readwithmeemz's reviews
1255 reviews

Charming and funny, this book was so darn cute! I loved the illustrations (Batcat!!! i would die for u!!!) and the narration was sassy, with just enough fourth-wall breaking that I think kids will have a GREAT time. I loved the subtle and unsubtle ways that this book enforced and reinforced its message that you don’t have to be only one thing - it’s ok to be in between, both, or neither. This was such a delightful and easy read, I’m charmed by this world (i wanna meet this witch, i am convinced she is a Lesbian ™️), and i can’t wait to share this with the kiddos in my life!

I enjoyed the basis of this poetry collection - channelling prayer and scripture into a queer rhapsody. The poems were largely short and simple, but nonetheless beautiful. Tonally, the poems veered from powerful & resonant laments, to snarky and pithy “zingers”. While both were enjoyable, there was a bit of whiplash swinging between poetic moods. Ultimately, this is a strong collection, featuring some really memorable poems. 

Reading every book in this series is like coming home to an old friend. Tense & atmospheric, the latest installment in The Singing Hills Cycle was a gothic horror story with sharp teeth & soft edges. Hazy and immaterial, while also being bold and immersive, Vo’s world building is immaculate, and this series is a masterclass in fantasy writing. Full of magic and myth, and mystery, & murder, this was a delicious entry to the series, and one I won’t soon forget. In this installment, memories fail, and our cleric develops a crush, as we’re immersed in a world where nothing is as it seems. We’re thrown headlong into the story, & we settle in immediately before we remember to ask a single question or point of clarification. Lush, brilliant, and beautiful, every book in this series is a gift.

This book was bold, exciting, and such an immersive read. I had a hard time putting it down, and couldn’t stop thinking about it while I was doing other things. 

The concept was compelling, the prose was engaging, and the romance was butterfly-inducing. I enjoyed the lack of specificity - we didn’t name our heroine, and I don’t believe we knew exactly what year it was either (unless I missed it!). That left the novel seeming unspecific (in a good way).  

This book was sad, curious, romantic, tense, funny, messy, and honestly brilliant. We would spend pages and pages in the delicious mundane, followed by racing through action and plot. The pacing was inconsistent, which both worked, and didn’t (more on this below).

I liked so much about this book, and I think the author has so much promise, but there were a few things that didn’t quite hit the mark for me.

Positives:
- The characters were fascinating. Even the ones that weren’t given the opportunity to develop much, or for us to get to know them much, they were all quite compelling, and I would read all of their files in depth! 

- The romance was sweet and tender and achingly lovely, the slow burn was slow, but the reward was great

- The concept itself was so great, I was hooked by this premise, and I honestly feel like this would make a great TV series, or book series, following bridges and their expats. It would be delightful 

- The mix of genres (science fiction, romance, literary, suspense) was great! 

- Overall the writing was strong - engaging, full of prose and melody, and very evocative

- I loved that this colourful story was told in so many shades of grey. Everything was messy and complicated, and morally ambiguous, it was DELICIOUS


Room for improvement:
- The pacing was great for so long, but the story kind of fell apart near the end. Not completely, but it did not stand strong on its own, a lot felt rushed, some stuff wasn’t clearly reasoned out, and there were so many twists and turns that panned out via the exposition of conversations that were as finessed as a brick to the head. The conclusion was clunky, and could use some work. 

- Our narrator at times would be brilliant and snarky and smart, and delightful, and at other times, she would shakily almost arbitrarily make her way through some sort of self discovery or memory, and it felt like her reflections were almost half-hearted. I especially noticed this whenever we touched on moral and social issues like race and some of the ethics to do with her work. Often it worked - life is confusing and we don’t always have fully formed thoughts, but other times it felt underdeveloped. Our protagonist would at length list microaggressions, and be so painfully self-aware at her own faults and mistakes, but then would make decisions that felt extremely out of character. While I’m all for a complicated and multifaceted main character, didn’t feel intentional, and It just felt a bit inconsistent. 

Ultimately, I really, really enjoyed this book. It was electrifying, and smart, and unforgettable. I hope to read more from Bradley soon!

Evocative and beautiful, Sarah Ghazal Ali’s <i>Theophanies</i> is full of rich and heady prose. Exploring themes of life, death, birth, sex, violence, womanhood, and faith, each poem and each line and each word is written with care and thought, and intention. Ali is unafraid to experiment, making bold and brilliant choices in style and phrase, leading to a unique and engaging reading experience. Each word had weight, like you could roll it around in your mouth. I was impressed with this work, and I can’t wait to read more prose from the author. 

<i>”I didn’t know what any of it meant, but I knew it meant intensely.”</i>

Beautiful. Devastating. Funny. Brilliant. Masterful. Resonant.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is an early contender for the best book of the year, and definitely one of my favourites. It’s a meditative and melodic masterpiece that journeys you from birth, to life, to death, to death, to death, to death, and beyond. It’s about homecomings and hostile welcomes, and staring and screaming in the face of The Void ™️. This is a book about martyrdom, and like the mythos of a martyr, it will live on forever.

Poets-turned-novelists bring some kind of kinetic energy into every word, every line, every page, and Kaveh Akbar is no exception. I’ve read and loved much of his poetry in the past, and this novel is poetry too, but also so much more.

His words are strung together like pearls on a necklace, and I often found myself highlighting favourite words and lines and paragraphs, and saying whole passages out loud just so I could taste them.

