this book is compulsively readable, but it isn't honest.
the best mental health memoirs are wildly brave, willing to relate moments of what seems to bthis book is compulsively readable, but it isn't honest.
the best mental health memoirs are wildly brave, willing to relate moments of what seems to be stunning selfishness or carelessness or cruelty in the aim of carrying across the reality of these illnesses.
you’d be hard pressed to find a moment in which anna marie tendler is willing to let you see her at her worst. as a teen or almost teen fighting with older men, she speaks in lengthy, therapist-approved paragraphs while they struggle to get sentences out. she spends substantial time in intensive mental health treatment, but she makes sure to tell us she completes her postgrad program with barely even an extension.
ultimately, she wanted to write a book that would prove her to be a victim of everything: circumstances, relationships, her career.
i think tendler has been through a ton, and i think (especially based on the diagnoses we share) her brain must be a truly hostile place to be.
but i don’t think she needs to convince us as readers that her repeated tendency to financially rely on men (often right before ending the relationship) is a bad thing that somehow happened to her. i don’t need to be convinced that her career is one of accomplishment, when it seems like that wasn’t possible for her.
i didn’t come to this book for a tell-all about a shocking celebrity divorce (although i will say, the traces found here paint a very different picture from the public perception). i came for honesty, the kind of honesty that feels brave and destigmatizing and beautiful. and i didn’t get it.
i came away from this book thinking that anna marie tendler is a complex and interesting person, trying her best to be kind. that didn't come from her writing, but in spite of it. she writes with walls up, trying to convince us that she is good and likable, telling us time and again the times that she was angry and chose peace, spending the last chapter of the book refuting excerpts of her psychological analysis, telling us why she is not mad, she is not hateful, she is not not not. she tells, never shows.
the best memoirs are shockingly vulnerable, and the best moments of this one are too—the chapters spent with tendler's beloved dog petunia left me teary eyed.
but by and large, this is defensive.
on top of that, there's a really unhealthy-feeling sense of competing that anyone who has suffered bad mental health spells in high school will recognize. sharing how much she weighed, or how stunned professionals were by just how bad her mental health was, or the insertions of her exhausting monologue to every inane moment...it's a different version of the same desire to impress the reader as her lack of vulnerability.
also the writing is not very good. sorry! now i'm done.
bottom line: an unpopular opinion that surprised even me.
the devil herself is in this book and she's a prematurely gray violinist.
possibly it is not the fault of charlotte, one of our two dual-pov second chathe devil herself is in this book and she's a prematurely gray violinist.
possibly it is not the fault of charlotte, one of our two dual-pov second chance romantics, that she sucks so hard. perhaps she has a life-threatening allergy to asking her alleged best friend a single question about her life. maybe she lost all of her non-hair-related characteristics in a tragic accident. there's a chance she was put through a now-debunked invasive psychological experiment that left her heart a la the grinch's at the beginning of the movie. she could have a genetic lineage made up solely of people who ride in sleds and yell at huskies to mush mixed with assistant managers who run fast-casual bowl restaurants like the navy.
but unless the answer is "all of the above, as related in a lengthy and disturbing prequel i somehow missed," she is just the worst without good reason.
she does have A reason, and that reason is the irritatingly named and alarmingly traitless brighton, her ex girlfriend who left her at the altar. sounds bad. but still not really checking all my boxes re: having a personality so bad i fear it's contagious.
this book was painful to get through. i didn't root for these two monsters to get together — far from it. i was hoping one of their wintertime activity fails or hangovers would have a more lasting impact so i could ride out a few pages of silence (or, god forbid, other characters), but no dice. just a who's who of tropes thrown at the wall to see what sticks. fake dating, enemies to lovers, second chance, miscommunication, forced proximity, friends to lovers, rescue romance: i'm sorry. all of you deserved better.
AND SO DID I.
all i wanted was some christmas cheer and instead i nearly lost everything. and by everything i mean "my mind for like 300 pages."
bottom line: to each their own. this book is not my own.
