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geraldine's reviews
319 reviews
Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler
challenging
dark
informative
tense
medium-paced
next week's pick for my book club since they decided to stop doing winemom thrillers. i don't think i would have ever read this otherwise.
most frustrating part of the book was super early on, when someone quizzes her on how to put out a grease fire in a kitchen, she says "throw flour on it", and then congratulates herself for answering correctly. YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO THROW FLOUR ON A GREASE FIRE!!!! THE CLOUD OF FLOUR IN THE AIR CAN EXPLODE!!!!!!!!!! MISINFORMATION SPREADS AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
most frustrating part of the book was super early on, when someone quizzes her on how to put out a grease fire in a kitchen, she says "throw flour on it", and then congratulates herself for answering correctly. YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO THROW FLOUR ON A GREASE FIRE!!!! THE CLOUD OF FLOUR IN THE AIR CAN EXPLODE!!!!!!!!!! MISINFORMATION SPREADS AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Content Warnings
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Self harm, and Suicidal thoughts
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
adventurous
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
really enjoyed this one.
spent the vast majority of the book thinking that i really liked the parts about zelu and her life and thought they were really strong, but that the part about the future robots didn't seem to fit with the rest. i didn't think they were bad and i thought the story was interesting, but i just didn't find it believable that these would be the book that had taken the world by storm and made zelu a critical darling. i was at the very end and thinking, "yeah, i like this well enough, probably like a 3-3.5ish" and then i got to the very end.
really liked that both zelu story ended vague and also the final reveal!! it worked for me.
had finished the book last night and laid in my bed for a while thinking about it.... does ankara have like ao3 downloaded as part of her scholarly research or what. how does she know what fanfiction is. why did she write zelu looking up fanfiction about the fictional versions of herself and ijele. she is so so so so so funny
really liked that both zelu story ended vague and also the final reveal!! it worked for me.
Mickey7 by Edward Ashton
adventurous
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
solid sci-fi. nothing terribly groundbreaking but still enjoyable, and for modern sci-fi this is a somehow still a super high bar to clear
The Last One at the Wedding by Jason Rekulak
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
i had a hundred paragraphs written out and deleted them all because I don't think this book deserved them. his first book got flack for having a conservative bent, which I thought was one possible read but might not have been intentional, but having read this i do now think it was intentional. frank comes across as a loving but flawed father and brother, who is very set in his ways, and then is proved wholly right all along by the end. like???? you told a child with food insecurity to eat a chicken breast out of the dirt????? you get mad that a little girl who was homeless doesn't want to sleep in a room filled with spiders? everything about the way he treated that little girl felt like not what she needed at all, she needed someone like a trained social worker working with an actual foster parent who had experience with children living through food insecurity, not a hapless dad who yells at her and feels smug when she throws up. and then he gets to be her actual dad. really hated this. plus things like, seeing a gay couple kiss at a party as a signifier of debauchery.
for the record I don't think he's an unrealistic character, he felt very real, but the narrative praising him for being set in his ways felt extremely gross to me.
i will say however the horror offinding a nest of daddy longlegs was actually extremely effective and horrible. good sequence. insane sequence.
for the record I don't think he's an unrealistic character, he felt very real, but the narrative praising him for being set in his ways felt extremely gross to me.
i will say however the horror of
Verity by Colleen Hoover
dark
funny
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
just straight up nonsense. second book i read in a row where partway through the book i was just thinking GIRL ABORT THAT THING!!!!!!
non-ironically this book should have had more of the process of trying to read someone's book series and compile their notes and try to workout an outline for the final books in the series. the true horror would be verity pretending to be sick and then finding out what another author was trying to do to her characters. CAN YOU IMAGINE!!!!!!!
non-ironically this book should have had more of the process of trying to read someone's book series and compile their notes and try to workout an outline for the final books in the series. the true horror would be verity pretending to be sick and then finding out what another author was trying to do to her characters. CAN YOU IMAGINE!!!!!!!
Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
GIRL!!!!!!!!!!! ABORT THAT THING!!!!!!!!!
Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
2.0
really did not enjoy this one. a lot going on and it's hard to put my thoughts into words, but every single character's treatment of poppy, every single one, really rubbed me the wrong way.
that poor girl. that poor little girl. her ending really did not feel like a happy ending in any way, at all. she's been isolated her entire life and now she has her life yet again upended, being placed with people who have never known her and a woman who is clearly, explicitly, projecting the life of another person onto her. she's never gotten a chance to be her own person, and nothing in the ending of the book gives any indication that she ever will. she desperately needs intensive therapy. that poor girl.
gives me stuff to talk about at book club anyway. anyone want to talk about the dangers of homeschooling?
gives me stuff to talk about at book club anyway. anyone want to talk about the dangers of homeschooling?
