I understand that this nearly 1,000 page book is revered as brilliant and that the author has received the Nobel Prize for Literature for another novel.  I know that many intelligent people think the book is amazing. I, however, feel like it was pretty much lost on me.  I found it a slog, pedantic, male-centric, and frankly boring.  Yes, some of the historical pieces were mildly interesting, but I have decided that I do not find 18th century Poland particularly enthralling.  Sometimes, it felt like the descriptions would never end and that the plot was a very long ways away from the words I was reading.  Other times, some of the narrative would pull me in, particularly the portions that compared the Jewish protagonist's exploration of other communities. But, those parts were short lived and almost as soon as I realized I was engaged, the moment would be gone and I would return to feeling that this book was just too heady for me.


Do not recommend.

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I really enjoyed Beyond the Cerulian Sea and so I was disappointed that I did not love this book.  I really don't like being spoon fed morality in my novels and this one left nothing up to interpretation.  The metaphors and symbology were just too obvious and the pionts felt like they were being rammed down my throat at some points.  I obviously think that having trans representation in fiction is important and powerful, but my underlying take away from this book was that only magical beings (read Queer) can take care of magical kids and magical beings can only depend and trust magical beings. I can understand where this mentality comes from, but I just think that there is a lot more nuance than what this books allows for.  I found it pretty depressing, rather than inspiring, and a letdown.  The first book took quite a while to grow on me, but once it did, I was all in.  This one had the benefit of my coming in really excited for it and just progressively getting more and more let down as it went on.

Do not recommend.

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I was a little nervous to start reading a Stephen King book. I am not a fan of horror, so have always shied away from his books, despite Delores Clayborn being one of my all-time favorite reads and having liked Eyes of The Dragon a few years ago.  I was therefore pleasantly surprised by the first part of this book, which is the set up for the actual adventure that comes fairly deep into the book.  This set-up portion of the book is exquisitely written, developing characters with depth, describing their friendships and interactions with so much detail and nuance that I was really sucked into the story before any of the fantasy part even started.

Unfortunately, once the actual adventure story starts, the narration lost me.  This was in large part because of the way in which the narrator describes the many people he encounters who have disabilities or disfigurements.  From blind and Deafness, to Dwarfism, to many others, the ableism and stereotypes that he employs in his descriptions of these characters shows such a lack of understanding of what it is to live with a disability that I could not suspend my disbelief and judgment.  He spends an exorbitant amount of time comparing and ranking their conditions, while at the same time saying things like: "Dissing disabled people is crap behavior even if they are an asshole."  As if having a a disability means that you should be coddled and pitied and given a pass for being a terrible human being.    As if that attitude is respectful of people with disabilities instead of a reflect of their dehumanization and othering.  

​Not recommended.

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An elaborate modernization of Animal Farm, this book creates a world of sentient, talking animals in a fictionized African country as it flows from being colonized to an oppressive regime to complete chaos after the dictator is driven out. I think it is technically supposed to be an allegory, but it just feel too obvious, with the parallels too similar to the current world.  With situations and even language that clearly is lifted from real life current oppressive regimes, fascist leaders, and bigoted politicians from around the world, I thought it lacked nuance and was just force feeding us the analysis instead of letting the reader do any independent thinking or analogizing.  This, plus it used a literary tool in which the same words or short phrase was repeated over and over again--so much so that it became an irritant. This may not have been so aggravating in a paper book where your eyes could skip over the 2 minutes of repetition, but in an audio book, it was just distracting and it was so many times. It felt gimmicky, even if it was obviously being done to make a point.  The point was just too obvious.
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Not recommended.

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This was the perfect book to fall asleep listening to. It wasn't so much that it was boring, as that the cadence of the narration is very soothing.  The author employs a writing technique in which he makes long lists of things, often the latin names for plants or animals, that might interest the hardcore biologist and botanist enthusiasts, but I found lulled me to sleep, like a lullaby.  In fact, I would listen to the same chapter several nights in a row, having not made it to the end of even one chapter before I drifted off to sleep.  I would like to say that the book was light and pleasant, as he describes at length the natural spaces that he is so drawn to--and there is something compelling about how much he loves these spaces and wants to make sure they are preserved--and yet the racism of 1901 finds its way into a world it has no business being.  This is in addition to the complete exclusion of women from the narrative in any meaningful way.  All said, I just can't recommend it.

​Not recommended.

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Another post-apocalyptic novel, which really seems to be disproportionately recommended in recent times, this one was extremely graphic in depicting gratuitous violence. This was oddly juxtaposed against explicit descriptions of sexual encounters.  I was disappointed that I did not like it more since the premise of the futuristic world felt well thought out and plausible, though incredibly depressing. 

Set in the dessert of the American southwest, the complicated backstory includes litigation over water rights, complicated interpersonal dynamics, lots of characters with compelling and believable backstories, and  a nuanced world created with attention to details that I really liked.  Ultimately, while there was a lot to like in the story, I really disliked the violence, which I did not think was needed to advance the story and which reflected a deterioration of human decency at a level that was just too dark for me.  I found that I couldn't listen to this unless I was in the right frame of mind and definitely not before bed.  

