bashsbooks's reviews
245 reviews

I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti

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challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

I wish I had a whole discussion group, full of individuals of wide backgrounds, to engage with about I Saw Ramallah. I must confess upfront that I definitely did not understand all of it - my knowledge of Palestine and its history is woefully limited, and I'm still trying to fill in those gaps. That said, what I did understand was beautifully written and agonizingly heartbreaking in content. To be ripped from your homeland, from your family, to be painted as the agressor, to lose your loved ones thousands of miles from yourself - I cannot imagine any of these horrors, but Barghouti gives raw and gutting approximation in how he writes. I need my own copy of this - there are too many poignant passages for me to quote one or two here.
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Dinner on Monster Island: Essays by Tania de Rozario

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

4.5

Dinner On Monster Island is a crazy-good collection of essays. I love the reflections on Singapore and its issues intertwined with (mostly horror) media analysis, as for the most part it works well, and it's extremely compelling. The essay that talked about Crazy Rich Asians and De Rozario's dislike of it was especially enlightening to me - as an American, I feel like I don't have a great grasp on how racism, xenophobia, and colorism function in other parts of the world. 

There were a few parts where I felt that threads were woven and then not followed through (honestly, I think that could've been fixed by reordering some of the middle essays), but overall, superb. De Rozario is the narrator for the audiobook as well as the author, and she is just as fantastic of a reader as she is a writer. Can't wait to read more of her fine work!!
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What Once Was Mine by Liz Braswell

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adventurous funny lighthearted fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

What Once Was Mine is a very fun book. As an avid reader of fanfiction, I love the transformative possibilities that come with the question "what if x was different?" and I felt like this book answered that question for Tangled pretty well. And this whole series gives a pretty positive spin to this kind of fanfiction-adjacent transformative property, so that's cool. I don't know that I fully understand the inclusion of the frame story (although it was really sweet! It just felt kind of unnecessary as well). I also don't know why there was repeated Bathory slander (on one hand, I think it's weird as someone who assumes that most of the vampiric tales about her were lies, but on the other, it's very fanfic core). Will probably read a few other Twisted Tales.
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Corpse Party: Blood Covered, Volume 1 by Makoto Kedouin

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

4.25

I need to start this review by emphasizing how incredibly biased I am - I have loved the game that this manga is based on since I was thirteen. That kind of teenage attachment makes you handwave a lot of flaws, and I feel like if I didn't have it, I would've disliked it way more. 

Obviously, it has some issues (pretty genre-typical ones I think); the oversexualization of the teenage girl characters and the predatory lesbian trope in Seiko being the most glaring to me. That said, I love Seiko as a character (not a lot of lesbian rep available to me as a kid, what can I say?) and this manga did a great job of translating the impact of her death. 

Something else I like about the manga is the stylization of the corpses - it's really gritty and gross in a way that couldn't be depicted in the game (though it was described). 

I'm excited to read Kishinuma and Shinozaki's arc next, as it's my favorite. Also I'm fighting for my life trying to get a paperback copy of Volume 4.
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The Rose of Versailles Volume 2 by Riyoko Ikeda

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adventurous emotional slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

The Rose of Versailles, Volume 2 is much like the first volume. I don't really have much to add - my general impression of it is mostly the same. I am enjoying Oscar's growth away from being a monarchist. Antoinette and Fersen still bore me. There isn't a ton in this volume that makes it stand out - I suspect all of them will blend together in my head. The scandal of lesbianism was both funny and exasperating.
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Priest by Sierra Simone

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 35%.
Just could not get into it. Sad cause I enjoyed the Thornchapel series so much.
The Rose of Versailles Volume 1 by Riyoko Ikeda

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adventurous emotional lighthearted medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

The Rose of Versailles, Volume 1 was not what I anticipated, but it was still quite good. I was uncertain about the choice to make a woman acting out a man's social role in a rigidly gendered society, and I still think it results in some wonky gender implications - but Oscar is such a cool character and the fact that she is incredibly overtly nonbinary is awesome, especially coming from a manga that started in the early 70s. (I'm also interested in Oscar's slow-burn arc against monarchy and how that is going to play out.) Unfortunately, I find Marie Antoinette to be mostly boring, and the love triangle with Fersen to be eyerolling (though it's super funny that he leaves a lot and is super shallow next to Antoinette and Oscar). The Court DramaTM is so over the top that is also hilarious (love that final plot twist!). 

I'm not entirely used to reading manga, and I think sometimes it's unclear what order to read the text in. On that note, I think that sometimes the switch between characters/plot threads is muddy, too. 
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Breath & Name by Makari Clove, Pur Durance

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adventurous dark funny mysterious fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

On the flip side, this was my least favorite book in the series. It was much shorter than the other books for reasons unbeknownst to me (my understanding is that the authors head the indie publishing company by which these books were published so surely it wasn't an external deadline...?). Kian and Rosemary were separated for the vast majority of the book, and the tidbits of their relationship that had been sprinkled throughout the other three books weren't really resolved, which was supremely disappointing. I found the plot with the elfs to be super interesting and compelling, but it seemed like it supplanted most of the character work at the heart of the series.
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Blood & Nerve by Makari Clove, Pur Durance

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adventurous dark funny mysterious fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Out of the four books in this series, this one was my favorite! Very unusual for a third book to be my fav, but here we are. I really enjoyed tangible fallout from 1) revealing magic to the unsuspecting nonmagical world and 2) the consequences for the specific individual who revealed it (especially because Kian did so unintentionally). It was really nice to see Rosemary unconsciously commit to protecting Kian. I also liked the introduction of Rowan and the development of Connor, and the subsequent banter between the two of them. 
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Things I Should Have Said by Jamie Lynn Spears

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reflective fast-paced

2.0

I only had a middling opinion of Britney Spears' memoir, and I came into the material with a more sympathetic opinion of her than Jamie Lynn. While I believe that Jamie Lynn Spears had struggles unique to being a child actress and the lack of privacy that comes with fame, I don't think she has much to say about this topic that isn't shallow and empty due to her lack of desire to beef with anyone about the truth. And in that vein, she's really catty and vague about things that others (especially her sister and her oldest child's father) have said about her. She undermines her repeated assertions that she doesn't want to get involved in these rumors by being passive aggressive around them. Also, her writing isn't that great; she repeats the same concept with different wording about three times per paragraph on average, meaning this book is actually only a third of its purported length by content.  

I did feel bad about her daughter's accident, though. I'm glad that little girl ended up being okay.
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