I requested Taipei Story because I am, if nothing else, a huge language nerd. I started reading and thought, “Nope. This was not written for me.” And then, somewhere along the way, I started seeing myself in Lily despite all the reasons I thought I wouldn’t.

Lily Chen, a college freshman, spends ten weeks in Taipei at an intensive Chinese language program to relearn the language she has forgotten and reconnect with a culture she inherited but has only ever experienced from a distance. It’s supposed to be her homecoming. It should all be rather easy, right?

The story unfolds through vignettes of rather mundane everyday experiences. Lily goes to class. She struggles to order food. She can’t remember the correct word. Exactly what you’d expect to happen when someone doesn’t really know the language they are trying to speak. It reads a bit like a teenager’s travel blog. Every vignette is a new blog post describing whatever Lily just did and the thoughts she had while doing it. The beginning is slow and, frankly, rather boring. What is the point of all these completely expected, everyday experiences? Where is the story? The conflict? I was stuck between “this isn’t even a story” and “maybe this just isn’t for me, because what the hell do I know about the diaspora experience?”

Except there is a story. Taipei Story reminds me of The Bell Jar because both are told through seemingly ordinary experiences that matter because of how the protagonist experiences them. It doesn’t really matter what Lily does that day. What matters is what she thinks and feels while doing it. There’s a lot of showing and basically no telling (yay). We are rarely told exactly how Lily feels. Instead, we are allowed to just sit inside her mind and observe the questions she asks herself and the conclusions she cannot quite reach. Am I sad? Should I be sad? The entire story, from conflict to resolution, is internal, and slowly, those pointless little scenes stop feeling pointless.

Kuang introduces this as a book about getting things wrong. My initial reaction was basically, “Getting things wrong while learning a language? Groundbreaking.” Clearly, I had no idea what she meant. Yes, Lily gets words wrong and sometimes meaning gets lost in translation, but the heart and soul of this book is about getting things wrong on a bigger level than just words. What is expected of her. How she should feel and act and study and learn. What is expected of her as a friend, a girlfriend, a daughter, a granddaughter, a Chinese person, a Chinese American person. She gets it all wrong. It’s about all the times we go into something with certain expectations and realize only too late that we should have acted or felt differently before we ran out of time.

Maybe the vignettes are mundane and shapeless on purpose. Maybe they become whatever you see in them, a little like a Rorschach test or an abstract painting. On the surface, it’s a bunch of nothing. A huge part of this book belongs specifically to experiences of diaspora and growing up in an Asian family, which I cannot personally speak to, but that didn’t make the book inaccessible to me. Lily is relatable in a lot of ways: her habit of trying to logic her way out of feelings, not knowing what she is supposed to feel in a given situation, the sinking feeling of walking into a room and believing everyone is talking about her, misunderstanding what other people expect of her, and all the ways we misunderstand what an experience is supposed to mean while we’re still living it. Other readers might see something completely different in the same scenes, and I think that’s the point. You are shown Lily’s experiences and how they affect her, but what do they make you feel? What do they make you think of? What does the “nothing” become when you look at it?

So what about the Israeli pianist? And yes, truly, what about him? His nationality is mentioned twice (once to introduce him, and once to refer to "the audience of the Israeli pianist"). Lily attends several of his concerts because she is lonely. Navigating Taipei’s cultural scene alone makes her feel capable and gives her a chance to immerse herself, while his music gives her something to feel. The book does not use him to discuss Israel or Palestine, and his nationality has no discernible political function. Kuang must have anticipated that people would react strongly, so it is an interesting and perhaps questionable choice to make him Israeli, especially when he could seemingly have been from anywhere since his nationality has no impact on his role in the story. Questioning that choice is completely fair. Negatively reviewing the book based only on knowing that an Israeli character appears in it is not criticism of the text. It is a reaction to one fact stripped of all its context. If Kuang is making a Zionist argument here, I could not find it.

I was so certain this wasn’t a story for me. Apparently, that was just one more thing I got wrong.

A big thank you to Netgalley, HarperCollins UK/HarperFiction, The Borough Press and R.F. Kuang for the ARC!

Sometimes the bravest thing a dragon can do is fall.

Garrodigh, the Great Terror, is not so fearsome anymore. Once a four-headed dragon, he now has three heads, one stump, and a lot of unresolved trauma. He can’t fly, and the remaining heads are coping in very different ways. Centerhead is proud, regal, furious, and anti-human. Standard dragon. Upperhead is convinced that he is human. Bottomhead is basically a child and only cares about eating. After a nearby battle goes badly, the three of them make the executive decision to sneak into an elite dragon rider academy in the floating Winged City, pretend to be tame, and get free food and lodgings. Unfortunately for this wild, anti-human dragon, this involves being claimed by Rania, a refugee and aspiring dragon rider who desperately wants a dragon of her own.

