Earwen

Not as good as the first volume. The focus shifted from the main characters, and while it never was a super character focused story it still weakened the volume and made it hard to be invested. The general plot was interesting, but it would have been better without the final twist which was needlessly confusing.

30 stories in just about 300 pages makes for incredible short short stories. Most of them had interesting concepts, but the story had not much room to do anything with them. I would love to read some of those being expanded upon. Namely Violina which is about a robot girl whose body is also a violin, Mary A through Z about 26 identical girls raised in a lab in order to see the effects of nature vs nurture, True if by Sea a transgender little mermaid retelling (sort of, at the very least its obviously inspired by it) and also Don't Eat the Bluebird which introduces a different take on werewolves.

On the other hand there were several stories that I thought stood well on its own. My favorite is definitely Speak of the Devil, a story told in verse. I can't judge it as a poem but I loved how my whole perception of what's going on completely changed every few lines. The runner ups are Flower Constancy, a historical fiction with a dash of magic about butterflies and loss and Solitary Birds another story with themes of loss and loneliness, and The Gray Road which, now that I think about it has also the same themes with more overt homophobia added in.

In fact a lot of the stories dealt with the loss of a loved one, isolation, or homophobia. Though it always ends on a happy, or at least hopeful note. I didn't mind that at all, but it might be surprising to those who pick this up expecting happy fluffy lesbian stories. So, overall this was a mix of several really good stories, and a lot of stories that fell -literally- too short. None of them were flat out bad though, so I will be picking up the first volume sometime which I for some reason skipped over.

The thriller/mystery/crime/whatever you want to call it aspect could have been interesting, especially if the book had focused more on the parallels between the main character Jan and the “runaway” Maddy. But instead it focused on a (bad) romance between Jan and one of the most unlikable characters I had the displeasure of reading about, Catherine. First of all, I'm supposed to believe they're instantly in love with the only real reason given is the great sex. They barely talk in the book, when they do it's mostly Catherine trying to convince Jan she's not a terrible person (she is). Catherine not only cheats on her longtime girlfriend with Jan, she also abuses her power as her boss to be with her when Jan is avoiding her. Later Catherine says she was going to tell Jan, if she only had picked up her phone, after a whole day of not telling her despite having every opportunity to until directly asked about it. Later on when we meet her girlfriend (as Catherine calls her, her wife even) she's portrayed as a crazy jealous woman despite Catherine having cheated on her multiple times.

Meanwhile the thriller plotline is just an afterthought, just Jan's job shes thinking about when she can tear her thoughts away from Catherine. Which is a shame because that was much more interesting. Not to mention Jan's ties to it, and the fact her whole past is a lie, but those issues barely matter in the story to the point im wondering what the point of giving Jan that past was. Maddy doesn't even get a real conclusion despite the book intermittently changing perspectives between her an Jan, the last few chapters fellow Jan exclusively. We have very little idea of how she is doing after the events. This book is a mediocre thriller at best. I'm not a romance reader, but if the point of romance is to make the reader want to see the two leads together, this book definitely fails as a romance as well. The best thing I can say about it is that it was over quickly.

