readthesparrow's reviews
265 reviews

As a lover of Beowulf, I really quite enjoyed this graphic novel adaptation! The references to and reflections on the original poem were really interesting to see (for example, the final funeral scene with the opening lines of the OE poem). The reinterpretations of characters--such as Unferth as a childish, unsure boy--were clever and fresh.

The treatment of Brecca was interesting, too; while nothing is ever explicitly said, the potential for interpretation of García's adaptation is vast. Is Brecca Grendel? Were Beowulf and Brecca a little more than friends? Did Beowulf actually murder Brecca?

The art is gorgeous, too. I especially loved the monster designs (Grendel's Mother's design was my favorite; what can I say, I'm a sucker for monstrous women). The brutality of the fights come through loud and clear, with rich reds and splattered guts.

[NSFW] ||Grendel, uh... arriving at the beginning of the fight felt out of left field. I'm sure there's a reason for it--the English major in me is already running through several interpretations--but it's a detail that I'm still, personally, struggling to place.||

I have only two criticisms. The first is that this interpretation cuts out all of the female characters, such as Wealtheow, whose roles are vital to the politics of the story.

The second is a more practical one: the book is just. Quite large and very floppy, which made it a little difficult to read, physically.

This review is based on an eARC recieved through Netgalley.

REVIEW
I’m not much of a romance reader (in fact, this book is one of the titles I read in my attempt to find out if I like it or not), so take this review with a grain of salt. People who do like contemporary romance will likely have different feelings about this book than I do.

Overall, the only thing I can really say about this book is that it was… fine. And that’s about it.

The two main characters, Ava and Grace, both seemed to be perfectly nice. As people, they’d probably be favorite coworkers or folks I’d like to be friends with. As characters, they’re likeable, but not terribly interesting. It’s split POV, but I would often lose track of whose turn with the narrative it was because their voices were indistinguishable.

The prose, too, was fine, but nothing to write home about. There were some interesting turns of phrase here and there. My main complaint is that there were only a few bowling puns.

The plot’s pacing is a mess. It takes like 30% of the book for bowling to even start happening and the two main characters only actually bowl once, at like 70%.

The one interesting plot thread, revealed at the VERY end

that there was possibly some kind of coverup involved with the death of Grace’s father, as well as the fight that happens between Grace, Ava, and Grace’s mother when that information is revealed

isn’t really. Resolved. Or even discussed on page, beyond a throwaway line where Grace’s mother attends a bowling match.

The “main” plot (quotations because it really doesn’t matter at all) is that

the shitty principal will dissolve the bowling team if Ava and Grace don’t get a win.

However, this plot barely matters, there’s no real tension or stakes built up about it, and the girls on the team were barely characterized beyond being nosy about their coach’s love lives, so I just wasn’t invested at all.

There were other plot threads that got dropped too, such as

Grace’s old coach. He shows up twice to talk to Grace and, from Ava’s point of view, comes off as creepy, and after one time he shows up Grace’s car breaks. I thought this was going to lead to some kind of reveal that he’s a creep or was trying to sabotage the team or something, but nothing’s done with him.

I really don’t know what the point of that character was, besides to maybe give Ava a chance to get a little jealous?

The one thing I did really appreciate about this book was that while miscommunications did happen and the characters would get upset with one another, they did actually have conversations about these problems.

FINAL THOUGHTS
There wasn’t anything about this book that is extremely objectionable, but if this wasn’t a Netgalley read, I probably would have DNF’d around 70% because I just realized how bored I was. I forced myself to bulldoze through the rest of it today so I could read something else. (How’s that for a 7/10 split?)

As for whether I’d recommend it: shrug? I’ll probably forget everything about it in a few months so take that for what you will.

Thank you to the publisher, Afterglow Books by Harlequin, for providing an ARC via Netgalley. If you’re interested in The 7/10 Split, the book releases 21 May 2024.

I am of two minds about this edition of Carmilla!

On one hand, it's Carmilla. I loved it the first time I read it years ago and loved it just as much the second time. The illustrations are gorgeous, and I especially loved the ones that featured Carmilla and Laura together. I also love Carmen Maria Machado--she's one of my favorite authors--and the way she used her role as an editor to create metafiction was genuis (though, of course, somewhat problematic, considering many readers--especially those new to Carmilla--took it as fact).

On the other hand, while I did love the metafiction aspect of this edition, I feel it was almost a missed opportunity. The introduction is, of course, itself a piece of fiction, and there are a few footnotes throughout the text which are essentially flash fiction pieces. However, I left this edition feeling like there wasn't enough of that metafiction. I can see the potential for an ambitious metafictional project which sets the original Carmilla text alongside the fictional "real" letters between Veronika and Marcia (as imagined by Machado in her introduction).

I really loved A Magical Girl Retires! It’s a short, fast read that packs a heavy punch, especially when considering the abysmal state of women’s rights in Korea.

Before I talk more about the novella itself, I want to make a disclaimer of sorts. This story does touch on dark, serious topics (the first chapter opens with the main character about to attempt suicide), but A Magical Girl Retires is not all one of those “dark” magical girl stories that wants to tear down the genre. At its core, A Magical Girl Retires is very much true to the magical girl genre. It’s about hope, justice, and solidarity between women. To quote the translator, “magical girls exist because justice does not.”

A Magical Girl Retires’ themes are all about hope and justice. It’s about facing down a hopeless situation and deciding to keep going anyway. It’s about trying to make things a little better for the people around you, and for the future. I can’t talk too in-depth about the execution (the novella is quite short, and I don’t want to spoil anything) but I just loved the story.