(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
------------------------- tbr review
it's actually never too early to begin christmastime...more
this is a book about sisters, scams, paris, magic, sapphic romance, and ghosts.
that's like 6 of my 10 all time favorite things.
turns out it also has athis is a book about sisters, scams, paris, magic, sapphic romance, and ghosts.
that's like 6 of my 10 all time favorite things.
turns out it also has a lot of my least favorites.
what it doesn't have enough of is story. it's not even 300 pages long and yet we don't have enough content to cover us! we try our hand at multiple perspectives (all my homies hate multiple perspectives) that cover the SAME TIMELINE, resulting in the first 200 pages becoming totally redundant as we sit through the same story once more. 150 pages of the first pov, 100 pages of the next one telling the same story, all with a slow pace and an actual plot beginning at the halfway point. by the time we catch up to where the first perspective left off we have less than 50 pages to go.
did that description make sense? it was so surreal as i was reading it i'm struggling to capture the experience.
and the bummers continued apace. this is allegedly set in paris, but it has literally 0 atmosphere and contains a bizarre choice to write one perspective in what i can only describe as "old-timey british dialect." two unredeemed, deeply annoying protagonists were the killing blow.
the writing and synopsis aren't quite my cup of tea, but i thought this could be the exception to the various rules in my hater's heart.
throw in a bunch of unresolved thoughts about familial abuse, suicide, depression, infertility, motherhood, social class, and love...and it's safe to say it was not.
bottom line: it was the best of tropes, it was the worst of tropes.
if a book has a low average rating, is categorized as lit fic, and is about a woman destroying her life...i'm in.
even if i should be out.
i think thereif a book has a low average rating, is categorized as lit fic, and is about a woman destroying her life...i'm in.
even if i should be out.
i think there's a thin line between masterfully mysterious lit fic and deliberately obtuse, underedited lit fic. i badly wanted to make this into the former but it was the latter.
there were a few basic inconsistencies that contributed (like a friend who knows a lot about the world of ballet spreading the word that a famous up-and-comer quit on purpose, when in actual fact she broke her ankle mid-performance in front of an audience who could hear her bone snap?)...
but the larger issue is the confusion at the sentence level. this writing feels obscure and hard to parse. it takes effort to read and the result is not worth the re-analyzing. good writing =/= difficult writing — in my experience and/or opinion, the two have little overlap.
it's an overwritten style that almost feels like kwon is writing into synonyms — so many phrases are weird walks into words that fit awkwardly. "I'd marvel at his altering." "Spoil the image, but I'd find the sight ideal." "If I forgot, thin lifts bit through soil, the lapse like skin tearing." "If a friend had taught me this shit, I'd have thought it false." "I got asked, at times, if, with the triptychs, I had regrets." (that one i just included because it's comma city.)
it reminds me of when i dabbled in creative writing as a kid and would try to think of a specific word and, failing, put a slightly wrong one in.
except, like, every sentence.
bottom line: tough when work is pretentious and yet not good....more
it's the kind of book that seems like it might set feminism back a decade or two, tossing two of the best writers of the 20th century (or at least the back half of it) together, shaking them up, objectifying them, and calling it a feud. somebody call ryan murphy.
i felt a low-level guilt while reading this, but not much pleasure. maybe i'm the kind of buttoned-up joan acolyte the author rolls her eyes at in early pages (she's an eve girl and it shows constantly, in the way that girls who smoked cigarettes in the bathroom tried to out-cool the popular groups without showing their effort).
i especially don't like defining eve by her body and those in or near it and joan by her cold calculations. those are components of them both, but god, after this many pages, how lazy!
some of the things in this book are unforgivable — say, that joan was never all that interested in her husband or her daughter (and to hell with those two career-defining books about their world-destroying losses, they don't fit with the narrative, we'll discuss them only to cherry-pick quotes we can use to call her unfeeling). or diagnosing joan with an eating disorder out of an also author-diagnosed fixation on being diminutive. or admitting to editing (without in-quote notation) many excerpts of eve's writing.
ultimately i think allowing a 98 year old man a few months out from death ramble unchecked about how he "made joan didion" tells you everything you need to know about the seriousness of the work here.
bottom line: i love these two enough i'd read anything about them. i just wish i didn't have to hit myself on the head with a rock until i forgot feminism in order to enjoy it here.
i have marked 1,865 books as read on goodreads. i have reviewed 1,813 of them. of those, i would say at least 1,727 had at least one complaint. and STi have marked 1,865 books as read on goodreads. i have reviewed 1,813 of them. of those, i would say at least 1,727 had at least one complaint. and STILL, i just discovered a whole new negative thing to say:
this book is all feelings. the characters don't really have personality traits, they have emotions. they don't have development, they have new feelings. there is no romance, just instalove. there isn't really a plot, just people going through feelings together (for a podcast) and people going through feelings together (that will eventually lead to them being together).
it makes it all feel shallow, like there's no actual connection between these people or their story, and that means there's no connection between the reader and the book.
for this reader, at least.
bottom line: you learn something new every day. i already knew i was a soulless void, but today i learned a new effect of that.