The relationship between Garrodigh and Rania is where this book shines. They are both outsiders. Rania is trying to belong in a city that doesn’t fully accept her, and Garrodigh is trying to recover from something that has left him physically and emotionally changed. He never really feels like he belongs with any of the dragons. Too tame for the wild dragons, and too wild for the tame dragons. The bond between Garrodigh and Rania has a warm, found-family feeling, and I loved watching this furious, traumatized dragon slowly grow attached despite their best efforts. It’s very “I am NOT emotionally invested in this human” while actively rearranging his entire worldview around her safety and happiness. Sir, please. We can all see you.

The first half of the book is so endearing. It has this cozy training montage feeling, like Eye of the Tiger, but make it dragon rehab. It’s a story about trauma, shame, fear, and remembering who you were before you fell. Remembering that the greatness isn’t lost just because you fell. I like the way Garrodigh’s heads externalize different responses to trauma. It’s silly, but there’s something tender underneath the absurdity. Centerhead wants revenge. Upperhead escapes into delusion. Bottomhead retreats into instinct.

I have to mention Oleksiy. I say this as someone with no authority on how queer characters should be written or introduced: Oleksiy is the only character in this book whose identity is made explicit on first appearance. He is introduced as a trans man before we know much else about him. No other queer character in the book, and there are several, is introduced the way he is. It's clear that they're queer based on who they date, for example. His introduction stands out by contrast, but that alone doesn't mean it's an issue. I’m curious how this lands for queer readers more broadly. When a character shares your identity, do you prefer it to be stated clearly right away, or do you prefer finding out when other pieces of their background come up naturally?

On the topic of Oleksiy, though, I love him. He has this unbothered confidence about him, calls everyone darling, and has glorious hair. If you love Howl, you will love Oleksiy. We need more MMCs like Howl and Oleksiy. Seriously, where are they?? (pls tell me in the comments)

My main issue, and the reason I'm giving this 3.5 stars, is that the book started to feel so long. It's not even that long, but it felt like it would never end. I struggle to describe why. Maybe the descriptions were too long and tangential? I love intricate side characters and all that, but sometimes it felt a bit like listening to that friend who never gets to the point because they go into 15 side stories.

Ironically, the second half, which is a lot more action-packed than the first, is when I started getting bored. The quieter moments and character detours started to feel stretched out, and the larger war plot never grabbed me as much as the Garrodigh/Rania dynamic did. It's more serious, with battles, airships, political tension, and real danger. While that gives the book more plot, it's not what I would expect from a cozy fantasy, but I am certainly no expert on the genre.

Still, despite my complaints, there’s a lot of heart in this story. The chapters are short (and named! I miss named chapters!), the humor is cute, and Garrodigh is a delightfully ridiculous creation. The book works best when it’s about the divide between dragons and humans, and how kindness can sneak past even the most stubborn defenses. I just wish the whole book had stayed as sharp and endearing as that central bond.

A big thank you to NetGalley, DAW, and John Wiswell for the ARC!

This is a review with a lot of "I get it, but..." The symbolism, the allegory, the horror behind the horror. I get it, but… I just didn't have a great time reading it.

At its core, this story is about Good Stab, a Pikuni man and vampire, recounting the horrors he and his people endured during and after the Marias Massacre. But his story does not reach us directly. It is filtered through Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor who records Good Stab's confession in his diary in 1912, and again through Etsy Beaucarne, Arthur's great-great-great-granddaughter, who transcribes those entries in 2012. It is not only a story about the attempted erasure of Indigenous people. It is also about how history is recorded, edited, misunderstood, and rendered unreliable by those who survive to tell it.

As a Swede, my knowledge of Indigenous history in America is limited, so I spent much of this book googling terms, names, battles, and historical context. My normal reading notes quickly turned into something that looked a lot like a school project (Google Doc with 6 tabs). Casual little reading experience, you know. Just me and my emotional support document. But I’m glad the book made me do that, because the historical foundation is what makes this book so meaningful.

The classic vampire story is flipped on its head. The real monster is, in a way, sitting across from the vampire. Arthur represents the real horror that is invasion, land theft, forced assimilation, and the white man writing it all down in a way that makes him feel orderly and sane. Something he can live with. Good Stab calls an event a massacre, Arthur calls it "an unrecorded skirmish at best." The whole book is a question about who gets to narrate history. Who gets believed? Who gets recorded? Who gets erased?

The horror extends to Good Stab's vampirism: he becomes what he consumes. Drink napikwan blood, and he starts looking and even thinking like them. What happens when surviving requires taking in part of the thing that is destroying you? When the self is changed by what it has to consume to keep going?

All of that was devastating. Meaningful. Horrifying. I was outraged, horrified, unsettled, humbled. The experience of reading it, though? Arthur, my dude, your hand must hurt.

