Tag: fiction

Review: Pet

38612739

Review for "Pet" by Akwaeke Emezi (2019)

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

I will start this review by first saying that this is not the book for everyone. It’s marketed as YA, but I don’t think its intended for a general mainstream YA audience. I certainly think that that’s perfectly fine because anyone who stumbles upon this gem of a book, whether child or adult, will definitely love it like I did.

“Pet” is a novel about evil, particularly one that silences its victims and is ‘hidden’ in plain sight. I won’t be more specific than that because I’d give the novel away. The main character is Jam, a Black trans girl who lives in a Lucille, a futuristic, utopian version of an American city in which bad things have been banished and ‘monsters’ no longer exist. Jam is accepted and loved by her parents and her best friend, Redemption, as well as Redemption’s family.

One night, while exploring one of her mother’s paintings, Jam brings a monster to life. At first she is afraid, but then the monster explains the reason for its existence: to hunt a real-life monster. The creature, which Jam calls Pet, confuses her at first, until it is revealed that the location of the monster to be hunted is within her best friend Redemption’s house.

Right at about 200 pages, this is a short book that packs a heavy punch. It has a surreal feel to it, but the deeper questions it asks are based in a gritty, everyday reality. What are monsters made of? Who or what are angels? How do you tell the difference between the two?

Earlier in this review I said that this is not a book for everyone. I say that because I think we’ve become too used to YA with “grown” teenagers (kids who are 16-18 years old who seem to know every damn thing that’s going on around them). “Pet” is not such a novel. Jam is a 15-year-old girl and her naivete about the danger around her matches every bit of her age. Perhaps some readers will find this frustrating, but I found a book that speaks to the sensibilities of an actual child refreshing. Also, this book is all about queer representation, as I said before Jam is a trans girl; Redemption’s family is portrayed as possibly polyamorous (there’s a woman, a non-gender conforming person, and a man), in addition to several aunts and uncles living with him and his brother who also function as his parents.

I could type all day about this book. Definitely read it though, 4.5 stars.

Review: Tinfoil Butterfly

43565379
Review for "Tinfoil Butterfly" by Rachel Eve Moulton (2019)
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

A bizarre book that reminds me less of a novel and more of a David Lynch movie.

As this story begins, a late adolescent girl named Emma is attempting to escape her past by hitchhiking to The Badlands of South Dakota. She is picked up by a man named Lowell who tries to violently kill her. She gets the best of him and escapes, driving to an abandoned diner in the Black Hills mountains. Emma wakes the next morning in the diner to find a boy wearing a tin foil mask with a gun pointed at her. The boy introduces himself as Earl and says that his mother is dead and he will help her, but she must help him bury his father first.

I know, I know…it sounds crazy, but all of this happens in the first 30 pages or so. The rest of the book is a mass of twists and turns and flashbacks to past traumas. There is never a dull moment in this book or a period where you can rest assured that the two main characters are ok. Earl and Emma come to love and trust each other and I really liked that about this book, emphasizing that it is not so much about the trauma but the hope that two damaged people can find in one another.

I definitely recommend this, if you don’t mind writing with surreal elements and books about how people deal with the bad things that happen to them.

Review: Welcome to America

48507788. sy475 

Review for "Welcome to America" by Linda Bostrom Knausgard (2019)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

“Welcome to America” is a short book with a whole lot going on. The dialogue is minimal, and the reader is always in the headspace of Ellen, a young girl who has stopped talking in the wake of her father’s death. Certain that she has ‘killed’ him by praying for him to die, it is clear that Ellen is in the middle of a serious trauma about which the rest of her family is unaware.

Through flashbacks, it is revealed that shortly before Ellen’s father’s death he had been institutionalized and may or may not have tried to kill his family with a gas leak. Her brother nails his bedroom door shut and becomes angry and abusive. Ellen’s mother, an actress, continually insists that they are “a family of light” is emotionally absent and a narcissist.

