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brennanaphone's reviews
635 reviews
The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels by India Holton
3.0
Funny, light, and frothy. Sort of like reading Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams in that it's having a lot of fun within its genre and the writing is witty and surprising, but don't expect really any character depth or development. It's all about the madcap shenanigans.
The romance is surprisingly sexy (I don't know why, but I wasn't expecting an actual sex scene, so hooray!). The characters are plucky and witty, and the historical part of this historical romance is delightful rewritten so that, due to a magical incantation falling into a society of proper ladies, women are now running a whole cabal of pirates, thieves, and murderers. It made for a lot of fun inversions of usual historical tropes, wherein the women now get to be the bloodthirsty ones, the adventurous ones, the take-charge ones. I liked that part a lot. Not the flying houses part, which was just bizarre (like, just make it historical romance instead of fantasy??), but otherwise good stuff.
I will say that Holton often goes just a step too far, spoiling the effect by hammering home her point. She repeats a lot of her jokes (Cecilia often has the exact same experience of being too close to Ned and suddenly assuming her blush is from the heat of the fireplace and definitely, DEFINITELY not from standing near him, which got tedious after the first three or four iterations), and the gender stuff was so brilliantly done until she started throwing in modern terms and phrases ("fuck off," "the patriarchy," "lesbian," "misogynists") that felt like she didn't trust the reader to understand what she was already accomplishing. The very last page ended the whole story on a meta joke about genre awareness that just left me bemused and a little disappointed.
Overall, though, it's a book that is having a lot of fun with tropes and expectations. It's a very visual way of storytelling, even cinematic, often leaving out crucial description so it can twist your assumptions into a punchline. The most fun I had with it all the way through was puzzling out how Holton was keeping these characters in the reader's good graces, staying away from the grotesquery of actual murder and rape and torture but employing plenty of murder attempts, seduction, gunshot wounds, betrayal, and robbery. It's a fine line, but it's a lot of fun to follow.
The romance is surprisingly sexy (I don't know why, but I wasn't expecting an actual sex scene, so hooray!). The characters are plucky and witty, and the historical part of this historical romance is delightful rewritten so that, due to a magical incantation falling into a society of proper ladies, women are now running a whole cabal of pirates, thieves, and murderers. It made for a lot of fun inversions of usual historical tropes, wherein the women now get to be the bloodthirsty ones, the adventurous ones, the take-charge ones. I liked that part a lot. Not the flying houses part, which was just bizarre (like, just make it historical romance instead of fantasy??), but otherwise good stuff.
I will say that Holton often goes just a step too far, spoiling the effect by hammering home her point. She repeats a lot of her jokes (Cecilia often has the exact same experience of being too close to Ned and suddenly assuming her blush is from the heat of the fireplace and definitely, DEFINITELY not from standing near him, which got tedious after the first three or four iterations), and the gender stuff was so brilliantly done until she started throwing in modern terms and phrases ("fuck off," "the patriarchy," "lesbian," "misogynists") that felt like she didn't trust the reader to understand what she was already accomplishing. The very last page ended the whole story on a meta joke about genre awareness that just left me bemused and a little disappointed.
Overall, though, it's a book that is having a lot of fun with tropes and expectations. It's a very visual way of storytelling, even cinematic, often leaving out crucial description so it can twist your assumptions into a punchline. The most fun I had with it all the way through was puzzling out how Holton was keeping these characters in the reader's good graces, staying away from the grotesquery of actual murder and rape and torture but employing plenty of murder attempts, seduction, gunshot wounds, betrayal, and robbery. It's a fine line, but it's a lot of fun to follow.
Siege and Storm by Leigh Bardugo
3.0
Are there people out there who actually ship Mal and Alina? Because those seem like the kind of folks who'd like to watch oatmeal fuck.
Honestly, I think these books are trolling me. The worldbuilding is pretty good, the fantasy is fun and almost nearly dangerous, but it's like she wrote a romance and then coyly decided that she hates romance. The first book pitted the Bowl of Oatmeal against the Twilight-esque fey dude, and then made that guy the villain, because winning by default is the only way Mal is getting any purchase. Cool, that was a fun twist, even though Alina ended up with a dude who was essentially her brother, never paid any attention to her, but is now in love with her I guess.
