Brandon

Such a beautiful story, a love letter to her mother and the Korean culture to which the author desperately longs to stay connected. Michelle Zauner is a thoughtful writer who says more less, never trying to overexplain things or soften the emotional edge. She took the grief of losing her mother and made something beautiful out of it, in her own version of Japanese kintsugi.

Allegorically haunting

Themes of loss, death, and abusive relationships all swirl around the Orwellian-tinged Memory Police who enforce the rule: forget or suffer unspeakable consequence. Touching and haunting, the tale weaves in a story-within-a-story asking about the place that art has in the universe; will the story still exist when the mind that composed it has passed on?

Hats off to Grady Hendrix for another creative twist on the horror genre. HORRORSTOR tells the story of a haunted ORSK warehouse (a knockoff IKEA competitor) through the story of Amy, one of the company's young associates whose career is not exactly going places. But the story is almost secondary to the format of the book, which is laid out in the fashion of an IKEA catalog. If you normally read e-books or listen to audiobooks, I strongly consider you make an exception and pick up the print edition of HORROSTOR. Each chapter is named after a different piece of furniture, and the products - and their descriptions - get weirder the deeper into the book you get. I tore through this one in two days, so HORRORSTOR is a great choice for anyone trying to hit a reading goal late in the year. The story itself is good, although the ending doesn't wrap up as much of the plot threads as I would have liked. 4 stars.