There is not so much the focus of a plot line here. Instead, this is a stream-of-conscious window into Ellen’s life at this time period as she muses a lot about death and dying.

This is a decent read, I’ll give this four stars.

Review: Slay

And just like that…I’m back. My dissertation is finished, and I’m furiously overjoyed about it. I’ll upload a nice pic of me in my cap and gown for ya’ll in a few weeks. December 12 is my official graduation date. Yay me!!!

Anyway I’m chock full of reviews. Forgive me as I unload them upon you over the next few weeks…

43723509

Review for "Slay" by Brittney Morris (2019)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

When I first heard of this book being about Black girl gamers, I had to have it. It was on my TBR pile long before it was published, so my expectations were pretty high. It’s rare that a book deals with Black adolescent girls in certain intellectual contexts, even rarer for that focus to be on the world of gaming, which is, whether we like it or not, still a very strongly White male dominated culture.

Anyway, SLAY is a book that celebrates Blackness. No, really, it does. In addition to the storyline, I was pleased to find recent references from Black popular culture memes and such. At the center of the novel is Kiera, a teenage girl growing up in Seattle who is one of the few students of color at her high school. Although she is surrounded by friends and a caring boyfriend, she feels like an outsider. To pass the time, Kiera created SLAY, an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) for people of color to come together, collect cards, and battle for points. Black gamers come together from all over the world to play SLAY to be proud of their identities and to find a refuge against the racism that’s prevalent in the gaming world.

No one knows that Kiera is the creator of SLAY. She keeps her creation a secret from family and friends and her boyfriend Malcolm, who feels like games are a distraction and tool of the “evil White man.” All goes well until a gamer is killed as a result of a conflict related to SLAY. Suddenly SLAY is all over the news and branded as racist. Even worse, a troll with bad intentions begins to stalk Kiera online.

Overall, I had a lot of fun reading this book. There are some deep, intra-racial issues discussed here that I liked, such as what makes an authentic “Black” experience, the need for safe spaces, the ubiquity of Anglo and mainstream ideals. It’s interesting that so many games out there are based on systems of belief and characters that are Eurocentric in nature (wizards, castles, elves, and so on) and no one questions the ubiquity of it. Even sadder still are the experiences of harassment and racism by Black gamers in these White-dominated online spaces. Yet when a Black girl gamer goes to create a game based on Afro-centric standpoint, she is vilified.

The only complaint I have is that most of the side characters were a bit one-dimensional. There are also some other POVs of SLAY gamers sprinkled in at certain places that I would have personally left out. It’s forgivable though, I won’t dwell on it. This is a great book, a must read!

Review: Dominicana

43263696. sy475 

Review for "Dominicana" by Angie Cruz (2019)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

“Dominicana” is the story of a teenage girl named Ana, growing up with her parents and siblings in a rural part of the Dominican Republic in the mid-1960’s. Trujillo’s reign of terror has ended, yet economic stability has not yet returned to the country. She is proposed to at the age of eleven by Juan, an older man more than twice her age. At 15, her parents finally consent to the marriage–not because their daughter is in love with Juan, but to give him permission to someday build on their land, and give themselves better prospects of gaining an American visa through Ana’s sponsorship.

For Ana, the “American Dream” comes at a hard price. She hates the cold weather of NYC and misses home and has trouble adjusting to her new life. Her mother constantly asks her to send money that she doesn’t have back home. Juan hits her, often leaves her in their tiny apartment alone, and doesn’t let her go out to talk to anyone. Juan is also having an affair with another woman, who regularly calls and harasses Ana. Life is drudgery until Juan leaves the US to return to the DR on business, leaving her under the watchful eye of his brother, Cesar. With Cesar, Ana begins to experience something like a fulfilled life–taking English classes, going to the beach, making her own money, and dancing at local ballrooms. She falls in love with Cesar, and eventually must decide her fate.

