28 questions book review

Fiendfully Reading

Book reviews and chat from @fiendfull

All The Hearts You Eat by Hailey Piper

All the Hearts You Eat is a horror novel about life and death and the bonds that tie people together, as dead trans girl Cabrina appears to loner Ivory and to her best friends in life Xi and Rex. Cabrina Brite washes up dead in Cape Morning, and Ivory finds her death poem lying nearby. Ivory didn’t know the girl, but she seems to be haunted by her now. Meanwhile Cabrina’s best friends are also dealing with the realisation that Cabrina’s presence is still around, in this small town that held no space for her.

I didn’t know anything about this book going in, so it was a very welcome surprise to discover that it is, if you really want to boil it down, a trans vampire book. All of the main characters are trans and the book explores who you can choose to be and who you can’t, using the gothic horror of a town haunted by vampiric creatures and a mysterious island. One of the great things about this book is the complexity and messiness of the main characters, especially the complex relationships between the three teenage characters who are just reaching adulthood. The ending really highlights how this isn’t a simple ‘trans characters versus the world’ book, but a horror novel with the space to explore different ideas about who someone is and how they might act when treated badly.

I found the book took me a while to get into, with the writing style quite obtuse at first so I couldn’t quite work out what was going on. Once I settled into the book it became much more enjoyable, though still occasionally a bit confusing. As everything else about this book was so up my street, it was a shame that I found it so hard to get into at first. However, this didn’t stop me really appreciating this book, from its depiction of the messiness of feelings between trans teenagers to its exploration of what it means to feel like a outsider and how that might cause you to react to promises from supernatural creatures. Piper uses horror to tackle a lot of interesting things about growing up trans in a small town, but doesn’t forget to include gory and dramatic moments along the way.

Benothinged by Alvar Theo

[I was asked to blurb this book by the lovely Haunt Publishing, so this is a mini review I wrote for that.]

In Benothinged, Alvar Theo asks what if the real monster of queer horror is isolation, mental illness, grief, poverty, and all of the other things that people face in modern day Britain, and if so, how might we defeat that monster? The result is a book that is haunting, bittersweet, and yet also full of tiny joys, as the trans protagonists learn to work together to build a world free of this monster.

House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

House of Bone and Rain is a novel about revenge, as five Puerto Rican friends must come together to face the horrors in their lives. Five friends—Gabe, Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo—in Puerto Rico are used to death, hearing all stories are ghost stories, but when Bimbo’s mother is killed, they agree to help him avenge her. As they fight their way to get information, a hurricane comes, and the lines between revenge, natural disaster, and otherworldly happenings are blurred.

Though positioned as a horror novel, House of Bone and Rain is more complex than that (the comparisons with Stand By Me perhaps reflect this fact well). The narrative is told mostly from Gabe’s perspective and it offers a complex picture of not only these friends, but others around them, and the lives they lead. Gabe, for example, is torn between his home, his friends, and the memory of his father’s death, and his girlfriend’s dream of leaving Puerto Rico. Even as Gabe is drawn into the violence of revenge and taking on a drug kingpin, he is also looking for purpose, and also sees the mystical happenings that show the world not to be as simple as some paint it.

The narrative is a coming-of-age story mixed with a classic revenge narrative: boys growing up and violence begetting violence, but also the undercurrent of colonialism and ecological collapse. It feels like a crime thriller film mixed with horror and I really enjoyed that, and the fact it didn’t shy away from the weird side of the horror as well. If you go into the book just expecting horror, you might find a lot of the book quite a different tone, but there’s a lot packed into it. Iglesias doesn’t give answers to everything and this works well as a coming-of-age novel that acknowledges the things that haunt you as you grow up can’t always be resolved or explained away.

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

Small Rain is a novel about a fortysomething man facing a sudden health crisis, and what such an event can lead someone to think and feel. The unnamed narrator has a pain out of nowhere and his partner, L, encourages him to go to the hospital. Once there, it turns out his pain is something serious, something he’d never known of before, and now he’s stuck in a hospital bed, experiencing the American healthcare system.

Having read Greenwell’s earlier novels, I chose to read this one despite the blurb not being the sort of thing I would usually go for. The focus on hospitals and illness isn’t something I’d usually pick up a novel about, not out of squeamishness but more health anxiety and the horrible realities of healthcare, but Small Rain explores someone suddenly in hospital when they weren’t expecting to be, and the disorienting effects of assuming your own health and then being told otherwise. Essentially, the story that the novel has—of the time the narrator spends in the hospital—is a way of meditating on ideas of health, life, love, and art, and how the narrator thinks about these things in this context (as the story seems to be autobiographical, presumably some of these things Greenwell also thought about in that context).

