Written in 2015, I couldn't remember if I had read this years ago when it was released or if I had just heard about it and read excerpts, so I dug in and read it in its entirety and it holds up.  In fact, almost all of the main topics covered in this book about living beyond the gender binary and heteronormativity to which our systemic structures are beholden could have been written today.  These topics were not new in 2015, but this book was written at a time when the emerging, radical ideas from the era that preceded it had been academicalized and solidified with enduring language and a coherent world view that has stuck. 

This memoir is steeped in Queer theory and is well worth a read.

Recommend.

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This is a series of essays written loosely written around the concept of her experiences with her body, exploring disability, cancer, pregnancy, mothering, and autonomy. There is a lot to like here. Her discussion of using a wheelchair as a child and how this impacted her relationships with peers and others was insightful and provided a unique perspective.  The author is Irish, which put her discussion about choice and control over reproductive decisions in the context of the 12 women a day who, on average, left Ireland to terminate a pregnancy until abortion was finally legalized in 2019. This part of the book I found particularly interesting and covered topics that are not typically part of the American dialogue.

I found the first essays to be the best, with some of the later ones becoming a somewhat repetitive, which is I think a common flaw in essay collections that I wish editors would deal with before they release a compilation like this.  I would have recommended the book, but this dwindling of quality by the end had me finishing the book with much less enthusiasm than I had up until the somewhere in the middle and also a little bored.
Not not recommended. 

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This book is supposedly shelved as a YA book, but I found it to be much more sophisticated than that with layers to the story that could hold multiples truths at the same time. It is a harsh depiction of white feminism that is also able to appreciate the complexity of the criticism. To be able to honor the work without shying away from its imperfections, shortcomings, and both subtle and overt racism is not easy, yet here is done exquisitely.  

The book reads like a memoir and follows the growth of a starstruck college student from The Bronx as she moves in with a feminist Queer icon in Portland for a summer. On one level, it is a coming of age story, but it is just so much more than that.

Any white woman trying to be a supportive mentor to women and girls of color should make time to read this wonderfully nuanced and beautifully written book about the complexity of these relationships and how the insidiousness of racism and privilege are pervasive, even when white people are trying to do better.  I loved the layered relationships, the hard work reflected in the characters who were trying to hold people accountable and the ones trying to be held accountable, even when their failures were cringeworthy.

Set in Portland in 2003, the author's description of the quirkiness and cringy-ness of the city and its inhabitants conveyed the love-hate relationship that so many people have with the sometimes performative, sometimes genuine progressive and woo-woo culture there. From the public reading at Powell Books, to the hangouts in Pioneer Courthouse Square, to navigating the neighborhoods on foot and by public transit, it is fun to read a book about a city you know well.

Highly recommend.
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This book has a combination of things I usually do not like. 
 
First, I am not a fan at all of the social media influencer memoir.  I think somewhere fairly early in the pandemic, I overdosed on crappy ones that I got for free or that were recommended to me and I have not gotten over that.  They tend to have a number of features I do not like, such as referring back to what they posted, quoting those posts, and bragging about how early an adopter they were of a specific platform and how the fame they got and the money they made from said platform saved or ruined (or both) their lives. Many of these books are often compilations of blog posts that do not transcend mediums well when they get put into a book without a good editor. They are often repetitive in a way that reminds me of people who just tell the same few stories over and over again. 
 
Second, I tend not to love the writings of standup comics, especially ones who have a chaotic style of raunchy standup. I can take that in very small doses, but an entire 8 hour book is just too much.  The writing here felt a bit like Jenny Lawson (Let's Pretend This Never Happened), which I kind of just despised. 
 
Third, I usually do not like books read by the author. I often think they should have hired a professional with a voice I actually want to listen to, which I know might sound harsh, but I really love a good narrator and one way to tell a really good narrator is when you speed it up (which I virtually always do), you can still understand them clearly and their voice still conveys the emotion. This is not true of mediocre narrators and author are usually mediocre or worse, in my opinion.
 
While there were spots where she fell into the annoying "this is what I posted when I was an early adopter of instagram" context, it was short-lived.  She definitely had places that were slightly repetitive and other places where she went on too long about details that felt show-off-y to me without advancing the story which caused the narrative to lag a little. It felt like she really needed a more heavy handed editor.
 
That said, this book was, for the most part, an outlier on all fronts. It is very difficult to write trauma comedy, either for stand-up or in book form, and this is really trauma comedy at its best.  The places where she veers away from the style are the places that should have been cut. I particularly loved how she situated her complex relationship between humor and tragedy in the context of her cultural and familiar history. The intergenerational way in which her family used humor and laughter to survivor horrible things was so richly described here. She didn't have to directly talk about "rape jokes" to be talking about rape jokes told by survivors in her family.  It wasn't just that she decided one day to make comedy about trauma, she explains how this was passed down as a way to survive. I found it insightful, poignant, and (yes, even) funny. Through the bets parts, I found myself on the verge of both laughing and crying and in a place of acceptance that this was ok and maybe could even be healing  It reminded me of Hannah Gadsby in this respect.
 
