I loved this one. I am seeing some reviewers describe it as literary mystery + satire and I think that is quite accurate. It is VERY much a satire, very exaggerated, and yet, at times, too real. Shortly after reading this, I poked through the reviews from our PB friends of Asian descent, because I wondered if it hit different for them than for me (white lady). I saw a lot of variation in everyone's response to the book, which I think makes sense, since satire is often a more polarizing genre.

The aspects that really hit for me were the ones pertaining to hypocrisy in academia, openly racist behavior being rewarded, and the experience of the (in this case, fetishizing) white boyfriend who gaslights the hell out of you and somehow thinks that he's the prize. I really appreciated that the characters in this satire started out flat caricatures and many of them changed/became more complex over the course of the book (not notable for a lit fic, but pretty intriguing in a satire).

Overall, I loved this one! I thought it was fun and smart and interesting, and honestly, there is a lot to pick apart and discuss, which I really like :) Can't wait to read more from Elaine Hsieh Chou!

I wanted and expected to like this book more than I did. I was actually surprised by the difficulty I had in connecting to the characters because in theory, this book was right up my alley. I love Brooklyn, and reading what was clearly a well-researched love letter to Brownsville should have been such a slam dunk for me. By the end, I did truly adore Lina and Koon-Lai, but it took much longer than it typically would for me to care about them in any kind of significant way.

I think that unfortunately the writing let it down. It isn't even that it's poorly written, it's just that there is a lot of info-dumping at times, and... I don't know how else to say this than to say that for it to be a truly exceptional fiction book, it needed a little less brain and a little more heart. That said, Savitch-Lew is clearly a passionate and competent writer, and I would definitely be interested in her future work.

Thank you to NetGalley, Abigail Savitch-Lew, and Simon and Schuster for furnishing me with an ARC copy in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

I don't have a ton to say about this one except that I really enjoyed it. I laughed and I cried a little bit. It is a short and fantastical book that covered important topics in an accessible and fun way. Loved it.

This book was truly so disappointing. The premise was so interesting, and the intro and chapter 1, and for me, even chapter 2, were great. But I had expected this book to be about monstrous Greek myths and the way our society today has made women into monsters and villains.

I want to premise this by saying that I a. love a memoir and b. struggle and have struggled with a lot of the stuff (shame, body image issues, patriarchy, decentering men) that Zimmerman was grappling with at the time of writing. But based on the marketing of this book, I just was not expecting a memoir. To be fair, there were some sections that were analyzing our society from a less personal perspective, but many of the arguments made I felt were cheapened by the hyper specific examples given that really date the book and will prevent it from being relevant in, say, 20 years. The examples were also hyper-American in a way I did not expect and I think would have been strengthened by Zimmerman tracing the societal trends further back through history rather than being focused on the US in the years 2016-2020. Another challenge for me with this book was that the link between the monsters/myths and the modern day information was too often very tenuous. I would find myself hypothesizing how I thought they connected, and then get to the last paragraph of the essay and think, "huh. that is not the connection I would have made, and I wish that this was made clearer like, 6 pages earlier."

Despite me being a memoir lover, the more personal sections of this book were frankly really hard to read because the way that Zimmerman was writing about herself did not line up with the values she claimed, and felt like the kinds of journal entries you might write, look back at in 6 months, and think, "Wow, I was so sad and I had no idea." And so, idk, as the reader, it was a little awkward. It is not that it wasn't poignant, but it felt as though Zimmerman was in an earlier stage of healing/her emotional journey than she thought she was, and the shame that she felt about herself really permeated through the book.

tl; dr I had hoped that this would be like a "fuck the patriarchy, burn it all down" kind of book, and it ended up being a book I needed to talk to my therapist about because I saw a lot of myself in Zimmerman while simultaneously feeling pretty sad for her.

Yeah I… truly hated this one. I am sure it does have an audience, no shade to them at all, I just am not it bc… as a divorced women who started this book thinking “ooh divorcee in a romance, what a treat,” only to realize quickly that I was NOT EXCITED about the path we were on… despite the man being rich (not mad at that), the plot was v uncomfy.

WHAT DID ROBIN HOBB PUT IN THESE BOOKS? I am obsessed, this one really broke my heart into like, a zillion goddamn pieces. Like ugh this is what would have happened if my boy Merry (and Gandalf) did not get to Rohan and sass their way into the hearts of men in time 😭 I already want to reread it. I know there are more but I am dreading the day I come to the end.

As always, we get very multi-layered male characters and at times uncomfortably close animal relationships, but this one really brings the ladies into more focus as well, and… god, I just love Kettricken and Patience and Molly so much. All different, but from a complexity standpoint, the gals did not disappoint.

I came for the little child claiming to remember her past life because I love those kinds of weird, creepy kid stories and… I stayed for the scenes when we feed a 3 year old vegetarian child different fish and she identifies them by taste and mouthfeel and appearance when already cooked and prepared like a fish-eating Rain Man (yes I know that’s an offensive movie, I am not endorsing it, didn’t like the movie, but idk how else to explain this). I was really interested in the spiritual network that was explored and the strain this stuff was putting on the marriage between the pediatrician and the child psychologist. So I am not saying there is nothing here to like!

I found the writing to be very lyrical at times but… quite clunky at others, and… the young man who is meant to be a Gen Z dude is giving “How do you do, fellow kids?” but instead of that it’s slang that would have been extremely dated if I, a 37 year old, had said it when I was younger (things like “Pops” and “trippin’ on me”) that would, so to speak, send the young people of today into a coma if they heard a peer speaking this way.

Worse, I saw in a review in The Guardian after I finished that this was meant to be climate fiction, and… if that’s the case, it really did not land that way for me. I found it to be an interesting and at times (like when Tipu spoke) embarrassing lit fic exploring reincarnation, the spirit world, things that we may feel or understand or take on faith without understanding why they occur, but sad to say, I did not find it to be effective in delivering a climate message at all.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author, and RBmedia for providing me with an ALC in exchange for my honest review.