bluejayreads's reviews
849 reviews

Self-Made Boss: Advice, Hacks, and Lessons from Small Business Owners by Jackie Reses, Lauren Weinberg

Did not finish book.

Lots of useful information. Only DNF because I had to take it back to the library - will be finishing it later.

Bronze Drum: A Novel of Sisters and War by Phong Nguyen

Did not finish book. Stopped at 48%.

I struggled with this book from the very beginning. And normally when that happens, I decide to stop fairly early on. It’s part of my whole “only read books that I enjoy” goal – if I’m not enjoying it, why keep reading?

The problem here is that I really wanted to like this book. It’s such a fantastic concept. I had never heard the story of Trung Trac and Trung Nhi before, but a pair of sisters who raise an army of women to drive out the people occupying their country is such a fantastic story. Even better, this is based on real historical people and events! My knowledge of Vietnam is extremely limited, so I was excited to learn more about Vietnamese traditions and values. And not only is Vietnam an awesome setting, this is specifically Bronze Age Vietnam, which, as someone who finds ancient history much more interesting than anything that happened less than a thousand years ago, I found especially appealing. There are so many good ideas and good concepts and things I really, really wanted to love and immerse myself in.

However, it ultimately ended up being disappointing. Some of that was stylistic. The writing was very a folktale, oral tradition type of style – narrative heavy, switching perspectives with no warning, not identifying particular “main characters,” and telling you everything that goes on instead of actually showing you. Though there wasn’t an explicit narrator, there was a strong sense of the story, the setting, and anything that might have made it feel vibrant being mediated and muted through the lens of an omnicient storyteller. The characters and world, though interesting in concept, struggled to rise off the page.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes this storyteller-narrator style could work – and it’s not an inherently bad choice for a story based in oral tradition like this is. It wouldn’t be easy to make it work in a 400-page novel, but it’s possible. In fact, I think it could have worked if it weren’t for this book’s second major problem: Nothing happens.

The back cover establishes that the death of Trung Trac and Trung Nhi’s father is when the story actually gets started. When I stopped reading, he was still alive. Nothing truly interesting happened until 150 pages into the book. The first 184 pages (and possibly more) were more like a slice of life in that time period. Trung Trac and Trung Nhi walked in the gardens, practiced fighting forms, learned from their tutors, fell in love, argued with each other, made occasional stupid decisions, had complex relationships with their parents, and generally just lived as Vietnamese young women under the Han invaders. Again, in itself, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If done right, having such a long period of “setting the scene” can make the rest of the story feel more important and impactful.

The problem is that this book tries to do both. With the storyteller style, the reader isn’t getting a lot of emotional connection with the characters, so it needs to have a stronger, quicker-paced plot to make it work. To keep a long period of setup from getting boring, the reader needs to create strong emotional connections with the characters. But by doing both, the narrator/storyteller style toned down the emotions and kept me from forming a connection with any of these characters that would have engaged me in the minutiae of daily life, and having such a long period of setup left me with no plot or major central conflict to get invested in.

This is a really difficult book to review because I desperately wanted to like it. I really wanted to read this story about warrior sisters in Bronze Age Vietnam! But the telling made two choices that both individually make sense (storyteller style to emphasize its oral origins and long setup to familiarize Western readers with the place and time) that combined to make it dull. Not unreadable, definitely, but not really enjoyable either. I wanted so much to like this. I just didn’t.

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Resistance by Mikhaeyla Kopievsky

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3.0

I have read a lot of YA dystopian. This is largely because it was the primary YA genre during my prime YA reading years. If I'd read it back then, or even when it first released in 2017, I probably would have considered it a fine but not particularly noteworthy example of the genre. (Although it isn't technically YA, it has a very YA feel, and I probably would have categorized it as such.) However, reading it in 2023 - with expanded adult reading tastes, an extra decade of reading and reviewing (and life) experience, and a much deeper understanding of books in general - makes it an absolutely wild experience.

