emilyinherhead's reviews
1143 reviews

The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners by Jenny Minton Quigley, Lauren Groff

4.0

A solid set of stories, but my favorite part might have been Lauren Groff’s intro, in which she referred to the collection as a curated mix tape from her to the reader.

Old Enough by Haley Jakobson

3.5

This book very occasionally came across as teachy, but overall I enjoyed it, and the bi rep was nice.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

4.5

A heartbreaker for sure, but the writing is gorgeous and the ENDING, once one of my smarter friends explained the symbolism to me, blew my mind.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

challenging dark sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I revisited this novel because (1) it was the October pick for The Stacks book club, and (2) the film adaptation is hitting theaters soon! It’s a story about a lightly fictionalized Florida reform school called Nickel Academy, and it’s written in dual timelines that jump between the 1960s and the 2010s, largely focusing on a couple of students named Elwood and Turner.

After this reading, I stand by my original review from 2019, when I called it “captivating and well-written… with a twist toward the end that I absolutely wasn’t expecting.” Five years later, I was still “horrified, but not surprised, every time I remembered that what I was reading was based on true events that occurred at a real reform school.” It’s a really tough hang (content warnings for racism, child abuse, and child death, among others), but also an incredibly important piece of writing.

The Spite House by Johnny Compton

dark tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.0

The Spite House is about a father and his two daughters, who are on the run from something mysterious in their past when they stumble upon a lucrative job that involves living in an allegedly haunted house for a while and reporting back to the owner about any supernatural activity they experience. The story took a while to get going, but once it did, it was pretty fast-paced and spooky! I’m not sure the ending completely worked for me—some of the reveal and explanation felt a little clunky and overcomplicated. But overall, it’s a fun time that’s especially well-suited to the autumn months. A few of my friends are also reading it and I’m looking forward to our discussion.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I was a little nervous going into this new Rooney. I’ve read all of her previous books and enjoyed them to varying degrees, but the reviews I’d seen for this new one were mixed; some folks called it her best yet, while others complained about the writing style.

Granted, it is definitely a departure—a lot of the focus in her earlier novels is on the dating lives of twenty-somethings, and this one, while it does have a couple of romantic plot lines, largely centers on the relationship between two brothers in the wake of their father’s death. Chapters alternate between their perspectives, Ivan’s and Peter’s, and the voice is noticeably different in each: Peter’s sections are the ones I’d been cautioned about, written in a choppy, fragmented style, with little warmth or interiority, while Ivan’s feel much more thoughtful and fleshed out. I preferred Ivan’s point of view but didn’t think Peter’s was as frustrating or annoying as some reviewers warned, and I actually found that he grew on me as the story went along. I also loved Margaret, the woman that Ivan meets at a chess exhibition early in the book.

Margaret feels that she can perceive the miraculous beauty of life itself, lived only once and then gone forever, the bloom of a perfect and impermanent flower, never to be retrieved. This is life, the experience, this is all there has ever been. (183)

I’m solidly in the “best Rooney yet” camp. I appreciated the maturity of this novel, the examination of grief and how it affects us and those we love. Intermezzo has a pleasant weight to it, both relatable and beautiful in its bittersweet complexity. If you, like me, are an emotional girlie who likes reading about and pondering the messiness of being a human in relationship to other humans, I highly recommend it.

The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez

informative reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes

4.5

The basic premise here is that an older woman writer is weathering Covid lockdown when she ends up moving into a friend-of-a-friend’s home to care for her pet parrot while the homeowner is stuck elsewhere, pregnant and about to deliver. Even though it’s fiction, I suspect that there’s quite a bit of autobiographical detail here; I often forgot about the “novel” part and just read the narrator’s voice as Nunez’s.

This is very much an all-vibes-no-plot situation. Covid times and the parrot’s care form the framework of the story, and a few little things do happen (a family friend of the homeowner moves into the house while the narrator is living there, for example, because of a miscommunication), but mostly we’re just swimming around in the narrator’s head, drifting from idea to idea. I know this type of thing isn’t for everyone, but I often find myself idly working my way through long-ass trains of seemingly unconnected thought, and so to me it felt very comfortable and familiar.

Also, there was an entire page of dialogue between the narrator and her friends about the phrase “spit and image,” which has morphed over time into the incorrect but more commonly-used “spitting image,” and the whole conversation brought this little grammar nerd SO MUCH JOY.