The writing style is beautiful, but also picks up on the kinds of routines and details of medicine and healthcare. The narrative has many reflective digressions by the narrator, which mostly add to the portrait and the story, though even as a poet who likes to read and think about poetry I found the one analysing poetry a bit too long and digressive. Generally, I found the novel quite unlike other things I’ve read, including Greenwell’s other novels, in the way that it confronts something so terrifying and mundane in a literary way, exploring some of the complexities of human life and love through this lens. This is not a novel to go into unprepared: it is about being in hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic due to a different health issue, with vivid descriptions of needles going in and other elements that people might find hard to read. I found it full of tenderness and real snippets of emotion; even if it doesn’t sound like something you might usually read, it’s worth giving it a go.

Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram

Coup de Grâce is a horror novella about a man trapped in an impossible subway station. Vicken is on the subway, planning a one way trip to the Saint Lawrence River, but when he gets off, he’s in a huge, Brutalist station. A station with no exit and no return line. A station that changes as he explores. And suddenly things aren’t as certain as they seemed when he stepped onto the train.

This novella combines some fantastic horror elements: liminal spaces, fourth wall breaking, body horror, and the kind of terrifying impossibility of space you get in House of Leaves . It is also a dark look at depression, suicide, and self-harm, and the warning at the start is important to note because it does make up a lot of the book. What you end up with is something visceral and weird, almost absurdly funny in the way it paints hopelessness and lack of control by its ending, and a book that never quite offers a reprieve. The ending might be a bit divisive, leaving a lot up to the reader, but it is exciting to see this kind of horror, that isn’t afraid to be unrelenting, and I loved the creepypasta and liminal space elements (the book itself feels like it could be a creepypasta even as it refers to them).

William by Mason Coile

William is a short horror novel about a reclusive robot engineer who creates an AI consciousness in his house. Henry doesn’t leave his home and spends all his time on his project, an AI-powered robot he’s called William, even though it is impacting his marriage to his wife, Lily. As William starts to turn dangerous, Henry tries to stop him, but their high tech house shows William’s power is further reaching than Henry thought.

This book was compared to Stephen King, Black Mirror , and Frankenstein, and unusually, I think that’s actually quite a good set of fiction to compare it to, particularly as it doesn’t give away too many of the twists whilst still setting up the kind of vibe you’re going to get. Initially, there’s the creator/creation thing that is key to the book, exploring ideas of artificial intelligence and what kind of ‘spirit’ might be created. Then you get the kind of horror when a house seems to work against its inhabitants, and that’s where you can really picture the book adapted for the screen as it cuts between different parts of the house.

The length is ideal for a quick, gripping horror story that purposefully focuses in on certain parts of the plot and characters, and it feels precise rather than too short. William is a tense, fun read that builds on a lot of existing ideas and tropes to play on fears of things we create turning out to not be as they seem, and ideas of creator and creation.

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the race that will change the world by Parmy Olson

Supremacy is a book charting the race between OpenAI and Deep Mind to bring out their AI products, focusing on their founders, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. Journalist Parmy Olson explores these two founders’ starts in the tech industry, interest in AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ultimately the race between their two companies (and the tech giants behind them) to have the best AI product on the market in this generative AI age.

As someone who reads and teaches people about AI, I was interested to see how this quite recent race would be turned into a book. The narrative starts early and quite broad, looking at Altman and Hassabis’ initial failures and interest in AI, as well as early tech industry contacts, and I found this part of the book was a bit too obsessed with the ‘tech genius’ idea, not just from them but around people like Elon Musk as well. Thankfully, as the book goes on, Olson moves away from this idea and looks more broadly at the big picture, including the struggles around both ideas of AI safety and of AI ethics, and the need for the AI world to be dominated by existing tech giants like Microsoft and Google.

The part of the book describing the invention of the ‘transformer’ and the impact of this on work to build better AI models was a highlight as it was an approachable explanation of why this breakthrough was so important, helping people to understand why these huge AI products seemed to come out of nowhere a few years later. I found the section that explores how effective altruism ended up connected to some of the movements in AI also interesting, showcasing how it is often the ideas of billionaires that have a massive impact on world-changing technologies. There was plenty I learnt from the book, even as someone who has a fair interest in the topic, and knowing where these companies came from is a useful part of critiquing and evaluating generative AI.

