literarysara's reviews
45 reviews

Lone Women by Victor LaValle

adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

 I was attracted to the book’s premise of exploring the lives of women who homesteaded in the American West without men. It is a Victor LaValle story, though, so you know some spooky shit is going to go down. I didn’t love this story as much as I’ve loved some others of his–even Big Machine, as weird as it is, felt a bit more adult and nuanced–but it is nonetheless a cracking good story and a fast read with some delicious atmospheric spookiness built into the already-haunted lands of Montana at the turn of the 20th century. 

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

dark mysterious tense

5.0

I stayed up too late reading this doorstop of a murder mystery during the busy week before Christmas, but I couldn’t put it down. I appreciated every thread of this tangled web: Bodie’s good and bad memories of her time at boarding school, the doubled vision you get when you return to the formative places of your adolescence or reconnect with old classmates, still seeing their youthful beauty and energy within whatever changes time has wrought, the constant noise and threat of violence against women on the news, on true crime podcasts, everywhere. A riveting read and satisfying in some unexpected ways even though hardly anyone gets justice. 

Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels

challenging reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

I saw the author speak on a panel about AI and writing, arguing that writers should be able to use any tools they see fit to bring their creative work to life. But I didn’t get particularly curious about the book until I learned that he trained a large language model on the poetry of Marianne Moore to produce the lyrical stylings of Charlotte, a fictional generative AI platform. In this book, aging poet Marian Ffarmer is hired by a major tech company to collaborate with Charlotte on a long poem. Ffarmer’s character is inspired by more than Moore’s poetry: Like Moore, Ffarmer is an amiable recluse in a codependent relationship with her mother, an odd duck who is known as much for her cape and tricorne hat as for her poems. I’m no Moore scholar, but I worked in a museum that houses her faithfully reconstructed study, and it was both enjoyable and unsettling to see flashes of Moore’s familiar-to-me history made unfamiliar in the character of Ffarmer–perhaps similar to the way it can be enjoyable and unsettling to see an AI program write poetry in real time.
I thought the novel would be gimmicky. It is actually lovely, with Ffarmer’s late-life whims and worries rendered with dignity and humor, and all the questions raised by her AI co-poet/co-pilot treated seriously and thoughtfully. They are, this book demonstrates, the same questions raised about poetry even without AI: what is the work of poetry? what is it for? who is it for? why do we read it, or don’t we? why are some poets elevated by fame while others are forgotten? when we are driven to create art, what do we owe our art and what do we owe to others? I may regret it, but I think this book leapt onto this year’s list of Books I Love. 

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

dark funny mysterious fast-paced

5.0

I inhaled this deeply weird, bleak yet somehow lush and gothic novel. Harried along by the kind of voicy, bossy narrator that I adore when it is done well (and I think, in this case, it is!), the titular Abernathy finds himself attempting to pay off insurmountable debt by indenturing himself to an agency that cleans up dreams. The why and how of this dream industry is not that important, even when its unsurprisingly evil capitalist heart is revealed. What makes this book so readable and gloriously ambitious is its voice, which regards its hapless characters with an unflinching yet humane eye. When Jonathan Abernathy falls into doomed love, when he attempts to befriend an unfriendly coworker, when he lashes out in ways that harm others, it’s easy to pity him–but difficult to feel that we would behave differently or better under the same impossible circumstances. 

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

adventurous mysterious tense medium-paced

5.0

 While I was devouring this book and trying to explain it to friends, my short pitch was pregnant women solving a murder in space. This is a gross oversimplification. For one, not everyone pregnant on this spaceship is a woman, and not everyone solving the murder is pregnant–but most of space crew are, because one of the prerequisites of this desperate interstellar journey is a womb and the potential to grow the population once a new planet has been settled. This book interweaves a locked room murder mystery with the story of how and why these womb-bearing space travelers were trained and sent into space; both stories are riveting, and there are no loose ends, even the speculative elements that I thought were just aesthetic inclusions. 

Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest To Hunt Down The Last Remaining Lesbian Bars In America by Krista Burton

funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted medium-paced

5.0

This book was my treat and comic relief after a couple of heavy reads. I cannot believe there are only 20 remaining lesbian bars in the entire US of A, but here they are, catalogued in one of the only travelogues I will ever read willingly and joyfully. So it is a bittersweet book, in some ways–I still miss Sisters, the legendary lesbian bar in Philadelphia that closed quite a few years ago, and I had no idea that the Madison Flame in Memphis had shut its doors. The author asks patrons and bar owners in every city she visits why they think so many lesbian bars are closing. There are a few prevailing theories, no clear answers–and, slight spoiler, by the end of her journey the author realizes that new lesbian bars are opening, so the institution (such as it is) is not yet in danger of extinction. In the meantime, those currently standing got a loving, attentive tribute in this book, complete with a dash of local color, a snapshot of post-vax music and fashion, some charmingly self-deprecating fish-out-of-water scenes, and a lot of lovely paeans to the ways lesbian bars can help everyone feel at home. 

Blue Skies by T.C. Boyle

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I don’t typically read two climate fiction titles back to back–I need a break, usually–and you all know I don’t prioritize reading male authors. But I encountered a gorgeous, wrenching short story by Boyle last spring (“Chicxulub”) and was interested in how he would make narrative sense of the climate crisis. Like the short story, this novel focuses on the details of the lives of one particular family; the chapters are alternately narrated by a lonely, self-absorbed young woman, her entomologist brother, and their well-meaning but deeply bourgeois mother. Their story begins sometime around now or in a not-too-distant future, and encompasses a decade or more of marriages, births, deaths, loss of limbs, terrifying wildfires, and demolishing floods. Like the short story I loved, there’s a great deal of beauty in the novel’s closely observed human behavior as well as its gorgeous, occasionally astonishing prose. I think I may need to reread this book just for its vocabulary of natural disasters, which never once borrows a well-worn turn of phrase–the wind never howls, the fires never rage–instead finding utterly distinct and terrifying new language for increasingly frequent and deadly events. I also appreciate that the crises that befall this family are about half due to the climate, half due to their own human mistakes, although one is frequently tied to the other. Much to admire… and yet, this book is hard to love, with its short-sighted and frequently selfish narrators. The character Catherine in particular feels conceived to punish a certain type of young woman, which left a tinny taste in my mind. 

The Guest by Emma Cline

dark funny sad fast-paced

 I drank this book down in a day–partly because it was a deceptively easy read, drifting effortlessly from one word to the next the way its protagonist drifts from house to house, skating over unpleasantness in a painkiller haze. Partly because she is constantly skirting dangerous situations during her tense week of homelessness after being ejected from her lover’s home, waiting for the Labor Day party where she is certain she will reunite with him. This book made me think of the TV series Revenge–a soapy, suspenseful show which both rebukes and luxuriates in the trappings of wealth–and the movie Hustlers, albeit without the humor of the latter. You want the interloper to win. 

Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell

adventurous hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

 A slim, lovely book that I picked from the Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction shortlist; it has since been awarded the prize! It is a collection of interrelated stories with a few different narrators, a format which I somewhat struggle with–it reminded me of Semiosis in that way, where the changing narrators were necessary to follow a multigenerational story of a community, but in each chapter you have to get your bearings all over again. The story begins a few decades in our future, as a university library on the Canadian west coast is dismantled in the face of constant rain and floats. Some of the books travel to an island community on the Salish Sea, and the rest of the chapters chart the survival of this community over several generations as they relearn permaculture and struggle to stave off wildfire and floods. Each story is grounded in the geographical and ecological specificity of this region, which offers some lifesaving opportunities but also isolates the island from other regions. (Eventually, we learn that other communities solved their local climate crises differently, with technological advancement rather than organic tools.) It is a melancholy book, as its characters tend to mourn a way of life they cannot return to and resent the amount of energy that must be sunk into survival. Yet it is also hopeful–more hopeful than The New Wilderness, which is also interested in the hardship of survival. Communities shrink but endure, impart communal values and ethics, take pains to preserve music and poetry when possible. 

The Male Gazed by Manuel Betancourt

emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0