Except in this, the second book, we get their incredibly tepid relationship (shocking), which involves--gasp--him brushing his lips against hers. Maybe one time. I feel like the bookend chapters of "the girl and the boy" stuff is supposed to make me think they're end game, that they're destined to be together but are pulled apart by forces like her superpowers and her legitimately concerning intrusive violent thoughts, and her desire to kill people and take power. But honestly, Mal is just an insufferably sulky, jealous little cup of cream of wheat with the sexual charisma of a wet wipe.
And this is where I think Bardugo is trolling me. I think she agrees with me. I think she knows these two people do not want to be in a relationship with each other, and they've confused their codependence and their shared trauma for romance. So she took the Twilight villain out of the mix and gave us Nikolai, a whole grab bag of tropes ranging from smooth-talking pirate to brilliant inventor to ambitious politician. And the thing is? I'm rooting for him to get with Alina. Not because I like Alina overly much, but because they have actual chemistry, and he doesn't make her feel guilty and anxious all the time.
Anyway, there have been like eighteen love triangles and still no one has boned down, so this is getting unacceptable. Bardugo, point me at a ship and set me a-sail.
Honestly, I think these books are trolling me. The worldbuilding is pretty good, the fantasy is fun and almost nearly dangerous, but it's like she wrote a romance and then coyly decided that she hates romance. The first book pitted the Bowl of Oatmeal against the Twilight-esque fey dude, and then made that guy the villain, because winning by default is the only way Mal is getting any purchase. Cool, that was a fun twist, even though Alina ended up with a dude who was essentially her brother, never paid any attention to her, but is now in love with her I guess.
Except in this, the second book, we get their incredibly tepid relationship (shocking), which involves--gasp--him brushing his lips against hers. Maybe one time. I feel like the bookend chapters of "the girl and the boy" stuff is supposed to make me think they're end game, that they're destined to be together but are pulled apart by forces like her superpowers and her legitimately concerning intrusive violent thoughts, and her desire to kill people and take power. But honestly, Mal is just an insufferably sulky, jealous little cup of cream of wheat with the sexual charisma of a wet wipe.
And this is where I think Bardugo is trolling me. I think she agrees with me. I think she knows these two people do not want to be in a relationship with each other, and they've confused their codependence and their shared trauma for romance. So she took the Twilight villain out of the mix and gave us Nikolai, a whole grab bag of tropes ranging from smooth-talking pirate to brilliant inventor to ambitious politician. And the thing is? I'm rooting for him to get with Alina. Not because I like Alina overly much, but because they have actual chemistry, and he doesn't make her feel guilty and anxious all the time.
Anyway, there have been like eighteen love triangles and still no one has boned down, so this is getting unacceptable. Bardugo, point me at a ship and set me a-sail.
Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong by Prudence Shen
2.0
Kinda fun, very 2010s, if that makes sense. Lot of "nerds vs. cheerleaders" jokes and thinking creepy dudes are funny. There were also some frenetic Sugarshock vibes, which I enjoyed. I found the artwork in the action scenes completely impenetrable.
This story touched on a lot of stuff, but it didn't seem to be about anything. There's the frenemy dynamic between Charlie and Nate, a breakup that literally never gets mentioned and doesn't matter at all, coping with divorced parents, a robot competition, a student body election, and a romance. I wish the story had focused on one or two of these things and made them matter rather than throwing it all at the wall to see what sticks. The romance especially was incredibly underdeveloped.
I think my favorite part of this was the way Charlie over/under/reacted to his parents' divorce, which felt very painful and honest. The things that Charlie chooses not to say to either parent clearly build and eat at him, and I liked watching that tension throughout the story.
This story touched on a lot of stuff, but it didn't seem to be about anything. There's the frenemy dynamic between Charlie and Nate, a breakup that literally never gets mentioned and doesn't matter at all, coping with divorced parents, a robot competition, a student body election, and a romance. I wish the story had focused on one or two of these things and made them matter rather than throwing it all at the wall to see what sticks. The romance especially was incredibly underdeveloped.
I think my favorite part of this was the way Charlie over/under/reacted to his parents' divorce, which felt very painful and honest. The things that Charlie chooses not to say to either parent clearly build and eat at him, and I liked watching that tension throughout the story.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
2.0
I'm really not sure how this won the Pulitzer Prize, except that Walker Percy took the manuscript under his wing and shepherded into acclaim. And, based on his intro, Percy and I don't look for the same stuff in books, since he liked "its ethnic whites--and one black in whom Toole has achieved the near-impossible, a superb comic character of immense wit and resourcefulness without the least trace of Rastus minstrelsy." I think old Percy needed to read more Black authors.