Recommend. But maybe skim through the parts in the middle about buying the expensive purses and the celebrity name dropping parts.
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I am so enthralled with the very concept of this book in which the author uses her obsession with sea creatures as the basis of these fabulous life stories that use the sea creatures as complex allegories for her life. Even the title, referring to the point in an ocean where the light can no longer penetrate, relates to moments in her life.  As a memoir, it is insightful and tells the story of a unique life of Queerness and mixed-race identity.

I particularly appreciated how the author's experience of trauma and sexual assault were presented in such an unusual and poignant way.  All of this was done in the midst of providing rich details about marine ecosystems and creatures, some of which (like the octopus), we often hear about in other contexts, but some  of which I knew nothing about and found fascinating.  This is just such an unusual set-up and read. 

I highly recommend it.

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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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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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This is a post-apocalyptic story from the genre I like to call Depressing AF Futures.  Like Station Eleven, Blindness, How High We Go In The Dark, and The Earth Abides, this book is bleak.  It was definitely well written.  The characters had depth and I loved their complexity and growth, but the storyline just brought one heartbreak after another.  It was another reminder that I don't want to stick around to see everyone I love die and everything I care about disappear.  I found my outlook on life to be significantly impaired while reading the book, unable to completely shake it from my mind.  Unlike Station Eleven, with its sudden world demise, this is a gradual fall into a post-civilization world where only the most hardened survivalists exist. It felt like it could really happen.  Being on the west coast, where one of the characters flees to while the protagonist stays behind in Florida, which is the first to succumb to the irredeemable changes in climate, it felt like this could be happening right now or next week anyhow, that this next hurricane season happens in the opening of the book.  The loneliness of the book, from its very beginning, is haunting.  Well written, I had a hard time putting it aside and yet I cannot say that I enjoyed it or was glad I read it.

​Not recommended.

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Other than the writing of this book being above average, I basically have nothing nice to say about this story.  It is steeped in rape culture and sexual terrorism--the entire backdrop of the story is about missing young girls, abducted from their community, with the message being that the only way they can keep themselves safe is by staying home or being under the protection of the men in their lives.  As if that wasn't bad enough, [SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING HERE] it add in the wrongful conviction of a gay doctor who was actually trying to help young girls.  A young boy who saves one girls from kidnapping goes on a lifelong quest to find and save other missing girls that is self-destructive, obsessive, and downright weird. 

It is a complicated murder mystery, with so much many misogynistic themes and general themes that even the twist ending that plays with the idea that it wasn't what it seemed the whole time wasn't anywhere near enough to save it.  I guess if you like a book about a serial kidnapper who evades capture amidst an unrealistic plotline that is hard to stay engaged with and follow, while also being unnecessarily shocking, then you might enjoy this read.  It was not, however, for me.

Not recommended.
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I was under what I now know to have been the quite mistaken impression that this was a trilogy.  I was sadly, sadly disappointed to discover at the end of this book that it is not in fact a trilogy.  Indeed, it is now planned to be a full series.  I am very aware that this is likely the new Outlander series, where I will get 20 books into a series that is promised to be a 21 book set, with no estimated release date for the last one.  I just don't know if I can emotionally invest at this level again.  I miss the solid trilogies: Hunger Games, Legend (which added a fourth book years later, but the trilogy stood alone), Xenogenesis, Discovery of Witches (I know she added more, but the original trilogy was also a set), and Anne of Green Gables (again, the first three culminated an ending and if you didn't know there was more, all would be good in the world). This was not a solid trilogy. This was a telenovela, designed to suck you in and then using the ridiculously stupid amnesia plot twist to leave you completely hanging at the end of the book. 

This was just such a disappointment.  It was particularly a disappointment because all three books were really intricate.  The plotting was so complicated that half-way through the second book, I went back to the beginning of the first book to read it again because I want to make sure that I was following the interwoven stories of the secondary characters.  These side stories are so compelling and I didn't realize how much they would tie into the main storyline as things progressed.  They are written like backstory, not foreshadowing, and what is included there is really rich in detail that is needed to understand the big picture.  In the middle of the third book, I also backed up and reread about 10 chapters for the same reason.  And if I am completely honest, I also backed up because I didn't want to get to the end. This was because I expected that it was going to be over.  Now, I feel like there was no reason at all to have pre-ordered the book and started reading it on the day it was released.  I definitely should have waited until the series was completed before I even started the first one.

Likely, if there is ever an ending to the series, I might update my recommendation here, but after being rivetted through all three books, completely captivated by the magic and the politics, as well as the love story in this complex universe that was created, I just cannot recommend something that ends on such a cheap cliffhanger.  I really just felt like this was designed to make me have to buy more books and for her to get a deal with Netflix or Max for a series that never ends.  It was just such a disappointment.
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