emilyinherhead's reviews
1143 reviews

All This and More by Peng Shepherd

mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

I picked this book up to talk about with a few friends, and we chose it because Shepherd was one of the featured authors at Bookmarks Festival, which we all attended (or worked).

The novel is about a reality show called All This and More, which uses the physics concept of quantum bubbling to help one contestant per season create their perfect life by fixing past mistakes and trying alternate decision paths. Appropriately, it’s written as a choose your own adventure! You can either read it in a more conventional way by following the first path every time there’s an option, or you can pick whatever you want and bounce around. I did the first way, and then went back and read through the other paths because I AM WHO I AM.

As someone who is constantly overthinking decisions before I make them and second-guessing them after, this premise was so fully my shit. I also loved the thriller vibes that built and built with each successive episode of the show. Perhaps I am now cured of my “but what if?” speculation?? I won’t say any more than that, but yeah. Did enjoy.

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

adventurous mysterious medium-paced

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

2.0

After finally finishing this one (it took! forever!), I’m sad to report that it didn’t ultimately work for me. The writing style felt simplistic and juvenile on one hand, but somehow overly weighty and self-important at the same time. I often found myself momentarily confused about who each character was because they all sounded the same, and there was too much telling instead of showing—why use “that was classic Daniel for you, always doing x, y, or z,” when you could just write him acting that way and let the reader grow to understand what he’s like as a person?

Eventually the plot caught my interest, and I thought that might be enough to outweigh my qualms with the prose style in the end. But ultimately, no. The characters didn’t feel real to me, so I didn’t care enough about them for the conclusion to have any weight or satisfaction. Questions I had about the ritual the main characters are involved in and the magic they come to possess went unanswered. It was certainly a letdown, especially considering how much I’ve liked Link’s short stories in the past, and how long the novel took me to read. 

However! I know several friends who have enjoyed it, and I have seen many glowing reviews online, so if it sounds interesting to you, I still think you should give it a shot!

A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole by Marian Schembari

hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

Y’all, I inhaled this book.

A Little Less Broken is a memoir about Mariam’s experience growing up with various unexplained symptoms including noise and texture sensitivities, “attitude problems,” difficulty making friends, feelings of rage and overwhelm, and struggles at work. She takes us through her childhood, college years, and young adulthood as her understanding of herself grows—from identifying as an introvert, to learning about Elaine Aron’s concept of the Highly Sensitive Person, to finally realizing she is autistic and receiving an official diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

While I am not autistic myself (at least not that I know of), a lot of this book was extremely relatable and I think the familiarity was part of why I sped through it so fast. I already knew some of these moments; I’ve lived them.

Mariam’s writing about her own experience is clear and compelling, and she includes a lot of cited information and research on HSP and ASD, as well as statistics about autism diagnoses in under-represented race and gender identity groups. Her story evokes all of the emotions: sad tenderness for her unknowing younger self, excitement and pride as she figures things out, lingering frustration and heartbreak for folks with similarly confusing symptoms who still don’t have the answers, resources, or accommodations they need.

I learned so much from this book and I highly recommend it! Thank you to Flatiron Books and Netgalley for sending it to me.

McSweeney's 74: The 25th Anniversary Issue by Adrienne Celt, Adachioma Ezeano, T.C. Boyle, Eskor David Johnson, Bryan Washington, Samanta Schweblin, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Julia Dixon Evans, C Pam Zhang, Maria Reva, Emma Hooper, Kevin Moffett, Lydia Davis, Mimi Lok

4.5

McSweeney’s #74 is a themed issue in celebration of the magazine’s 25th anniversary—a collection of some of the best stories it has published over the last ten years. My taste must align pretty closely with editor Claire Boyle’s, because I loved almost all of them.

There were a few that I still remembered from the original McSweeney’s they appeared in, like Mimi Lok’s “The Woman in the Closet,” about an older woman who lives undetected in a stranger’s house for more than a year, and “The Next Day and the Days Ever After” by Adrienne Celt, about a group of construction workers watching a young woman run laps around a track for an entire day before she disappears.