Not recommended.
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I just can't with these fantastical fantasy  books that so many people I really like just love.  This bizarre story of a world sort of like ours but not really was just weird.  It felt unnecessarily complicated, as if unexpected and impossible things were just added to the story for no real reason.  Similar to other books I have hated, like Going Postal, Piranesi, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and  Small Gods, there just wasn't anything here that called to me or drew me in.  I just could not suspend disbelief, get invested in the characters, or care about what happened.  I had a hard time even paying attention for a lot of it, even though I was traveling and thus had more mental bandwidth available to focus on the storyline.

Do not recommend.

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I am less and less a fan of this newly popular genre in which an author selects a person in history about which there is a small amount of historical data and then builds an entirely fictional world around the their life to tell a story.  I really started to notice this trend with The Personal Librarian, which I quite enjoyed.  However, in that case, I knew absolutely nothing about Bella de Costa Greene, who was JP Morgan's personal librarian.  In this case, though, the author writes an entirely fictitous account of Martha Ballard's life.  Ballard was an 18th century American midwife who recorded her life in a personal journal that was published in the 1990s, called A Midwife's Tale.  I read the book in college and it certainly stuck with me all these many years later. 
When I read a 50 Bookish Friends recommendation, I do no research ahead of time. I don't read the book jacket or a summary of the story  I love that when I start the book, I have no idea what I am getting into.  It could be a self-help book, a political memoir, science fiction, or truly anything.  I don't even check to see if it is fiction or non-fiction, although sometimes once I am into it a ways, I do check this much.  In this case, though, as I was reading along, I thought the story sounded really familiar and when her name was used, I was certain that I had read the book before, even though it came out in 2023 and there was no way I had read it that recently. 

Turned out, though, that I did remember Martha Ballard by name and her story, but this book was not her story. I found the fictionalize version completely unbelievable.  I'm not an expert on that era by any stretch of the imagination, but I found the storyline completely implausible.  In many of these highly fictionalized accounts of historical events, I think there has been too much insertion of modern ideas that are more a reflection of our current thinking than of anything that could be consistent with the historical record.  I found this a huge distraction and I just could not get into the story at all~~ in large part because I knew that none of the story was in the diary and that we don’t have any other information about Ballard. The rest of the story was just too convenient, too much like how we wished things could have been for a spirited, intelligent woman.  I probably would have liked it more if she had changed the names and just said that she based it on historical records, including A Midwife's Tale.

Do not recommend.

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This is an absolutely terrible romance with irritating characters, including content that is just demeaning and offensive. I really did not find anything redeeming about it.  The good news is that it was a free download, so there is that.

Do not recommend.

I feel pretty terrible about this review. In a time when I think it is particularly important for us to reflect on the Holocaust, the violence of othering, and the horrors of ghettos and "camps" and determining human survival based on the official papers you carry, I am very sorry to report that this WWII book about all these topics is not to be recommended by me.  WWII historical fiction is usually a pretty easy sell for me, so this is almost certainly not why I didn't like it.

It started weird. This is because the story takes place in two time periods, while also telling a fictional vampire horror story that one of the characters wrote.  But you do not discover that is what is happening until really far into the book and it makes for a very confusing read.  And it felt almost like the author was deliberately trying to make it confusing.  Maybe she thought it would build up like a mystery and, to a large extent, I would call it a mystery, but it felt forced and unnecessary.  Yet, if you ignore the bizarre allegory vampire storyline distraction at the beginning, I found the book interesting enough at first and quite enjoyed the early character development that was mired in intrigue.

But even setting aside that problem, it just became more and more complicated as it jumped back and forth between narrators and time periods and between the actual story and the story-within-the-story.  I love a complex plot that makes me pay attention, but I kept thinking that this was a plot strategy meant to hide the ball.  And indeed, there were pieces of the story that were obviously being withheld--huge pieces of the story, like why one of the main characters has facial disfigurement from some type of trauma that most everyone in the story seems to know about and is alluded to over and over, but isn't spelled out for the reader until way past the point that I still cared.  It ended up just not being this big deal after all the hype to get to it. And again, I just felt like it was deliberately being done that way despite it not making any sense not to tell the reader.

Perhaps the most prominent reason for my not liking it was the gratuitous, graphic details of the violence that felt added for shock value.  Not that the Holocaust wasn't shocking and I don't disagree that some level of description of the details is appropriate and I don't want to discount that for survivors the horrors went on and on and on, each more horrific than the last.  There was just something about the way it was written that left me feeling like it was another game the author was playing with me as the reader.  I don't know how we learn about the time period without hearing about the details of the violence, but here it was done in a way that as I was reading I was aware that I was reading this book about this horrible thing that was designed to convey to me how horrible it was instead of letting the story unfold naturally.  In the context of the other unusual plotting choices, I just could not get into it.  So much so, that I had to take several breaks from it to read other things before coming back to finish it.

Not recommended.

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