Anyway, the book is okay. At its core it is farce that goes on way too long. I was really into the idea of a book where the bloviating, self-important white dude is the butt of the joke (although, reading other people's views, some folks actually identify with him, what??). His long-winded and painfully verbose rants are sometimes uncomfortably relatable and often hilarious, especially in his correspondence with Myrna, who is also painfully obtuse. But at some point you realize that everyone is the butt of the joke, that the author skewers everyone, often with boring stereotypes for lesbians, gay men, and Black people, and that a lot of what is supposed to make Ignatius a ridiculous and grotesque figure is his weight. Cool. So there's just no real warmth or empathy or growth or anything. And with farce that's usually fine, but it has to be a lot faster and a lot punchier for that to work, and this is 400 plodding pages long.
I have never been to New Orleans, so I will have to trust others when they say that the regional dialogue is note-perfect. It does have some legitimately funny writing, but it is also incredibly repetitive in its word choice, which undercuts a lot of the humor. You can really hear about Ignatius's pyloric valve, his belching, his "massive" tongue, his slurs, his mother's alcoholism, people screaming, Mrs. Levy's exercise board, Miss Trixie snarling, and Jones saying "Whoa!" only so many times before you just kind of glaze over. I can admire some of the writing choices, but I don't think I actually enjoyed more than a handful of pages of this book.
Anyway, the book is okay. At its core it is farce that goes on way too long. I was really into the idea of a book where the bloviating, self-important white dude is the butt of the joke (although, reading other people's views, some folks actually identify with him, what??). His long-winded and painfully verbose rants are sometimes uncomfortably relatable and often hilarious, especially in his correspondence with Myrna, who is also painfully obtuse. But at some point you realize that everyone is the butt of the joke, that the author skewers everyone, often with boring stereotypes for lesbians, gay men, and Black people, and that a lot of what is supposed to make Ignatius a ridiculous and grotesque figure is his weight. Cool. So there's just no real warmth or empathy or growth or anything. And with farce that's usually fine, but it has to be a lot faster and a lot punchier for that to work, and this is 400 plodding pages long.
I have never been to New Orleans, so I will have to trust others when they say that the regional dialogue is note-perfect. It does have some legitimately funny writing, but it is also incredibly repetitive in its word choice, which undercuts a lot of the humor. You can really hear about Ignatius's pyloric valve, his belching, his "massive" tongue, his slurs, his mother's alcoholism, people screaming, Mrs. Levy's exercise board, Miss Trixie snarling, and Jones saying "Whoa!" only so many times before you just kind of glaze over. I can admire some of the writing choices, but I don't think I actually enjoyed more than a handful of pages of this book.
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
3.0
I entered the Grishaverse books with Six of Crows, even though I knew the first book was Shadow and Bone. I am so glad I did. If I had started with this book, I doubt I would have read beyond the first chapter.
I was shocked by how Twilight-y this started: Clumsy, obnoxious, not-like-other-girls teen girl protagonist with laughably pointless chosen-one storyline stuff gets into a love triangle with a down-to-earth friend and a hugely powerful, ancient fey sort of dude who is way too sexually aggressive. Why is that a trope. Why do we have so much of that.
I guess Bardugo agrees with me at least on that front, and partway through there were some good twists to the point that it pulled my rating up quite a bit (including a resounding refutation of Twilight and all it stands for, so I do appreciate that). The second half was punchier and had better intrigue, and I was invested enough by the end to probably read the rest of the series.
I wish that were enough, but overall the prose is fairly flat and direct, lacking the punchy metaphorical language in her later books. I was actively rooting against both romance options, which I feel is rarely a good thing. Maybe it's that I didn't really believe that these two kids who were raised as basically siblings ended up with such an awkward, chilly dynamic, much less an uncomfortable romance. Or maybe it was because I disliked the narrator so much: Alina is uninteresting, two-faced, and unkind to most of the people around her, but she has a real persecution complex at the same time.
Genya was the closest to a full person, and even she felt like a proto-Nina, so again it felt better to just read Six of Crows instead. I strongly believe that Bardugo should narrate only in the third person--her writing is much stronger for it.
I was shocked by how Twilight-y this started: Clumsy, obnoxious, not-like-other-girls teen girl protagonist with laughably pointless chosen-one storyline stuff gets into a love triangle with a down-to-earth friend and a hugely powerful, ancient fey sort of dude who is way too sexually aggressive. Why is that a trope. Why do we have so much of that.