Others were written by authors I’m familiar with now but didn’t know as well when their stories were originally published:

• “Dad.me” by C Pam Zhang, about a phenomenon where ghost Dads suddenly show up in people’s homes
• “Palaver” by Bryan Washington, about a mother and her adult son learning to communicate with each other
• “An Unlucky Man” by Samanta Schweblin, about an 8-year-old girl who wanders away from the waiting room with a mysterious man while her younger sister is in the hospital after drinking a cup of bleach

A couple other new-to-me favorites were “The Apartment” by T.C. Boyle, about a middle-aged man gunning for the home of an old woman who just won’t die, and “Bears Among the Living” by Kevin Moffett, about a narrator coming to terms with his father’s death while cultivating a relationship with his own young son.

Oh, and I also need to point out that this issue is packaged in a lunch box illustrated by Art Spiegelman! And there are author trading cards, and fun pencils too! Very cool.

The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan

informative reflective relaxing slow-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

4.0

What a smart and eclectic little book! The protagonist is an artist in her late twenties who suddenly and inexplicably loses her hearing. As she undergoes various tests and treatments over the course of the book, we are in her head following thoughts that leap from subject to subject, prompted by what she’s experiencing through her physical senses. She ponders art, human nature, wild spaces, relationships, travel, and philosophical questions, and she is quite intelligent. If you stop paying attention for a sentence or two, you might miss an association or reference and wonder how you arrived at the current topic.

The premise of The Hearing Test was especially compelling to me because when I read it, I myself had an appointment with an audiologist coming up that I was a little nervous about.

I appreciated the slow, meandering tone here, the heavy use of references (I looked up a lot of places, historical events, and art works), and the topics of consideration. If you’re an all-vibes-no-plot kind of girlie, I definitely recommend. It’s also fairly short, so if you’re in the mood for some deep thinking (and frequent googling), it hopefully won’t be too intimidating.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

emotional informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

The essays in A Field Guide are all at least tangentially related to the idea of being “lost,” but Solnit does a lot of playing with what that means. She’s a really smart and clever writer and the topics she touches on are wide-ranging—art, travel, personal experiences, friendship, nature, philosophy.

In one of the earlier “The Blue of Distance” sections of the book (all of the even-numbered chapters share this title), she made me cry about a color:

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. (27)

I took my time with this collection and that felt correct. As nice as it can be to speed through a novel and get lost in the story, it’s another kind of satisfying to linger with nonfiction, rereading sentences and paragraphs, mulling over ideas. Here’s another quote I sat with for a while, appreciating it for its content but also for the way this writer in 2005 reached forward through time to remind and reassure the me of 2024:

People look into the future and expect that the forces of the present will unfold in a coherent and predictable way, but any examination of the past reveals that the circuitous routes of change are unimaginably strange. (119-120)

Nothing in life, good or bad, is forever; it can all turn on a dime, and it will, in ways we’ll never see coming. How comforting, how scary, how exciting! Buckle in.

Write It All Down: How to Put Your Life on the Page by Cathy Rentzenbrink

informative inspiring slow-paced

3.0

Though publishing a book isn’t currently a goal of mine, I thought some of Cathy’s advice about memoir writing might translate well to the newsletter work I do, and I was right.

Her tone is encouraging and pleasant, with a sprinkling of humor. Here are some of the most memorable specific nuggets I took away:

• Visiting significant locations and buying presents for your younger self are some helpful and fun ways to unlock memories and get in the mindset of past you.
• The most challenging part of writing is just doing it, so don’t be too hard on yourself when you’re writing a first draft. You can and will polish it later.
• You don’t need to include every detail. Focus on what is necessary to the story you’re trying to tell and the point you want to make. (This one is so hard for me!)

And here’s a quote that really punched me in the face:

The danger is that we become bland in the pursuit of being all things to all readers, that we are miserly in what we give of ourselves if we are frightened of being judged.(168)

If you’re a writer in any capacity, I bet you’d also find something helpful in these pages!

