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492 reviews

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

4.5

“The prose is cool water. Its images are lonely, weird, sometimes horrific, and always arresting.” I think Sophie Mackintosh rather aptly describes I Who Have Never Known Men in her afterword. (A kind of aside, but the afterword in this particular edition is definitely worth reading after reading the novel.) This novel was quiet, yet its message of humanness reverberated in ways I did not expect. Throughout the novel, Harpman asks what it means to be human (specifically a woman), especially after much of what makes a human human is stripped away. No context is given as to how or why a few dozen women were forced into cages at the start of the novel and what allowed them to escape, where they were after they escaped, along with the fact that there’s very little sense of time. To add to the disorienting ambiguity of it all, the unnamed female narrator has virtually no knowledge of what used to be, barely able to make sense of what the older women in the group tell her about life before confinement. Despite this sparsity of information, the novel is utterly rich in content as a result of the narrator’s curiosity about everything from the material to the abstract.

Something that struck me throughout this novel was Harpman’s observation of how humans can be the absolute worst toward other humans while simultaneously capable of showing so much love and care, the complexity of human nature. We see the horrors of how the women were treated at the start of the novel, but even during confinement and especially after escaping, we see such tender interactions between the women. These are all understood even to those who have not experienced conventional human life—in other words, the narrator—who herself notes at the start of the novel: “I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.” It was interesting to watch the narrator unpack newfound emotions and experiences, to continue to make sense of humanness, especially as Harpman whittled away dialogue, characters, and surroundings until the reader is left with a profound sense of loneliness in both prose and narrative, as well as a startling understanding of what it means to be human.

While I realize this novel is entirely speculative, I did find it a little hard to believe that the narrator was able to pick up on certain ideas and concepts as quickly as she did, but it wasn’t to the point that it completely took away from the reading experience. I also find myself a bit torn about the decision Harpman made to provide very little information to the reader. On the one hand, I thought it was incredibly effective in getting her ideas and message across; on the other hand, I did find it a little frustrating being left in total darkness from start to end with a lot of unanswered questions.

Overall, though, this was such a poignant novel that gave me so much to think about. I wish my French was better, because I would love to read this in the original language to really experience the novel’s emotional impact. I did think Schwartz handled the English translation phenomenally though.

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Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction by Sonia Sulaiman

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emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

4.0

“Someone once said that all Palestinian fiction is speculative; we are always grappling with the past and living in expectation of the future, while our fictions tell of alternate histories—being, by definition, histories told by the colonized. Others say that the definition of the speculative is itself a colonial imposition.”

I found that these lines from Sonia Sulaiman’s preface really stayed with me while reading this anthology. It also raises a really fascinating question of what “speculative” might mean for different groups, and one that I’ll be thinking about for a long while. Thyme Travellers is a short anthology of speculative fiction written by authors from the Palestinian diaspora, all of whom are (re)imagining a world for their people and motherland in different ways. Like any anthology, some stories stood out to me more than others. Personally, the two that I think are absolute must-reads from this anthology are Nadia Afifi’s “The Generation Chip” and Samah Serour Fadil’s “Gaza Luna.” I felt that both authors beautifully captured the love and resilience of Palestinians in their own unique manner.

I do (rather selfishly) wish a lot of these stories were longer, but I think each author brought something to this anthology that will give the reader much to think about, especially as we continue to push for a world with a liberated Palestine.

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Sunflowers by Keezy Young

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informative reflective fast-paced

4.5

This was a far too short graphic memoir (just twenty-four pages!) that draws attention to what it’s like to live with bipolar disorder (specifically bipolar 1). Young approaches being bipolar with great care and honesty, striking a nice balance between the personal and informative to reveal what it means to deal with (hypo)mania in particular. Furthermore, I appreciated that Young dispelled some common misconceptions able-minded people might have about a very stigmatized disability.

I do wish this graphic memoir was much longer and actually had more illustrations. While very much following the comics/graphic novel formatting, I did feel that it was far more text-heavy than expected, and I would have loved to see more of Young’s art style. Aside from these rather minor quibbles, I really enjoyed this nuanced look into being bipolar.

