Review This was the November pick for our Small Press Fiction Book Club. I liked it! I wish I could say I loved it, but that’s not quite true. I found it really challenging to read. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing, paired with very long sentences and a myriad of commas and semicolons and parentheticals takes a lot of effort to hold through. You can almost feel yourself running out of breath; I have to imagine that’s intentional. ...
Review I eagerly await hearing what my book club folks think about Seethaler’s book. I thought it opened with a lovely picture, and then there were some vignettes that I found compelling, but ultimately this felt overlong (and it’s only 190 pages), or perhaps it just felt so slow as to be hard for me to focus on. Notes Author: Robert Seethaler Last read: 2025-10-24 Rating: 2.5 Form: Fiction ...
Review I thought this was a lovely little book. Read for the small press fiction book club that I’m in, I certainly would never have known or read something like this without that. I thought the ‘satire’ of it all was fairly surface, but I found that surface very pleasant. The writing is a bit whimsical, and the wordplay pleased me something terrible. I also found it oddly musical (particularly the recurrent, ‘While You Were Out’). ...
Review What a weird book! I spent the first 50 pages wondering, “Am I going to hate this?” My hackles were raised by the Lispector quote; I tried to read Apple in the Dark some months ago and found it absolutely grueling and couldn’t finish. But I found this quite readable! Mechanically, the writing is serviceable but not amazing. Some of the dialogue is clunky, and sounds sort of rigid. Then again, I think our characters are pretty strange people, and for some of them, I think they would speak like this to appear more sophisticated than they actually are. So, I’m willing to go with some of the very strange dialogue. Someone in our book club pointed out that the italic usage is odd, and I didn’t notice this so much until the ending 40 pages or so (which I read after the book club). There are definitely some strange empresses. All that said, I never bumped on the writing like I sometimes do, it all flowed rather nicely. I found it very readable and often enjoyed reading it, even if I was not at all enjoying the characters’ decisions or actions. ...
Review I tried and tried. I got 5 pages in and started begging for paragraphs. I got 20 pages in and decided maybe it wasn’t the right time, so I put it down and read a 700 page fantasy book. I read 20 more pages and could barely force myself to focus on it. I put it down at 50 intending to DNF it. I see every review mention that it picks up at page 60, so I go back. At page 70 I start skimming again, totally unable to keep my focus. I find it painfully boring. I skimmed the rest. This style does not work for me at all. ...
Review This book was mentioned last week in our book club’s discussion of We All Loved Cowboys. Hearing the plot, I made sure to buy a copy before I left the store. It is a short little book, and it can barely contain the emotion within it. Letters are prized and terrible things. I cannot imagine carrying a letter for decades, knowing it contains the words of the person that I love and adore, and not having means to hear those words in my heart. I can imagine knowing that a letter like that exists, and not receiving that, because that has happened to me. But this is something different and something more. ...
Review I read this for my Small Press Book Club. In a recent view, I proclaimed, “three stars is good,” and in general this is true. However, this is not a “three stars is good” three stars. This is a, “I have no idea what to rate this book as” three stars. I found it mostly inoffensive, but also not compelling or engaging at all. There are some passages that read to me like white noise, words on a page without meaning, meandering. Occasionally, there is an interesting line. But overall, I leave the book not knowing what to do about it. ...
Review I have had this book on my living room table for months. Originally, it was to by my book club’s January read, but scheduling and then supply issues pushed it out months and months. The whole time I eyed it warily for its weight and size. I’ve been in a mood of 200-300 page books, and I had no concept of what this would be about, only that it was surprisingly dense to lift. The last book I read from Archipelago Press was Sara Gallardo’s January which is a tiny thing. ...
Review I read this for my small press book club. I am not sure why I stuck with it. On page 11, we have this sentence: Sylvia, our mother, reminded Henry daily, such was the routine of marriage, about fixing the ladder daily and went about partitioning the attic space, figuring if they were to have children, they would need a place to store them. I know it is snobby of me to take issue with the writing, and I know there are better things I could do with my time than critique a published author. But, really, where was the editor? My emphasis in the above highlights just one problem, a strange repetition that doesn’t make sense. There is also too much going on in the sentence. 39 words! That’s 15% of the Gettysburg Address! Too long. I also think it’s trite. The same-word-in-one-sentence problem didn’t recur often enough for me to notice, but overlong sentences full of overdone triteness became the standard. ...
Review I think this is my favorite book I’ve read in a book club. I am afraid to share what I love so much about it. But I see myself in this book in a way I never have so completely. Not all of Leda is me, but so much is that it felt fragile and scary to read at times. Sometimes it was a loving familiarity, or even a pleading with him to do something different. My copy is riddled with sticky tabs sometimes two to a page and often every other page so that it looks like the centrepiece of a research project. I have filled the margins with pencil scratchings. I have no idea if I could ever describe my feelings for it. ...