thereadingrambler's reviews
1072 reviews

The Undermining of Twyla and Frank by Megan Bannen

emotional funny lighthearted 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? Yes

3.0

I’m gonna be honest: romantasy is really not one of my genres. But I was drawn in by the first book in this series, The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy, primarily because the main character is an undertaker, and there was a letter trope, which I love. And then I did very much enjoy the book. Primarily because it delivered what romantasy claims to do: balance a fantasy plot and a romance plot. So when I learned that Bannen had a second book coming out set in the same world, I immediately got myself on the holds list at my library. And this one was even better because there were dragons.

Frank and Twyla are both in their 50s and after Twyla’s husband died and Frank’s wife left him, the next-door-neighbors struck up a a friendship. When Twyla’s daughter decides to go to medical school, Twyla needs to get a higher-paying job. So Frank petitions for her to join the marshals (magic park rangers), and now not only are they best friends but partners in not-crime. Their routine is entirely disrupted when they discover a baby dragon—particularly because dragons are thought to be extinct. Quickly they are sucked into conspiracies and mysteries and so many confusing emotions.

I had such a good time reading this. I was kicking my little feet and clutching my heart and laughing out loud listening to this (aside: the audiobook narrator did a great job!). A super fun time if you’re looking for something light-hearted and cute.

The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter

dark reflective 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

4.0

The Thick and the Lean is set in a world like ours in religion, class, philosophy, and race, but rather than a world that thrives off the repression of sex, the people of this culture take every opportunity to indulge. Instead, the shameful activity is eating. Food is heavily restricted, with most people opting for a liquid-based diet that provides only the bare minimum needed for survival. This is the belief of the ALGN, the dominant people group of this area, but there are two others: the Free-Wah and the Ahinga, two people groups who are oppressed and suffered mightily at the hands of the colonizing ALGN when they arrived hundreds of years before. The Free-Wah and the Ahinga do not ascribe to this restrictive diet religion, although the hegemonic beliefs of the ALGN heavily curtail their food practices. The book's first two parts heavily focus on this religious tension and provide a double layer of critique of contemporary American society. First, there is the critique of diet culture and the pressures for women to continually make themselves smaller physically, vocally, emotionally, mentally, and in so many other ways. Second, while not discounting anyone who suffers from eating disorders, this book also levels a harsh critique of fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity’s purity culture. For many, if not most, readers, applying the language of purity culture to food turns the first two parts of the book almost into a satire of purity culture. There’s a poignant scene where one of our main characters, Beatrice, is at a church lock-in (if my reader is not familiar with this practice is very common for teenagers in evangelical churches), which is usually dedicated to teens worshipping and learning about Christian beliefs. The same thing is happening here, but the worship they are engaging is in various sex practices with any number of fellow teenagers. But Beatrice discovers a secret larder in the church kitchen and gets in serious trouble for making a grilled cheese sandwich, just like teens in churches in contemporary America would get in serious trouble for sneaking off to have sex at a real church lock-in.

This brings me to the main characters: Reiko and Beatrice. Reiko is a poor girl raised in the city. The only operative principle of this religion is to become closer to angels rather than humans. Humans can transcend their animality and become more angelic. So this city is built in tiers, with the richest living at the very top and never touching the group. Reiko comes from the lowest part of the city, where the poorest live, mired in dirt. She is also a member of the Free-Wah people and has a rich (if impoverished) food culture. So when she is given a scholarship to a university in the Middle, she experiences extensive culture shock. She thrives in this setting, but her scholarship is ripped away. She can either go into massive debt to continue her education or leave. She picks a third option: a life of crime. Beatrice grows up in Seagate, a strict fundamentalist commune that operates/owns a corporation. All the adults in this commune work for this corporation, primarily interested in developing various supplements and pharmaceuticals that will remove people’s appetites and ability to taste and provide them with all the nutrients they need. Unfortunately, Beatrice is very interested in food. Through clandestine internet chatrooms, she discovers an underground of chefs, recipes, and food, spurring her to flee Seagate for the city where she can (hopefully) pursue her culinary dreams.

