reads2cope's reviews
331 reviews

If You Could See the Sun by Ann Liang

2.0

Kidnapping is okay as long as you follow it up with blackmail

Salt Slow by Julia Armfield

4.0

“She has noticed this before now, a tendency for the previous evening’s show to fade from the memory, the smeared place where recollection should have been. It is a curious thing, a sensation not unlike surfacing from sleep and grasping vainly for a fast-receding thought. It is as if she’ll watch the show and then her mind will close around it, knuckle-clench the way a magician palms a coin, opens up with an empty hand. And yet every night, the feeling is clear: a rushing, wild euphoria.”

The Ancient Near East Lib/E: A Very Short Introduction by Amanda H. Podany

I’ll listen to anything Fajer Al-Kaisi narrates! This was so interested. I especially appreciated the parts where the author explains what sources explain what’s known about the ancient societies and what’s left to guessing. 

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
Did not finish book. Stopped at 30%.

I might come back to this, but my library hold ran out and I haven’t asked for it again yet…
I was struggling with some parts of the writing. Some scenes are so vivid, but others I was confused by. For example, at the start, how did her brother learn that her father was drowning? How is it possible they got to him while he was still at sea if he was out there for less than 10 minutes?

Then I also found dialogue (or lack-there-of) awkward. “We shimmy out of the crawl space and tear down another path, accidentally slamming into a pair of curious divîners. One drops his bottle of rum... I scoop the bottle off the ground and scan the streets for my missing ingredient. There. It’s only a few meters from the girl’s head. “Grab the torch!”… we take off running.” So, she steals his bottle of rum (dropped on the ground after being slammed into, but we’re supposed to assume it’s unbroken?) and then runs off without anything said to or by either divîner they just knocked into and then stole from? This felt very awkward to me, and distracted me from the world.

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

4.75

My first book for this year’s Trans Rights Readathon! Despite seeing so many people raving over this book, I knew very little about the plot. At first, I didn’t think I’d like it. It felt like three very different books shoved into one, but by a third of the way through I was totally enthralled with all of them. The way all the story lines met and grew together was incredible. I’m sad to finish it!

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia by Jack Latimore, Deborah Cheetham, Patrick Johnson, Adam Goodes, Aileen Walsh, Tara June Winch, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Celeste Liddle, Jared Thomas, Terri Janke, Miranda Tapsell, Anita Heiss, Amy McQuire, Tony Birch, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Alexis West

4.75

A moving and thought-provoking anthology covering many diverse perspectives. I especially enjoyed the narrators, so many of the stories were written so vividly, and paired with the readings this book was incredibly beautiful.

The Free People's Village by Sim Kern

3.0

This will be a long review...  

I love and appreciate Sim Kern’s activism and voice online, and so maybe my expectations were too high going into this book after all I'd heard about it, but I unfortunately kind of hated it. I found Maddie insufferable and Red awful. While a lot of the theory and activism in the book is well explained and could be inspiring, it fell flat as a story. 
Maddie is insufferable not only because she cries as much as possible, constantly puts herself down, and has no self awareness beyond apologizing at every opportunity for her whiteness (without many offers of reparations) but mostly because she has no political backbone, yet expects everyone else to. At every turn, she explains how she only cared about Save the Eighth because of her personal relationships to the Lab, and that gets passed over. She never deeply interrogates or questions the theory people like Justice try to teach her - she simply parrots what she’s been told by others, then admits that she didn’t actually finish reading some of the books she was lent, like Black Marxism. While others around her engage in the theory, asking questions and making plans, Maddie is a bystander, doing what’s she’s asked without question beyond her own feelings of the actions. She tells us she would have chickened out of the city hall march if not for the peer pressure of the marchers behind her. It is so hard to root for someone so spineless. 

By the last chapter, we’re supposed to believe that she’s lived with activists for years, read theory and revolutionary memoirs, but the chant “from the river to the sea” is new to her? 