There are some really great ideas and unique takes on dystopian tropes in this story. As much as I generally dislike the post-Hunger Games trend of dystopias sorting society into groups, this world's idea of testing children's aptitudes and then using neural conditioning/scifi tech to fully align their brains to particular elemental traits, making their elemental alignment basically hard-wired into their brains, was a unique take. I enjoyed the reconditioning element, where Anaiya got to experience emotions for the first time and all the complexities that emotions come with, especially when you're not used to dealing with them. I found it both fascinating and relatable, and if the story dropped most of the attempted-dystopian elements and put the focus on Anaiya's internal journey, I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more. The "are we the baddies?" idea is also a unique take on dystopian stories - instead of rising up from the oppressed under-class, the protagonist starts out as an agent of the dystopian government and slowly realizes that maybe the government isn't as good as she thought.

However, despite the actually good ideas Resistance has, it has three major flaws that undermine it both as a dystopian story and as a reading experience.

First, it doesn't convince me that this is a dystopian world. Characters talk about how terrible everything is, but not only do we not see that in the narrative, they don't even give examples. The only actual described problem is police brutality (or, in this case, Fire element brutality) - it's the only thing actually shown on-page and the only specific issue anyone complains about. Dystopian societies probably have police brutality, sure, but it's not exclusive to dystopias. There is a curfew and the whole idea of conditioning people to elements in the first place, but these definitely more dystopian happenings are mentioned in passing as world-building. Nobody seems to actually have a problem with those.

Second, which ties into both the previous and next points, it never shows anyone in power in this society. The closest the story ever gets to someone "in charge" is the Fire element commander who gives Anaiya her initial re-alignment assignment. A dystopian society just doesn't feel very dystopian without someone or a small group of someones at the top doing the oppressing, and this book never indicates that there's anyone actually in power at all. It may be realistic that ordinary people don't actually interact with those in power, but they should at least know who their king/"president"/commander/dictator/etc. is. Not only does it reduce the world's dystopia factor, lacking an antagonist, even a symbolic one, makes fighting the system feel unrealistic.

Which brings me to the third problem: it fails to convince me that the resistance is a threat, or even that it exists in a meaningful way. Everyone is getting bent out of shape about the "Heterodoxy" and the brewing rebellion and how terrible this is going to be. But for the vast majority of the book, the entire rebellion consists of murals that say "Resistance." That's it. It does escalate a little towards the end, but not by much. The entire alleged rebellion against the entire alleged dystopia for most of the book is unauthorized paintings with provocative words. And, minor spoiler time, Anaiya's infiltration finds there's only three to five people behind the whole thing. The response to the threat of this Heterodoxy seems wildly out of proportion with the scope of the damage that five people doing unauthorized art can actually do.

I think I found this book so disappointing because there are some really good ideas. It does some truly fascinating things with standard dystopian tropes, and Anaiya's personal arc is, quite honestly, superb. (That character resolution? Spectacular. Loved it.) There are a lot of interesting ideas in the world that had real potential. But then the plot itself fell so flat. I didn't even hate the love triangle that much because none of it felt like it actually mattered. There was a fair amount of violence in the book, but it never felt like it had real stakes.

I did finish it. I started writing this review as a DNF, but at that point I only had about fifty pages left, so I went ahead and finished it to see if my criticisms bore out through the whole book. And in the end, I'm glad I did, because even though one of the twists felt entire out-of-the-blue and I guessed the other, the wonderfully satisfying resolution to Anaiya's personal arc was worth it. Resistance isn't a bad book, per se. I think I'm just disappointed that so many good ideas got a lackluster, stakes-less plot that didn't do them justice.

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The Truth by Terry Pratchett

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3.75

It seems like every Discworld book that takes place in Anhk-Morpork somehow involves a threat to overthrow Lord Vetinari. Most of them so far have been City Watch books and had the Watch thwarting the plot. In this case, though, despite the Watch definitely being present, it was investigative journalism that uncovered the answer.

The Truth is the second of Discworld's "Industrial Revolution" books. In the first one, Moving Pictures, the Discworld got introduced to movies and Hollywood Holy Wood glitz and glam. In The Truth, the Discworld gets journalism. The thing I love most about it is that it happens entirely by accident. There's something really appealing to me about stories where the protagonist didn't mean to do all that, they just had a good idea for something small and it got out of control. Which is exactly what happened with William de Worde, who didn't actually intend to become a journalist, he just thought a moveable-type printing press would make his letter-writing easier and it spiraled from there.