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Woman, Eat Me Whole: Poems by Ama Asantewa Diaka

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emotional inspiring reflective fast-paced

3.5

Diaka’s poetry collection is one that I believe was meant for a specific audience. It is one that I am not a part of, which is fine; poems shouldn’t always have to resonate with the reader. Many of these poems focused on experiences that distinctly impacted African women (specifically cisgender, and more on this), particularly the myriad ways misogyny makes an appearance. I was also intrigued by how Diaka used this collection as an opportunity to scrutinize the role of religion (specifically Christianity) in all of this. With that said, while I understand that this collection is deeply personal, I was a little unnerved by the bioessentialist understanding of womanhood in a handful of these poems. I wouldn’t go so far as to cry out that it’s transphobia in action but, rather, an opportunity to further reflect on the complexities of womanhood. One thing that I want to say Diaka did capture very well, though, was the pain and frustration that women face in society due to misogyny.

The poems carry power, yet I found that I was a bit disengaged with them. The collection read to me as a bit uneven, with the last section feeling out-of-place (though it was also my favorite, funnily enough). Furthermore, with the exception of a few poems, Diaka’s writing style didn’t really work for me, personally. It wasn’t until after I finished the collection and did a little more research into the poet that I learned she does spoken word that how she approached her poems made far more sense. It actually made me wonder if I should have borrowed the audiobook so that I could hear these poems while the words were in front of me for a better experience overall.

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Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels

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emotional medium-paced

2.5

With all honesty, I feel as though I was a bit misled by the synopsis of this novel and was given something a little different. Michaels certainly asks what to make of the relationship between AI and the arts (specifically poetry) through his elderly poet protagonist, Marian, who is invited to co-write a poem with a poetry AI bot named Charlotte. However, I wasn’t expecting so much of the novel to also think deeply about family relations (particularly motherhood), which I’m not entirely against, but it also wasn’t what I signed up for when I picked up this book. Unfortunately, even without this theme around motherhood, I found that this was a pretty uninspiring novel.

I think the core issue is that most of the characters around Marian were rather underdeveloped, almost as if they were only there to serve as vehicles to get certain ideas across or as plot devices. I want to say the most obvious instance of this was Morel, who seemed to be representative of anti-capitalist ideas and a critical voice. Another obvious example is Marian’s son, Courtney, who really seems to just serve as a plot device more than anything. (Also, I’m not entirely sure how he’s so well-adjusted as an adult despite essentially being abandoned by his mother at a formative age?) These faults become especially apparent due to the book being (theoretically) more driven by Marian’s interactions with other characters. In addition, the attention Michaels wanted to give to the relationship between AI and the arts left a lot to be desired. Questions were asked, but there was never an in-depth exploration or reflection of the complexities of this relationship.

I’m also not entirely sure how to feel about the tender portrayal of the relationship between Marian and Charlotte. I did think the way Michaels approached their interactions stylistically to be an interesting one. Overall, though, as someone who has very mixed feelings that generally lean toward negative about AI (especially within the arts), I was rather put off by all of it.

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Elsewhere by Yan Ge

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mysterious reflective medium-paced

2.75

This is the third work by Yan Ge that I’ve read now, and I think it’s safe to say that I’m just not a fan of her writing. I admittedly struggled to stay engaged with a few of these short stories (especially the final and longest one, “Hai,” which made up about a third of the book) and found most of them rather detached and distant. I do think that I’m missing something crucial here, and it’s why Ge’s prose never quite made sense to me and often read as disorienting and ambiguous. There’s no doubt that this collection has an interesting theme, which is this sense of being elsewhere and feeling like an outsider in more ways than one. I think this was more apparent in the short stories set in more modern times, but I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell you what role the historically rooted stories had in this collection. Perhaps the short story that I found most compelling was “How I Fell in Love with the Well-Documented Life of Alex Whelan,” which was a fascinating deep dive into a parasocial relationship and social media.

Again, I think I’m missing something crucial about Ge’s works, because other readers seem to have gotten a lot out of this collection (and other books by her) that didn’t click for me at all. I’m glad to have given her short stories a shot (and finding at least one that I enjoyed), but it was a bit disappointing that they largely didn’t work for me.

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Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan

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challenging dark sad slow-paced

4.0

My knowledge of Indonesian history is limited, but I did eventually pick up that the characters and setting of Beauty Is a Wound served as complex allegories for the turbulence that Indonesians faced throughout the twentieth century. Kurniawan wrote an incredibly intricate story with an impressive cast of characters that detailed the very complicated and multigenerational history of Dewi Ayu and her family. Furthermore, the whole story was immersed in the magic realism genre, with Kurniawan making frequent nods to local folklore to further establish its roots in Indonesian culture and history.