I did find that sometimes the book was so focused on tech billionaires and companies that it dragged, sometimes accepting at face value what these people say and argue for. Especially by the end, there was decent discussion of many of the issues surrounding AI, but I did think some were notably absent, particularly the climate impact of the GPU power needed and the human cost of data labelling for training data. The climate angle in particular I felt was needed, given that these companies often try and hide their negative climate cost, and it links back to other technologies like cryptocurrency that are mentioned in passing in the book. I do think that the way the book clearly distinguishes between AI safety and AI ethics, and how these can even be in conflict with each other, was very useful, especially for raising awareness of these to a general audience reading the book to learn more about the world of AI as it has become.

Overall, Supremacy is a detailed account of these two AI juggernauts over the past fifteen years and the road to get to tools like ChatGPT that have become household names, and it is a good place for people who want to know where AI has come from recently to start. For me, I found it did lean too heavily on ideas of the solitary tech genius billionaire and I wasn’t interested in that much detail about conversations between them, but the book didn’t go entirely in for the AI hype and did address a lot of the issues and controversies around AI at the moment.

So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison

So Thirsty is a novel about a woman whose dull suburban life is thoroughly thrown away when she becomes a vampire along with her best friend. Sloane didn’t want a surprise trip for her birthday, but when her cheating husband says she’s off to a remote luxury retreat with her best friend Naomi, she figures maybe she could do with it. When Naomi arranges them a night with mysterious strangers at an exclusive party in an attempt to get Sloane to live a little, they don’t know that they are about to be changed forever.

Having read some of Harrison’s previous novels, I was excited for this one and what her take on vampires was going to be. So Thirsty has her usual casual, fun style and story in which a female protagonist has to adapt to supernatural goings on, with the main narrative about Sloane and Naomi becoming vampires and Sloane finding herself again after settling down for something that didn’t quite work for her. There’s perhaps not as much as plot as you might expect, as it is mostly driven by character dynamics, but then again, quite a lot of vampire fiction is mostly based around vibes and newcomers adapting to being vampires rather than anything else particularly happening. If the book hadn’t had an epilogue I would have definitely expected there was a sequel, as the ending is quite sudden after the relatively slow pace of the earlier part of the book.

So Thirsty is a novel exploring lasting female friendship and what happens as you get older, but also a novel about vampires who like sex and fun parties, and about how the combination of these might help someone stuck in a rut to find new excitement. It’s silly and fun (and would make a great vampire film), with a lot of good things packed in (I love the dream mall idea) and some great vampire moments, but I think I wanted more of it, more gore and sex and exploration of vampires living a wild “life” as an alternate for Sloane and Naomi.

Still Life by Katherine Packert Burke

Still Life is a novel about a trans woman trying to make sense of her messy life and the realities of queer love and friendship. Edith is trying to write her second novel and trying to deal with the fact out of her two best friends, now both two exes, one is dead and the other is marrying a man. She’s returning to Boston for the first time since her transition, and the narrative moves between the present and the past, her friendships and relationships with Valerie and Tessa, and whether Edith can move beyond this tableau she’s caught in to some kind of movement forward.

I didn’t know what to expect from this novel, but it really hit me hard. It functions as a character study, exploring not just Edith but snatches of Tessa and Valerie as well, a narrative about transness and queerness and the messiness of moving between categories and identities and existences, and a meditation on autofiction and art more generally, even when a lot of that art is Sondheim and Gossip Girl . It can be disorienting to read at times, moving between the ‘present’ of the novel and the story of the ‘past’ chronologically, but for me that works, letting the line between past and present bleed together as Edith tries to form her past into a coherent narrative she could turn into a novel. 

The book doesn’t offer much closure or many answers, but I love how visceral and full of emotion it feels, making me genuinely cry and laugh (I loved Edith complaining she didn’t want to have to learn what 100 gecs is). Like another recent novel, Greta and Valdin , Still Life offers a bittersweet look at the joy and messiness of queerness through the three women that made up its central characters, and it is also an exploration of the glimpses of what might’ve been and how we cannot solely dwell on these. I think I’ll be haunted by Edith for a while.

Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White

Compound Fracture is a young adult thriller about an autistic trans teenager in West Virginia seeking vengeance in a decades-old feud. Miles Abernathy lives in an Appalachian town ruled by Sheriff Davies, where the Abernathys have been fighting ever since Miles’ relative Saint Abernathy was killed in a public execution following a miners’ strike. When he’s beaten almost to death by the sheriff’s son and his friends, Miles is forced to confront the violence of the town and the price you have to pay to fight against injustice and cruelty.

Fans of Andrew Joseph White’s other YA novels will see similarities here, with the trans teen boy protagonist and harsh violence of the narrative, but Compound Fracture is a less of a horror or supernatural story, and more of a grounded one, with the horrors being more about power and violence in rural Appalachia. The narrative is pretty straightforward, with a generally recognisable young adult novel plot of fighting against something and growing into yourself, just with a much more brutal reality than the typical YA book. As someone who no longer reads much young adult fiction, I find myself drawn to Andrew Joseph White’s books because they offer something different, something with more edge and violence. In this one, the community-finding and identity-exploring elements are carefully combined with the thriller-like plot as Miles is drawn into violence, and it makes for a gripping read.

A lot of the class and politics in the book isn’t something familiar to me as a UK-based reader, and the narrative simplifies a lot in order to be a compelling YA novel, but there is some interesting nuance around people drawn into violence and hatred. There’s a lot of big things covered in the novel—opioid addiction, poverty, alcoholism, disability—alongside the difficulties of being trans and queer in the USA, and the book explores Miles’ family’s reactions to his coming out without offering hopelessness to trans teens reading the book. This isn’t the first YA novel I’ve read that explores what happens when teenagers are forced into larger community violence and issues (Angeline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter was in my head when reading this book, for example), but I think it’s a great way for young adult fiction to go beyond what are normally seen as the interests of teenagers and YA fiction readers specifically.

Compound Fracture was probably my favourite Andrew Joseph White novel so far, despite the fact I’m usually more of a horror fan. There’s a lot to get into and I liked how many different things the book played with, even when things had to be simplified for the sake of the story or chosen perspective. 

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What Rachel Did

Reviews, travel writing and musings from a bookish Glasgow girl

Book Review: Fleishman is in Trouble

Overall I really liked Fleishman is in Trouble – the writing is so good and I would definitely read another of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s books! (In fact I have been searching NetGalley every few days in the hope that Long Island Compromise is up but not yet ☹️)

Her style was very much up my street and the characters were all entertaining to read about. The wealth was a bit mad to get my head around (Toby earns a quarter of a million a year and this is unimpressive?!) but I would say my only issue was that it did a lot of thought-dumping towards the end, about the condition of women etc. I also knew of the dual perspectives before picking this up and kept expecting something *more* to happen, which isn’t the book’s fault but the natural result of reading a very hyped and much-discussed book five years after it comes out. Still annoying though.

On the other hand, v much enjoyed my solo lunch at Papii – so cheap for a cute cafe in Edinburgh city centre!

Book Review: Nevada

I bought Nevada from Margate bookshop in August 2022 and then returned home to find I’d been gifted a copy by Picador. Who knows what edition I currently have, I gave one to my cousin.

This was completely different than I was expecting – not least because the blurb kind of leads you to think this is going to be a road trip novel, which it isn’t. (I was sad about this because I love travelling in novels!) I’m sure most people on bookstagram have heard of Nevada by now, but if you haven’t, it’s a reissued book from 2013 about Maria, a trans woman living in New York, and later, her attempts to be a kind of trans fairy godmother to James, a twenty year old living in the middle of nowhere in Nevada. 

I enjoyed Nevada overall: obviously it has a lot of resonance as a trans cult classic, and I liked getting to know Maria. It’s got things in common with the ‘sad girl novel’ (a term I hate!) but it’s a lot more refreshing and analytical, and reminds me of why it’s much better to read about well-rounded people with more complexity than just ennui. My favourite parts were when Maria is whizzing about New York on her bike, when she’s hiding in the bookshop where she works (been there done that) and James being at the very beginning of unpicking his identity. But I have to say that I struggled with the writing. It’s written in this very colloquial way, peppered with ‘like’s and ‘um’s, very often functioning as Maria and James’s internal monologues. I think Imogen Binnie does this really well – intermingling the deeper analysis of gender and femininity and the very prosaic, everyday musings – but personally I found the style quite irritating and I never got used to it. Writing is often the most important thing for me when it comes to enjoying a novel, so maybe it’s a testament to the story that I liked Nevada in spite of this, but I definitely didn’t enjoy it as much as I was expecting to!

