what was going on with her sister but i do wish it went deeper into how ollie’s mental illness affected amy than it being more like “oh yeah my sister steals stuff sometimes” at the same time i did find myself moved by many parts of the story, i was so often rooting for amy and i couldn’t help but feel sympathy for her and her inability to form long lasting relationships due to her abandonment issues with her sister. all in all for the most part i did enjoy this moving portrayal of a family dealing with addiction and mental illness and i did appreciate how we grew up with the sisters and saw them well into adulthood.

this was a fun nod to the classic the virgin suicides, complete with the sisters story being told from various POVs except for them. I loved the setting of a small European town in the middle of a heatwave, making the townspeople cranky and nasty. there's a lot of ambiguity in here, is the villagers hate sparked by truth? are the girls really turning into dogs or do they simple fail to comply to societal standards? while this book doesn't say anything new about girlhood I thought it was a damn good attempt, I ate up the atmosphere and the writing which I thought were stunning and did well in instilling a sense of blistering dread.

this was just okay. frustrated at how the majority of the horror/action happened during the last 30% i felt like the domestic scenes at the beginning took up WAY too much screen time and were quite frankly boring. i was also left with a “huh, so that’s was it?” after i was done with how much everyone raved about it when it first came out, i was expecting a lot more. and while there was an air of unease throughout the book i also thought that there were sooo many elements that were not explored to their full potential. like the parallel universes aspect was SO INTERESTING but it felt half formed. fun but slightly disappointing, not sure if i like the ending or not either, like it makes sense but it was sooo cliché

surrealist novella about a whimsical old lady with a grey beard who survives a fantastical apocalypse. I honestly had a bit of fun with this weird novella, I personally loved marian as a character as I thought she was so witty and adventurous and i do love a character who's main personality trait is being a cat lover because hellooooo thats me as well!!! I thought the narration and writing style was excellent as well, humorous in many parts and not so difficult to follow despite the surreal aspect of the story. I would sooo read something else from the author

sadly not as engaging as the first installment. i was bored through the majority of the book and in this one i did feel the repetitive nature of the story. a bit disappointing but the writing style is gorgeous. i was thinking on letting the series drop because i couldn’t see how we were gonna keep things interesting for 5 more installments but that ending??? insane actually and i WILL be picking up the third book

a disturbing, beautiful and profound exploration into girlhood and its erotism. k-ming chang's prose is one that I am always in awe of, it's visceral, raw, gross (there's so many talk about the body and it's many fluids...) yet it is also beautiful, sincere, clever and enchanting. I read this in a daze and my copy is full of underlines and exclamation marks, I might not always get her many metaphors but that just means that I get to reread this again and again, always finding something new. I did however like her themes of oneness, memory and feeling like a predator as a queer person. this book is grimy, queer and tender. it follows seven and cecilia, once childhood friends, now meeting after losing growing apart and losing touch for years. in the present day they're taking a bus together while seven dips in and out of her memories of her and cecilia as kids, they way she would admire Cecilia, wanting her in that innocent yet intense way kids want things. in the present, they're silently riding the buss, at a loss with each other, sitting apart...a sea of space in-between their bodies. "it became a habit of mine to ask acquaintances if they were still friends with the girls they'd known when they were ten, five, two. more often than not, the answer was no, and when I asked why, their mouths turned slack, unable to grip anything out of the air. it was a loss so mundane it didn't even have a name."