In a lot of recent novels about cross-cultural/racial adoption and other very similar/adjacent topics, there’s been some good novels that have rough edges and underdevelopment of characters. What often happens in these novels is that the well-meaning white people (usually white lady) gets in over her head or over simplifies the world or is naive and destructive. I know that plenty of white people are like this and do these things, so I won’t set out to defend them or anything like that. But a […]
Bad Dirt Bad dirt what you gonna do
I read the first collection of “Wyoming Stories” a few years back and it’s pretty good. It contains “Brokeback Mountain” which if you haven’t read, you should find a way to do right now, because it’s just so so so good. And it lacks the issues/flaw I think the movie has. But without that story, the collection is just ok. It’s mostly about the originating mythos of a place like Wyoming and beginning to explore its weirdness. This collection is much stronger and while it […]
The clues to her identity are….
not contained in this children’s novel. A few weeks back someone reviewed the weird train book from Stephen King’s The Wastelands that provides a creepy atmospheric mythos to the journey at the heart of the longer novel. In a strange way, this little children’s book, which you COULD conceivably read to children if you wanted, does the same thing. Three things that Elena Ferrante writes a lot about are lost kids (metaphorically and literally), dolls, and shoes. This book has all three, but the lost child […]
Life Among the Savages
As a site, we’ve been on a Shirley Jackson kick, and I have had this old copy of her domestic memoir sitting on my shelf for a few years. Simply put this book is super weird and super funny. There’s something that happens when I watch old movies, read old books, and think about old times. I convince myself that I am looking at life in a foreign culture and from a foreign perspective, like there’s nothing to be actively learned about humanity from it. Instead, […]
Not a super fun novel
Like I said, this isn’t a super fun novel. But it is quite creepy. It reminds me a lot of Suicide Club if that movie had watched itself, and then wrote a novel based on it. Four Japanese high school students narrate this novel alongside a teenage boy who they suspect has murdered his mother with a baseball bat. But rather than be strictly horrified with him, they are somewhat obsessed with him. They give him one of their cellphones, they talk with him, they create […]
Don’t break my rules, please.
So this book has a few problems that I will get to. Here’s what it does well: the scenes describing the experience of being on stage are good. The writing, in general, is quite good. The scenes describing the types of activities that happen at theater conservatory are good. These parts remind me a lot of My Dinner with Andre where Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory meet up and talk about among other things, experimental theater. One of the things that is really neat is casting […]
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