With that said, I strongly hesitate to recommend this novel to anyone. It’s not because I thought it was bad but, rather, a result of carrying very mixed feelings throughout my reading experience due to the amount of sexual violence against women and ever-present misogyny. While I realize that the treatment of women is meant to serve as an allegory of sorts for what Indonesians went through (as far as I can tell), there were far too many instances when I felt that the inclusion of a rape/sexual assault scene was gratuitous and served little to no purpose other than for it to be included. It also raises the question of what it means for a male author to write female characters in a symbolic fashion like this, and I’m not entirely sure if there’s an easy answer for this.

Given my limited knowledge of Indonesia, I have no doubt that I’m missing a fair amount of cultural and historical context that might provide greater insight into why Kurniawan approached his story the way he did, and I’d be curious to know what Indonesians—particularly Indonesian women—thought of this novel.

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Sordidez by E.G. Condé

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challenging reflective fast-paced

3.75

Sordidez was a fascinating and incisive exploration of colonialism in a near-future Yucatán and Puerto Rico, as well as a push for collective resistance against it. Condé, who identifies as a queer diasporic Boricua writer, is one of the creators of a genre known as “Taínofuturism,” which “imagines a future of Indigenous renewal and decolonial liberation for Borikén (Puerto Rico) and the archipelagos of the Caribbean),” and this novella very much situates itself in the genre in the way it uplifts the identities, histories, and cultures of this region. Furthermore, Sordidez shows how issues are deeply interlocked as a result of colonialism, one of which is climate crises. Relatedly, there were some great critiques of countries and organizations (notably, the United Nations). Another thing I greatly enjoyed was the inclusion of a Deaf character and how sign language was incorporated into the dialogue.

With that said, as much as I really enjoyed the concepts and themes of this novella, I had a lot of trouble with the prose. This is absolutely a me problem and not a critique of Condé’s writing style by any means, and I couldn’t really tell you why it just didn’t work. In addition, I really wish this novella could have been an actual novel, especially considering how many incredible ideas there were that could have been explored more in-depth.

Ultimately, though, this novella was a great introduction to the Taínofuturism genre that I’d love to read more of. It’s also a great addition to the growing list of speculative fiction centering Indigenous voices.

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Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi

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informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

Free was a memoir I did not expect to enjoy as much as I did. It didn’t surprise me in the least when I found out that Ypi is a professor of political theory who specialized in Marxism; what did surprise me was the writing style, which read very much like a novel in some ways. (It’s not to say that political scientists are incapable of writing lyrically, so much as it is that I fell for the trap of making assumptions I shouldn’t have, haha.) The memoir was approached as a coming-of-age story of sorts while deftly blending in the historical and political. Not knowing very much about Albanian history and politics, this book was rather eye-opening for me with how Ypi discussed what life was like as a child under communism in her home country, and I liked how she unraveled the complexities of this life from a child’s perspective, which is often taking everything at face value while also reveling in the little things in life (such as Coca-Cola cans). The memoir was as much informative as it was humorous and poignant.

I think what I appreciated about this memoir was the nuanced and honest commentary Ypi provided throughout about different political ideologies and the meaning of freedom. It was also a deep (self-)reflection on the modern history and identity of one’s country that made me curious to learn more about Albania.

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Plantains and Our Becoming: Poems by Melania Luisa Marte

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emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

3.75

I am not Black and Latina. I am a Black Latina.

Melania Luisa Marte opens her collection with “Afro-Latina,” in which she asserts that Black and Latina are not two separate identities but, rather, one. However, she also makes clear to the reader the rampant anti-Blackness of this world and that her “Afro comes before Latina,” to recognize and uplift her Blackness.

With that said, the poems in this collection were a bit of a hit-or-miss for me. I enjoyed the themes that Marte explored, the love and strength that flowed in these pages, but the way she delivered them didn’t work for me, personally. I also found that, while the close focus on identity and culture were compelling, there were instances when I wanted her to go a little deeper.

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jayisreading's reviews 492 reviews

jayisreading's reviews
492 reviews