Critiques et Commentaires

Consistently strong interior stories of women reaching for meaning and connection.

Re-read after many years for bookclub.

Witty sitcom romp layered with grief and trauma, perhaps some growth and acceptance... this never goes deep, and it would have been better if it could have, but then it wouldn't be light-hearted and easy.

Satisfying coming of age and coming to terms with fraught systems of power, with an interesting world at war to make sense of and plenty of sarcasm. But, a lot of military and courage and fight filling in for connections.

Funny and irreverent and angry and at home and at peace with living on the garbage heap of our drowned future.

The dystopian premise that's central but hardly the point narrows and sharpens this otherwise moving English boarding school story of childhood misinterpretations, loves, obsessions growing into adult reframing, acquiescence, and ailing concerns to an objective study of universal questions.

Similar questions of identity and purpose as Permutation City, again that satisfying hard sharp didacticism, a broader galactic exploration scope for minds to weigh their decisions, but didn't resolve nearly as clearly for me.

Tender and painful, how we make sense of destroying those close to us.

Beautiful imagined world of near-steampunk and near-gods and near-dynastic-capitalism. Within a caper with increasing stakes, confronts freedom, slavery, and knowing oneself.

Hilarious right off the heap.

Bookclub pick, I'm on edge from the flimsy stereotyping and the seven year old's lisp from the getgo but I have to assume someone knows what they're doing, for now...

Colonialism has always meant genocidal extinction, and with Kendi-esque clarity Lindqvist charts the shifting justifications and revelations swept aside or welcomed in "civilized" society grappling with these terrors and all too normal evils. The elements of the author's own travelogue and of Conrad's literary and experiential background for "Heart of Darkness" are minor counterpoints to a forceful documentation of societal guilt.

Promising noir murder mystery in a magic high school, I was kept guessing well but also meandered away from caring by the inconsistent stakes and gaps in attention.

Grim rural experience and pain, there's an arc from recent to more misty past and back again, and the strongest poem is in that middle distance, about a cow and a grandfather.

Jarring moving phrasing juxtapositions of popular culture and reflecting on recent immigrant experience of being unwanted, lost, and vulnerable.