I knew quickly that the writing would be an issue, which is perhaps less a critique of SGJ as a writer and more an admission of my own limitations. English is my second language, and when an author starts to combine old-timey register, the longest sentences I've ever seen in my life, and Big Words, I start feeling like I've been lobotomized. I had the same issue with Wuthering Heights I understand the words individually, thanks Kindle dictionary, but by the end of some sentences, I have forgotten who I am, where I live, and what the sentence is trying to say. An example, as it were:

"I had brought coin to pay for this provender myself, not with church funds, but the butcher insisted it be his tithe, which I take to mean he's paying ahead, as it were, for some sin he can see coming, that he can now enter into with less guilt, as he's already been shriven, as it were."

This is an extreme example, it's not all this complicated. But it's not the worst example either. I do understand why Arthur's voice is written this way. His stiff, self-important register barely conceals the kind of racism that hides behind good manners. But his parts dragged. In part due to the writing, but also because his role in the beginning is basically just to figure out what we already know. I know what they were all setting up for. I just felt like his parts dragged on, even in hindsight.

It's not that I don't think Arthur should be in the book; this is obviously not a story you can tell without an Arthur. He makes sense as a counterpart to Good Stab. He represents a kind of white innocence that exists because it refuses to look directly at what it benefits from. He also gives the story its confessional structure. What looks like one man recording another man’s sins becomes something different. Who is confessing to whom? Who is being absolved? Who even has the right to offer absolution?

Maybe how much space he took in the story is the whole point. Maybe Arthur filtering Good Stab's voice through his own diary, centering his understanding and possible absolution, taking up all the space in this recording of history that isn't his, is exactly the metaphor. It just doesn't make those sections more fun to read.

This is a case of wanting to like a book more than I actually did, possibly because it feels like the right response to history this heavy. That's not the same as thinking it isn't good. It is. What it says is worth saying, and everyone should listen. It lingers in my mind, and I think it will stay there for some time. I just had to work way too hard to understand what I was reading to ever really feel immersed in the story.

Momfluencers today have already unboxed everything imaginable. Except maybe the baby itself.

This book is such a vibe. “Omigosh,” I say as I read the first page. “Obsessed. Literally, holy grail of psychological fiction.” My heart is racing, my eyes scanning the page with an avaricious, hungry reverence. "It's giving dark academia slow burn enemies-to-lovers spicy romantasy morally grey shadow daddy sapphic BookTok crying cottage core villain era found family trauma dumping chosen one literary fiction adjacent cozy gothic emotional damage atmospheric denouement marginalia slay!!!" I am sweating, hungry, turning pages with something close to devotion. I am a five-star review happening in real time. I am—

That’s more or less how reading the book felt. It’s also basically exactly how the book starts (except Breigh is opening boxes, not reading a book). It’s thought-provoking brain rot. Bet you never thought you’d see those words in the same sentence.

Breigh, an elder millennial, earns her keep by unboxing products for a livestream crowd. Now, at only 27 weeks pregnant, she thinks of a plan to go viral: unbox the baby live! Of course! She's a pioneer. She just has to do it before pregnancy ruins her camera-ready looks. Welcome to #LiveBirth.

The story unfolds in a stream of consciousness, racing at the manic pace of Breigh’s thoughts. The writing is feverish, dazzling, almost delirious. It uses this rapturous, divine fervor about things that are completely vapid. A skincare routine feels like spiritual ascension. Like watching a high-church mass, but instead of a priest, you have a woman unboxing a dermaplaning tool.

Breigh is experiencing a simultaneous awakening and a descent; she is becoming more and less sane at the same time, finding flashes of clarity even as she slips deeper into paranoia.

Beneath the glittering surface lies a real story that is actually pretty devastating. Breigh’s life is a performance, and it doesn’t end when the cameras are off. While she (presumably) looks like she has her shit together on the outside, her inner world is a chaotic wasteland of isolation, cynicism, dysmorphia, and denial. It’s a brutal look at body dysmorphia, internalized misogyny, and the desperation to be thin and beautiful at any cost. Apparently, even babies prefer symmetrical faces? We just can't win, can we? It’s a Sisyphean chase for validation, filling an existential void with everything from skincare to sex to food.

“Show me something worth living for. I’m starving. I’m digesting myself and finding that, though I am vast, I am startlingly light.”

This book has moments that really made me stop and question my habits. Or rather, question how broken the systems are and how much we are lied to by the corporations. I had to Google some of the claims (like that only 9% of the world’s plastic is actually recycled, what??), and it’s true. God dammit!! Here I am thinking I’m helping by recycling, and they’re just lying to me? There’s also a part that discusses consumption and how the companies are “robbing us blind, and we are purchasing the privilege. We call spending self-care. We call shopping therapy.” GOD DAMMIT!! Even when we tell ourselves we are winning, even when we tell ourselves we beat the system, it’s because they designed it to make us feel that way!!

I don’t think this is a book for everyone. But if this book is for you, it will really hit. It’s funny, it’s vapid, it’s satirical, it’s poignant, it’s thought-provoking. It’s a dazzling portrait of modern life that leaves you feeling a bit like you’ve been unboxed yourself.

A big thanks to NetGalley, Columbia University Press/Roseway Publishing and Sara Cooper for the ARC!