Scan barcode
catalinamunoz's reviews
164 reviews
Just Last Night by Mhairi McFarlane
emotional
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
3.75
Don’t let the cutesy cover trick you. This is a story about friendship, mourning, and overcoming grief. Still, I enjoyed it and ended up loving how the story developed unexpectedly.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
This book excels in terms of writing style and quality. In The Dream House is a memoir written in fragmented form. You never get the story as a whole but a sequence of short chapters with memories narrated in them. It’s nothing like anything I’ve ever read before. Some chapters are as short as one sentence, others are pages long, and others are almost like poems.
Machado expresses her experiences in an abusive same-sex relationship through lyrical writing, addressing a rarely discussed subject. She also touches on the societal expectations for what a queer relationship should look like.
It's not just the exceptional reading experience; it's the delivery. She writes in the second person, which is a difficult thing to do successfully (the other person I’ve read who triumphantly does it is Shehan Karunatilaka in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida).
It’s an intimate story of her life and her relationship with her former partner made in an authentic, creative, and beautiful way.
emotional
reflective
5.0
“I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.”
This book excels in terms of writing style and quality. In The Dream House is a memoir written in fragmented form. You never get the story as a whole but a sequence of short chapters with memories narrated in them. It’s nothing like anything I’ve ever read before. Some chapters are as short as one sentence, others are pages long, and others are almost like poems.
Machado expresses her experiences in an abusive same-sex relationship through lyrical writing, addressing a rarely discussed subject. She also touches on the societal expectations for what a queer relationship should look like.
It's not just the exceptional reading experience; it's the delivery. She writes in the second person, which is a difficult thing to do successfully (the other person I’ve read who triumphantly does it is Shehan Karunatilaka in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida).
It’s an intimate story of her life and her relationship with her former partner made in an authentic, creative, and beautiful way.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
It successfully challenges the Western worldview of “This can’t happen here.” The dystopian elements mirror political unrest worldwide and throughout history.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
Prophet Song shows us a democratic society (Ireland, in this case) that becomes a totalitarian state and a mother who fails to flee while she can because she cannot envision how easily things fall apart. The book screams. I could feel the tension, despair, and grief.
It successfully challenges the Western worldview of “This can’t happen here.” The dystopian elements mirror political unrest worldwide and throughout history.
“...the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore…”