The thing I love the most about A Magical Girl Retires (beyond the themes, of course) is the main character. Though she’s unnamed, she has a huge personality and a strong voice–she’s got more character to her than some protagonists from 300+ page novels. She’s so relatable and yet completely her own person, with her own wants and dreams (she wants to become a watchmaker!).

Her relationship with Ah Roa is so sweet (I definitely read a little queer subtext in there, but I’m not sure if that’s just because of my violet-colored glasses).

Each chapter begins with a single-page manhwa-style illustration. I loved the thin, clean lineart, and the attention to clothing (because what is a magical girl without fashion)? I would love to see this novella adapted fully to a manwha or even animated, because while as a novella it rules, the magical girl genre really shines in a visual medium. 

If you love the magical girl genre and want a short, hopeful novella to read, I suggest picking up A Magical Girl Retires!

If you’re interested, the book will be released on April 30th, 2024. For more information, see the publisher’s page here (https://www.harpercollins.com/products/a-magical-girl-retires-seolyeon-park?variant=41099497078818)! If possible, I always suggest you support indie bookshops by purchasing the novel from your local brick and mortar or from Bookshop.org!

Thank you again to HarperVia for providing a digital ARC via Netgalley.

I got this as an ARC via Netgalley.

When the narrative is doing anything but the romance, I enjoyed it. I loved Juleesa--she's cool, confidant, and I always love found family--and her relationships with her son, Amani, Nana Cherry, and her coworkers was so sweet.

I also love how normal queerness is, and how much the book abashedly romantacizes and lavishes praise on the bodies of its main characters. Also, as a southern food-lover, I loooove the food in this book. Higgins has a way with words when it comes to making me crave BBQ. I'd kill for the potato truck food mentioned in chapter eleven.

But the second the "romance" part of the book starts happening, the narrative just gets so goddamn boring. It's friends to lovers, but all the plot so far has just been miscommunication that happens because Cyn keeps getting hit with the romanceification ray that turns her from a fully fleshed out human adult to a complete mess who can't understand her own feelings (for some reason). All the side characters just stand around making knowing comments implying that they know Cyn and Juleesa are totally In Love and that they're just too stupid to see it. Which, like. Come on! Y'all are friends! Have a conversation!!

Maybe I'm just the wrong audience (I don't usually read contemporary romance) but I don't want to read 300+ pages of actually interesting character moments sandwiched between contrived miscommunication bullshit that doesn't make for an interesting romance.

Also, during the "spicy" scenes of the book, the writing would be fine until some random weird phrase would make me double-take and go wait, what? Like, sorry, but what the fuck ||do "flowers picked from a PUSSY GARDEN"????? smell like???????? Hello?? That phrase literally made me stand up and walk away because I. W H A T.||

Anyway. Yeah. I really wanted to push through for the sake of my Netgalley score but I'm DNFing. I can't take this any more.

I’m a bit ashamed to admit this was the first of Butler I’d read. I’ve been meaning to read Gender Trouble for ages (despite the fact it is a little outdated, as Butler themself admits), but haven’t managed to get around to it yet.

That said, I feel Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a book that anyone interested in the emerging authoritarian right-wing movement globally needs to read. Butler’s discussion of gender as a phantasm is a really useful tool for discussing the weaponization and demonization of gender broadly. In their acknowledgements, Butler discusses the scholars who helped them with this book–even without seeing the list of names, though, it was very clear that this text was written with real nuance and care and conversation with a global scholarly community.

Butler breaks down the mass of the gender phantasm, examining the ways different institutions and movements utilize contradictions within the phantasm as ways to displace very real fears about war, cultural change, the climate, and colonialism onto vulnerable populations. 

 My personal favorite chapter was “Foreign Terms, or the Disturbance of Translation Conclusion: The Fear of Destruction, the Struggle to Imagine.” I’m someone who loves talking about and thinking about language and translation, so this chapter was right up my alley. Butler discusses the interaction of language and gender as an English/Western construction that exists as both a colonialist and anti-colonialist concept. They also question the very act of gendering as an act of translation--how do we translate ourselves to each other? How do we translate the performance of others? And how does our translation of that performance change over time and context (and, yes, language)?

If you want answers for any of this, you won't get it here. With Who's Afraid of Gender?, Butler is more interested in examining the construction and weaponization of the gender phantasm. The only 'answer' offered is the only one that I think is necessary for this text: a call for broad coalition that encompasses everyone who fights for equity and against injustice. 

Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a vital crossroad that I see as becoming a new cornerstone in how we discuss gender as a political, social, and cultural phenomenon.

That said, it is nonfiction written by a scholar. That means the text can be difficult to get through at times, even if you are someone who does like academic writing. Be prepared to possibly have to look up a lot of terminology. 

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing a digital ARC via Netgalley. If you are interested in Who’s Afraid of Gender?, the book releases 19 March 2024.

Find more information from the publishers [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374608224/whosafraidofgender]. If possible, support indie bookshops by purchasing the novel from your local brick and mortar or from Bookshop.org!

Would have been a solid 3.5 stars, if Harry wasn't so weird about women every five seconds.

Read through the first book and needed to return the collection. I'll read the other ones later.

A pretty decent legal thriller! Though there were some sticking points for me (it was very clear the author doesn't speak AAVE and there was a lot of summary instead of narrative in the second half), I still overall enjoyed the book.