------------------------ tbr review
what's your favorite niche book trope? mine is road trips.
unfortunately this is not really a road trip book. my bad.
i love reading about artists. that way i can pretend i'm creative and interesting.
unfortunately...only the first half of this book was that.
and i lovei love reading about artists. that way i can pretend i'm creative and interesting.
unfortunately...only the first half of this book was that.
and i loved that part! it focused on three friends, all asian-american women, through their 80s childhoods and 90s and Y2K time in new york, on their very different paths—an artist, a coder, a housing activist—and all that they had in common, each in some way on the fringes, in worlds that pointed to what was to come.
i could've read so much of this.
unfortunately, it took a sudden turn into an inconsistent, fake-feeling dystopian future, with everyone forgotten but one, whose character felt different and her motivation unrecognizable.
i've been awaiting this book since the leavers, but this lacks everything that made that book great: memorable characters, a light hand in melodrama, and striking, even emotion.
pssst...emily henry's screenwriter for beach read wrote a romance novel...
and you can probably skip it.
this was a weird book.
it uses the word vague apssst...emily henry's screenwriter for beach read wrote a romance novel...
and you can probably skip it.
this was a weird book.
it uses the word vague a lot, and it loves to murmur. it has a lot of italics, for no real discernible reason. there's a whole scene where it seems like it might be sponsored by scrivener (credit to halle)?
more seriously, it creates a very troubled romance with very troubled characters and puts them in a love story it will take 300 pages to untangle into something resembling a happily ever after, except we never really get to their individual personal issues.
except forget about their respective personal issues because we don't have time to get to those.
helen never makes real friendships, and grant doesn't either. parental relationships are left unresolved. they get back together, but the why feels unsolved at best.
and then there's the worst crime of all...this is so devastatingly unfunny.
a lot of the time in modern life, rom coms are more like rom drams, featuring characters navigating wildly upsetting interpersonal crises with a romance in the background and the occasional line of banter.
i actually don't mind that much, because i'm obsessed with drama and it helps to soothe the part of me that is constantly one bolt of confidence away from asking my acquaintances why they broke up.
but the drama in this was SO crazy, and the jokes SO unforgivably bad (to the point that i wouldn't know they were supposed to be jokes if it didn't literally say "he joked"), that i was more like...why would i root for these people at all.
while questioning if i know what jokes are at all, in the emotional equivalent of when you use the word "joke" so much it doesn't look like a word anymore. which is also happening.
it also relies on chemistry instead of intimacy, with a lot more sex scenes than romantic ones.
i read an interview with the author in which she says that she wrote this early in the morning and late at night while working on an emily henry script, and i hate to say it shows. this reads like the compiled discarded bits of something distractedly written by her.
that would be the meanest thing i've ever said if i didn't love emily henry so much.
except the ones that are really about forming a psychosexual relationship with a bear, i guess.
probably even when give me all the books about sisters.
except the ones that are really about forming a psychosexual relationship with a bear, i guess.
probably even when i'm 85 years old and, like, baking cookies and reading 24/7 like a nerdy keebler elf, my primary identifier will be eldest sister.
so i was destined to dislike this book.
it's about two sisters: our protagonist, sam, who is obsessed with the idea of selling their house when their mom dies and leaving the island they live on, and her older sister, elena, who is constantly having to care for their mom, work, clean, and cook, and also is obsessed with a bear.
sam is a really aggravating character. she's a 28 year old grown woman and yet she expects her sister to do everything, then throws tantrums and tattles when her sister (WHO IS ONE YEAR OLDER) doesn't just work for sam's own dreams. this is not solved by character development and in fact gets worse over the course of the book.
i imagine a lot of the low ratings on this book are because it's very silly and dumb to be obsessed with a huge scary animal who is mostly described by his reeking of piss, but that's only the start of it.
the best part of this whole book is when elena finally tells sam to f*ck off.
i love books about sisters, but this read more like a soap opera: everything bad that can happen will happen, with no time for character development along the way.
bottom line: maybe it's the eldest sister in me, but this book's smelly monster was more sympathetic than the baby of the family.