<i>”How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?”</i>

I connected so much with so much of this story. It was full of so much beauty and care and heartache and wretchedness, and I couldn’t get enough. Martyr! is a coming-of-age American dream novel in a way that only an alcoholic Irani Muslim obsessed with martyrdom can write (without getting arrested by the FBI, at least). He speaks on immigration and the thousands of deaths it brings. He speaks on imperialism and oppression and addiction and love. he speaks on death. And he does it all in a profoundly moving, tender, funny, and brilliant way. 

I am saying so much about this book while also saying so little, I know, and it’s because I simultaneously want you to read it immediately without knowing much about it, and I also don’t want anyone else to read it, because I want it to be mine and mine alone. 

<i>”That’s the secret, don’t you think, the amongness…”</i>

This book is art and magic and oxygen and heartbreak, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head or my heart. 

4.5 Stars

This is a tender and meditative coming-of-age story about grief and loss, what comes after. When our main character loses his best friend, he puts his life on hold, until one day he is at a cafe, and someone sits beside him… That someone is Haru, a “missed connection” from over a year ago that he met on a whirlwind, romantic day… The only catch is that no one else can see him. 

This was a tearjerker, and often in unexpected ways. It chronicles our protagonist growing up, trying to live his life, and making decisions shaped by his grief, his desire to move through it, and also his age as a young adult shaped by love and loss and heartbreak, while also trying to grow up and discover who he is. I knew it was going to be sad, but wasn’t expecting the emotional GUT PUNCH that comes near the end (I was literally crying on the train). 

I’m really impressed with Thao’s writing. Book 2 is just as strong as book 1 (You’ve Reached Sam), with a lot of the same appeal. Both are sweet and beautiful stories of grief and love, and although a lot happened in Haru, Thao keeps it tight and everything kind of makes sense. It’s a confusing and kind of messy story for our character, mirroring our confusing and kind of messy journeys through grief. 

My one qualm is that we don’t see that much development or layers or personality from most of our characters, even some of the more central ones who occupy a lot of the story (Jasmine, Haru, Daniel). Our main character Eric too, felt a bit removed from us as readers - like there was almost a layer of numbness or a wall in between us (who were inside his head), and what he was feeling. I could be generous and say that it’s a really powerful meta comparison to the numbness people who are depressed or grieving may feel, but I don’t know that it was that. Thao’s creating a great body of work that does well exploring love and grief and teenage feelings, with some sort of genre-bending or magical realism twist. The stories are great - tender, melancholic, romantic, but I hope as he matures as a writer, we see a bit *more*. He’s definitely a writer I’m excited to see grow, and excited to continue reading!

I  received an advanced reading copy of this book, from the publisher, in exchange for my honest feedback.

At times laugh-out-loud funny, at times subtly devastating, this was an intimate, vulnerable, and powerful peek into the life of Jennette McCurdy, her child stardom, and her … complicated… relationship with her mother. Well written and full of sharp wit, and short chapters, this book was unputdownable. I really enjoy celebrity memoirs because through the fame machine, we see or feel like we get to know them, but their memoir is a deeper look, on their own terms. 

McCurdy really has a voice for memoir - wry, and self-reflective, tackling incredibly devastating topics, but not always taking herself too seriously, she has a way of taking the readers through her pain and her traumas, and holding our hands through it, as we navigate her life story. And what a life story it has been - this book was quite emotionally affecting, and even harrowing at times, as it explored her journey with: child stardom, disordered eating, toxic work environments, codependency, alcohol addiction, and most centrally, her messy and painful relationship with her mother.

As someone who has been struggling through a book slump, this book felt like I could see the fog of my reading slump lifting, because boy, was this engrossing. I tend to be wary of super highly rated, buzzy books, because I worry they’ve been hyped up too much, and that I’ll be let down, but that was definitely not the case here.

I’m grateful to McCurdy for sharing her story, and I wish her the very best with all that’s ahead of her… I really hope it includes more books!

This starts off quite slow and insufferable. It was hard to be in Theo's head, and for the first third of the book, I thought I was going to hate the book completely. Theo is more of a queer quip machine than a person, and with the weird nepo baby chip on their shoulder, it was all a bit much, and I couldn't find it in me to care about the story. I just wasn’t invested in Theo that much as a person, and didn’t care for them. 

I found Kit’s inner voice to be more enjoyable, but both Theo & Kit’s problems - outside of their relationship - felt flat and underdeveloped. They were resolved too quickly, and often came from out of nowhere, with no build up or context, and they sometimes didn’t make much sense at all. 

Most of the secondary characters have little to no depth or personality, and we see such little development. So many of them were almost compelling but we don’t get the chance to really know for sure. 

The story itself is horny and sumptuous, and kind of a vibe, but I didn't start caring much until (Again), like a third of the way into the book. By the time we make it to Kit's section, the book levels out a bit more, and is a bit more bearable. The reflections on gender and art, and the section in Florence were BEAUTIFUl, and really redeemed the book for me. 

However, the pacing wasn’t great, and the book felt a bit too long. This was fun and horny and romantic and delectable, but also poorly paced, and over reliant on zingy one-liners, with weak character development. It felt like Casey went on a food tour that maybe changed their life, and I love that for them, and felt transported there, so that was definitely a plus. 

Ultimately not the best, nor my fave McQuiston, but it's a fun addition to the queer, bacchanalia cannon.