everie's reviews
59 reviews

Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky

adventurous dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

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

4.25

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

dark informative tense medium-paced

4.75

Horrifying! Incredible work really digging into the lives of the women murdered by Radium Dial. Moore truly pays close attention to their depictions, and I think this allows the reader to feel so much closer to the long-deceased Radium Girls who had to fight for decades for any kind of justice

Also wow I still have way too much faith in corporate types bc I really thought "aha, now that they know the cancer-causing, bone-eating Radium is radioactive SURELY they will switch to something else" and :) no they sure didn't :))) Eat the entire board room 1s2g0

In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch by John Zada

4.0

Gorgeous descriptions of the area and history

Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

4.75

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

3.75

The Husky & His White Cat Shizun: Erha He Ta De Bai Mao Shizun (Novel) Vol. 4 by Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou

4.0

Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

3.0

Not bad, a pretty good

sci fi?

thriller. The narrator has a fairly strong voice. I think the world it created couldn't carry it through to the very end, but interesting 

Everything with her parents and piano school was tough to read (complimentary). The climax of that section (

the narrator feeling shame for using her stipend to fit in with privileged rich jerks -> her parents' accident and later deaths :( )

hit harder emotionally than the actual ending, though her

friends' deaths were also awful and awfully effective.

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong

challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative sad tense medium-paced

4.75

Fantastic collection of writers reflecting on a world barely ever designed with disabled people in mind. Important subject matter, but also just for writing quality, this was almost all hits! Interested to read others in the series, incredible work

A ton to think about. I listened on audiobook and have a collection of standout essays, but I think I should reread in print form for sure

The Husky & His White Cat Shizun: Erha He Ta De Bai Mao Shizun (Novel) Vol. 5 by Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou

4.0

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

emotional funny mysterious reflective relaxing sad slow-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? It's complicated

5.0

Lovely vignettes of an island in summer where not much seems to happen on the surface, but an entire emotional iceberg is lurking beneath

The characters were so charming, especially Sophia and Grandmother, who are both set in their ways in some regards and open and curious about the world and each other in others. 

The swing from morbid to comical to morbidly funny feels so real, especially in the context the book takes place in. Sophia's anxieties about jesus and heaven and hell, oof :( it's tough enough navigating grief as an adult, to be six and reckoning must be excruciating.

Overall, fantastic and a great long book club discussion was had from this little volume!