One of the things that continues to draw me to literary fiction is when an author can draw me into an unfamiliar setting and elicit empathy; I feel this is one of the ways we can best grow and understand those around us, and become fuller people in service of the world. In Shuggie and Agnes Bain, Douglas Stuart has dazzlingly accomplished this. This is such an up-close and personal, and most importantly, honest look at how love can hurt us, our hearts reaching out with everything they have to help those dear to us, sometimes coming up short despite our best efforts. The way he writes about addiction in this community is so honest and vivid that I can almost feel the frigid Glasgow wind beating against my pea coat, walking alongside Shuggie and Leek in the abandoned colliery or seeing the city lights reflected in Agnes' wet eyes. A truly stunning novel that I will never forget.

Reviewed on Sunday, January 21st, 2024, 5:21pm.

I definitely lost a lot of steam midway through reading this. I was very engaged with the "mystery" side of the novel, particularly how it interacted with the Chippewa mythology and connection to nature and animals, but it kind of feels like that plotline was dropped almost entirely. What you are left with is still a very interesting perspective on the life and politics of the tribe and reservation, how much poverty and struggle they dealt with, and how much they had to fight just for a tiny scrap that they didn't really want to begin with, but as it's all they had, it was dear to them.

Reviewed on Monday, October 23rd, 2023, 10:40am.

A nice campy gothic horror story. I would have honestly liked to have seen a little bit more Mexican culture in the novel, as it essentially takes place in an English home, completely secluded from the rest of the town, so it never really feels like that Mexican identity is present, even though the narrator is of that culture. I think Moreno-Garcia could have done a better job there and, to me, it would have been an altogether more interesting setting.

Reviewed on Sunday, August 14th, 2022, 12:00am.

This book had an uphill climb to winning my affection by using the phrase "big lol" within the first ten pages, and the multiple well-placed Frank Ocean references sent it tumbling back down at intervals, but it's hard to begrudge a book that you can breeze through in a weekend too much. The concept is cool, and the execution is concise, if predictable, and of course, it has a nice message. I guess I ultimately found it to be kind of merely scratching the surface of the concept, but nothing about it is what I'd call bad.

Reviewed on Sunday, November 19th, 2023, 6:32am.