sophieskilling's reviews
289 reviews

The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket

3.5

my worry with the previous books was that they were becoming a bit too formulaic so i’m happy this one strayed from that! i was genuinely very invested in this one and it would’ve been a 4 but the climactic scene felt like a bit of a mess - oh well! 

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers

3.0

clare chambers does such a good job of evoking the time and place of 1950s london, i very much enjoyed the mundane details of everyday life and think it was the strong point of this book. 

i really enjoyed the first half but felt like as jean got more and more derailed from her original goal, so did the plot. i found gretchen to be the most interesting and fun character to read about so when she was less involved that was lost. 

i’m not as angry about the ending as other people seem to be lol, but it did feel weirdly forced in and not in-keeping with the rest of the book, and if you have to explain it in an afterword does it actually work all that well? like, if i just hadn’t read that, i’d have a very different idea of how this book ended 

i also have weird beef with the cover for not portraying the vibe of the book ? but oh well lol

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

4.0

(oops i forgot to leave a review for this one at the time, now it is much later but i will do my best)

i’d heard such good things about eliza clark, and unlike many other hyped-up-online authors, she lived up to the hype 

this book was fucked in exactly the right way that grabs hold of my brain. i love to read from the pov of an unlikeable narrator and oh boy this she was! eliza clark’s depictions of characters were so true to people on real life that i really felt like i knew them, especially flo and eddie from tesco. like those are real guys

also shout out to having one the most accurate night out/drug taking narratives i’ve ever read. it doesn’t seem like something that should be hard to do but a believable one comes around so rarely that i really need to commend this 

my only gripe was the ending … and maybe i can come to terms with the idea that i was meant to be left unsatisfied … but that doesn’t change the fact that i was hehe 

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

3.5

this is very much a combination thought piece/memoir and while i’ve seen people unhappy about this, because tbf it isn’t marketed this way, i think the topic is one that is so personal that the coming at it through personal experiences just make so much sense 

i did enjoy it! i ate up the first sections, and while it maybe lost it’s way slightly in the middle, the ending was strong as well. her capitalism conclusion was possibly a bit too “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” vibes, and i’ve seen other reviewers take this as her saying Consume whatever you want! It’s fine! but i don’t think that’s what she means either lol. she also is very much coming from a privileged pov (white, middle class, very liberal and second wave feminism vibes) and while she acknowledges this, i don’t think she overcomes it  

we’re left with no answer to the question - and that’s good! what’s important is that claire dederer took us on a nuanced exploration of the topic that allows us to reflect on our own relationship to good art by bad people. i think that in itself makes this a v worthwhile read 

Lady Susan by Jane Austen

3.5

feels weird to give a rating to a book the author never submitted for publishing and never knew was published….sorry jane but they raided ur early works 

because of this it’s obviously not a perfectly formed and finished novel like her other works are (and i’m not including it in the big 6) but what’s good in this is GOOD! it’s so fun to see early versions of later characters pop up in here, i especially loved the letters between lady susan and alicia, and above all it is just fun!!! people always overlook how FUN and FUNNY jane austen is so im happy to see this shine in this little novella. the woman was clearly a genius to be writing this as a teenager and i love her always and forever 

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

2.5

i fear this book may have suffered from being massively hyped up and not living up to that but also maybe it is just a meh book for me and that’s okay lol

the pacing was the weirdest thing about this. i kept finding myself getting frustrated we were spending so long on certain aspects of the story and then the bits i was looking forward to fell flat bc they lasted barely any time at all. i get that the nature of this being a retelling is what lends itself to this issue and it wouldn’t really exist otherwise but hey if you set out to retell a story we already know it’s a problem that exists! 

for the first maybe third of the book i didn’t care about either patroclus or achilles. i did come around a bit but it took a while. the secondary characters had much more personality for me to latch onto. 

still, quite nicely written, though the prose was maybe even a bit repetitive. it sounds like i hated it but i didnt lol. just didnt love it 

Kallocain by Karin Boye

3.25

as someone who is not usually a Dystopian Fiction Girl, i really appreciated that this was very a much a politics-explored-through-the-personal type of book. it’s so unfair that this isn’t shouted about like it’s contemporaries (especially when it was doing some of george orwell’s bits before george orwell was). there are many layers to it!!! it’s very well done!!! 

the middle lagged a bit (i’m putting that down to a lack of linda) but overall i very much appreciated it for what it is 

Middlemarch by George Eliot

3.5

listen i’m a jane austen stan and in my eyes she can do no wrong, but since all of her novels end in marriage, there’s definitely a question in what happens after the fact - enter middlemarch ! 

with dorothea getting married off almost immediately, a lot of this novel was an exploration into the downfalls of a courtship system that rushes into marriage and views that as the end point and i very much enjoyed that. george eliot is a smart lady with interesting things to say!!

my favourite thing about this was the way my love for the characters crept up on me. with such a long book it sometimes felt that not everything needed to be there, until something happening to a character would hit me right in the heart because george eliot had been secretly building my care for them through all these pages i’d read. i especially loved the girls - my love for flawed and almost unlikeable female characters remains strong in rosamund and celia - but eliot was so good at showing sympathy for all characters, even ones i didn’t want to like at all thank u!! (i’m looking at u, casaubon)

she was also especially good at including those universal emotions that come from just being human, proving that humans have always been humans that we can relate to even in very different circumstances - which is one of the main reasons i read classics <3 

You've Got To Be You, Snoopy by Charles M. Schulz

4.0

some absolutely classic shenanigans in this one 

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

2.0

there’s a really beautiful story hidden in this book somewhere, but i couldn’t connect with it because it felt like every word had been so agonisingly forced to be poetic and beautiful that the actual emotion behind them was lost. i love poetry and maybe this would’ve served me better as a poetry collection? (though some of the poetic writing was lowkey cringe so maybe not lol) as a narrative though, it just didn’t work!