heelturn2's reviews
84 reviews

Tomboyland: Essays by Melissa Faliveno

emotional hopeful informative reflective slow-paced

2.0

at its worst when trying very hard to be annie dillard. at its best when journalism adjacent. i felt like most of these essays just… weren’t new ideas and had little to say. eh.

Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst

emotional funny lighthearted reflective tense slow-paced

3.75

fun & messy. love a workaholic self-perceived girlfailure femme dyke blowing up her shit in a series of small, painful decisions. But also that’s kind of every character! everyone & their relationships all felt very real & solid - stuck in these habits that aren’t serving them very well, trying to make shit work. ig Mickey gets a chance to change her life in a way the other characters don’t when she gets laid off from her shitty job - but ofc it comes with all this very real shame and resentment and baggage, so the changes get kind of unhinged instead of clearheaded. interesting stuff here about family and home and comfort too… how those things often don’t come easily or without conflict and work. like a “growing pains” kind of story without being coming of agey bc everyone is thirtyish. I liked this!

The Future by Catherine Leroux

dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

3.25

I enjoyed the self sufficient child forest commune & the general vibe of lawlessness/anarchy balanced by community care & understated magic (?); the characters fell a little flat for me and to be 100% real I do not know anything about the colonial history of Detroit so the alt history aspect was very much lost on me! love the foundational concept “what if Quebec was really long” though

Severance by Ling Ma

adventurous dark emotional funny mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

4.75

my partner hated this book and couldn’t finish it but I think that’s because they need to quit their office job really badly lol. 

cool spin on the zombie genre! I enjoyed the ambiguity around how exactly the illness spread & people became infected - & because of that, the constant tension you feel when the narrator starts reminiscing and describing her past and routines. really interesting exploration of a person who is totally uprooted and lost and unmoored from history/place/family. the end of the world already kind of happened for her. what does that mean for this kid? 

I might be getting a little sick of the culty survivor group trope within zombie fiction, which this book uses, but it was effectively tense and the characters were interesting so I’ll allow it… genuinely felt nauseous with anxiety while reading the mall sections!!

I liked this a lot!

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

3.5

devastating and weird. at times really hard to read and then suddenly you get these little moments of humanity and care and community that let you keep going. little tiny interactions are written with detail and care that I really loved. very beautiful and very dark. dystopic parts took me by surprise because when some of them first came up I earnestly thought it was just another real evil part of the incarceration system I hadn’t heard of before, until I realized details outpaced current real world tech. very short and hits very hard. 

might have to revisit a few parts again before returning this to the library - the writing is sometimes very quick and abstracted, & coupled with the fantastical powers doing unexpected things I could sometimes lose the thread of what was happening too easily. 

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
Did not finish book. Stopped at 1%.

the library was so mad at me for having this book still so I will return to it another time lol

Denison Avenue by Christina Wong

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

4.75

a very beautiful story about grieving people, places, community, “the way things were,” etc, that manages to not fall into irritating nostalgia (while still being nostalgic/dealing in nostalgia). very loving of Chinatown/Kensington & feels really actually rooted there. does this book track for people who haven’t lived in Toronto, & spent time in this area? it put such a lump in my throat so many times, both for the character’s story & the mention of so many places I recognized & know are gone now. the illustrations/comic section is lovely & a cool addition. also I like when a novel is written by a playwright and you can tell because they’ve somehow worked diagetic sound effects into the text, lol. 

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

4.5

weird and totally fascinating… alt history southern us fascist secession as the setup for alt history of contemporary (US) art. there are so many layers here, to the world & the characters. idk if I’ve read something like this before - really engrossing and dark and also imo very funny in a very understated way! like

“Brian Eno transitioned in this timeline”

is both very cool and extremely funny to me as a throwaway detail, as is

David Bowie calling out X for saying fascist sympathizer shit he said irl

… soo many implications to consider too - like

I’m literally just realizing that AIDS is never mentioned, & likely wasn’t a public health crisis at all in this world because of the drastic differences in politics happening here…!

really compelling characters; they are unknowable and mysterious in interesting real ways, they do things that make you wonder “why?” while feeling coherent & consistent. the (fictional & real) art discussed is actually interesting, & X feels like exactly the sort of artist you might have a complicated personal relationship with the work of. C is a good narrator - likeable but flawed, comes up short in ways you think about… and that you’re sure she’d think about too. I related to her kind of painfully at times tbh, yikes!!! she (& the author, in different ways) withhold answers very satisfyingly. slated for a reread sometime in the future & I’d love to read Catherine Lacey’s other stuff.

Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show by Suehiro Maruo

adventurous dark mysterious tense

4.5

bonkers horny weirdo horror comic. beautiful gross scary art. read illicitly as a child and was soo darkly obsessed lol. glad to have revisited!!

The One-Trick Rip-Off by Paul Pope

adventurous dark tense fast-paced

3.0

good old fashioned pulpy early aughts indie crime sci fi comix. art really reminded me of Brian Lee O’Malley at times - very manga inspired while maintaining its own western comics style. fun vibe but nothing to really write home about