zillanovikov's reviews
78 reviews

It Helps with the Blues by Bryan Cebulski

dark emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

There is a tendency for lonely, disconnected teenagers to fall too deeply into introspection. To observe their own life as they live it, both Nick Caraway and Jay Gatsby in their own story, hurdling towards their destruction, their eyes open. I know this because I was this kind of teenager. The narrator of It Helps with the Blues knows this too. 

I'm not old enough to know if manic-pixie-dream-girls existed before Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind gave them a name. But I know that all too often, lonely, disconnected teenagers are looking for an external saviour. This thing we feel when we find the person we think will save us, will give us meaning, will make us finally not alone–it's not love. But it's not exactly not love either. Only it's too much to ask someone else to save you. Especially someone who needs saving just as much as we do. It's not just unfair. It's impossible. It ends in heartache. It ends in tragedy.

When I was in high school, I felt like my life was recursive, like I would be given the same choice over and over in different contexts until maybe–I hoped, if I made the right decision–I could escape the loop. Jules. Gabriel. Estelle. Joshua. The narrator is trapped in a Midwestern prison of suburbia and recriminations, doomed like Sisyphus to endlessly repeat and reexamine his mistakes. 

It Helps with the Blues pours one out for the lonely kids. That was me. Maybe that was you, too
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Thank You For Loving Me by Nicole Bea

emotional hopeful slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

"This connection, the one between our skin, is a kind of unwritten, unpainted, unphotographed something that tells me that from now on we might have moments of loneliness, but we’ll never be truly alone."

Thank You For Loving Me is a gentle book. It's a story about healing after a loss that destroyed you. It's about forgiving each other and yourself for continuing to go on, for finding happiness when all joy seemed lost. It is a book about sailing your grief ship to safe waters.

Maggie's world ended when she lost her sailor husband, Taylor. Her remaining lifeline to community is his sister, but Caitlyn has her own wounds, and Maggie is as lonely when she calls as alone. Thank You For Loving Me tells the story of Maggie allowing herself to move past her grief to find friendship and new love, without forgetting Taylor. 

The book is classic Nicole Bea; the description is lush and the east coast setting is a character in its own right. The sea took Taylor from her, but the maritime ocean is not cruel in this book-–it is the inspiration for Maggie's paintings, and the colour of the eyes of her new love. Even when she has little human company, Maggie is never truly alone on the beach. The world can be impossibly hard, but Nicole shows us that it can be kind, too.

...And the Stars Will Sing by Michelle Browne

adventurous funny medium-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? No

5.0

Anyone who liked The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet will love this space opera about found family on a remote space station. Told as a series of letters Crystal is writing to her best friend, we see the gorgeous world building of a complex intergalactic social system, we see friendships (and love) unfold, and then we see things fall apart when the pirates attack. Come for the space, stay for the adventure. 

Darknesses by Lachelle Seville

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful 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

5.0

I devoured this book. It took me three days, which is less time than it took the characters to eat each other, but it was worth my very limited patience to see them fall completely in love.

There is a very specific genre, which may or may not have a name - don't ask me - about abuse survivors who find people who love them entire, scars and all, and make a found family to replace what blood denied them. Think Black Jewels Trilogy. I am a connoisseur of these novels. I consider the best of the genre to be the stories allow the survivors space to be angry, to refuse to forgive the unforgivable, to seek revenge on the perpetrators and the complicit. We need space for rage. We need to be loved in our righteous anger as well as our self-hated. Lachelle's book savours revenge like a fine red wine. All will end well, it promises you. The broken can be loved. The wicked can be punished. Both will be glorious.

In a world where the angels don't protect you, it's a great comfort to think the devil and her friends have your back.

Airy Nothing by Clarissa Pattern

adventurous emotional hopeful 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

5.0

 This is a story about two kinds of loneliness. John has no place in his village, can't conform to their ideas of gender, can't admit what he sees, friendless and alone. Jack is welcomed across the mean streets of London, easily befriends strangers, but trusts no one and knows no one should trust him. Jack knows how to walk away and bury the pain, except that he can't walk away from John.

Jack and John are both survivors. Jack knows that the way to survive is to do whatever it takes to be ready for the winter, and to bury the dead quickly in your mind. John has magic, the kind of magic misfits and rejects conjure so their minds can escape the pain that their bodies and souls endure. Only in this story, the faeries he sees are real, or real enough. The village is spitefully cruel and the streets of London are anonymously cruel, but he has a way to survive which lets him still be kind, and he is determined to share it with Jack.

I fell in love with both of them. 

Sushi and Sea Lions by Rachel Corsini

emotional hopeful inspiring lighthearted medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Sushi and Sea Lions is a romance with heart. Dany thinks she's lost everything when an injury takes away her ability to dance ballet professionally. But ballet is a complicated thing to love. It gave her the ability to fly, but it demanded perfection from her in return. She had a body she didn't love and a boyfriend who didn't really love her. It's only when she's lost both ballet and the toxic boyfriend that she can start to find herself.