As with most other Discworld books, this one has some interesting themes and questions. The big obvious one is journalism - the nature of the press, what is considered news, journalistic judgement, what people want to read versus what "the public" needs to know, and some very pointed and un-subtle digs at tabloids. And if the title didn't make it painfully obvious, it also mulls over the nature of truth and how journalism and printing affects the perception of what's true. (It also tried to say something about privilege during the climax, I think, but that one was very muddled.) This book has a lot of interesting themes and ideas, but it is not particularly subtle about them.

I'm not often much for mystery plots, but I didn't mind this one. Part of that is because it's less of "a mystery" than many smaller mysteries in a trench coat. William is trying to untangle all the pieces of who framed Lord Vetinari. But there's also a cast of fascinating characters and strange happenings to keep that from feeling too mystery-heavy. The talking dog is back, and he's at least in an interesting situation this time, even if he's no more likeable. There's a vampire on staff at the newspaper who takes photographs and is experimenting with using flashes of darkness instead of light to take pictures. There's the New Firm, a pair of hit men who go by the names Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip. They start out somewhat comedic (at least in Mr. Tulip's desperate attempts to pick up a drug addiction, consuming all sorts of weird and unpleasant things along the way), but turn into one of the darkest plot lines I recall happening in a Discworld book. And there's also the Watch, trying to do their jobs with all of William's meddling.

The Truth is definitely less funny than some of the other Discworld books, but it was entertaining the whole way through and quite fun at times, even if I didn't end up actually laughing. It has interesting things to say (even if they are SIGNIFICANTLY less subtle than I've come to expect from Sir Terry) the plot is solid and kept my interest, the cast of characters was strong, and the ending wrapped everything up neatly, including a few plot threads I had forgotten about. On the whole, it's an enjoyable, if a bit in-your-face, entry into both Discworld canon and the Industrial Revolution arc.

(And as a note that's only relevant to the audiobook, my favorite Discworld narrator Nigel Planer has still been replaced with some guy named Steve, the guy who did a terrible job on Carrot's voice in The Fifth Elephant and also did a terrible job on Death's voice in The Truth. It's not relevant unless you read the audiobook, but I am not a fan of Steve.)

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The One Day Box: A Life-Changing Love of Home by Flora Soames

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1.5

I had no context for this book going in - I didn't recognize the author's name, and the book itself has no dust jacket, where the author information and back cover copy usually reside on a hardcover. The only context I had was some of the pictures I saw flipping through it at the library, which were nice. I am interested in interior design and maximalist style, so I checked it out. And I think I would have liked it so much better if I hadn't actually read it and just looked at the pictures. The pictures were very pretty. But the text just smacked of wealth and upper class Britishness. Flora talks so casually about centuries-old antiques that probably cost more than I make in a month. Out of all the homes featured in the book, only one of them couldn't have fit my entire last apartment in the foyer. When I found out Winston Churchill was Flora's great-grandfather, my only thought was "this explains why this lady seems so out of touch with ordinary people's reality." There's a whole chapter that's just kinda promoting her own product line. And to top it all off, the book never actually explains what a "one day box" is (unless it just means the collection of pretty wallpaper and fabric Flora used as inspiration for her wallpaper and textile designs?). The photos are very pretty and I won't deny that she has a good sense of interior design. But I also kinda dislike her as a person.

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Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller

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3.5

Interesting in many ways and I learned a lot about olive oil, but gets a bit dull at times and unfortunately is quite outdated. I would love to see an updated edition for the 2020s.

The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros

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3.75

I'm generally not interested in historical fiction or murder mysteries. However, I am interested in Jewish protagonists and characters getting possessed by ghosts, so I decided to give it a shot. And it was good. I read it in a single evening, which is impressive for a 500-page book, but honestly that says more about my mood that day than the book itself. Not that there was anything wrong with it - in fact, there was a lot that was good. The historical Chicago setting felt vivid, the characters were solid, the emotions were done well, the plot was strong, the romance developed well with a lovely touch of angst, and I loved the Jewish community and tradition that infused every page. But the possession element was much smaller than I expected (more a catalyst for the plot than a main element) and the primary plot was the murder mystery of tracking down Yakov's killer. Which, unfortunately, I wasn't all that into. Again, not a failing of the book, just a personal opinion, but mysteries in general aren't and have never been my thing. If you enjoy mysteries (and/or historical fiction), you'll probably like this a lot more than I did. Again, it's not bad, and there's a lot about it that's really good - it just didn't really appeal to my personal reading tastes.