(they say if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. but i just said that nice thing so now i getoh how i love a good title...
(they say if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. but i just said that nice thing so now i get to complain.)
this has a kind of folksy and imprecise style that charmed me at first but eventually got on my nerves, with lots of run on sentences and descriptors like "strangely odd" and dangling participles. i'm sorry to be a nerd, but i'm still the same person who enjoyed copyediting so much i designed my own 300-level class on it.
it's a writing style that is mirrored in the never-ending list of quirky characters we meet. this book never quite coalesces into a story: we start off with a mystery, but we never hear about it again. in each chapter, we meet a new Black or Jewish or Italian person with a memorable name and an amusing backstory who is down on their luck, hardworking and yet marginalized to chicken hill (a falling-apart neighborhood in pottstown, pa) and little opportunity by the town's white people.
i cannot even tell you how goddamn frustrating this got. on the off chance one character's solo chapter piqued your interest, you're sh*t out of luck. i tried to care about chona and dodo, and what i got in return is watching unbelievably horrific things befall them, only to exit their story for the next 9 chapters while we hear about people chuckling and hamburger bars.
i was unable to build connections or feel for any of these characters, because there were 982 of them and who knows if i'd see them again before the author remembered he'd promised us a mystery to solve anyway.
(if you, like me, thought that mystery would be any sort of plot, you're sh*t out of luck too.)
bottom line: it's a rare thing to actively dislike a book i don't think is objectively bad. rare in a bad way....more
this is about a young woman who hates the future...representation is so important.
unfortunately it turns out i can't relate that much to "dumb."
it is this is about a young woman who hates the future...representation is so important.
unfortunately it turns out i can't relate that much to "dumb."
it is very hard to read a whole book without sympathizing with its main character once.
this is actually not because the character in question spends this entire book sleeping with a married man, and a large portion of it sleeping with a man married to a pregnant wife, and a slightly smaller portion of it sleeping with a man married to the mother of a newborn. i have sympathized with characters who have done worse. although not by much.
it's because this character is SO unfeeling, so shallow, and so cruel in the worst way — the way that comes from just not caring about the interior lives of others. i don't know if this character has no interior life or is just uninterested in showing it to us, but it is not on page. not even implied.
i liked the writing of this at first, but eventually the constant slang and pop culture and devil-may-care mentality got old. it reminded me of greta and valdin at first, and then bad greta and valdin, and then no greta and valdin at all.
time passes in this book without reference, feelings grow without reason, and the plot just bumbles on.
boats against the current.
bottom line: a frustrating read, and not in the ways it intends to be.
there should be a legal defense for young women who attempt gruesome crimes upon the gross older men who think they're in a mutually romantic relationthere should be a legal defense for young women who attempt gruesome crimes upon the gross older men who think they're in a mutually romantic relationship with them.
especially if you can tell they're thinking about sex in a really weird way.
i would never convict yamasaki in a court of law.
this book, though, is guilty of the crime that is literary sex scenes...i will never recover from some of these descriptions.
i expected this book to have some serious self-awareness, and while i think it is striving towards that, it doesn't really get there. i did everything i was supposed to: separated the protagonist from the author, accepted the potential of an unreliable narrator, tried to have a good time. but whatever point about gender and power this was trying to make, whether it's my opinion or not, it didn't accomplish it.
and for that reason, i am out.
bottom line: a book i enjoyed so little i am subjecting it to the cruel and unusual punishment that is a shark tank reference.
this is an untraditional, timeline-twisting book in which a company has accidentally invented time travel and is committing inter-time violence accordthis is an untraditional, timeline-twisting book in which a company has accidentally invented time travel and is committing inter-time violence accordingly...
and somehow the most unrealistic part was its depiction of human emotion.
the thing they never tell you about sexism is that it's boring. that's the worst part of misogyny: just the most boring female characters you've ever read.
ok, maybe not the worst part. but it's not in my personal favorites.
i am personally of the opinion that if you are going to tell me something relatively insane, such as time travel is real and being hoarded for evil by corporations (with some parts of that being less insane than others), you need to ground me in the narrative. maybe give me some lovable characters. maybe give me some real-feeling feelings. dare i say give me a dose of reality via human relationships, or human life, or human thought patterns.
this book skipped all of that, and the result was dramatic and annoying.