In Queens, she meets an old friend, Vincent, who's going through his own journey of self discovery. She teaches him to bark at sea lions and play video games and smile, and he teaches her that she is worthy of love, just as she is, imperfections and all.

This is a romance, but it's not just Dany falling in love with her Vin Vin. It's also Dany falling in love with herself, and learning to fly again on her own terms. 

The Pink and the Blue by I. Merey

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Merey's books lodge themselves in my heart, take up residence somewhere near the left auricle, leave me breathless and internally bleeding. His books are raw and visceral and they hurt like memory.

The characters in The Pink and the Blue are drawn in their truest sense, sometimes so transparent that you can see the city through their outlines, sometimes melting off the page, sometimes with limbs scattered around the bedroom. It's body horror, but the horror is that it reflects a reality that we fail to observe when we look at a person in meatspace and think they are whole, think they are okay. As always, art is truer than life, because art is not bound by physics or convention.

I got this book in physical form because I needed to touch it. It's hard to explain why. It's digital art, and there's a note that the colours are brighter in the pdf version. But I need to touch the pages, to run my fingertips over the smooth paper of textured pixels and images of cut outs. I needed the book to be as real in my hands as it is in my heart.

Melancholic Parables by Dale Stromberg

dark emotional funny reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? N/A
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

Reading Melancholic Parables is like listening to someone speaking what sounds like gibberish but you understand every word.

What is this book, this compilation of microstories? It's about all those tiny thoughts that run through your head, which you've never bothered to ask if anyone else wonders too. How would it feel to live your life twice, if you remembered everything? Is that weird feeling of being watched because of time-travelling tourists? What if there was a language in the dial-up modem buzz? Bellatrix Sakakino wonders along with you, and lives through the answers. That's part of this book. But that's not all of it, not exactly.

This is a book about being born in the wrong time, the wrong body, the wrong world. It is a book about failing to belong. It is a book about loneliness.

The microstories are absurd and deeply meaningful. I found myself wanting to quote them, but all-too-often unable to pull apart passages into neat quote-sized fragments, because sentences hung on paragraphs, on microstories, on the book. 

"Not every book is for every reader. A book must rhyme with you, or you with it."

This is a witty, clever book, but it's also a dark work: a work of uneasy ghosts and climate change, of loving your abuser and hating yourself. It might be better for me if this book didn't rhyme. But it does. This is a book for me. It might be for you, too.

(I recieved an advance copy of the book for review here and on the Night Beats blog.)

Noema by Dael Akkerman

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Now is not the first time the Earth's climate has changed. Now is not the first time that temperatures changed, that animals were driven to the brink of extinction, that food production dwindled. Noema is a story about human survival through environmental change twelve thousand years ago. But Noema is much more than historical fiction. 

This book is about the price of survival, and who pays it: the animals, the people, All Life. It is about the Law of Unintended Consequences and about complicity for what is done in what is done in your name, when you have been the one to teach people your name. Or when those people are the ones who gave you a name in the first place.

Names and identity are major themes in Noema. I still can't tell you who the narrator is, but then, I think that's the point. We are interconnected. We are the living and the dead. We are the humans and the horses and the wheat. We are All Life, and sometimes to preserve All Life, we have to make terrible sacrifices.

Noema is a book that lingers with you, that offers up its precious secrets deliciously slowly. It is a book you can read over and over.

A + E by Ryszard I. Merey

challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-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

5.0

I was 12% of the way through A+E when I realized it was going to break my heart.

Remember when you were young and queer and neurodiverse in a world that only had words for one of the three? Remember those friendships which lived in the liminal spaces between love and admiration and need and desire, and you didn't have words for any of those either, and you were a mess and so was your friendship-love but it was also the only thing that mattered in the world? You don't know if you want to be them, or be with them, but you know you can't survive without.

YA stories - well, stories about young adults - don't usually get me. They're didactic and clean and tidy, spoon-feeding the Reader a set of Important Messages. They're about what some adult wants a hypothetical teenager to learn. But sometimes, there's books about life as a teenager which are painfully, messily real. Books which I can't read in one sitting because I need to stop and let the memories subside safely back under the waters. Books which I can't stop reading, and can't stop thinking about when I finish.

A + E is that kind of story.

Ash and Eu are the rejects who find each other, who are open wounds in uncertain bodies, who are trapped in the vicious system to enforce compliance and conformity that is high school. I recognize the bands they listen to, the orange tic tacs they eat, the books on their shelves. I recognize the homophobia, though it was never that bad for me. I hope we left that behind in the 1990s, I hope things are easier for the Youth of now. I recognize the messy, hopeful, desperate friend-loves. Relationships that shaped my life, and that I have no words for, that don't exist in the lexicon of clean, tidy love, finally reflected back to me on the page. I won't ever leave those relationships behind; even if I never see the people again, they're still burned into me.

I was right. I was in tears by the end of A + E.