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Your Best Apocalypse Now by Taylor Hohulin

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funny lighthearted

Strong character development? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I've had this book on my to-read list for years - possibly since even before the book came out. I've had spoken to the author previously when he sent me a review copy of his book The Marian, and I can't remember if he told me Your Best Apocalypse Now was in the works or if I just found it following one of his author pages. Regardless, I never got around to finishing the rest of the Marian series (I have a bad habit of saying "I can't wait to see where this series is going!" and then never actually doing that), but I wanted to read this one so much that I eventually broke down and bought the thing.

Now, at first glance you might go, "Jay, you don't generally like comedies." Which is usually true. However, what I do like is weird, wacky, unique, and original takes on religious topics. And a scammer prophet pretending to help angels investigate why the apocalypse didn't happen so he can actually stop it from happening sounded exactly up my alley. Plus I remember Taylor being a good writer from when I read The Marian (admittedly almost a decade ago), so I figured it would at least be well-written.

Now, after all that preamble, let's get into my thoughts on the book itself.

This is one of those light, fun books that really isn't taking itself - or anything else - too seriously. Even though the plot is based around the end of the world and the complete destruction of humanity, there's very little that's actually dark or serious. Even looking at the trigger warnings, there aren't many. It leans hard into its comedic elements and is largely light, funny, and above all, absurd.

I think the absurdity is what I liked about it so much. The unexpected and absurd, after all, is what I tend to find funniest. A combination end-of-the-world prediction and self-help book written entirely as a cash grab that turns out to be right? Hilarious. (And I legitimately want to read that book.) The great world-devouring beast having an office with a bored receptionist? Hysterical. Ridiculous and slightly heretical portrayals of God and angels? Funny and fascinating. Some of the one-liners fell flat, but more were on point. The chapter titles were fantastic. I legitimately laughed quite a bit. Your Best Apocalypse Now is the one thing that, in my experience, most comedy books struggle to be: Funny.

The plot is fairly straightforward - largely a series of "talk to this person, who gives you information that means you now need to talk to that person" quests as Daniel and his angels go from absurd situation to absurd situation in the quest to find the missing world-devouring beast. The characters were fun enough to follow around for a book and I did genuinely enjoy Daniel, but they weren't particularly robust. What really shines here is the ridiculous, absurd concepts and ideas and the humor that the absurdity creates.

Your Best Apocalypse Now is what it set out to be: Light, fun, absurd, not very deep but enjoyable and funny all the same. (Although if you look beyond the surface, it does gently touch on some interesting theological ideas.) I found it genuinely funny in many places and enjoyed the whole book thoroughly. It's a perfect book for some relaxing reading between heavier books, or if you just want something where you don't have to worry about Themes or Motifs or Important Ideas. There aren't any Important Ideas in this book - but there are a ton of absurd and funny ones, and if that's what you want, this book will deliver.

Content Warnings

He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan

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adventurous dark emotional fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This is a hard book to review. Not because it was bad, or even because I'm ambivalent about it - on the contrary, it was spectacular and I loved it. Even having read the first book nearly two years ago, it didn't take me long to get back into the story. It kept me engaged throughout and even got my heart speeding up in a few particularly tense scenes. It was, above all, astonishingly good.

And I think that's a large part of what makes it hard to review. I can't share all the emotions it made me feel by writing *about* it. To get the full experience, you have to read it yourself. It's vivid and intense and full of twists I didn't see coming but probably should have and the kind of book that leaves you completely exhausted at the end because you've been feeling so much along the way.

