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venusenvy's reviews
145 reviews
The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault
4.0
I can honestly understand the complaints I see in other reviews of this novel. It definitely doesn’t live up to a lot of the promises from the back cover (it’s disappointing if you’re seeking a lesbian love story, even more disappointing if you’re expecting much real commentary on the ways of artists). But, I have to say, I had a great time. The constant miscommunications, especially with everything flying over adorable idiot Elsie’s head, kept me laughing and coming back for more. Messy bisexual representation!!
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
5.0
Hard to write any sort of true review as I’ve just finished the book and am left breathless in its wake. Luminous and triumphant. Much like with Matrix, Lauren Groff renders the distant past with equal parts familiarity and strangeness. This Girl became so dear to me and so real. The grief and awe and sadness and wonder are certain to linger — there are passages from this book I can’t imagine ever forgetting. Oh God, what a novel!!!
Mrs S by K. Patrick
3.0
I’ve been waiting for this for a long time as the premise — an erotic boarding school novel about adults — sounded like it was written especially for me. Ultimately very sexy. And as both a boarding school book devotee and a former women’s college student who always wondered what was going through the heads of the “real adults” as we ran around them playing tricks in the night, I enjoyed seeing some of the standard fare of the genre filtered through an adult narrator. But, I absolutely could not stand the lack of quotation marks and dialogue tags. It’s a stylistic choice I not only don’t enjoy but don’t respect. I’m literate enough that I can realize a potential “point” of doing it (to create a sense of confusion for the reader that mirrors the confusion of the narrator’s emotional situation), but I have almost never seen it executed in a way that felt worthwhile (and am I alone in finding that it seems increasingly popular to do?). The frustration I felt reading and rereading passages in an attempt to figure out who might be saying what didn’t feel like the frustration of an unclear relationship, it just felt like frustration at a poor writing choice. Instead of gaining insight into the state of the narrator, I instead felt like I lost any chance of true characterization through dialogue. Maybe this was also the point, with the nameless characters, all merely roles and not characters. The more I write here the more I seem to justify it, so, perhaps just take my dislike with a grain of salt!