A sweet, predictable, read about a grieving girl running a laundromat. There’s an evil fat (literally) cat property developer wanting to buy the laundromat and kick out the family. Will the girl with the help of her ghostly friends save everything in time?

Spoiler: I said it was predictable, so yes, obviously they will. Everything works out in the end. I wish the real world were as ultimately karmic as here. Really, that’s what makes me saddest about the story — just how in the real world, being sweet and kind may not mean you win at the end of the day.

In any case, my nine year old read Sheets about thirty times in a row. For about a month, it was always the last thing opened on my reading app because she would just read it from start to finish again and again and again. I hope she absorbed some of the message and turns out to be sweet and kind too.

Sheets by Brenna Thummler went on sale August 28, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I read this on an airplane…

… which, I know, has seemingly nothing to do with the book in question, but it was a book I read, on an airplane, and being on an airplane (especially ones without any in-flight entertainment) are times where I feel sort of removed from reality, or in stasis. So I read Veil while in stasis and it feels that way when I think about it: I read about an experience removed from me (I am neither Muslim nor do I wear a head scarf) while I was removed from everything else.
It was like listening to a friend tell you about their experiences. It was soothing. It didn’t offer solutions or force opinions.

A friend. Talking to you on an airplane. Passing the time. How the veil may be liberating. How the veil may not be liberating. What it means to her.

Veil by Rafia Zakaria went on sale September 7, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

So it’s a collection of somewhat interwoven stories (MFA before MFA was even an MFA!) about the underside of Odessa, the petty crooks, the not-so-petty crooks, their hangers-on, their not-so-hangers-on. But reading it, I couldn’t help thinking I’d missed something, like I’d literally forgotten to read an introduction or something because while everything felt familiar, something was just a teensiest bit off. Maybe the translation didn’t work for me? Maybe I need more background in that specific time-and-place of Ukrainian/Russian history. It was good and I knew it was good, but I had to keep reminding myself as we went along.

I did appreciate the dark humour, even if I was missing something all the while.

Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel went on sale November 15, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Geoff: Is that book any good?

Me: I’ll bet you a million dollars she has an MFA.

Geoff: How can you tell that?

Me (looks in the About the author section): Yep! MFA!

Geoff: That doesn’t answer my question.

Me: What question?

Geoff: Is it any good?

So is it? Parts sure — the chapter set in the city with the rebels was so tautly written and great to read. But that whole thing reads exactly like my idea of a stereotypical I have an MFA and this is my first novel novel (I have no idea if my opinion is justified, since, perhaps, I read tonnes of novels with those two qualifications and don’t even realize it). What do I mean?

1. Every chapter is about/from the perspective of a different character.
2. Chapters change the point of view constantly (i.e. some chapters are second person singular (you), some chapters are third person singular (she), etc.
3. While each chapter is interlinked, they all have a stand-alone feel to them.
4. Catharsis is somewhat muted.

And so, it ends up being more like a bunch of short stories about a fictionalized account of the filming of Cannibal Holocaust. I’m not saying that this is bad, but it isn’t the most wonderful book I’ve ever read either. I think it was marketed as horror. I’m jaded, so I wasn’t that horrified. But, maybe I was supposed to be horrified. I don’t know. I need a new POV chapter/character to tell me what I’m supposed to feel.

We At Our Own by Kea Wilson went on sale September 6, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

It’s a mystery novel with the word fish in the title that has Spoiler red herrings in it and you have no idea how happy that makes me as someone who likes puns. So I’m going to giggle off here in the corner for a few minutes before moving on with my review.

Okay. Giggling done.