Bright and Tender Dark by Joanna Pearson

dark mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No

3.5

This is a slowly-unfolding mystery set in 2019 about the murder of a college student back in the late nineties. I’d say I liked but didn’t love it.

Every chapter is written from a different character’s point of view, which illustrates just how many people are directly affected by an act of violence like this and how the impact trickles out into the community, sometimes across a span of years. But no one’s perspective is repeated in the novel, meaning that many of the side character arcs don’t see closure, and interesting tidbits that come up in one section are simply left hanging at the end.

Someone in my book club mentioned hearing that this novel started as a short story collection, which tracks with my reading experience. In my ideal version, I would have preferred maybe four or five character’s voices; that way we’d still get the kaleidoscopic, communal feeling, but there would be more space to fully tie together all of the different narratives.

What I loved most about this book was the setting: Chapel Hill, North Carolina! Just down the road from my hometown (Durham) and a place with which I am intimately familiar. As someone who sometimes has trouble visualizing the worlds of the novels I read, I was delighted to have a mental map already drawn up in my head. I felt a thrill of recognition at each local landmark mention, especially Carrburritos, Cosmic Cantina (whose Durham location makes my all-time favorite burrito), and Pepper’s Pizza (an iconic spot that my boyfriend used to take me to circa 2004 and that sadly closed in 2011).

There’s even a UNC classroom scene where a snobby student speaks up, the narrator mentioning that he went to Durham Academy (a private local high school), and oh my gosh that shorthand was just for me. I knew some DA kids in my day, and almost all of them were just so… eye roll. Is this how New Yorkers feel reading the billions of books that are set in their city?? The familiarity! The nostalgia! What a delight.

Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi

dark slow-paced

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

4.0

This book takes place in the seedy underbelly of a fictionalized Nigerian city, and it is good, but it is dark. The story begins with a breakup: giving up on the hope that he will ever agree to marry her, Aima is finally leaving Kalu. But when she stays in the city instead of boarding a plane as planned, everything starts to unravel—the choices she and Kalu make over the course of one evening ripple outward to involve multiple other characters, and ultimately spiral into a complicated maelstrom of misunderstanding, intoxication, desire, violence, and death.

Little Rot is a continually escalating series of bad decisions and consequent problems. Just when I thought shit couldn’t get worse, it absolutely did—like oh, you thought you were doing something helpful? Turns out you’ve embarrassed and angered one of the richest and most powerful men in the city, and now there’s a hit out on you. I won’t give specific spoilers, but yeah. That type of thing. On the plus side, I emerged feeling a bit better about my own life? I might not have it all figured out, but thank god I don’t have to dispose of a dead body today!!

I wouldn’t recommend this novel if you’re already in a cynical, dark, dangerous headspace (I will personally need a literary palate cleanser to recover from this reading experience), but if you don’t mind descending into a sinister and twisted world for a while, you will likely enjoy it. I’ve followed Akwaeke Emezi for several years now—their debut novel, Freshwater, completely knocked me down and I’ve been thinking about it ever since reading it in 2020. I will continue to pick up anything they write!

McSweeney's Issue 70 by James Yeh, Dave Eggers, Claire Boyle

4.0

One of my favorite stories in this collection was “Serranos” by Francisco González, about the residents of a trailer park called Ranch View Mobile Estates and some new people, the Serranos, who move in and mix things up in the community.

There is also a collection of photos, “Please Forgive Me Pele” by Ryan Thompson, that features containers of sand and volcanic rock that visitors have taken from Hawaii and then later sent back, claiming in their accompanying letters that they’ve experienced bad luck over the intervening months or years, and apologizing to the goddess Pele.

Here’s the single quote I wrote down from this issue, an unexpected gut punch from “Conspirators’ Notes” by Edward Gauvin:

In my thirties, I realized a large part of my life had been devoted to engineering, then eschewing, environments where I could be thought of as intelligent, which was the only way I could imagine being loved. I wanted people who loved me to admire me, and I thought people who admired me loved me. (153)