Penance by Eliza Clark
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
picked this up because i read boy parts and liked the writing style well enough that i figured i would give her next book a go. and i liked her writing style here as well! i also liked this one better, for the record, even though it's a lot more complex. i do feel like i wanted to keep a little notebook with everyone's name and a basic summary because a few times i felt like i had forgotten who someone was, but this might just be a me problem. and by the end this was not an issue.
all other takes are spoilers from here-on out.
i hadn't remembered the synopsis when i checked out the library ebook, but the very beginning was promising to me, like the setup of the second release of a (fictional) true crime non-fiction book, i do like a commentary on true crime. and then imagine my surprise when i realized that it was not only this but specifically a commentary on serial killer fandom and RPF???????????????
i actually have a note in the kindle app on my phone (i read this on both physical kindle and phone app, for the record) from around the 57% mark when i realized she was drawing a direct parallel between what dolly was doing with her serial killer fanfiction and what alec was doing with his book. and for the record, i did think it worked.
my main complaint about this is the very end, that maybe she felt like she was being too subtle here? (she was not.) and then has that final interviewer sit down with alec and y'know... literally say out loud the thesis of the book. i feel like this was genuinely unnecessary! i don't think we needed that interview at all! i felt like the afterward up until that point, info from the editor explaining who was suing and why and who had complained etc, this was enough to get the point across. trust your readers to pick up on this even if you don't explicitly spell it out!
this also made me question one of the other things i thought i was picking up, like if she directly explained one of the things she was hinting at, does that mean that i was just reading into the other element i thought she was suggesting? or did she choose to leave that subtle and it was intended? because to me it also felt like alec was not only being voyeuristic and obsessing over the culprits here, but also that he is doing this to teenage girls, and there may be more to it than just this. he is a fifty year old man, obsessing about teenage girls.
he includes what heather says about dolly's father and the accusations that dolly refuted on the stand, and in his fanfiction moments he has other characters allude to the accusations being true, but then when heather explains what she saw, he defends dolly's father and directly compares himself to the father. with an example where he spends hours standing watching his daughter sleep. really wondered about this one for a while. perhaps i really am reading too much into it, but still.
that's all really. i thought she did a good job integrating like... i guess online and "fandom" concepts in a way that made sense for the story she was trying to tell. and not assuming that a random reader in a barnes & noble would automatically know what the term RPF meant.
anyway, vriska homestuck gets namedropped in this.
all other takes are spoilers from here-on out.
i actually have a note in the kindle app on my phone (i read this on both physical kindle and phone app, for the record) from around the 57% mark when i realized she was drawing a direct parallel between what dolly was doing with her serial killer fanfiction and what alec was doing with his book. and for the record, i did think it worked.
my main complaint about this is the very end, that maybe she felt like she was being too subtle here? (she was not.) and then has that final interviewer sit down with alec and y'know... literally say out loud the thesis of the book. i feel like this was genuinely unnecessary! i don't think we needed that interview at all! i felt like the afterward up until that point, info from the editor explaining who was suing and why and who had complained etc, this was enough to get the point across. trust your readers to pick up on this even if you don't explicitly spell it out!
this also made me question one of the other things i thought i was picking up, like if she directly explained one of the things she was hinting at, does that mean that i was just reading into the other element i thought she was suggesting? or did she choose to leave that subtle and it was intended? because to me it also felt like alec was not only being voyeuristic and obsessing over the culprits here, but also that he is doing this to teenage girls, and there may be more to it than just this. he is a fifty year old man, obsessing about teenage girls.
he includes what heather says about dolly's father and the accusations that dolly refuted on the stand, and in his fanfiction moments he has other characters allude to the accusations being true, but then when heather explains what she saw, he defends dolly's father and directly compares himself to the father. with an example where he spends hours standing watching his daughter sleep. really wondered about this one for a while. perhaps i really am reading too much into it, but still.
that's all really. i thought she did a good job integrating like... i guess online and "fandom" concepts in a way that made sense for the story she was trying to tell. and not assuming that a random reader in a barnes & noble would automatically know what the term RPF meant.
anyway, vriska homestuck gets namedropped in this.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Bullying, Emotional abuse, and Fire/Fire injury
Moderate: Child death, Death, Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, Mass/school shootings, Murder, and Toxic friendship
Minor: Drug use, Incest, Pedophilia, Sexual assault, and Alcohol
Pew by Catherine Lacey
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
i was at the halfway mark and struck by the thought that i really enjoyed the book so far, but that the ending would really be make or break. on the whole i really liked it. i really liked the slow reveal of the horror of the town and that it really was all just grounded in reality and not actually like human sacrifice as such, but the racism of the town and the heinous but realistic acts they committed. i thought it really worked
Mammoth by Eva Baltasar
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
didn't realize how short this was! i read the ebook, and I keep the percentage/location turned off when I read so when I got to the end I was very surprised that it was over.
I found the book very stressful to read overall!! this girl and her choices!!!! imagining the smell of the sheep..........