I found this book to be very well written and intensely readable. Ana is 15 and stays that way, and her viewpoints and her actions accurately match her characterization. However, there is a strong anti-Black sentiment among some characters in this book. Ana’s husband, now living beside Blacks, Jews, and other minorities in the US, speaks of Black Americans throughout the novel as “trouble” and “lazy.” Although I have no doubt that his prejudice is an accurate portrayal of the attitude of some Dominicans, it’s jarring and off-putting. Another complaint is the end, which I didn’t care for at all.

The biggest theme in this novel is the same with most immigrant novels, and that is one of the pursuit of the American Dream. What does it mean? How will Ana achieve it? Ana is ever-industrious and thoughtful, when one plan fails she does not hesitate to simply create another. It’s the classic “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” American tale.

Four stars. Definitely worth reading.

Review: Everything Inside

43064139

Review for "Everything Inside" by Edwidge Danticat (2019)

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I’ve said this and I’ll say it again: short story collections are usually hit or miss for me. Although I love the genre, I always end up liking some, none, or most of the stories therein. This collection is an exception to the “some, none, and most” rule, as every single story here is a literary achievement.

I’ve read just about everything Edwidge Danticat has written, from “Krik? Krak!” to “The Dew Breaker” to “Breathe, Eyes, Memory” and everything in between. “Everything Inside”is a wonderful collection of eight short stories, all featuring characters from the Haitian diaspora living in Miami. Her characters deal with death, love, and loss and their lives are complicated. Each story is well written and thought out, with beautiful language that leaps off the page.

Favorites here include “Dosas,” a story of romantic entanglement and betrayal featuring a husband, wife, and a female lover; “In the Old Days,” about a woman who meets her dying father for the first time, and “Without Inspection,” a harrowing tale that narrates a Haitian emigre’s final thoughts as he falls 40 stories from a building to his death.

Five stars. Hands up, way way up.

Review: The Nickel Boys

42270835. sy475 

Review for "The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead (2019)

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I meant to write this review a lot sooner, when I first finished this book this summer. It’s quite excellent, so here goes…

“The Nickel Boys” is a historical fiction, based on the all-too-real Dozier School for Boys, a hellish reform school for adolescent males that ran from the early 20th century until 2011 in a rural part of the Florida Panhandle. In the early days, black and white boys were separated upon entry, with the black boys performing more physically grueling tasks. Housing and food were minimal, and any resistance to authority was met with brutal physical punishment from the guards and caretakers. Due to harsh treatment, several boys died and were unceremoniously buried on and around the school’s campus over the years. After its closure, due to the high number of unmarked graves, an anthropology team from the University of South Florida began the task of digging them up with the goal of identifying them in 2012. According to the latest report, over 100 burials have been documented, many of them unnamed and undocumented.

Colson Whitehead takes this history and brings us the story of Elwood Curtis, a do-gooder boy being raised by his single grandmother in Tallahassee in the early 1960’s. Elwood believes in the message of Dr. Martin Luther King, choosing pacifism in the face of Jim Crow racism. After being falsely accused of stealing a bicycle, he is sent to the Nickel Academy. Once there, he meets another student by the name of Turner. While paired for tasks outside campus and in the local town, Elwood and Turner form a deep friendship, with Turner’s realist outlook as the perfect complement to Elwood’s idealism. Together, they navigate the torturous contours everyday life of the Nickel Academy.

True to history, there are brutal scenes in this book, but I felt they were necessary and not gratuitous. Colson Whitehead shows us just what we need to know and moves on, this book makes it point perfectly in less than 250 pages. Not one single word was wasted here, and five stars aren’t enough to review it. This book is a victory, a straight slam dunk.

If you haven’t already, definitely read this book. If you’re at all like me, you will be unable to put it down.