bottom line: logically i know i read this as a book. but in my heart, this is one of those budgetless interchangeable shows you scroll past on a lesser streaming platform and know no human has ever watched or talked about.
except not really. having to interact with strangers every day for no money and subsisting off of amazon gift cards and my wife's generosity sougoals.
except not really. having to interact with strangers every day for no money and subsisting off of amazon gift cards and my wife's generosity sounds like my nightmare.
i thought this would be an interesting exploration of society, and what constitutes a job, and what we value and what we don't. instead, this was a very literal walkthrough of a lot of tweets about doing small errands. it reminded me of the novelty books that came out when twitter was first a thing and people were like "how do we monetize this?"
in other words, for someone who claims he doesn't care about money, this seems like a real fixation for the author— and a money grab.
my thoughts and prayers remain with his wife at this time.
bottom line: this book should be sold for $8 on the novelty table at urban outfitters, and nowhere else....more
i was so excited to read this book, which is so many of my favorite things: women who spy! family drama! historical fiction about an under-discussed gi was so excited to read this book, which is so many of my favorite things: women who spy! family drama! historical fiction about an under-discussed geopolitical moment!
its purpose — to show WWII and the era leading up to it from the british- then japanese-ruled malaysian perspective — is excellent.
unfortunately, the way this book conveyed it undermined the message.
so much tragedy occurs here. violence of every type, deaths of multiple main characters, colonization, war, labor camps, comfort stations, racism, sexism, assaults, murders, torture. it's wrenching and difficult to read.
that isn't a con of this book, obviously. all of those things really happened, and the forgotten stories of the people that experienced it deserved to be told.
it's the fact that these don't feel like real people, or real stories. our characters kill people without regret. they see untold horrors and don't feel them. they keep unforgivable secrets, commit crimes, experience trauma, and give none of it a second thought. characters change from page to page, and motivations, development arcs, and things we hold to be true aren't consistently upheld.
there is nothing that will allow us to ground ourselves in order to really feel these stories as they deserve to be felt. a character who can't pick up a stick in one paragraph is running across a camp and doing his own stunts in the next. 4 people we've been following for hundreds of pages die within one chapter. these people do terrible things without the painful justification that would allow us to feel it alongside them.
bad things happen for no reason, to people who don't feel real—nor does their suffering, keeping us on the outside as one horrible scene after another unfolds.
bottom line: i am glad this story is being told. i wish it was better equipped to be shared.
this just felt too unrealistic. every book ni'm not saying i condone art theft.
but i AM saying...it's pretty cool.
and i wish this book had more of it.
this just felt too unrealistic. every book needs something to ground it, and this was so absurd: indescribable mansions, teenage art thievery prodigies, john green-esque dialogue, friends at school who act more like obsessive fans, rare disorders diagnosed by nearby ballerinas, insta- and life-defining love.
it was too much, and all of it felt dramatic and heavy, and because there was nothing to make any of it feel lifelike it just felt annoying.
i don't even know what this book is about.
but it wasn't art theft.
bottom line: i think many, many people will like this book. i am sad to learn i am not among them.
this one's for all my true crime haters out there.
and also for my general haters out there. because i didn't like this book.
like s'mores, or the kind this one's for all my true crime haters out there.
and also for my general haters out there. because i didn't like this book.
like s'mores, or the kind of chocolate chip cookie that's currently popular where it's essentially grainy dough in the middle, this is a great concept that does not achieve what it sets out to. in the first two cases, it's to be yummy. in this case, it's to remind us that behind every garish crime headline, there are real people trying their best.
we are presented with a potential crime and some of the people that surround it: lucy, a lonely child who may have committed a murder; carmel, her distant onetime teen mom; richie, carmel's alcoholic brother; john, their withholding father; the specters of john's first and second wives; and tom, the journalist who's set out to write about all of them.
the goal of this book is to humanize this cast. and much like the outer bites of the aforementioned chocolate chip cookies, or the part of the s'mores process where you're toasting the marshmallow and you haven't yet undergone the gunky sticky textural nightmare eating of it, there are moments where it's very effective.
this is true of carmel's case. richie has moments of searing sympathy, too. but i felt equally left outside of lucy, john, rose, and tom by the conclusion as i did at the outset. we never get much insight into the first three, and what we do hear from tom happens early and contradicts itself often.
i like the intention here, which it shares with penance, a book i was very impressed by. but like the author's first novel, i think it fell a bit short.
bottom line: the disappointing cookie of books....more
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