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.

What a wonderful representation of the complexities of love and friendship. This book really caught me off guard in that regard; I was pretty hooked from the beginning due to the readability of it and my own interest in the creative process of video games (I especially enjoyed the many references), but the aspects of human connection are what will stick with me. Not only does Zevin do a great job of showing the ways our childhoods influence our lives (through both trauma and our escapes from those traumas), but the novel is stunning in using its own influences in the gaming world to shape its form in places. I found the 'Pioneers' section, in particular, to be very special and a beautiful culmination of bringing content and form together. I was left misty-eyed by the end of it.

Reviewed on Sunday, November 26th, 2023, 12:15pm.

I saw R. F. Kuang quoted she wanted Yellowface to feel like an anxiety attack, and I can't think of a book better accomplishing its author's goals than this one, in that case. From the very beginning of the novel, you're cringing your way through it, and the quick pace of it only ratchets up the anxiety throughout. It brings to mind a lot of really interesting questions to think about when it comes to authorship and who is allowed to tell what stories, and, for me, was one of the more scathing satires on the publishing industry I've read. It really brings a sense of doom to the concept of being a public figure in any realm, but the publishing-specific stuff is particularly nightmarish.

Reviewed on Monday, January 15th, 2024, 8:29am.

Nathan Hill writes about love and parenthood, and more importantly trying to navigate those topics in awful modernity, with so much compassion and humor. As a father of a boy about to be two years old, the sequence in which Elizabeth is struggling to get her two year old son to eat, following her to the grocery store for her "unraveling," evoked an internal horror the likes at which Stephen King would blush. The nonlinear approach pays off very well by the end, as well, giving you glimpses into Jack and Elizabeth's lives at different points and from different perspectives makes the conclusion satisfying and meaningful.

Reviewed on Monday, January 15th, 2024, 8:29am.

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.

I really enjoyed the frame of this novel being that the end of the world was an inevitability and that what we are left with is seeing how people will deal with it, but ultimately it felt a little too narrowly-focused to be super effective for me. I think maybe showing a little bit more of the outside world, perhaps through the lens of David, rather than being so confined to Lyd and Mott's lives, we might feel the overall danger imposed on the two throughout. Instead, there are often long stretches of not much going on other than internal and personal conflict between mother and daughter. I will say, the book really sticks the landing and ties up how important being so narrow throughout was, because we can see a very personal experience with this whole thing in a way that we wouldn't had it been too broad.

Reviewed on Monday, October 23rd, 2023, 10:44am.