Seething

This was not as strong as I wanted it to be. 

Pros: As a capital G Gamer, I was thrilled to see such a strong grasp of the emotional and sociocultural impact of games on the narrative, of the “sides” of the aisle when it comes to design, of the modern nods to cultural shifts in the medium and in PR about it. I liked how strong the side characters were- this was a genuinely fleshed-out world, for the most part. It did make me tear up near the end.

Cons: This meanders. Oh g-d, does it meander. Sometimes I felt I was circling an emotional drain and then the drain would get deeper and the water pressure would lessen. The plot is a tad predictable, and the Big Twist doesn't do enough to really shake up the world beyond the literal shock of it. The deviations from the point of view of our main trio, and the deviations from narrative style, were too jarring, undeveloped, and weakened both the flow and the theming. Too obvious and too long. When they were good, I wished we could go back to them and was bored by the same-old same-old emotional droning hum of the main story. The asides didn't work for me.

I liked this! I won't read it again. 

Great look at both Wong's career and activist trajectory as well as a look at the modern disabled activist movement online. Great combination of essays, interviews, and visual media. Really enjoyed this, and seeing as I've had Disability Visibility sitting on my desk for years, this is going to give me the push to finally crack that open!

It sucks that this wasn't good. Some good ideas but they're squandered so quickly and the emotional drama is so... separate and boring, and the relationship/sex parts were just... they needed to be tied in properly. I think this needed multiple editing passes, but frankly, it was boring, overwrought, preachy, and not scary! A sin for a horror novella. Everyone in this novella was boring and shitty and annoying in unfun ways.

I struggled with the pacing of this. It's sharp and loud and unapologetic about its political theming, but I found some chapters so much stronger than others that it slowed my progress. I thought Lovely and Jivan had stronget voices than PT Sir, and Lovely had movement in her chapters that the other two didn't.

Part of me feels that I would feel differently if I could better see the characters as metaphors for communities rather than standalone personas, but alas.

For all the rave reviews of this, I found it a little dull and nowhere near as exciting as I thought. Fantastic visual imagery and setting, especially in the last scenes, though.
Really frustrated by the strong setting and writing in the first third of the book in Mexico city, as implied by a book called “Mexican Gothic”, that then throws its protagonist into a British(? or certainly extremely Western European) castle so that all the charm and unique takes on the Gothic genre melt into just another Eurogothic novel. As a Mexican, I can tell this was written by someone who has not been back to the homeland in a long time. 
To be completely honest, the race-gender relations in this are confused- Moreno-Garcia clearly wants to tell an empowering tale, but it all gets very muddled with the plot that values European women as goddesses above Mexican/Indigenous women, explicitly and subtly through its storytelling. Let's not even start on the question of class. It's not just that these characters have so little time in the spotlight- the writing, the plot, and the contrivances all add up to make clear that the protagonist is the only one who could have saved these poor morenas y morenos because of her spunk and education. Yikes. 

Good starter. I'm reading it as someone who studied this subject to see if this is truly the gold mine for beginners everyone says that it is. I think it is.
There were moments that made me pause, but it's for folks new to this cinversation. I even found myself learning about identity-development theory and terminology.
I see why this is on all the reading lists.

Well-written, well-researched, and harrowing in prose and in content. A collection of issues interconnected through legal, sociopolitical, and personal story, Urbina has written a journalistic expose of the seas unlike anything I have ever seen. I was enthralled the whole time. I learned so much.

And, despite my usual misgivings on journalists who spill a lot of ink on their personal connections to the story as slowing the pace, I didn't feel like that at all about Urbina's personal asides. Incredible.

What an incredible tale of the MHA nation, of the Yellow Birds, of KC and the people around him, of the Arikara people and their land and the federal government's cruelty towards them. This is a story about a lot of people and a lot of land and all of it is too true and too untrue to be believed. I cried. I laughed. It hurt me to know that KC's body was not found. 

I want to be clear about something: I don't respect “True Crime” as a genre, or as a cultural touchstone in the U.S. This is not a “True Crime” book. This is a memoir, a biography, a sociopolitical explanation, an anthropological investigation. This is not about KC's murder at the same time that KC's murder drives the book and many of the folks in the book to the conclusion and the trial.

I doubt I will ever read something like this again. A book that truly takes to task the people, investigators, lands, peoples, and nations involved and present when someone is murdered; Yellow Bird is incredible. I'm glad I read it.