So we have a pretty standard British murder mystery book, a re-release from the 1998. A doctor finds out he’s being tried for the murder of his wife, his children are missing, he claims he is innocent, and then the scrappy female police officer has to save the day! The book then veers off into a whole side investigation before a Spoiler twist ending. I’m not generally a fan of twist endings (too much building up an emotional rapport between readers and characters before the story is like Aha! I’m smarter than you!), but this one wasn’t so bad. Maybe it was because it wasn’t all about being cleverer than the reader, although I doubt one could have figured it out on one’s own. I’m rarely surprised by plots anymore, so maybe I’m softening towards twist endings. Who knows? The investigation was compelling too — not that it had much to do in style, tone, or content, but it reminded me of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, wherein you don’t really realize how far you’ve floated away from the story catalyst for quite some time (I guess until the twist). Bobbing along on a floaty in the ocean, only to look up and realize that the shore is no longer in sight (need some water analogies because of the fish title).

So decent potboiler mystery novel to read during a lazy summer.

Back to giggling about fish and red herrings (you don’t even want to know how much I laughed about the fish statue from the In Auction in The Ersatz Elevator).

Dead Fish by Ruth Carrington went on sale March 29, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

(One of those reviews where I spend more time ruminating on my own mind than on the book in question.)

If the goal of F-Bomb was self-reflection, than hurrah! It succeeded. Because I sit here and think and think and think and think about what I want to say about this book, about what didn’t really work for me with it, and then I end up thinking about my twenties and then that day in my thirties where I just decided to take all the liberal feminism blogs off my RSS feed (yes, this was a while ago), mainly because there had been a whole string of ewww breastfeeding is gross and yay I’m not pregnant statements in articles* and it really hit me then that the feminism that these blogs was in very narrow focus, and me, non-USian, non-single, non-childfree, was not what they were ever going to focus on. F-Bomb doesn’t have that same teensy focus, but it has the same feel of trying to appeal to someone who isn’t me. That’s fine for me to not be in the audience — I don’t expect every book on every issue to cater to me (although I am awesome, so if you are looking for someone for your book to cater to, I do suggest me), but F-Bomb does have a bit of an echo-chamber feel to it. Who is going to pick up this book? Middle (and up) class twenty somethings with an interest in liberal feminism. Who is going to say hell yeah! to the message in this book? Middle (and up) class twenty somethings with an interest in liberal feminism. Who is the audience for this book? Middle (and up) class twenty somethings with an interest in liberal feminism. Did it teach me (middle class and thirty something more aligned with non-liberal-feminism) anything I didn’t already know? No.

Am I done posing questions? About F-Bomb, no. Plus I have more to say.

Sometimes the book had snide quips for people, places, or things that McKeon holds in contempt. When it comes right down to it, that was what really annoyed me most about this book. But why? I know ridicule is a time-honoured tradition for revealing the sheer idiocy of idiotic movements. So why did this grate so much in F-Bomb? Because it was unnecessary, in which case I can blame McKeon, or because I found it catty — which is such a loaded, gendered term — in which case I have no one to blame but myself for falling prey to my own internalized misogyny. Am I mad at McKeon or am I mad at myself? If I am angry at myself, is that what is colouring my reaction to F-Bomb? I just can’t get past the feeling that F-Bomb made me angry at the wrong things.

F-Bomb by Lauren McKeon went on sale March 6, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

* I actually emailed a complaint to the blog (I can’t rightly remember which one it was now, but it was a relatively major one in terms of liberal feminist blogs) in question about how for some women pregnancy was a radical act (W/POC, people with disabilities, or any other people for whom body autonomy had been denied to them by governmental and/or social forces). The article in question disappeared, but there was no acknowledgement, not even an insincere mea-culpa, they didn’t even email me back. Just whoosh, gone, no interest in engaging. It’s shitty to be called out, yes, but these blogs had no problem calling out others, and I’d like to think I was polite about it. Didn’t matter. No engagement back. Oh well.
Google Reader shuttered a few years later, so the golden age of RSS was coming to an end in any case.

So I can’t tell whether I found this book tedious and overly lengthy and boring because it was tedious and overly lengthy and boring or because the structure of being tedious and lengthy and boring is supposed to mimic the tedium, length, and boredom the characters themselves feel, being trapped inside a closed-bubble ecosystem off in the Arizona desert for two years. It felt like it took me two years to read the book (really, it took a week), but was that the point? I don’t know. We’re given three annoying POV characters and two dull years of their lives and it just draaaaaaaaaggggs on. Then we get to the end and everyone is exactly the same as at the beginning so what was the point of this week I spent reading this book? I kept at it because I thought something, anything, meaningful would happen.

