justabean_reads's reviews
1278 reviews

Naniki by Oonya Kempadoo
Did not finish book. Stopped at 50%.

This is a beautiful book, a mix of poetry and prose, African and Caribbean languages, a pair of spirit beings travelling across the Caribbean in search of a way to save the world. For some reason, I just couldn't focus on it, possibly just the prose it too floaty and the plot felt so shapeless. I picked at it for two weeks, then gave up.

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

4.5

This won both the Women's Prize for fiction and the Carol Shields' Prize, and I can very much see why. It primarily deals with the early years of the civil war in Sri Lanka, and a Tamil family torn apart as some join the resistance movement, while others want to stay out of the fighting. The book takes the form of main character trying to reconstruct the story decades later, retelling her childhood through her years as a medical student in an effort to de-mythologise them.

The writing is incredibly powerful, and very beautiful, and Ganeshananthan clearly expresses the feeling of having no good choices, while everyone around you makes worse choices. I appreciated how she engaged with the conversations around international movement solidarity, and the sexism embedded in it, but didn't let the book feel like a history lesson. The focus on the narrator's journey and choices is always at the heart of it all. Towards the end, it references events covered in more detail in Sharon Bala's The Boat People, which takes place in the same conflict a generation later, so I felt a lot of resonance there.

I feel like there's a lot more to be said about this book, but I'm running out of review steam. It's good! 

Coexistence: Stories by Billy-Ray Belcourt

4.0

I very much appreciate the friend who told me this book marked a significant stylistic shift for Belcourt. I'd tried to read both one of his poetry books and his memoir, and come away with the feeling that I was at least a Masters in English Lit away from understanding what the heck he was talking about.

This is not that! It's a collection of linked short stories, and though the majority of the characters are gay Cree men in the arts, it doesn't have the same interpretability as his other books. Instead, Belcourt writes story after story about connection, and warmth, and moments of joy. "What do you call a handful of Crees? A laughter."

Which is not to say that Belcourt has turned away from his critical view of society and the systemic violence and injustice Indigenous people live with. Rather, it's about finding life despite all that, finding connection anyway, surviving and moving forward. The stories aren't sappy or fluffy, and some of them are sad, (and frankly there were a few too many navel-gazing men in the arts), but the depth of care and joy shines through the collection.

I'm sorry to have written Belcourt off, and very glad to read his work now. 

The Valkyries' Loom: The Archaeology of Cloth Production and Female Power in the North Atlantic by Michèle Hayeur Smith

3.5

I think the subtitle and blurb oversold the "Female Power" part of this, when the book is primarily about cloth production and cloth trade, with a sideline into the advantages of sheep wool over goat wool. The first chapter was probably the strongest in terms of discussing the homosocial world surrounding cloth production, and its cultural impact. After that, Hayeur Smith was very cautious about suppositions, and I don't feel like I came away knowing much more about women's roles other than as it pertained directly to spinning and weaving. There was some talk about Norse women in Greenland recycling clothes more, and experimenting with tighter weaves as the Little Ice Age set in, but that was the extent of the sociology. A lot of that discussion was also quite technical, and I think would've landed better with someone into fibre arts.

I'm making this all sound very dry, and to some extent it was (I may have skimmed some of the extended descriptions of artifact thread counts); however, I did like a lot of the conversation around archaeology. Hayeur Smith talks quite a bit about the challenges of dating cloth, especially when feeding the sheep seaweed apparently throws out all your dates, and also engages in some academic infighting with past theories about the history of Greenland settlements. These perhaps provide an explanation as to why the author's own speculation is so limited. We meet an archaeologist who decided because a hat reminded him of one found in 1550s Europe, it must have been traded with them, misdating the entire dig by several hundred years. Another person decided that because they'd found yarn in a bunch of Inuit sites that the Inuit must have traded extensively with the Norse in Greenland, because of course the Inuit didn't know how to spin (they did, actually).

Overall, interesting, but probably more so to yarn nerds. 