Book Review: Piglet

I read Piglet in a day – sometimes office days are sooo good for this – after seeing a lot of love on bookstagram. The story of Piglet – a cookbook editor engaged to the wealthy Kit, nicknamed thus because of her childhood greediness – is like Supper Club combined with the first half of Melancholia , and I had mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it’s kind of bog standard sad girl novel and I found it lacking depth in a few ways: Piglet is a bit one-dimensional, we don’t know a lot about her life or her and Kit’s relationship before the novel begins, the theme of food as a motif for class was sooo interesting but was a bit underdeveloped in my opinion.

On the other hand, the days before and surrounding the wedding were so perfectly tense, and made for a really good, wedding-as-horror read. I love reading about weddings and this really delivered, so much so that I kind of wish that had been the whole book? The commingling cruelty and support of Piglet’s parents was so believable and complex, and there is a lot about the food/class thing that is really ripe to be explored. I often think, when did everyone learn what all these expensive ingredients are and how to craft recipes with them? Is it just something that wealthy people grow up knowing? 

Thanks to  Doubleday  for letting me read this through  NetGalley ; I actually read this months ago but have only just got around to posting!

Book Review: In Europe

I borrowed this book from my dad, and read it on and off from October to December. Geert Mak is a Dutch journalist who spent 1999 travelling around Europe, and In Europe is a history book about Europe in the twentieth century, and a travelogue of the author’s time crisscrossing Europe. I started primary school in 1999, so it was interesting getting a glimpse into a Europe I don’t remember, one of wars in the Balkans and the euro being new and shiny. 

I really enjoyed this book. Obviously not everything could be covered – although I think he made a good attempt – and, as ever, there were periods and events that I was more interested in than others. Some of the language could be outdated at times too, which was a little weird to read. But it was a great overview of a mad century, and I actually learned so much – not just about things I only had a tangential knowledge of, like the Balkan wars, but about periods I have read loads about. I loved all the Second World War bits, and I loved the descriptions of all the places he visited. Mostly I just loved reading about history! I’ve read less history in the past few years, partly because nowadays most of my heavier non-fiction reads tend to be about political and gender issues, but I love reading history books so so much and I really need to get back into it.

Book Review: Jaded

I thought Jaded was really good and I’m so glad I took a chance on it when  Vintage  reached out with the NetGalley link! Jaded tells the story of Ceyda (also called Jade), the lawyer daughter of two immigrants, and what happens when she is sexually assaulted at a work event. I thought all the disparate parts of Jade’s life were woven together really well – her supportive friends, her loving but culturally dissonant parents, her posh and ultimately dickhead boyfriend, her absolutely insane job at a City law firm – and the story and characters felt so true and authentic.

Ela Lee’s analysis of privilege and corporate culture wasn’t really saying anything new but it still felt fresh to me, and although maybe the writing wasn’t always the best at a sentence level, I think Jaded really delivered on its premise. Such a strong debut and I haven’t seen much of this on bookstagram so take this as your recommendation to pick it up! Obviously a massive trigger warning for sexual assault, this really goes deep into Jade’s trauma and recovery. This one is already out because I have been slacking in posting reviews, I have about a million saved in my notes app 🥲

Book Review: The Dutch House

This is the third novel I’ve read by Ann Patchett, and the fourth book – and has definitely cemented her as an author whose entire works I want to read (I’ve still got quite a lot to go). This wasn’t my favourite in terms of story – that would be Commonwealth , and I found Tom Lake more readable – but I really enjoyed her writing, her characterisation, her little details and all the ways in which she made the world of the book feel real and convincing. She feels like a special writer in that way – I don’t encounter many writers whose worlds are so believable and complex. (I’m thinking of Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood etc).

Like I said, though, I didn’t find the story as compelling as some of her other books. My only other complaint was that, until the action shifts to New York, I didn’t have a big sense of what era this was happening in – the New York scenes are full of historical atmosphere, but the earlier parts could have been set at any time, it wasn’t very clear to me. Anyway, I borrowed this from my mum and overall I really liked it. I think I’m going to pick up Bel Canto next.

This edition is also absolutely gorgeous!