Nope.

Nothing.

Terranauts are boring. I guess that’s what I took away from this.

The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle went on sale October 20, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Overall, it’s a pretty even anthology of little comic stories, each with a sort of twist at the end (where I guess the SHOCK in the title comes from). There are some aliens (not particularly clever ones who try to hypnotize a scarecrow), there’s a retelling of Red Riding Hood where she is a hood in the more colloquial sense of the term (i.e. hoodlum), there are fighting transformer buildings, etc. But again, like I find with so many comics, it’s like a whole smorgasbord of amuse-bouches but then I want to eat something more filling than a bit of bacon wrapped in watercress, except there’s not the option. Why is it that word-based short-stories can fill me up (good ones, at least, like Goodbye to Berlin or Just Pretending, or even non-traditional ones without true endings, like let’s say If on a winter’s night a traveler), yet I’ve never been satisfied completely with any comic anthology? Is it a fault of the medium or a fault of the reader?

So I liked SHOCK Anthology more than I expected to, but I still, as always, have my reservations about the effectiveness of comics for short stories.

SHOCK Anthology by Neil Gaiman, Paul Jenkins, Brian Azzarello, Cullen Bunn, Marguerite Bennett, Frank Tieri, and more went on sale April 24, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

So part way through my reading of the first story in this collection I was like Wait…was Bettie Page actually a secret agent? Obviously, as the story devolves into giant occult lasers I’m guessing the answer was no, but still, for a second, I really considered the possibility, so in that Bettie Page Volume 1 by David Avallone succeeds. Where it maybe doesn’t succeed as well is in pacing — sometimes I felt lost. Sometimes it seemed like new characters were abruptly introduced or taken away. Sometimes I didn’t really know what was going on. I’ll chalk up my confusion to a combination of maybe there’s something missing here and the low-res file I got for reviewing — low res implies pixelation implies sometimes I have to squint and when I squint I get a headache and then I end up scanning quickly rather than reading.

It’s fun. It’s pulpy. But it isn’t necessarily enough to keep you satisfied.

Bettie Page Volume 1 by David Avallone went on sale May 22, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I hate it when I read a book and I then struggle to say much about it. So let me try and force a bunch of words out for no other reason than I got this book for free in exchange for a review, and so I will keep my promise and review it.

So I read To The Promised Land, spurred on by a comment from a university course I took many years ago: Most people know Martin Luther King Jr. from his anti-segregation work and his I Have A Dream speech (and looky looky — I reviewed a book about that speech a few years ago) from 1963. He was assassinated in 1968. So there’s five years where, for the most part, the popular narrative stops. Why? Because he spent a lot of those five years advocating not just for civil-rights for African Americans, but also advocating for the poor, against classicism, and working with unions. And while voting rights and desegregation was one thing, working for economic equality was a whole other kettle of fish.

And so, I got To The Promised Land because of that university professor many years ago and because To The Promised Land has a sub (under?) title: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice. Okay. So I was going to learn about those missing five years.

So I did. I read To The Promised Land (in April, and now it’s June). I made precisely zero notes on my kobo. I highlighted nothing. I read it and I remember basically nothing. My fault for being disengaged with the process or the book’s fault for informing without captivating me with language or story-telling or whatever it was that didn’t have the words worm their way deep into my brain? But this is the second book in a row about someone working to make the world better that I’ve read to which my response has been a precisely mid-range, not-even-angry-about-it, meh.

Martin Luther King Jr. tried to make the world better for all Americans, then they shot him, and that makes me sad. Later I read a book about him. There was a sanitation strike in the book. He still got shot. I am still sad, but I do know that my being sad is not really what this is all about. Still sad though. Still a big blank space in my brain where this book should have gone. Sorry.

To The Promised Land by Michael K. Honey went on sale April 3, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.