emilysquest's reviews
248 reviews

This book is GREAT FUN and highly recommended for folks who like: female queerness & interqueer politics, female-dominated casts of characters, ghost stories & gothic fiction, horror tropes, Edward Gorey style grotesqueries, triads over dyads, fin de siècle girls' boarding school fiction, LA noir(ish), creepy-New-England-in-the-fall, and interlinked past-and-present narratives that parallel and reveal one another.

Edit: Also a little surprised by all the reviews citing a slow pace—this book zipped along for me; I couldn't put it down. And I loved the discursive (but not really discursive) narrator and the characters' messy inner workings. But these things are, of course, subjective.

This book is probably someone’s jam, but it wasn’t particularly mine. Interesting because it’s the first novel(la) by an Equatorial Guinean woman to be translated into English, and queer into the bargain, but the plot & characterization are thin, almost fairytale-like, and the pacing is odd. 

A gorgeous memoir about falling passionately in love with your family, and all the attendant heartbreak and revelation.

This collection is phenomenal. What kind of love do you make with the violence that made you? 

A family epic in the tradition of White Teeth, Middlesex, & Midnight’s Children, although with an ending that is less Dickensian in terms of building to a neat & tidy dénouement. Which I quite liked about it, even though it made the last third feel anticlimactic (the narrator in fact labels the last third the “B-side” and points out that B-sides are usually not as good as A-sides). The 90s and early 00s penchant for every single thread coming together in a tidy way at the end feels a bit contrived; Djavadi’s approach felt truer to life to me.

I loved the interconnectedness of personal and political life here—the narrator is the lesbian daughter of Persian dissidents who flee the country after the rise of Khomeini, so her identity is believably inextricable from the modern politics of Iran. And I liked the way Djavadi handled writing activist characters. 

I also deeply appreciated her depiction of a woman & her female partner making the decision to go through IVF treatment in order to have a baby, rather than adopting. As someone with basically zero native empathy for why someone would do this, I nonetheless really understood and sympathized with Kimiâ’s motivations by the end of the novel. Which shows impressive character work!

As always with Ishiguro: 😭😭😭😭😭

I know it's a real dick move to review someone's second book solely as a comparison to their outstanding first, but to be a dick for a second... Freshwater put me in intellectual predicament bondage and unapologetically let  me squirm, whereas this is merely a good book. 

Very thoughtful & well-done, though. Emezi writes so incisively about the intersection of nonbinary gender identity, postcolonialism, and the vexed category of "mental illness." 

Lovely, dreamy, contemplative, real queer. 

Interesting mixture of travelogue, tasting notes, and history of wine development in the ancient world, with a plea for biodiversity and adventurous drinking mixed in. Definitely made me curious to branch out & investigate some unusual grapes & production methods.