That’s the end of part one. In the rest of the book, we follow these two girls as they grow into adulthood and attempt to fulfill their dreams and goals while the world crumbles further around them—more people pushed into poverty to allow those Above (literally) to rise even higher. The stories are told in parallel; the two do not join at some point to become rebels or form a relationship or anything like that. They live their separate lives, allowing the reader to see many different angles of this world and the various impacts of the ALGN's religious (and, therefore, economic) beliefs and practices. Thus, if you are someone primarily motivated by plot and, when confronted with systemic injustice in a book, want to see the system destroyed, this will not be the book for you. We leave the world worse than when we started the book with only the small steps of some of the characters toward making a better world. This is a book about worldviews and how characters navigate those worldviews. How can they balance, if they can, their well-being and the tragedies and horrors of the world? This is the kind of book I love, so I gave it four stars; one deducted only because the plot at points became a little too convenient even for a low-plot book. I would definitely recommend if you are interested in these topics and these kinds of critiques.

Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

4.0

This book relies on an impending sense of doom and a perpetual sense of dread—and it does it so well. I could barely put this book down but I also constantly wanted to run away from it. It fascinated me in the kind of way where I felt I need to peek through my fingers. I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there.

The book follows an unnamed man through two timelines intercut with excerpts from a screenplay. We also have an implied frame story of the unnamed main character narrating the book we are currently reading (aside: I read this book, but I do wonder if there would be an added element if you listened to the audiobook). He move between the past and the present. In the past he is filming Horror Movie, while in the present he is being courted to get Horror Movie rebooted because of its massive online cult following. The odd thing about this cult following is that Horror Movie was never released or even finished. The fanbase arose around three scenes, three stills, and the script—and the fact all of the major members of the cast and crew are dead except for our narrator.

As we move through the book we slowly realize that there is something truly terrible currently going on and something terrible that happened on the set of the original Horror Movie. What Tremblay does so exceedingly well is entwining the script, the past, and the present into this horrifying conclusion that simultaneously seems inevitable and entirely preventable.

I loved the meta commentary on horror as a genre and the way horror fans interact with the genre and the people who make the genre. There’s a pivotal scene where the main character is at a horror fan convention and an antagonistic attendee demands that the main character reveal evidence of a trauma that informed how he played his role. The main character puts this kid in his place in a very satisfying way, but this interaction frames how the readers are supposed to understand the main character’s choices in the second half of the book and also how the reader is supposed to understand themselves in relation to the book.

The reader is so implicated in this book and is slowly drawn deeper and deeper in to the horror we and all of the characters are experiencing. It is really a beautiful exploration of the concept of horror itself.

On the Subject of Blackberries by Stephanie M. Wytovich

3.0

This collection was particularly hard for me because I’m not a mother and have no interest in being one and this collection is intimately tied to Wytovich’s experience of being a new mother. This is not exclusively the theme of this collection because she also talks about her mental health issues (of course, emerging from her experience as a new mother) in graphic and vulnerable ways. I appreciated her candor and refusal to shy away from some of her darker thoughts, but I am not really the target audience for this collection, particularly as I wasn’t a fan of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed

emotional fast-paced

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

4.0

The Annual Migration of Clouds is a hopepunk/solarpunk climate fiction story about Reid, a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, confronting a series choice: leave the only home she has never known and a very codependent mother to attend university or stay and swear allegiance to this community and its needs. This is a little novella and takes place over the course of about a week, from the time Reid receives her acceptance letter until when she makes her final decision and all of the factors that go into making this decision.