Book Review: Milk

Milk is a mix of memoir, short essays and vignettes about Alice Kinsella’s experience of becoming pregnant and becoming a mother. Interspersed with this are musings on the specificity of being a mother in Ireland, with its particularly complicated history. I found this book very intense, anxiety-inducing and a bit scary; it makes the idea of having children quite off-putting if I’m honest.

Milk offers no clear-cut answers or conclusions: I don’t really know how I feel about it and ultimately I don’t know how much I got from it. But I don’t have any children, so my opinions are probably irrelevant in this instance. Anyway, it was an interesting book to read at the age of 29 when it feels like half the people I know who are the same age as me are having babies and the rest are thinking about it. Thanks to  Picador  for letting me read it through  NetGalley !

Book Review: Still Born

I borrowed Still Born from my cousin when I went to visit her in Cartagena last year (sidenote: have been dreaming of wintry sunshine in Spain ever since, defos need to do a similar trip again!)

I’ve seen a lot of rave reviews about this one, and it didn’t quite match up for me. I did like it though, and I do agree that its expansive attitude towards motherhood is refreshing – it encompasses ‘mothering’ in lots of different forms, as well as the difficulty and unexpected joy when it really doesn’t go to plan. The only thing is that I find I rarely connect with translated fiction in the same way as with fiction originally written in English – there’s something about the writing that always distances me and it doesn’t delight me in the same way that writing in English language fiction can do.

I also very much enjoyed reading a book set in Mexico, and particularly Mexico City, one of my favourite cities; I would love to read more novels set in Mexico and I was disappointed to learn that it doesn’t seem like any of Guadalupe Nettel’s other books have been translated into English. Hopefully that changes!

Book Review: Hello Beautiful

Snapped in Rare Birds on my lunch break x

I am not a massive fan of family sagas, but I was reeled in by all the love for this story about the Padavano sisters. It’s definitely engrossing and super readable, but a bit too sentimental and unrealistic for my tastes (in character development, rather than plot). It was set largely in the 80s and felt like it was set about thirty years before, and the protagonists always felt a lot older than the teenagers and twenty-somethings they were supposed to be. That aside, though, I think it would be a great holiday read and you would like if you’re a fan of family dramas! I liked the Chicago setting too; I’m going there in September and it was fun to read something about Chicago and its working-class inhabitants. Also a bonus that it made me decide I want to stay in Pilsen. 3.5 stars and thanks to Viking for letting me read it via NetGalley!

Book Reviews: Queer Intentions, Glorious People and Good Material

Some books I’ve read recently!

I bought Queer Intentions from Lighthouse Books a couple of years ago and I really liked it! It’s a personal journey exploring several different queer communities across the world, and I v much enjoyed the mix of personal interrogation and reporting. Some of it was really thought-provoking – my favourite bits were probably the death of gay nightlife in London, and learning about LGBT+ rights in Serbia and Turkey, which I knew pretty much nothing about before.

Glorious People was sent to me by Pushkin Press; it’s a story about Ukrainian women between the 1970s and 2015. Although I would say I mostly enjoyed Glorious People , it took me a really long time to get into it and I never fully connected with most of the perspectives (Tatyana’s life in the 90s being the exception). I think this is because I wasn’t keen on the structure and the weight given to some storylines, but also I found the ending pretty pointless and I’m never a big fan of the childhood parts of stories that span decades. Saying that, though, I did think it was an interesting look at the Soviet Union and Ukraine, and the multiplicity of experiences and identities that existed there (and how the chaos of the 90s impacted that). Still glad I read this because I’ll never not be intrigued by a novel set in this part of the world in this particular time frame.

And then we have Good Material … I did like it, although I have to say I actually found it the least funny of Dolly’s books and didn’t laugh out loud once (I was literally crying with laughter at her memoir, so she had stuff to live up to). For most of the book I thought it was a solid four-star read, but it did dip for me at points (but that could have been because I read it during quite a frazzled week). Lots of lovely little details and the world felt very real and the characters all very convincing. I don’t really have any complaints, but it definitely doesn’t feel special to me in the way that her non-fiction does. My favourite bit was literally the acknowledgements lol (a testament to my insane parasocial relationship I’m sure) x

What did you think of these if you’ve read them?

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Kathryn White. Author. Book critic. Blogger. Poet. Cat lover. INTJ. Caffeine junkie. Insomniac.

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