abbie_'s reviews
1757 reviews

Reader for Hire by Raymond Jean
Did not finish book. Stopped at 16%.

I’ve decided any book that doesn’t make me look forward to my reading time is getting DNFd this year

Bear by Julia Phillips

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

3.0

This is a very quiet novel, of two sisters looking after their sick mother, stuck in a tiny town with few prospects. Their mundane routine, made more precarious by the covid pandemic, is shaken when Elena, the older sister, steps outside their cabin to find a bear. The parts with the bear were the most well written, taut with tension so you could feel the power of the animal through the pages. But I grew tired of Sam’s behaviour throughout. I get her situation is a tough one, and Phillips writes their money worries with great delicacy, but the way she shuts anyone down who offers genuine advice about moving forwards in life is frustrating. It feels like she doesn’t actually want anything different, she just wants to complain about it. I wasn’t sure about the ending either - if I sit with it I feel like it might grow on me.

Picked up because I joined the NPR Books We Loved 2024 more out of curiosity (I’m deffo not going to read all 350 books on it - or am I?) and spotted this one from the list on my library website. I likely will pick up her first novel, Disappearing Earth, but I’ll hope it’s more impactful than this one. 

Soft Core by Brittany Newell

emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC! 

I enjoyed this trippy, dreamy little novel a LOT! I don’t think I fully grasped the ending (were we supposed to?) but I enjoyed the ride there so much that it barely matters. 

Ruth, or Baby, is a stripper and dominatrix living with her (amicable) ex boyfriend and their dogs in San Francisco. Newell works/worked as a dominatrix, so her depiction of the sex work industry is imbued with such a staggering authenticity. It felt like reading someone’s diary, almost voyeuristic. I absolutely loved Ruth, her vulnerability. The way Newell described her relationships with Dino (who mysteriously goes missing later in the book), the pups, Ophelia, was just so alive. You feel like you know them. And her nights at the club and shifts in the dungeon were just fantastique, glitter practically falls out of the pages. It’s gritty and tender, hard and soft, I just loved it. 

Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

This one caught my eye for a myriad of reasons - grisly body horror, parents dealing with the loss of a child, monsters, queerness - and it delivered on all fronts! It starts with a mother cutting a piece of her dead son’s lung out, shit unravels from there, and that’s really you need to know.

Córdova’s style is an absolute dream to read, the story unfolds at the perfect pace, enough tension and drama coupled with reflections on love and loss. I think I would have preferred it if we cycled through the four narrator’s in turn, a chapter each, rather than four blocky sections from each. It would have been cool to hear from everyone at different stages of the story, especially M. As it is, we don’t get the full picture of how, for example, Magos feels when M is 18, since her section of the narration is at the very beginning.

That aside, it’s still a hugely engaging novel. M is a great character, and making us feel for a bloodthirsty monster in an almost endearing way is a feat of characterisation. A beautiful and bloody meditation on grief. 

How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom by Johanna Hedva

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

3.5

Picked up this collection after having Hedva’s Your Love is Not Good on my physical TBR for years. I’ve never quite been in the mood for it, but was intrigued by their work, and this collection of essays centred around disability justice was an excellent introduction to Hedva’s punky, no-bullshit style. Their comments about how they wish writers who write about disability weren’t pigeon-holed into the subject, and how they themselves embraced chaos when it comes to genre, made me super excited to finally pick up Your Love is Not Good in 2025. 

Hedva doesn’t beat around the bush. As they put it, everyone should care about disability justice because it’s not a case if you become disabled, but when. Everyone will get sick, get injured, eventually need care. Realising that society sees care as acceptable only if it’s a temporary state, is like a slap in the face. Permanent care under capitalism is not acceptable; if you’re not giving your productive 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, what are you to capitalism? Useless. 

Along with disability, Hedva also explores kink and sex, community, queerness, and I appreciated mostly all of the essays. Lots of nuggets of wisdom, lots of reminders that we can all do so much better by one another, and that it’s better to try and sometimes fail at activism, than to give it up completely as a lost cause. 