Hundreds if not thousands of young adults face this decision every year so on one level this books holds all of the quotidian coming-of-age plot beats that we expect, but because this book is set in a quasi-post-apocalypse world there is a heavy added layer of this clash between the subsistence hunter-gather lifestyle Reid and her community have been forced to adopt and the glimmering advanced-tech world of the dome cities where the rich and powerful fled during this apocalyptic event (which happened decades before Reid was born so we only get glimpses of the past).

To complicate matters even further, Reid is infect with the Cad, a semi-sentient fungus that is visible under her skin and has the ability to control her body and possibly infiltrate her thoughts. This fungus is passed genetically and often doesn’t manifest until later in life, increasing the chances that it will be unknowingly passed from parent to child. This has led to fewer and fewer children being born each year, so every member of the community is extremely valuable for the whole community’s survival. So Reid faces a very complicated and layered choice that Mohamed ably guides the reader through.

I loved the pairing of the very familiar with the very strange to draw affective connections between our present and our near future. Reid was a character most could immediately sympathize with: a brand new adult having to figure out how to separate herself from her parental home. But the added layers to these decisions and developments of the Cad and of the ravaged world highlights what so many of our contemporary youth are afraid of: what world will be left for them? How will they navigate their emotional and developmental future when that future is narrowing because of the choices of the present and the recent past?

Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera

5.0

I have no way to summarize or describe this book in terms of character or plot. On the surface, this book is about two people who are continuously re-incarnated in, alongside, between, and with each other through millions of years as Earth disintegrates. The better way to explain this book is through its themes, because this book takes absolutely no prisoners and gives you nothing to hold on to except for a sense of what the book is trying to do.

The book is divided into ten parts, each of which is basically entirely distinct from the other ten parts. The reader has to do all of the work to connect the characters, timelines, and plots to each other. But that’s not really the point of the book; there are many points to the book, but the main one I kept returning to was death. I love a reincarnation story, and this one thinks more deeply about the cycles of death and rebirth not of our “main characters” at all but the very notion of return as it is woven through the sites of great death, such a colonialism, slavery, genocide, and climate change. The lack of cohesion plot-wise between the parts emphasizes the greater cohesion of theme and purpose—to delve into the meaning and experience of death and the truth that no matter what we cling to everything will eventually die, perhaps entirely purposeless or from preventable causes, but death itself is not preventable, even for characters who count their years in the millions. Death, in many ways, is the ultimate goal of the book, a final death, not in the sense of a “release” but because that is the inevitable end and becomes something to be desired through its lack in this book. You find yourself wanting these limping, broken, diseased entities to finally die because being alive seems cruel, almost like they are siloed away from some vital (fatal?) experience.

But every story about death is also a story about love, and we do have two characters (their names are constantly changing and honestly I couldn’t keep up with all their incarnations) who are bound to each other through every dimension and incarnation and body. They die for each other and live for each other over and over again. The sense I had through my reading experience of wanting these two to finally, fully, and totally die could only be met when they were finally, fully, and totally reunited. The book was as beautiful as it was brutal, as painful as it was soothing and as intense as it was placid. I don’t know how to recommend it because it is also a hallucinatory dream which will definitely not be for everyone. But if you think you’re the kind of person who would enjoy a story that pushes the boundaries of what a novel can even do, then I would definitely pick this one up; it will be a reading experience like no other.

The Daughters of Block Island by Christa Carmen

4.0

I love a meta book, so I was absolutely delighted to discover this was a meta-Gothic novel. I’ve had a bit of a pet peeve for the past few years that “gothic” has been turned into an aesthetic as opposed to actually engaging with the genre and the cultural work it is doing. This book directly engages with the Gothic tropes and plays with them in such an interesting way. People who have read a lot of Gothic fiction (as in actual Gothic fiction, Bronte, Polidori, Radcliffe, etc.) will get an extra level of enjoyment, but even if you haven’t, this is still a solid horror-mystery novel with some delightful twists and compelling themes (definitely look up TW). The daughters from the title are both engaging characters in very different ways. The awareness of the story they’re in controls their actions in really different ways—in how they play into and against the tropes. I was confused for a minute about the prologue into the first chapter. We switch POV characters between the prologue and chapter one, but maybe I was just not paying close enough attention. I would definitely recommend this book if you’re into Gothic literature, female-front horror, and generally creepy vibes, but want a positive ending, not one where all the heroes are dead

