Did I only understand like 45% of this? Yes. Did I enjoy it? Also yes LOL I love a book that pushes me to the limits of my reading comprehension and I have to applaud the absolute undertaking translating this must have been. The moments when the prose and my understanding were in harmony were a captivating experience. I love especially the way Lispector writes about the limits of language, of transforming a moment or an idea into a tangible form for others to witness and comprehend, and about the imperfect art of achieving such a thing. Her nameless narrator tackles this idea and many others from numerous angles, turning them over and examining them in a way that from a lesser writer would read as tedious and repetitive, but never do so here. Honestly, I find this a MUCH more inspiring meditation on art and its creation than Letters to a Young Poet, which I read a few months ago and did not like LOL I probably made a mistake using this book as an introduction to her writing, but I enjoyed the reading experience and would love to return to it after gaining more familiarity with Lispector's work. This definitely feels like something that you can gain something new from every time you read it. For now, this is a 4/5!

A queer(-er) reimagining of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway that started off incredibly strong but ultimately lost me at the end. The writing here was incredible. Tons of poignant musings on life, family, queer love, coming out, forced displacement and the Palestinian diasporic experience... The author tackles a lot of themes, some more successfully and comprehensively than others, but the actual prose remains strong throughout. This novel utilizes the stream-of-consciousness narrative style a lot less often than its classical inspiration, but I'm honestly thankful for it. Firas, our protagonist, is an obsessive planner with a tendency to catastrophize, and being in his head is incredibly taxing. His thoughts are represented by long, unbroken blocks of text that leap from one idea to another, crossing back and forth, contradicting each other... I was breathing a sigh of relief whenever other characters stepped into our protagonist's physical space to force him out of his own head. Highest of kudos to Saadi for perfectly representing EXACTLY how an anxious-obsessive thought spiral feels in text form cuz holy shit. When I say this was an exhausting read, I mean it in only the most positive way. Which brings me to my biggest issue with this novel: the ending, and specifically how unearned it felt. After nearly 300 pages of being intimately entrenched in this man's mind and his irrational thought patterns, I just don't buy the conclusions he suddenly comes to at the end of the novel. It all seemed much too abrupt, without any work done on our protagonist's part. Ultimately, the journey of this novel was far more interesting than the destination, but as a huge endings person, it did leave me with quite the bitter taste in my mouth. I think this book is absolutely worth reading for the master class it is as a character study, as well as being a refreshing take on the typical coming out narrative. But, man, I really do wish that ending lived up to the promise of its strong beginning and middle. 3.75/5.

DNF @ 31%. Just not vibing with any of this.

DNF'd at 30% Saw a bunch of people raving about this over on the bird site and. Well, I was lied to LOL Okay, this wasn't BAD, it just wasn't good. This read like fanfic, and in fact it WAS originally AU fanfic (something that I wasn't aware of when I started reading this). And honestly, I've read numerous fanfic that's better edited than this. COUNTLESS comma splices, missing punctuation, misused words... I know this is indie published, but it was really distracting (and, again, I've read indie published books with far better editing than this). This book markets itself as slow burn, but it isn't. At all. Slow burn to me is like, three books of tension and yearning and then they MAYBE kiss or hold hands at the end. By the 20% mark, our two female leads were already engaging in what basically amounted to foreplay DNSNSN like WHAT slow burn 😭 I was duped. And on top of that I just didn't really buy into the "chemistry" between the two characters in general, so I was reading with no real motivation behind it. The last straw for me was the introduction of a group of Indigenous characters that really only seemed to exist to teach the main character that Racism Is Bad. In a genre that has historically been plagued by racist stereotypes and rhetoric, it just seems gauche to only utilize the Indigenous characters as a moral lesson for our sheltered white female protagonist. I really wanted to be into this, I love lesbians and I love the idea of Westerns (that aren't plagued by the aforementioned racist and misogynistic writing that are staples of the genre), but I just don't get what everyone else sees in this.