I guess Bardugo agrees with me at least on that front, and partway through there were some good twists to the point that it pulled my rating up quite a bit (including a resounding refutation of Twilight and all it stands for, so I do appreciate that). The second half was punchier and had better intrigue, and I was invested enough by the end to probably read the rest of the series.
I wish that were enough, but overall the prose is fairly flat and direct, lacking the punchy metaphorical language in her later books. I was actively rooting against both romance options, which I feel is rarely a good thing. Maybe it's that I didn't really believe that these two kids who were raised as basically siblings ended up with such an awkward, chilly dynamic, much less an uncomfortable romance. Or maybe it was because I disliked the narrator so much: Alina is uninteresting, two-faced, and unkind to most of the people around her, but she has a real persecution complex at the same time.
Genya was the closest to a full person, and even she felt like a proto-Nina, so again it felt better to just read Six of Crows instead. I strongly believe that Bardugo should narrate only in the third person--her writing is much stronger for it.
My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
3.0
Droll and quick-witted farce. Feels like an inspiration for the late, great Terry Pratchett, with characters who are meant to be somewhat shallow stereotypes and vehicles for madcap shenanigans and incredibly striking witticisms.
I've read absolutely no Wodehouse before, but this collection of humorous short stories struck me as a sort of prototype for what were likely beloved characters in later books. He plays around with a lot of the same phrases and schticks, and some of them absolutely land with a bang. Some of them feel repetitive. Overall very fun, light, and with quite a few genuinely hilarious lines and delightful turns.
I've read absolutely no Wodehouse before, but this collection of humorous short stories struck me as a sort of prototype for what were likely beloved characters in later books. He plays around with a lot of the same phrases and schticks, and some of them absolutely land with a bang. Some of them feel repetitive. Overall very fun, light, and with quite a few genuinely hilarious lines and delightful turns.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
4.0
Lushly written and absolutely devourable. I had some problems with the pacing, but I'll get to that later. For now I want to talk about the magic of feminist fantasy!
In my early twenties I had a male roommate call me a buzzkill because I complained about a sexist show he was watching; he said it was "escapism." Interesting how in male escapist fantasy women are sex objects who live only to serve the male narrative, while in feminist escapist fantasy, women are just... allowed to do other things? Jesus, what a low bar.
Anyhoo, what I loved, loved, loved about this book was that the entire world she built (all four points of the compass and every culture therein, babyyy) was egalitarian when it came to gender and sexual orientation. Married folks are "companions" to each other, no matter their gender. While I was expecting badass women assassins and captains and dragonriders, some subconscious part of me expected them only in spotlight roles (and probably "taught by their dad to love boxing" or whatever, lol). Instead, women populate every single background role you could have--sailors and castle guards and scholars and assassins and rulers and ambassadors and healers. They're just... there. It's not a big deal. It's amazing how huge that felt to me, how I would find myself automatically picturing male NPCs until it would be like, "The guard turned right and then continued on her patrol" or something. Here. For. It.
The romance in this is lovely. Honestly, I found Ead and Tanè too similar most of the time: they're both very serious and hardworking women with lofty professional ambitions who are sometimes kneecapped by personal issues. They think and speak the same way, to the point that I sometimes got them confused with each other. Ead's complicated and quite tender relationship with Sabran, though, really sets her apart in a way that felt sweet and authentic. Sabran herself is also probably the only truly complex character of the whole book; everyone else, while interesting, tends to be exactly what they seem: Loth is stalwart and honest, the Prioress is devious and conniving, Niclays is a self-serving coward, etc. (Don't expect the plot twists to surprise you, tbh.) Sabran, however, was the perfect combination of haughtily regal and curiously needy, and the growth she experienced over the course of the book was fantastic.
I'm surprised I'm saying this, but at 800 pages, the book felt too short. Or it felt like it should have been a series of books, maybe? I say this because the first half of the book was stunning. She unfolded the worldbuilding really elegantly, bouncing back and forth between the East and West, then extending it slowly to a whole different kingdom in the South. It felt adventurous and huge and populated by so many people and cultures, all at odds with each other over religion or disease or philosophy. There was enough violence and danger to make a lot of things feel unexpected, sometimes sickeningly so.
Then, sometime in the last half, the book got really streamlined. They came up with The Big Plan, and you kind of knew from that moment on that the point of the book was just to get us to the climactic battle as quickly as possible. Characters were suddenly traversing half the world in a day or two without issue, meeting up with each other in chance ways, and even world leaders were setting aside huge fundamental differences to agreeably join in battle. By the end, the world felt small and homogenous. I could have used more time to keep everything fleshed out and to not pay tribute to the idea that Everything Goes Perfectly and Everyone Agrees on History and Religion.