Carmilla: The First Vampire by Amy Chu

3.0

I’m going to be honest, I’m not much of a comic/graphic novel person. They usually just don’t emotionally pull me in as much as non-image texts. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy them well enough, they just aren’t the first thing I reach for usually. I picked this up because it is a Bram Stoker winner, and I have a YouTube series reading a bunch of the SFFH winners for each year. While I still had the personal problem of not emotionally connecting to the characters or plot, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who likes a vampire story. As you might be able to guess by the title, this book is engaging with the classic vampire story of Carmilla. It does so very directly but also in clever new ways that cause the story to unfold even more. The story focuses on Athena, who is an Asian-American social worker in NYC during the 90s, and her quest to figure out where these young homeless girls are disappearing. Because of the reader’s meta-knowledge, we know it is a vampire, so the dread comes from watching Athena walk into the vampire’s web without knowing it. I was particularly struck but the final page of the first chapter, depicting her directly inviting someone into her house. That’s the first moment the reader can guess who the vampire is, and you get this sense of how Athena’s life is about to fall apart, and she doesn’t even know it yet. I can definitely see why this won an award, and I hope more

An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris

adventurous 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? Yes

4.0

very month the members of the #SagaSaysCrew get to request books from a curated list. A few months back, there wasn’t anything on the list that I had heard of before/hadn’t already read, so I just picked the book that had the most interesting cover. And that happened to be An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris. I had absolutely no idea what to expect, particularly since the premise of this book is kinda wild. This takes place in an alternate history southwest United States. After the assassination of FDR shortly before he was supposed to take office, the United States collapses, splitting up into multiple countries. Lizabeth Rose lives in Texoma and makes a living helping former American citizens leave what is now Mexico due to the persecution the face there. After one particularly disastrous trip, she is trying to figure out how to get her life back on track when she is approached by two grigoris—Russian magicians—to be their bodyguard. This seemingly straightforward assignment becomes increasingly complicated particularly as it gets more interwoven with Lizbeth’s personal life. I had no idea how all of that was going to come together, but it really did in a fast-paced and well-constructed way. Lizabeth is such a realistic character; the choices she makes are logically and concretely informed by her past, her personality, and her current circumstances. She always felt like a real person, and she is the driving force of this book. Don’t get me wrong, the other characters, particularly her grigori employers, were also engaging and three-dimensional by Lizabeth is the heart and soul of the book. I will definitely be continuing the series, and I would recommend you pick this up if you are looking for something gritty and dark but the main character is quite likable and has a compelling narratorial style.

The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

4.0

What an absolute trip of a book with so much female rage. Where do you even start with something like this? Ji-won’s father has just abandoned her family—her mother and little sister Ji-hun. Ji-won is a freshman in college, her little sister is still in high school, and her mother works at a Korean grocery store; in other words, they are not exactly capable of really caring for themselves after this abandonment. To help with their expenses and security, as well as her own emotional distress, the mother soon gets a boyfriend, a white man named George, who is extremely creepy and pretty quickly reveals his fetishization of Asian women. Meanwhile, Ji-won is trying to deal with being at a new school and the aftermath of her high school friend group falling apart. Oh, and also her new found desire for eyes. This is a book gender, class, race, and immigration and how all of those things intersect and can fuel a burning and deep rage for all the injustices, traumas, and betrayals of a cultural system designed to exclude. This is gory and visceral with cold, brutal language reflecting the cold brutality of our main character. I would definitely recommend to people who are interested in the horror of the immigrant experience and the accompanying racism.