heelturn2's reviews
84 reviews

The Bone Mother by David Demchuk

dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

4.25

Every story is like the kind your oldest relatives tell you nonchalantly: “that’s just how things were then,” that makes you go, oh my god, how are you alive, how did you keep going?

Very beautiful, scary, weird. Delightfully freakily queer. Like finding a more ancient more fucked up version of a familiar fairytale. 

No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating by Alicia Kennedy

hopeful informative

2.5

picked this up because I’ve followed Alicia Kennedy’s food writing for a couple years and really enjoy her short form essays & journalism. I’m what she describes in this book as a “conscientious omnivore” but have been vegetarian & cook & eat most meals in my week without meat. I worked in a vegan restaurant for close to 3 years but I’ve never really understood veganism beyond its role in the lives of people close to me as an eating disorder enabler. That said, I’m sympathetic towards anyone else operating with the goal of reducing the environmental impact of our diets (as a meat eater something I care a lot about and build my diet around!) and very curious about the cultural history of veganism!

Unfortunately I didn’t like this book! I’m always saying this about every nonfiction book but I really really mean it here: it needed a much better edit than it got. there’s so much less flow and clarity here than Kennedy usually has in her writing; so many sentences or whole paragraphs are clunky, with weird syntax and awkward quotes. Chapters lead with anecdotes that are never really connected back to the main topic. Major issues are brought up and then quickly dismissed (my qualms about restrictive eating and the wellness industry’s overlap with veganism get kind of given lip service in chapter 7, about raw veganism, but aren’t really addressed beyond a few sentences that are like “yeah we definitely see thinness as culturally important & healthy - and that’s not great!”). Despite Kennedy’s opposition to the commercialization and depoliticization of vegan food, sections of the book read like just a list of vegan/plant-based companies, brands, restaurants, and pro-chefs.

Weird things are taken for granted as already known by the reader (I was like “what the fuck is rejuvelac” for 2 chapters before it’s explained) but so much of the book also feels like re-treading 101 territory for people interested in food justice and sustainability that I’m actually not sure who the intended audience is. It doesn’t seem to be vegans… there’s a slight defensiveness that seems geared toward omnivores or highly skeptical vegetarians, but it’s certainly not written with the goal of changing anyone’s mind about their diet either. idk not that a book about veganism has to proselytize either… I guess the unstated goal here seems to have been to change the (potentially non-vegan) reader’s opinion on what veganism is - ie. it is political, the food can taste good, many people and movements have contributed to the development of a vegan cuisine. It just feels a bit disorganized in its approach sadly.

There are some interesting bits in this book! Like the first soy dairy business being a Chinese anarchist scientist in Paris was fascinating and I could have read way more about that! The sections on commune cooking and cookbooks were great but don’t super address how these communes settled on veganism in the first place. I would have loved more information about non-western veganism, and more just straight up stats and numbers and sciencey facts, especially in the “Wheatgrass and Wellness” chapter re: claims of the health benefits of veganism and raw diets (not made by Kennedy necessarily, but by the figures she is writing about). 

Anyways dang. I wanted this to be really good but found it a little bit of a slog and felt disappointed. I hope forthcoming books get a better editing treatment and the benefit of more experience and knowledge.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez

lighthearted reflective slow-paced

3.0

honestly i wish the old guy was more of a pervert

this was my gabriel garcía márquez introduction lol perhaps i will try one of the better known books next time. the writing was nice! 

Babel by R.F. Kuang

adventurous dark emotional tense 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? Yes

4.5

Ooh I liked this a lot, very close to 5 stars for me

Big interesting alt history light magic world with lots of things going on - I wish we’d seen more of it, but I think the choice to follow characters who are kind of isolated and insulated from everything Happening is interesting. Love this time period, so much to think about. We got some but I wanted even more direct refs to real historical events going down.

Enjoyed the more political intrigue/organizing/coalition building/siege-y aspects of the end, I was so pleasantly surprised to see sabotage and general strikes laid out as the most effective tactics in opposing empire! Like… hell yeah… I am always saying this etc but you don’t get to read solid spec fic that is also saying this very often y’know?

My only gripes were with pacing - sometimes very slow, lots of studying and buying bread which I don’t hate and is kind of par for the course with a campus novel but dragged at times, and eventually felt a little out of sync with the last 100-150 pages which move at a much faster pace with lots more moving parts - and then also characterization being like. maybe a little weaker than I had hoped! I wish secondary characters had been developed a little more, I wish Victoire had gotten a bit more spotlight earlier on, and I feel like the way Letty is described by her friends vs. the way she appears to speak and act in the actual text of the book are a little out of sync (she’s described as being kind of blunt and ruthless but half her scenes are her crying or coming off just kind of tactless and naive, which is fine but hard to square with the way her friends seem to see her). 