Review: The Dreamers

40131477. sy475 

Review for "The Dreamers" by Karen Thompson Walker (2019)

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

In the small fictional college town of Santa Lora, California, a virus spreads among the students on campus. The victims fall into a deep, coma-like sleep from which it appears that they will never wake. They are alive, but dreaming.

“The Dreamers” is told through an omniscient narrator and follows several people throughout the town, each grappling with the epidemic. There is Mei and Matthew, two quarantined freshman who breach the barrier and fall for one another, Anna and Ben, a married couple with a new baby, and Libby and Sara, two young sisters coping with life after their doomsday prepper dad falls ill. As with any medical based mystery, as the virus spreads, fear among the residents increases and the town becomes more and more isolated by quarantine as more people fall asleep. What is it? What is going on?

An interesting thing about this novel is that there is no background info given on the source of the virus or how it is spread; you as a reader are just as clueless about what’s going on as the town’s residents. I didn’t necessarily mind the lack of a solid back story here, though I admit that this was the only thing that kept me reading. Other than this, I wanted more from this book. Characters are too brief, events are fleeting, emotions aren’t explored as deeply as they could have been. There’s echoes of Jose Saramago’s “Blindness” here, but this doesn’t come close.

I liked reading this and I definitely like Karen Thompson Walker, but her first novel, “Age of Miracles” much much better.

Review: The Body in Question

42046111

Review for "The Body in Question" by Jill Ciment (2019)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

“The Body in Question” is a short novel that centers on a sensational murder trial in Central Florida. The defendant is a wealthy teen girl accused of murdering her brother. Six jurors and an alternate are chosen from the public and later sequestered, one of them being the narrator, C-2. C-2 is a 52-year-old photographer who is married to an older man. Another juror, F-17, is a non married, 40-ish anatomy teacher. Throughout the novel, we only know these characters only as C-2 and F-17 as they begin a torrid, but passionless affair during the murder trial.

Although the focus of this book is the trial, this comes to a shocking conclusion around the middle of the novel. The rest of the book deals with grief and other plot twists, as well as difficult choices that C-2 makes.

I gave this book four stars because it is very well written and readable. I didn’t care for the characters though. Everybody in this book is to some degree obnoxious, selfish, and completely self indulgent. Normally how I feel about the characters isn’t part of my reviews, but in this case there is a detached, sterile quality in this novel that I couldn’t penetrate. Being that the subject matter deals with a murder case, I figured that it carries over into the overall tone of this book.

I definitely recommend this.

Review: Rani Patel in Full Effect

32074261. sy475 

Review for "Rani Patel in Full Effect" by Sonia Patel (2016)

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Took it back to 2016 with this one, though I read this a little over a month ago. It’s a worthwhile but tough YA read, content warnings abound for rape and sexual abuse.

Rani is a 16 year old Indian American girl (Gujarati) living with her parents on Moloka’i, a remote island in Hawaii. Despite being a person of color, she is an outsider among the locals. She finds common ground with her peers through writing and performing raps under the alias MC Sutra in a hip hop collective about a variety of topics–racism, sexism, colonialism, female empowerment, etc. Often Rani’s raps about female empowerment are in direct conflict with her actions and decision making, which have been damaged due to her chaotic home life. Rani’s mother is emotionally absent, her father is out cheating on her mother with a much younger girl (in addition to some other foul things I won’t mention here in order to not spoil the book).

As far as the writing, this book seemed kinda thrown together. Some editing would have been nice here, at times it felt like sentences and different scenes were just strung together with no transitions at all. There’s also a lot of Gujarati and Hawaiian words that just show up organically with no translation at all. I don’t mind this (I’m in their story–remember), and the glossary at the back is a huge help. Just know that there’s a LOT of unfamiliar words here. You will work reading this.

Also, I strongly encourage you to read the author’s note in the back of the novel. The author details why Rani is so frustrating and makes unhealthy choices time and time again, despite all warnings to the contrary. It’s critical to understanding the book.

I gave this three stars–no more, no less.