The Tree and the Vine by Dola de Jong

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

3.75

If you told me this book was written in the last five years, instead of in 1954!!!! I would have believed you. Part of this could be attributed to the fact it is a new translation, but I still think the tone and subject matter feel so fresh and modern - but that just goes to show that women love women and have always loved women. Bea is closeted and quite uptight, enter Erica, a wild journalist who is, even for the time, up front about her desires. The two move in together as roommates, but their routine is disrupted by the imminent arrival of Nazis in Amsterdam. Erica, being half Jewish, is at risk, and Bea wants to help her flee to America but Erica is determined to stay in her home. It’s always interesting to read something set in the past but written when it was contemporary. Needless to say the fascism aspect felt a bit too close to home, politics being what it is at the moment. And yet even with the threat of fascism, people’s lives continue to unfurl, with all their petty dramas. Bea and Erica aren’t particularly likeable, but I don’t think they’re meant to be. Erica is thoughtless, Bea allows herself to be walked over. They’re not destined for a great romance, they’re just two women who act on their desires in different ways, things get messy, it’s just LIFE. It feels alive, which is a high compliment from me when it comes to classics, because I find so many of them stodgy and dry. 

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami

mysterious reflective medium-paced

4.0

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for my free digital ARC of this one! This is my third Hiromi Kawakami, and it was super different from the others - in a good way! She’s ventured into the science fiction realm, exploring a near future where humans have gone extinct and been slowly reintroduced through cloning. If I hadn’t read How High We Go in the Dark a couple of weeks before, I probably would have enjoyed this even more, but they’re quite similar in their themes and structure, and HHWGITD just did it better in my opinion. But if you like quiet, humanity-driven science fiction, like Station Eleven, you’ll really appreciate this one!

As it’s told in interconnected vignettes, I think it’s a good idea to read it in decent sized chunks. I read it while super busy with work, and so it took me almost a week and by the end of the week, when I came across a character’s POV mentioned earlier in the book, their role wasn’t as fresh in my mind as I’d like it to be. I think it would be much more satisfying to have all of those a-ha! moments. 

I think it’s one I’ll revisit in the future, hopefully with more time to dedicate to it! As it stands, I still found it thoroughly engaging. 

A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar

reflective slow-paced

4.0

I honestly wasn’t expecting that much from this book but it turned out to be quite the delightful little read! It’s a gentle musing on Matar’s month spent in Siena, observing paintings and making acquaintances with the locals and just generally musing on life. I sometimes found the art passages a little harder to follow than his recollections of chance meetings with strangers, but I still thoroughly enjoyed them, and this book made me want to run away to Siena and drink coffee on little terraces and wile away afternoons in front of paintings. I’m so intrigued by the tragic story of Matar’s father, and I’ll definitely be seeking out his other nonfiction and fiction.

The author reads this himself and he has a beautiful voice to listen to, 10/10 audiobook experience. 

Tingle: Anthology of Pinay Lesbian Writing by Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

3.5

Was super intrigued by this one when I saw it on the Philippines prompt page for StoryGraph’s Read the World, and although it was a bit uneven (aren’t all anthologies??), I am overall glad that I read it! This is the only anthology of lesbian writing from the Philippines so it’s such an important contribution to literature! The stories are nicely separated into sections like Beginnings, Family, Unrequited and Endings, although all the stories are supposed to be a response to ‘what makes you tingle as a lesbian?’ And I’m not sure all of these really seemed to ruminate on that theme.

My favourite section was the Passion section, there were some absolutely gorgeous pieces of writing about sex and lust. Then I also really appreciated the pieces that explore the tomboy phenomenon in the Philippines. It seems like a lot of queer women in these stories and essays still adhere to quite strict gender roles - mascs pair with femmes, stone tops abound.

Not all pieces left an impact, some left the wrong kind of impact (one was a bizarre recollection which seemed to romanticise touching a woman’s breast without her consent??), but overall glad this anthology exists!

The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ And Mũmbi by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

adventurous reflective fast-paced

3.0

I have been wanting to read Thiong’o’s work for a while now, and this one piqued my interest when it appeared on the International Booker longlist in 2021. It was originally written in Gikuyu and the author himself translated it into English. It’s a creation myth, an epic poem, and for that reason I do think the audio works really well. Such stories give themselves to oral recitation, the repetition sounds great and overall the narrator does an excellent job. However, there were some jarring parts where I guess the microphone stopped working properly or something? And it’d be super loud or weirdly muffled for a sentence or two.

Content wise, sometimes the story did lose me. But I was fully invested in all the ogre parts, it felt like a classic adventure tale, heroes overcoming tasks and challenges - including an ogre who never stops shitting, frankly iconic.

It didn’t leave a massive impact on me though.