peeled_grape's reviews
143 reviews

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

4.0

This is such a rich novel. It's easy to read, and has a lot to follow. It does end a little quickly -- and the ending comes out of nowhere -- but it really is a pleasure to read. So many layers.

This was also one of the few books about domestic violence that did not make me want to tear my hair out. It was greatly oversimplified, and skipped over the hardest parts of this, and has the naivety of someone who has seen someone else go through this, but is mostly okay. I think the simple sort of fits for a novel like this, but it dropped the ages of who I thought this was for quite a bit. It does feel like the domestic violence story you'd tell kids or young teenagers just because it is simple.

Happiness by Aminatta Forna

2.0

The style of this reminds me a lot of Lindsey Drager and Matt Bell, but more whimsical. This gets two stars, which is a little unfair, but my justification is that it dragged in places and did not handle trauma the way it should have. It was dense and a little hard to get through. The reason it reminds me of Bell and Drager is in the way it dwells on tiny moments, seemingly insignificant, except there were sections that I thought had too much detail. The coincidences, too, never entirely seemed to justify themselves, and it seemed to dull the better parts of the book. Attila is supposed to be a trauma expert, too, but his comments were so naïve and stupid that I wanted to throw the book. I really don't think Forna knows anything about trauma, mostly because her comments were all about resilience and the human spirit and how pain is good for you. It wildly oversimplifies everything. So dumb. I was so frustrated. It's not bad, but it feels inauthentic and shallow.

To Live by Yu Hua

3.0

This is possibly one of the most readable books I've ever read. That being said, I didn't fall deeply in love with this book. It was good! It was really good! But my hot take is that the simplicity of this novel is, at some points, working to its detriment. Maybe it's not the simplicity -- One Hundred Years of Solitude had a certain simplicity, but it carried weight. Maybe it is the lack of interiority and bluntness. The point is that it gave very little room to feel, at times. There is so much tragedy in this novel and it never hit the way I imagined it would.

And also: I felt like we were supposed to like Fugui, but I don't feel like he learned anything from being a bad person? I mean, yes, there was the gambling, at the beginning. But what about his relationship with Youqing? That was horrible? And are we just supposed to overlook that? I don't think I'd call him a thoroughly terrible person, but he's definitely not a good one. I almost felt like his relationship with the ox was the only truly real one he had, and still, the connection between him and the ox is unmistakable.

Paradise Lost by John Milton

4.0

The first time I read this, I was religious; this last time I am far from it. My readings have changed drastically, which is so crazy to me because I am very convinced of my reading now. (I also think I am just a much better reader now, too.) I'm obsessed with the first two books of this, and I think I will inevitably end up with a Paradise Lost tattoo. You can't read it the way Milton intended it. It's so much more fun if you don't. I don't know how you come out of this feeling good about Christianity. It's like a self-roast of religion in places, and ironically, I think that if you've left any kind of Christianity and are bitter about it, I highly recommend at least the first two books and maybe up until Satan stops becoming a major character. Read it like Milton himself is an unreliable narrator. Also, Satan is by far the most interesting character. Just throwing that out there.

My favorite moment in this is in book 2, when the demons debate what to do after being cast down to hell, and Beelzebub wraps up the debate in Pandemonium: "Or these titles now / Must we renounce, and changing style be called / Princes of hell?"

The Protester Has Been Released by Janet Sarbanes

5.0

Honestly? Holy shit. Simple but profound is the best way to describe these stories; I came away from a lot of them like I had just read a novel I was intensely invested in even if the story was only 20 pages. These stories are all marked by environmentalism and disaster and the way art can sustain us in times of tragedy. My favorites were "Ars Longa," "The Protester Has Been Released," and, most of all, "The First Daughter Finds Her Way," which is subversive and strange and complex. I love collections like these because they remind me I can write whatever the hell I want however the hell I want to. I really loved this.

Felt in the Jaw by Kristen N. Arnett

4.0

This was lovely. It's a collection of problems that are present but never fully realized or identified, both in the characters or in readers (or both). I don't read a lot of realism -- I don't find that I'm a huge fan of people falling out of love/sort of out of love/falling out of love because of an inability to communicate, etc. -- and sure, some of those stories were like that, but I felt like they subverted the type just enough or had a good enough B-plot to stay interesting. I found some parts of this hard to get through. I will say I have never seen images so effortlessly disturbing in writing except for when I read Yoko Ogawa, so that was impressive. There's just a lot of touching moments, or horrifying ones, or moments where the tension was so perfect that I ended up really liking this.

My favorites were "Notice of a Fourth Location" and "The Locusts," mostly because of their gut-punch moments. "A Decline in Natural Numbers" was great at frustrating me with language on purpose, which was fantastic.

Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai

3.0

Silly, but fun and readable. It’s like a strange cross between One Hundred Years of Solitude and Catch 22 . Not super deep and profound, but serviceable. I feel like the ending was a little off and not quite relevant to the rest of the novel. I have a hard time pulling anything deeper out of this one.

One World Two: A Second Global Anthology of Short Stories by

2.0

"It was okay" is a good way to describe this. These are all perfectly adequate stories, but the ones I read all fall into clichés, and it is frustrating. I wasn't necessarily moved, touched, or inspired by anything, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were bad. "Serviceable" is another good word. Meh.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

4.0

This one was surprisingly hard to put down. The protagonist shows a kind of neurodiversity -- we're never told what, exactly -- who deals with adapting to other people's expectations of her. We get a close first-person perspective, so we get all of her thoughts, and the novel does a really great job of showing the logic Keiko walks herself through. This is the most interesting part of the novel: her logic, the way she acts in social situations, how she interacts with others. It reminds me so much of Stephen Florida except that it is more explicit about everything.

Tokyo by Michael Mejia

It is embarrassing how little of a grasp I had on this. I have no idea how to read it. The first fifty or so pages are perfectly accessible, and then the novel totally shifts. The genre and tone changed so suddenly I didn't know whether or not we were even in the same story, and then, by the time I realized it was the same story, I already felt as if I had been thrown in the deep end. This is part of the work of the novel, though: There is the play with gender and race and performance and the relationship between all of that, but almost as much a part of this is the reader's experience. Take the focus on pausing, for example -- there is an unrelenting amount of em dashes in this, which creates pauses instead of clean sentences that flow all the way through. There is also the images, which throw a break in the text, and the sentence fragments and the line breaks and the English spellings (?) for Japanese words. Given this isn't a translation and was published in the U.S., I'm assuming that we are meant to make us pause to look them up or suffer through not understanding it. Even the first section plays into this -- the writing itself is distracted, something accomplished through the narrator's voice, forcing us to wait for an explanation for what the "Tuna Affair" is, even though it's introduced in the first sentence.

All of this is very good and interesting work, but I have no idea what to do with it yet. I have a feeling I'll come back to this in a few years and then be like !! oh! But today is not that day.