The story itself was full of other contradictions to me. Maddie is constantly worried about her asthma being triggered, but no one thinks twice about smoking in her face or sending her into a protest that is sure to be tear-gassed. Disability justice is lacking in general in this work. Further, she has dated at least two abusers, but it feels like the reader is supposed to root for her relationship with Red? Red was just as abusive. Xe smashes instruments in front of Maddie twice, once specifically targeted at her, making aggressive eye contact with her. This is abusive behavior! Xe took advantage of her breakdowns, lied to her, and Xir freak-outs were not only childish but horrible. Smaking the organ was the final straw for me, but xir dismissal of indigenous cultures and refusal to be taught was just another red flag. 

Maddie’s behavior at her school was also confusing. I rooted for her to connect with her students and teach beyond the lesson planned by the state, but her interaction with her boss was unprofessional. It felt like another example of her failing to think more than one step ahead. Her calling her boss a “bitch” later felt needlessly reductionist and misogynistic. 

Finally, the book was too meta. Especially the reference to fan fiction of authors who write about alternative timelines and “maybe if Bush would have been elected, there’d have been a zoonotic pandemic.” 
 The last few paragraphs were beautiful, but were also an info dump. I appreciate the amount of research that must have gone into this work, but putting it all so plainly came at the expense of the story. Trust readers to see the theory behind character’s actions, rather than spell the theory out in rote dialogue. 

Resistance and Hope: Essays by Disabled People by Alice Wong

5.0

 Anything Alice Wong published is a must-read, and this anthology was even more moving than I expected. Most of the essays are a clear time-capsule from the core of the Trump presidency. Reading now about perseverance in the face of the Trump's election - when I feel so much more hopeless as Biden advances Trump's policies to the silence and sometimes cheers of alleged “liberals" - this book still managed to give me hope and energy. My reaction surprised but heartened me, and I'm so grateful to have read this now. A very limited sample of my favorite quotes:

“The trend here is the eugenics-laden sentiment that the disabled should cease to exist, if only to end our suffering. We should not exist. We should disappear. As a disabled woman, my instinct is to say, “Screw that!” I will resist disappearing. How do I resist? How do I find hope? Connecting. Ceremony. Being visible! Shouting “NO!” Self-care. Creating.” - Mari Kurisato 

 

“I'm not finished yet, no matter what emotional state I'm in. Today wasn’t enough. I can’t even begin to imagine enough: unable to plan even a year ahead of the now, I can only live moment to moment as if another one will come after this one. I have to act as if what I do matters, even if I'll never see the outcome of my work. Is that hope? I don't know how to manufacture feelings of positivity. But I do know how to keep moving into the darkness and the unknown, waving my flashlight for the other lost and lonely, until my path ends. If hope is a choice we make to act like someone will have a future if we give them one, maybe the work isn't hopeless after all.” - Lev Mirov 

 

“We have very little, generally speaking, in the way of institutional power, much less influence. Instead, we’re running on what we’ve managed to scrape together for ourselves, but mostly on the memories of our worst individual and collective experiences; the knowledge of where we could’ve been but for relative luck; the urgency of current conditions; and the love for and camaraderie of our community. This might not be power in a traditional or tangible sense, but it is strength.” - Shain M. Neumeier 

 

“Once you have tweeted and snapped, call or write your representatives. In their minds, every year is an election year. Give what you can to organizations and candidates who champion disability rights.” - Maysoon Zayid 

No one's free until we're all free. Wear a mask and support your local organizers!

All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir

4.75

I knew this book would be heavy, but still wasn't prepared for the amount of tragedy and trauma. At the same time, Tahir beautifully balanced the dark horrors of the world with those who shine a light in it, and the rage the main characters feel was cathartic (even when it hurt them further)

Orthodox Christianity: A Very Short Introduction by A. Edward Siecienski

I was assigned a Very Short Introduction book at University, so when I saw my public library had a bunch of audiobook versions on Libby, I thought I'd explore more of the series. This was an interesting, though obviously brief, history of the religions. I enjoyed the descriptions of celebrations and rites, and will look for another book that expands on the schisms between Orthodox and Catholic churches as the information here was very interesting to me.