Would love a (totally unnecessary) followup with a

tortured evil Victoire/Letty rivalry and more global Hermes action

but also I think that would probably be difficult to write and cheapen the ending.

Out There Screaming by Jordan Peele, John Joseph Adams
Did not finish book. Stopped at 5%.

Forced to return to the library after admitting to myself that things were too busy and too dire in my life to get through my overdue book stack :•(

We Meant Well by Erum Shazia Hasan
Did not finish book. Stopped at 70%.

Boring and not well written i’m afraid. UN international policy left-liberal pilled…

Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados

adventurous funny lighthearted reflective medium-paced

4.0

love a party girl! earnest, funny, another extremely solid entry in the genre of “books about being extremely 21 years old”

Gone to the Wolves by John Wray

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

3.25

I don’t know anything about metal; my mom was born in the same year as the protagonist of this book, but she was a punk/new wave kid and metal was smalltown bigoted jock music to her, so despite having pretty expansive music taste in the house as a kid, and a willingness to explore/experiment musically imparted to me, metal is not a genre I’m familiar with and (this is sincerely embarrassing but it DID prime me to feel sympathetic twd metalheads) most of what I know about it, like, anthropologically, is from Mountain Goats songs and John Darnielle books (jesus christ) ????

anyways. metal is obviously integral to the plot & vibe & themes of this story. lots of band namedrops, nerdy teens arguing about guitar specs, shows as places where major plot points occur,

varg vikernes shows up in a basement to be an evil loser for like 40 pages

etc. but it’s also a story you could tell (with differing details) about any weird little freak subcultures. what draws people to the culture? where do the tensions between sub factions lie? what are the internal contradictions - for ex, a music scene where everyone wears weird makeup and glitter and tight pants and is intensely, violently homophobic - ? how is it boring? who’s taking it way too fucking far? I enjoy this kind of story. I like the specifics of time and place and being like “oh my god this character is that fucking guy” or whatever. the lack of metal background didn’t detract for me. 

I liked the central trio. I like reading about incestuous conflict-ridden found families more than ones where everything is idyllic and sweet. I hate to say this but I felt like Leslie and Kira fell the tiniest bit flat!!! maybe it’s because we spend so much time in Kip’s head and get more of what he’s actually thinking & feeling, while Kira and Leslie are much more mysterious to the reader (& Kip)… but I felt like I needed a little more from them. maybe harder hitting critiques of Kip and one another from these two??? I’m not sure.

also I kind of think Kip and Leslie shouldve fucked too or something.

not in a fanfic way but like,

in some way that they regret and both diffuses and adds to the awkwardness and fighting.

I don’t think I like Kira as a hinge here, for half assed feminist media analysis reasons… it’s giving manic pixie dream girl but successfully averted because she kind of sucks.

again, really interesting to have her be such a possibly morally compromised character wrt her affiliation with white supremacy multiple times! but I wanted a little more exploration of this!!! she is totally comfortable around violence and assertion of oppressive power… that’s compelling, but not really shown to be as scary as it really could be…

I hope Leslie makes friends with some other black people at some point. I know that’s kind of the point - that he’s the lone black guy most of the time in this scene, that he’s in this weird position with his older white adoptive parents - but it’s a little brutal that we don’t see much of his thoughts on the matter. also some not so low-key

fatphobia

happening in the latter part of his arc unfortunately. idk man. I think Leslie and Kira are (for the most part) successfully written, interesting, flawed characters whose social positions are partially but not fully or satisfyingly explored here.

enjoyed & related to the way Kip’s anger issues were written and explored - always nice to see one’s heavy & shameful flaws appear not unsympathetically, fr. enjoyed the decision not to go into great expository detail about Kip and Kira’s traumatic childhoods. enjoyed the weird shift of the story from one thing to another in the back third of the book - clunky but fun and tense. 

overall, solid, some small and big flaws but had fun reading this and would probably check out John Wray’s other stuff. 

Curses by Kevin Huizenga

adventurous emotional funny lighthearted mysterious reflective medium-paced

4.0

love the weird dreamlike fantasy/unreality of these stories - it helps that i’d read some of them years & years ago and they had that half-remembered quality to them. genuinely love a series of stories where there’s no real continuity but characters are kind of the same and kind of totally different people from one story to the next. beautiful classic aughts alt cartooning… hell yeah

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

3.75

beautiful and also nauseatingly upsetting and unflinchingly violent. what are your options for the future as a queer child in a harsh place? what does care look like in a community that hurts its members just as much as it looks out for them? to all the gentle sons of glasgow. oof. 

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Hate crime, Pedophilia, Sexual violence