lepasseportlitteraire's reviews
108 reviews

In this novel, we follow the life of teenager Charlie Vega while she struggles to appreciate her own body, a conflictual relationship with her mother, her first crushes, rejection, and feeling loved for the first time: but will she be able to overcome her insecurities and accept the fact that yes, she too deserves to be loved?
I am not the biggest fan of romance books, as I usually find them heavily predictable and reliant on clichés.
 However, I highly recommend Fat Chance, Charlie Vega if you are looking for a feel-good YA romance with yes some classic romance clichés, but also some serious insight into the life and thoughts of a fat teen going through her first crushes and relationship. In addition to the fact that the main protagonist is fat, I particularly enjoyed the representation of the mother-daughter relationship: how to reconcile feelings towards a parent who is full of love but at the same time has some problematic and toxic behaviors resulting from her/his traumas in life?
The writing is simple, and even if various themes are addressed (being fat in modern society, first love, personal insecurities, grief, parental toxicity) it does not become an emotionally hard reading and manages to keep the lightness of a YA while also serving serious reflections.

I can finally say that I enjoyed a romance YA novel.

This is a masterpiece, a MUST read in your feminist TBRs. In such a short space, Virginie Despentes showcases her writing skills outside of fiction with a unique style in the non-fiction genre. 

The first 10 pages alone manage to resume in a short but truly poignant way what being a woman and feminism is: I cried while reading it, and I have never felt more represented, never felt my voice as a woman was being put into words, my body seen as well as my rage. This book is not an essay based on numbered facts, statistics, and studies made by scholars (not that there is nothing wrong with them, they are just a different type of essay).

Virginie Despentes, drawing from her personal experiences, screams about rape instead of whispering about it, she points the finger at patriarchy instead to point fingers at people, she exposes imperfection instead of trying and hiding it under a rug of hypocrisy, and most of all she deconstructs the image of what the perfect woman or the perfect feminist should be. 

I knew before starting to read this that I would have enjoyed it, but I hadn’t planned to fall in love with it. King Kong Theory has quickly and easily entered the list of my favorite books ever.

This short stories collection literally killed me of boredom, there was not ONE single story that got me interested or involved, to the point that as soon as I closed the book, I forgot about them in an instant. However, I will never forget the feeling of flatness and emptiness that exude from every single element of the books: descriptions, the story arches that just do not go anywhere, the characters.
I am rarely this harsh with books, and always try to find some positive things about a book, but I find it impossible with this one. What I will say, however, is that I am not particularly fond of nordic literature, so maybe if you enjoy hermetic literature, this could be your cup of tea!

This book has quite everything I enjoy in a book: impeccable character development, a perfect balance in descriptions and dialogues (I hate long descriptions as much as I hate useless dialogues put there only to fill a couple pages), and alternante narrators. In addition to that, we get to see the evolution of a family in time, while describing the American society over a laps of time from the 1950s to the 1990s.

While the theme of race is central to the story, it is far to be the only theme to be covered by the novel: Brit Bennett also cover the themes of gender identity, as well as class, social constructs and family relationships.

Mockingbird is a sweet yet deeply touching middle-grade novel about Caitlin, a young girl affected by Asperger and her struggles to understand society, friendship and, on top of all that, grief.

The fact that we can get to see the world through her eyes makes the novel unique, and her behaviours that might seem odd from the outside, become Cristal clear.

I found the book was incredibly insightful and a nice reading if you are looking to better understand how a person with asperger sees the world. On top of that, it makes the case for early intervention and the importance of a support network outside of family and friends, in this case the one that the education system might provide when resources are present.

Highly recommend this read ! 

In questo romanzo seguiamo Horra nella sua vita piena e impegnativa, cercando di trovare un equilibrio tra famiglia, università, lavoro e volontariato. 

Il romanzo riesce a mostrare le molteplici facce del mondo musulmano, rappresentando perfettamente la sua ricchezza, ma anche esponendo come gli estranei non sembrino capirlo né credere nella sua varietà, cercando di incasellare un'intera religione e i suoi seguaci in un'unica definizione.

Tuttavia, non ho trovato la scrittura molto fluida, soprattutto i dialoghi che sembravano un po' innaturali per la maggior parte del tempo, il che è un peccato perché la trama era interessante e ben costruita, così come i personaggi e le loro caratteristiche uniche che mostrano come l'essere musulman* non sia una definizione unica per tutt*. 

Nel complesso, consiglierei il libro per la storia e l'importanza culturale che ha, ma non per la scrittura che manca di spontaneità.

In this story, the unnamed protagonist who now lives in Canada meets a man who reminds her of a boy from her childhood in Sarajevo: they were supposed to run away together, but the boy never shows up and she never sees him again. In a stream of consciousness, the narrator goes back and forward between the past and the present, reminiscing how she lived in the Sarajevo war as a child, as well as her escape.
This reading was … confusing at best. Nothing happens, the story arch is practically inexistent, and all we are left with is good writing and too many metaphors and beautiful images. I found it extremely difficult to reach the end of the book, it seemed as reading a very long poem and while I found the writing beautiful and lyrical, the lack of a story in itself ruined it. 

In questo romanzo storico, ambientato nella Tanzania coloniale, seguiamo le vite di diversi personaggi che si uniscono e si allontanano allo stesso tempo.

Mentre tedeschi, britannici, francesi e belgi fanno della Tanzania (e del continente africano in generale) il loro campo di battaglia offshore, a pagarne le conseguenze sono ovviamente le popolazioni che sono sempre state lì e che si trovano improvvisamente divise da confini immaginari ma molto reali, sia dal punto di vista geografico che interpersonale.

Ho trovato la storia molto interessante dal punto di vista storico, con uno sguardo al passato coloniale della Tanzania.

Tuttavia, come romanzo, ho trovato che mancasse un po' di pathos narrativo: il punto di vista alternativo non è sfruttato al massimo delle sue potenzialità, perché i salti temporali sono troppo veloci e non danno abbastanza tempo a ogni personaggio. Si salta da una storia all'altra e il narratore riempie i vuoti lasciati dai salti temporali troppo frettolosamente.

Nel complesso, penso che potrei leggere altri libri dello stesso autore, poiché trovo che la scrittura sia abbastanza fluida, il che mi fa sperare che questo possa essere un problema di questo libro specifico.

✨ On the island of Black Conch, the lives of David, a fisherman, and those of the other islanders are disrupted by the arrival of Aycaya, a mermaid captured by American tourists who are planning to bring her to the USA to make an attraction out of her. When David rescues her and hides her in his home, he will see her transform into a woman again, but not easily and without difficulties: will she ever be free of her curse?

✨ I was quite disappointed with the read: while the storyline is interesting, everything else was kind of lazy: characters reduced to cliches, a magical realism not fully developed, a lack of atmosphere, and quite a big and imposing male gaze (which is all the more upsetting considering it was written by a woman)

✨ The latter was the most maddening for me: a few pages in, I stopped the read to check if I misread the author and wondered if it was written by a man. The mermaid is throughout the book described as innocent, and naive and plays a massive passive role in the story that sees her as the protagonist. Her fate is completely in the hands of men: men who want to capture her or men who want to protect her, but either way men who want to fuck her, constantly. I would have appreciated more time dedicated to her POV rather than reading pages and pages about what the men of the story thought of her breasts or wondering where her pussy was and how they would have fucked her: BLERK.