heelturn2's reviews
84 reviews

Stone Fruit by Lee Lai

emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

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

4.0

beautiful art. love to read about Lesbians With Problems.

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 by Francine Prose
Did not finish book. Stopped at 46%.

echhhh. this book was making me cranky so I stopped reading itZ very slow. all of the narrators speak and write almost exactly alike. there are like 4 or 5 of them. none are particularly likeable.

setting is unfortunately flat as well. interwar europe was like such a fascinating lively time and place but this falls flat - most of the characters are artists (or friends/muses/patrons of artists) living and working in paris c. 1920, but you don’t really get an evocative sense of the city and the scene and the philosophy and the politics that should be surrounding them… the characters are strangely uninfluenced by the world around them, except for the central non-narrator character, who seems to have little agency as she’s unwittingly moulded into a nazi collaborator. instead you get these sniffy little references that are immediately explained because the author doesn’t trust her reader to know what she’s talking about. there’s a bit where a character, writing in a private diary entry, references “madchen in uniform” when describing the appearance of someone… and then immediately explains that it’s “a lesbian movie very popular right now” …!!!! why would she explain this to her own diary? why should the author explain an iconic film to her readers??? the whole book is written like this. I found this eventually made it sort of unreadable.

this book is too mired in liberalism to really reckon with the question at its core - why are people drawn into fascism? the central character, Lou Villars (based on real life evil gnc lesbian athlete Violette Morris) doesn’t do much deliberately to become a fascist. she’s framed as a victim of circumstance. her upbringing and the few opportunities she has to do what she loves and follow her passions just *happen* to land her in the path of nationalists, antisemites, and xenophobes who profoundly influence her worldview. this seems very at odds with the portrayal of Lou as a person with a strong innate personality that goes against social expectations. does she have autonomy or not, yknow??? maybe the book gets into this later but it really didn’t feel like the author was equipped to deal with the fact that someone might *choose* fascism (rather than simply be led astray), let alone *why* they would do that. 

also. I don’t want to get into it but generally the way queer people are handled in this book feels so weird. like at best I’ll chalk it up to a straight ally author simply not understanding the vibes. at worst it’s like quirky homophobia. I don’t care to explain! iykyk

anyways go read about Violette Morris instead if you need a morally corrupt lesbian fix. the real person is far more interesting than the character in this book (Morris was older at the time of WWII - she had already driven ambulances in WWI and then had an amateur sports career before aiding the Vichy regime) and can probably offer you more insight into how fascism takes hold of those you wouldn’t expect it to. 

Heaven No Hell by Michael DeForge

emotional funny hopeful lighthearted reflective fast-paced

5.0

deforge is a cartoonist who really uses the medium. visuals are always beautiful and strange, the writing is like a perfect mix of absurdity, accurate observation, terrible sadness, & utopian hope perhaps on the same level as ursula k leguin. his panels have a really excellent sense of rhythm to them. “album” is my favourite comic in this collection. I will probably always have a soft spot in my heart for stories that handle grief/death like this… 

The Hard Tomorrow by Eleanor Davis

dark emotional funny hopeful reflective tense fast-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

3.75

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor

adventurous emotional funny hopeful lighthearted mysterious reflective slow-paced

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

5.0

for like 2 months I recommended this book to everyone I know lmao. captures messy 22 year old queer life in a way utterly familiar to me while taking place ~a generation before I was that age. iykyk. very funny, hot, balanced with a lot of hardness and sweetness. one of those books that makes you go ”goddd I hate queer people” (lovingly! connection through exasperation!) as much as it makes you grateful to be queer. I hadn’t realized Paul is kind of a divisive main character - for what it’s worth, I loved him.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

adventurous challenging dark funny mysterious reflective sad 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

5.0

insane read. hallucinogenic & devastating. best fantasy I’ve read in ages

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

read this in a day while I was supposed to be prepping for a party, felt seen (currently recovering from twitter brain), wept & laughed openly, kept trying to read excepts to my Not Chronically Online loved ones who did not care but I thought they should care because this book was so good

Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn

challenging emotional funny hopeful mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

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

4.0

weird lovely little book 
about objects in rooms and love and work and personhood and wanting to put things in your mouth
captures homesickness and grief for a place well
looking up the art installation it was written as a part of was very cool. I’d like to read more strange collaborative art literature

The Children of Men by P.D. James

dark mysterious reflective 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

3.25

among other things, a good character study of privileged liberal ambivalence in the face of fascism 😜