Nunez has a subtle “if you know you know” way of writing about real people and events that doesn’t give specific names or details but does provide just enough info for you to google. And google I did (another thing about me is that I’m nosy)! One of my favorite stories she obliquely references is that of a colleague of hers, writer H.G. Carrillo, who died during Covid, at which time it was revealed that he had falsified his entire Cuban immigrant identity! At one point I also found myself pausing my bathtub reading to embark on an internet deep-dive about Princess Diana’s struggles with bulimia.

Books that meander like this, surprising me with random facts and history, are some of my favorite sorts—if that also sounds good to you, I definitely recommend The Vulnerables. (Do watch out for mentions of the 2016 election, though; there are only a couple, but considering our current political moment, they hit me like jump scares.)

Jazz by Toni Morrison

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

2.5

This was the September pick for The Stacks book club and in her review, Traci Thomas says it has “the best first paragraph I have ever read in a book”:

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”

Such a strong start! I was drawn in right away and wanted to know more about everything that led to such a bizarre mess of a murder. But, as in jazz music, Morrison wanders away from the opening melody and does a whole lot of scatting and improvising before she works her way back, and I found myself losing the thread several times. Her writing is exceptional (it’s TONI), but it wasn’t always clear who was narrating or where we were in time or what was going on. I’ll definitely blame myself for part of the confusion—Emily, maybe don’t read an intellectually challenging book when you’re winding down for the night and starting to get sleepy, and especially don’t do this when the world feels freshly again on fire and it’s hard to focus even when you’re fully awake—but this wasn’t my favorite Morrison.

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo

relaxing slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.0

This is a fantasy retelling of The Great Gatsby where Jordan Baker is queer and Vietnamese. It has elements of magical realism, too. There’s a psychotropic substance called demoniac, for example, that’s made from the blood of demons and added to cocktails for some extra oomph. And Jordan has a paper-cutting superpower that lets her create living, breathing beings from paper; she uses it at one point to make a double of Daisy Buchanan, who attends a party in the real Daisy’s place when she’s too drunk to go herself. I enjoyed these additions to the canonical story, but I wish they’d been a little more fleshed out and emphasized!

What Nghi Vo really nails is the mood of the F. Scott Fitzgerald original. Both narratives are hazy and dreamlike, the characters exuding disaffection and malaise, time slippery and slow and hard to keep track of. Reading The Chosen and the Beautiful made me feel itchy, like I’d been lying around for too long and needed to get up and DO something before my muscles withered to nothing. It’s enhanced by at least a passing knowledge of its source material, but I think it would be just as enjoyable if you’d never read The Great Gatsby.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #75: First Fiction by Eli Horowitz, James Yeh, Dave Eggers

4.5

The theme of this issue is “first fiction”: it’s a selection of ten stories by writers who have never been published before, chosen from thousands of responses to a McSweeney’s call for submissions last summer. And it’s formatted as a dossier-style folder of individual story booklets, each illustrated by a different artist.

The stories cover a wide variety of topics and writing styles, but there isn’t a single one that I didn’t like. So rare for a collection like this! I made two exciting discoveries while reading: one, that the author of “Procurement and Transport,” Brittany Price, lives in my hometown, and two, that “Puck Fest” by Will Lowder (another NC writer) is set at my local renaissance festival. While that second one isn’t the happiest story, I will say that walking around said festival the day after reading said story was truly a trip—I kept clocking details that Lowder had described and thinking yep, accurate, accurate. What a treat it was to see a place I know and love so much portrayed like this in fiction.

I’ll leave you with the few quotes I wrote down from the collection, which together might paint a picture of where my brain is right now? I don’t know, it wasn’t a conscious thing, but despite the different subject matter of the stories these come from, there seems to be a vibe here.

I have nothing, I said. No prospects, no perseverance.Don’t be sad about it, she said. So you get to lead a colorful life. 

—“Small Mistakes in the Scheme of Things” by Stephanie Skaff, 7

I don’t have the guts to leave by myself. What if I leave, only to find that without anything tying me to a place, I am so empty that I disappear?

—“Diablo Winds” by Maya Sisneros, 11

Perhaps grief had made her fearless, even a little mad.

—“The Teacher of Forbidden Things” by Chii Oganihu, 15

My heart is a dove with wings strong enough to push open my rib cage and draw everything in front of me closer, closer, folded up in warm white down.

—“Procurement and Transport” by Brittany Price, 29