Another part of what makes this hard to review is how utterly dark it is. The first book was dark, too, don't get me wrong. Zhu is not a good person. She is ruthless and ambitious and claims she is willing to sacrifice anything to reach her goal, and this book puts that to the test. This is also a book where Zhu starts to challenge the bounds of a likeable character. In the first book, she was ruthless and ambitious and violent and did a lot of really horrible things. But in the context of a world that would rather let her starve than inconvenience a man, it didn't seem unreasonable. In this book, she had reached some measure of security - though still under threat, she was one of the four dominant military and political powers of the area. But her ambition to be the *greatest* kept her pushing onwards, even as she destroyed others in the process. She was still a dynamic, compelling character and I never really stopped rooting for her, but as the book progressed I found myself repeatedly confronting the reality of her actions and not really being sure how to feel about them. In some ways, it feels weird to even apply moral judgements here, though I can't fully explain why. But eventually both I and Zhu were looking at the consequences of her ambitions and wondering if it was really worth all that.

(Yet another thing I appreciate about this series: None of the women in these books - whether or not you want to count Zhu and her ambiguous gender identity as a woman - are shamed for their ambition or treated any worse than the men for their crimes. The society is blatantly misogynistic, but the narrative refuses to be.)

General Ouyang was a major player in the last book, and he still is in this one, but to a lesser degree. Some of that is because of his arc. Following on the events from the climax of book one, his is an equal but opposite story to Zhu. While Zhu's ambitions propelled her to further heights, Ouyang's relentless pursuit of revenge drove him to further lows. Zhu's resolve clarified as Ouyang's mind descended into chaos. I found myself mainly feeling compassion as he destroyed himself on the teeth of his own self-loathing. I wish he could have had a better ending, but he was so far gone that I think he got the best he could.

This book, being the last in the series, was an ending for every character, though not all of them died. Writing-wise, their endings made sense, fit with their arcs, and felt narratively satisfying. On a personal level, so many of them deserved better. Xu Da deserved better. Ma deserved better. Ouyang deserved better. Even Baoxiang deserved better (he deserved better last book, and even before - he is yet another case of an antagonist who I really just feel bad for).

And this brings me to the final reason this book is so hard to review: There is just too much to say. I haven't said anything about Baoxiang's story, even though he was a point of view narrator. I haven't talked about the gender politics involved in this story, or the absolutely spot-on depictions of that very specific and hard-to-define type of sexual trauma where you have sex when you really don't want to or with someone you don't want to have sex with as a means to get something else, or the theme of being seen in a gendered body (and, to a lesser extent, a visibly disabled body), or how it's paced so well that it feels like so much is happening without ever feeling rushed or monotonous, or the really awesome historical setting, or the ghosts.

If I talked about every amazing thing in this book, I could go on forever. But I've focused this review mainly on the characters, because despite all the action and adventure and ghosts and politics and invasions, this is a story about these characters and how their actions, good, bad, or otherwise, shape (and often end) the lives of the people around them and, ultimately, the course of history. This feels like a book (and, honestly, a series) that you could keep re-reading and discover something new every time. (It helps that these books are *long*.) So few sequels live up to their predecessor, but this one does - but it's also unique to the point where I can't say whether *She Who Became the Sun* or *He Who Drowned the World* is better because they're both so good for different reasons and in different ways.

I'm running out of eloquent ways to say "this is an amazing book, you should read the whole series," so there you go. This is an amazing book. So was the first one. You should read both - especially if you like stories that show your emotions no mercy.

Content Warnings

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

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4.5

A fascinating, slightly weird, and overall wildly creative retelling of the Sleeping Beauty myth where the princess was put to sleep for a very good reason and the wicked fairy who did it was barely more than a child herself (and arguably not even a fairy). Despite being several hundred years old at the opening of the story, Toadling was a curious mix of child-like and ancient. She may be able to turn into a toad at will, but I found the most fey thing about her was her nebulous place between young and old. She was engaging and I loved her. The story is told in a straightforward, bare-bones fairy tale style. Details are enough to sketch the world and the plot vividly enough to keep me hooked, but there is no flowery language or dwelling on feelings or reflecting on whether the happenings are right or wrong. Things just are what they are. Despite being a dark and somewhat twisted version of the story we know, it never felt excessively dark and retained a magical fairy-tale feel. I'm having a really hard time putting the mood of this story into words, but it's very good. And if you really want to understand what I'm trying to say, it's very short - just go read it for yourself.

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bluejayreads's reviews 849 reviews

bluejayreads's reviews
849 reviews