So the ending was a little too neat and a little too quick, but this was still a beautifully styled book in a nicely imaginative world.
In my early twenties I had a male roommate call me a buzzkill because I complained about a sexist show he was watching; he said it was "escapism." Interesting how in male escapist fantasy women are sex objects who live only to serve the male narrative, while in feminist escapist fantasy, women are just... allowed to do other things? Jesus, what a low bar.
Anyhoo, what I loved, loved, loved about this book was that the entire world she built (all four points of the compass and every culture therein, babyyy) was egalitarian when it came to gender and sexual orientation. Married folks are "companions" to each other, no matter their gender. While I was expecting badass women assassins and captains and dragonriders, some subconscious part of me expected them only in spotlight roles (and probably "taught by their dad to love boxing" or whatever, lol). Instead, women populate every single background role you could have--sailors and castle guards and scholars and assassins and rulers and ambassadors and healers. They're just... there. It's not a big deal. It's amazing how huge that felt to me, how I would find myself automatically picturing male NPCs until it would be like, "The guard turned right and then continued on her patrol" or something. Here. For. It.
The romance in this is lovely. Honestly, I found Ead and Tanè too similar most of the time: they're both very serious and hardworking women with lofty professional ambitions who are sometimes kneecapped by personal issues. They think and speak the same way, to the point that I sometimes got them confused with each other. Ead's complicated and quite tender relationship with Sabran, though, really sets her apart in a way that felt sweet and authentic. Sabran herself is also probably the only truly complex character of the whole book; everyone else, while interesting, tends to be exactly what they seem: Loth is stalwart and honest, the Prioress is devious and conniving, Niclays is a self-serving coward, etc. (Don't expect the plot twists to surprise you, tbh.) Sabran, however, was the perfect combination of haughtily regal and curiously needy, and the growth she experienced over the course of the book was fantastic.
I'm surprised I'm saying this, but at 800 pages, the book felt too short. Or it felt like it should have been a series of books, maybe? I say this because the first half of the book was stunning. She unfolded the worldbuilding really elegantly, bouncing back and forth between the East and West, then extending it slowly to a whole different kingdom in the South. It felt adventurous and huge and populated by so many people and cultures, all at odds with each other over religion or disease or philosophy. There was enough violence and danger to make a lot of things feel unexpected, sometimes sickeningly so.
Then, sometime in the last half, the book got really streamlined. They came up with The Big Plan, and you kind of knew from that moment on that the point of the book was just to get us to the climactic battle as quickly as possible. Characters were suddenly traversing half the world in a day or two without issue, meeting up with each other in chance ways, and even world leaders were setting aside huge fundamental differences to agreeably join in battle. By the end, the world felt small and homogenous. I could have used more time to keep everything fleshed out and to not pay tribute to the idea that Everything Goes Perfectly and Everyone Agrees on History and Religion.
So the ending was a little too neat and a little too quick, but this was still a beautifully styled book in a nicely imaginative world.
Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty
4.0
Fascinating structure! It's pitched as a book of short stories, and it is, but as you read you realize you're reading about one person, and by breaking David's life into individual stories, the author is doing something interesting: he's emphasizing fracture and disorientation, both from trauma that happened young and from the subsequent addictions that stem from those traumas. Also, because each story is meant to be read on its own, the narrator is constantly introducing you to people you've already read about, heightening the feeling of disconnect David has from his own community and reality.
The stories are well-placed (as my friend Sarah said, you could call them "stories" or you could just call them "chapters") so that by the time you get to the end, you are dreading uncovering the events of David's young life, since you've seen where he ends up as an adult. The title of the book might sound flip, but it isn't: horror in the movies is nothing like the horror that can happen in your own home.
The stories are well-placed (as my friend Sarah said, you could call them "stories" or you could just call them "chapters") so that by the time you get to the end, you are dreading uncovering the events of David's young life, since you've seen where he ends up as an adult. The title of the book might sound flip, but it isn't: horror in the movies is nothing like the horror that can happen in your own home.
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
5.0
What a delightful little book! It's slim and quick, but each word is so, so carefully chosen. It is engaging, brief, vivid, and creepy as all hell. Legitimately terrifying moments but also sweet and charming. I think if I had read this as a child I would have been deeply scarred, but as an adult I found it enchanting.