melanie_page's reviews
1469 reviews

I just wasn't jiving with the way the audiobook narrator was reading.

Powerful. You'll lose yourself and neglect everything else on your to-do list the day you pick it up. If you like this style of storytelling, I highly recommend Bogeywoman by Jaimy Gordon, Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell, or, for the kiddies, The Great Gilly Hopkins.

...And in the end, when no psychoanalyst seems to have answers for her, Isadora must mentally work alone through the setting that shaped her, the politics and wars, the magazine ads and maxims about good wives, and understand why she exists as she does, and how she wants to exist tomorrow. Highly recommended classic novel.

Check out the full review at https://grabthelapels.com/2021/08/05/fear-of-flying/

Most of the essays in Shit, Actually are about 20 minutes long in audio format. Each essay goes through the entire plot of a movie, making fun of memorable moments and trashing scenes that never should have been given the green light. It’s like watching a movie with your best friend (a movie you’ve both seen, I hope, or all that talking would make you mad). The first movie West discuses is The Fugitive because, claims West, it is the most perfect movie ever. Thus, every movie she “reviews” is rated ___ out of 10 DVDs of The Fugitive. Hearing the rating never failed to make me laugh because it’s so silly.

Check out the full review at https://grabthelapels.com/2021/08/03/shit-actually/

Author includes details about his time infiltrating the KKK in Colorado Springs, but that also included building a phone friendship with David Duke, grand wizard of the Klan. The book is written in a straight-forward fashion, but I got hung up on the way it repeated and sometimes over-explained, such as use the terms slave and massa and then putting "master" in parenthesis. Even simpler terms were explained. Or how the leader of the Colorado Springs Klan wanted to start a cross on fire using a method he'd seen in a James Bond movie; this was reiterated about 5-6 times. Sometimes it seemed odd which words he would include in quote marks, because at times it looked like he was indicated which words someone else used and he was being accurate, sometimes it seemed like sarcasm, and other times it was unclear to me. The end of the book has a lovely thank you to the author's 10th-grade English teacher, who helped edit the manuscript, and to be fair, I feel like a lot of the juvenile-feeling writing style likely came from this person, who was used to helping young writers clarify to the point of being too obvious. The content, though, was interesting. I wish I knew more about why everyone in the police department felt the sting was so funny beyond duping the Klan; the serious nature of the work they were doing, and why they were doing it, didn't always come across to me through the entire work.

Two things threw me off on this audiobook: 1) the reader had this quiet, thoughtful NPR-esque voice while she was reading the narration. But then when she got to dialogue, she was SO loud that my hearing aids would make crackling sounds and I'd have to crank the volume down, only to miss the next sentence read in that baby-soft voice again. 2) The mother character. Just....I don't get it. Her privacy and feelings of shame read like someone born in the 1940s (add to that the she dresses her daughter in lace and silk dresses. What is the time period??) but then she says "fuck" alllllll the time. She sounds like a disaffected Gen X-er teen. I didn't get how "wiggly" this character's personality was.

Stinson’s writing is as rich as the cow’s butter theme that appears in Martha Moody, and it’s easy to pick up her work again, to miss it when the book is not in your hands. The unexpected plot kept me wondering how it could end given the lesbian relationship and the time period. That’s why I was glad to see Martha Moody was just republished by Small Beer Press a few months ago with a wonderful new cover.

Check out the full review at https://grabthelapels.com/2021/07/15/martha-moody/