Where Sleeping Girls Lie by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

3.0

This was certainly very readable, and the characters were quite fun, and always nice to have a queer Muslim woman front and centre. I also liked how Àbíké-Íyímídé nailed the unfairness and horror of a school culture that ignores/enables sexism and sexual violence. It stuck the landing on being a Social Issue book that portrayed a problem without preaching to the reader.

However, the actual plot kind of lost me in the last act. I'm not especially sold on the narrative technique where a close third person point of view character is holding back key information from the reader. I guess the idea is a cool twist at the end, but it's the kind of plot device that works better on film. I don't mind bringing up details that the character is pointedly not thinking about (like what happened to her sister, here), but I'd actually like to know their primary motivation for everything they do sooner than three chapters from the end.

It's possible that YA boarding school mystery/thrillers aren't my genre. 

Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds by Yvonne Blomer
Did not finish book. Stopped at 46%.

Nothing specifically wrong with this book, but I was trying to read a couple poems a day, and never remembered do it, and now it has to go back to the library. I think I do better with poetry collections by a single author.

Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

4.0

This is exactly the book I'd have expected Tanya Tagaq to write, complete with throat singing if you get the audio version. Do I have any idea what happened in it? Not really, no, but it was a hell of a ride. I think it's a mix of modern retelling of stories from Inuit mythology, different retellings of those same traditional stories, scenes from the life of a teen girl in small-town Nunavut, and poetry, all intercut with the throat singing. The writing, like Tagaq's music, is incredibly beautiful. There are so many lines and turns of phrase I just wanted to polish and keep, but on the whole this book was A Lot. Content warnings for sexual violence, animal harm, and body horror, among other things. 

Democracy or Else: How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps by Tommy Vietor, Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett

4.0

Very fast read by the Crooked Media/Pod Save America gang, meant to be a humorous, low-stress intro to participating in politics in the United States (though a lot of it is broadly applicable to any modern democratic system). It does make getting involved in a campaign feel very approachable, and the jokes are good enough that my wife and I have been quoting them at each other. I follow Crooked Media, but I don't think you'd have to know them that well to get the humour. Nothing ground breaking, but it's a solid primer, and if you're gonna get involved well... I guess there's a reason they put it out in the summer of 2024. 

Len & Cub: A Queer History by Meredith J. Batt, Dusty Green

5.0

Photo-biography of a gay couple living in rural New Brunswick in the early 20th century, which is so far the only record of that kind of queer history in the province, and one of few in the country. One half of the couple was an amateur photographer, at the beginning of the era when middle-class people could afford easy-to-use portable cameras, and took hundreds of pictures of his daily life, including of him and his "friend" in their adventures across the county, and then serving in the army during WWI. On his death, his sister preserved the photographs, and they eventually made their way to the provincial archives, and then to this book.

Batt and Green's text largely tries to provide context for the many pictures they include, though other primary sources are scarce, and it's long enough ago that oral histories are also on thin ground. I thought they did a good job of bringing contemporary documents from other regions to explain the context and culture as well as might be done (and reminding me that I really need to read all of Jackson's One of the Boys). There's some speculation about the young men's emotional landscape, but everything's sourced so well that it feels grounded and reasonable.

Well done micro history, and a sweet story, even though it comes to a sad end. 

Cold by Drew Hayden Taylor

3.5

In present-day Toronto, an early-spring cold front sets in, and something is eating people (if you don't know what, you've read zero northern Indigenous horror in the last ten years), causing a disparate collection of strangers to come together and try to save the day. It's certainly a page turner, and I generally liked the characters, and appreciated that they were all low-level jerks, and I liked that the major Indigenous characters all came from slightly different histories and had different perspectives on the old stories. Taylor did a nice job of setting up the twists and turns so that they felt grounded, but not too predictable. There's some good humour moments, though not as many as I'd expect from Taylor, who I think of mostly as a comedy writer.

I did find the writing a bit clunky, and wish the book had gone through more editing. We got way to many descriptors, and many turns of phrase felt stale and repetitive. The project apparently started as a movie script, and still has its roots there as a very visual and action focused novel. As a book, it more or less worked for me, but would've maybe worked a bit better on screen. Fingers crossed for an adaptation.

Also, add another log on the fire of: "this is tagged as horror, and I have no idea what that means."