paigieodo's reviews
53 reviews

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

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emotional reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

the most beautiful prose i've ever read in my entire life. it's a 200 page long poem about loving even the things that should be impossible to love.

i hate grim books, books that are fixated on the ugliness of life. i just hate them, because that's never been how i see things. i don't think humans are selfish, that bodies are grotesque, that everyone is just waiting around for a chance to take advantage of you. i love my coke addict mother and and i love my drunk of a father and i love the disgusting mess my mom would feed me every dinner growing up with the scraps from the back of the cupboard because we were dirt poor. i love the people who have abused me, who have hurt me on purpose. i don't think there's anything ugly about being human. only things that hurt, things that shred us apart, things that make us feel too much in all the wrong ways. and all of it is beautiful.

joshua whitehead, through the character of jonny, encapsulates this better than any other author. rot and mess and mud and blood and cum and spit are beautiful because they're attached to the people we love, even the ones we love without really having a good reason to. whitehead has written the most wondrously human characters in this novel. i'm in love with them. i'll never forget them. god. i have a lot of feelings about this book and also nothing meaningful to say at all that will do it justice. i love it. i love every part of it.
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You Will Get Through This Night by Daniel Howell

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funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

3.0

Effective execution of a simple concept! I think for folks very early on in their mental health journey, this is a good starting place. It has a lot of easy-to-follow tips that seem common sense for some but can potentially be useful to those of us who have a hard time being reflective or getting out of the bubbles inside our heads. Where this book likely has the most appeal is amongst Daniel Howell's already-existing fans -- not because it the book doesn't work well enough standing on its own -- but because by far the most interesting and original parts are where Howell speaks about his own experiences, with his family, with social anxiety, with depression, and with being queer. The jokes are also much more endearing if you're already familiar with his sense of humour. The demographic most likely to benefit from this book is people who need to hear this kind of advice from a beloved idol or mentor like Dan himself.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo

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emotional informative sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 spans three and a half decades of Korean women's history through the vehicle of Jiyoung, first as a young girl, sister, and daughter, then as a young woman, student, and eventual wife and mother. Cho Nam-Joo blurs the lines between fiction and non-fiction in a fascinating way by citing real-world studies and journals that parallel the experiences in our fictional protagonist's life. The grounds all of Jiyoung's experiences in a way that makes them feel more pressing, more urgent. From start to finish, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 narrows in on the ways in which Jiyoung and all of the women in her life are subjugated for their womanhood. The short novel turns history into a story in a way that makes it so easy to connect to, while making it clear that nothing within these pages is truly fictive; everything that happens to Jiyoung is really happening to real Korean women.

Suffocating. Emotional. Bleak. Simple in a good way. Jiyoung's life is so average, so when her mental health declines, it is jarring, because it forces you to confront that womanhood itself, or rather, the socially-constructed requisites of womanhood, can be traumatic.
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Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green, David Levithan

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

3.0

Man. This book is kind of a mess. 3 stars because it was fun and cute and there were many parts that I thought were so wonderful. I did really enjoy a lot of it. But also 3 stars because all of the other parts were not very good at all. All of the characters are indistinguishable. I would not be able to tell you who said or thought what if it weren't for the dialogue tags. They all talk in The John Green Way, which also happens to be the exact way that David Levithan writes characters, believe it or not. It's cute. And sometimes very heart-warming. Other times just straight up not good at all in kind of an embarrassing way. Occasionally, it would say something very hopeful and honest about love and relationships (more so the parts written by Green over the parts written by Levithan, sorry David). The ending was just honest-to-god terrible. A fun romp though. I don't recommend but I don't not-recommend, either.
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One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

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adventurous emotional funny hopeful medium-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

4.25

A perfect book, by the way. I don't have much else to say. Perfect book. Changed my life. I want to have sex on a train now. I also want to live with my queer found family. Please let me fall gay-in-love with someone who wants me back. Please. Someone be my August. I promise I can make a great Jane.
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Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan

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hopeful fast-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? No

3.5

Holes by Louis Sachar

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious sad tense fast-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Holes is a beautiful, serendipitous adventure with simply the purest example of love and friendship I've seen in a while. For those of us who read Holes as a kid, it is so worth revisiting. Reading it is like finding small moments of magic hidden in seemingly grim places. This novel is both light-hearted and deeply reflective of the horrifying state of prisons and juvenile detention. I loved it more than I could've ever imagined loving it as an adult.
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Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective tense slow-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Never will you read a fictional novel that feels so honest as Homegoing. Never will you read a book so saturated and vibrant, even as it lays out bleak, grey histories. These stories, these family lines—they're made up. But they're real. Yaa Gyasi does not need to dramatize or embellish history to drive home a point about ancestral trauma or about systemic racism; The history tells the story, Gyasi simply uses her beautiful words as a vehicle. Her characters, all of whom are stunningly rich and full, almost feel tangible in the real world. They endure the mundane much more often than the extraordinary. Gyasi wants us to understand that suffering lies in the average and the simple as well as the audacious and the repugnant.  Her characters feel real to me. I feel like I know them, and like I will always remember them. This is both because Gyasi is fantastic at writing characters, and because the history she pulls them from is so rooted in truth. They feel real because they could be, and in many ways, are.

We all carry our families—the ones we know and the ones we don't—in ourselves.  We are all traumatized by their traumas, imbued with their loves and their fears, holding all of their good and their bad as well as the good and the bad that was done to them. Yaa Gyasi understands this better than any other author I've encountered.  Nothing speaks more to this than these words from the closing chapter:
"How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it—not apart from it, but inside of it."
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A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

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informative inspiring slow-paced

3.0

If read keeping the time period in mind, this essay provides a very valuable reflection of the perpetuity of the poverty of women. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness style makes for a less academic read and allows the reader to connect more to her ideas. More often than I anticipated, I found myself getting emotional at her observations. She makes statements about womanhood and quiet oppressions that are well-understood today, but in the essay's historical context, are revelatory. Even in the feminist political landscape of today, many of the issues Woolf discusses that condemn women (and by extension, other disenfranchised peoples) to poverty are not often challenged or explored; for example, the titular "room of one's own" refers to a woman's lack of privacy, lack of freedom, and lack of opportunity to escape the financial control of men. Anyone would struggle to create great works without these privileges, hence why women do not have a stronghold in many realms of society, including politics and art. Despite being published in 1928, it can, in this way, be understood as relevant to modern society — those who are vulnerable to financial codependence or relegated to service roles in society have little means to create. This does not mean they are less valuable, but simply that we do not provide them with the necessary space to forge things. Woolf's essay is worth a read by any critical eye. Note in tags: minor racism.
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Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.75

The reading sample for this book opens with a story from the author's life that made me flinch and stop reading. I'm not usually a fan of books that lay bare the grotesque and violent nature of the world with such grim language; I typically prefer gentler allusions to horrifying truths and then a more nuanced uncovering of their evils. But this year, I came across a handful of novels and stories that changed my mind slightly on this matter. Obasan by Joy Kogawa, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi — many novels I read this year allowed me to explore the grossness of humanity without losing perspective on how beautiful it is, as well.

So I pressed on with Tiny Beautiful Things.

And it was the right decision. Through Sugar, Cheryl Strayed offers the most honest and kind-hearted advice rooted in a deep love for her fellow humans. I consider myself to be very reflective, very intelligent, very aware of myself and how to operate as a good person in this world. I didn't think I would learn much from this collection. But I did. It filled me. It brought me the feeling that all of us, even those who feel sickeningly wrong so much of the time, will be okay if we try.

Strayed is unafraid to explore the awful and the absurd. But more than that, she is unafraid to try to find wonder and possibility in all of it. It is hopeful. It is terrifying. It is brimming with love. And it is absolutely worth reading, no matter who you are.
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