(CW: incest, bestiality, rape, among others)I encountered this book first in a list of female weird fic writers. She was the only name in the list that I never encountered before, unsurprising as only two of her books seem to be translated, and are impossible to get a hold of. If there is one positive thing I can say about my attempt(s) at reading this book is that it led me to learn about The Internet Archieves online library which has many books I couldn't find. I had to wait a few weeks to get The Woman with The Flying Head and was pretty excited to start. Unfortunately I saw no reason to bother finishing it. I read the first 4 stories. Which are as follows (I returned the book by now so I don't have a reference on hand but the titles should be close enough if not exact): The Extraterrestrial : The short version is...Two siblings find an alien egg, hatch it, and well....proceed to use the alien that hatched as a sex toy, oh and then they go um..inside the aliens vagina and into space. The alien itself doesn't really seem to have a will of its own, instead it is just acting in the way others want it to. There are incestual undertones right from the stars, and sure enough they don't remain undertones for long. Out of the stories I read this was the one that got closest to being meaningful or thought provoking in any capacity. Peoples mundane reactions to the alien was honestly kind of funny, like the fathers only thought upon being shown the alien is that it should be legally registered, and later on saying that they should focus on other things besides the alien, but they can still keep it “as a hobby”. The closer a character is to being an adult the more mundane they seem to find the alien. The themes of identity are hard to miss, the father is a lawyer, and his whole being is defined by it. The sister is about to be a wife and she seems to be alternately fine with it and not. The siblings are limited by their identity as such, despite being in love with eachother. One unsubtle scene has them have a threesome with the alien in between them and not directly touching eachother. Eventually they go inside the alien to space free of the constrains of their identity......I'm being fair see? It's not like I'm unable to interpret the text just because of the subject matter. I don't think the message was especially interesting or the method particularly clever. I won't comment on the writing because it is a translated work. Overall it just felt like an amateur, banal attempt at the topic. Still somehow, the best story out of the four I read. The 2nd(We are lovers) and 3rd story(black cat?) are related the eachother and each pretty short. So I'll talk about them together. As you might guess this is were the beastiality cw comes in so I will keep it brief.A couple, a man and a woman each has a cat. The cats both despise the partner of their respective owner. The narrator is the cat of the man, and she is instantly in love with the male white cat of the woman. Later on she decides that the white cat isn't all that and her owner is better so she uh...they kinda have sex I guess. And then it ends. The 2nd story has a couple borrow a “homemade porn tape” from a friend thats highly implied to be the owner of the black cat from the previous story. In the tape the black cat at times seems to turn anatomically to a human (well the sex scenes in particular), but other times returns to being a cat and doing cat things. The couple watch it, think its amazing but also seem kind of disturbed by it (narration notes neither wanted to watch it again). A few days later it turns out the friend is missing, they heard that he has a wife and children so they go to check up on them. When they do so it turns out said wife and children are cats, and it's highly implied they ate the friends corpse.I want to stress my problem isn't simply she wrote something morally wrong (Although in this specific case I can't imagine how you would justify this dreck). If I was squeamish about reading disturbing content I wouldn't be seeking out weirdlit. However if you're going to use these elements in your story there needs to be a reason for them to be here. I don't think either of these stories have anything behind them. I think they're the equivalent of someone yelling “BESTIALITY” in my face and leaving. It's not interesting in any capacity, it just includes these themes for its own sake. It's somewhat concerning on the authors end and mostly boring on mine. I was going to stop here if only the next story wasn't the Title story The Woman With The Flying Head. If there is anything salvageable about this book it should be evident in the story it was named after, it should be the story that represent the collection to its fullest. Well I don't know if it does that as I stopped right after reading that one, but it sure was the worst of the lot, and considering the previous two stories that seem to boil down to the author battling with her desire to want to write about bestiality porn while still maintaining an air of intellectualism that is saying something.In short, the fourth story is about a man repeatedly raping his step-daughter while she sleeps, until one day he kills her out of jealousy. Oh and her head flies at nights and re attached in the mornings. Yeah that's a rough summary but it is a. like 10 pages long so it really isn't that much of an oversimplification and b. frankly doesn't deserve any better. I think the previous ones illustrate the problems I had with the book well enough, this was all that again, but worse. Anyway, for some short weirdfic collections that doesn't stoop to this level [b:Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 27192545 Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 Kathe Koja https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1444887178s/27192545.jpg 47234707][b:Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror 28229930 Dreams from the Witch House Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror Lynne Jamneck https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1450325804s/28229930.jpg 48207686][b:The Ape's Wife and Other Stories 17367172 The Ape's Wife and Other Stories Caitlín R. Kiernan https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1381956984s/17367172.jpg 24133191]All of these have stories that are much more well written and meaningful. And when they get creepy and approach a disturbing subject matter, they do not do it in the spirit of an 13 year old doing their best to cram in as many taboo topics as they can to prove they're mature.

this is a book for fans of the game. There is absolutely 0 reason for anyone else to pick it up. Its not well written –it's not well translated (I'm thankful that the fans have taken it upon themselves to translate it but it is what it is. ) but I strongly suspect it wasn't very well written either. So you know, from a non-ff13 fans perspective this is 0 out of 5 no literary or other merit and definitely not the right place to get started.

But if you already played and loved the game, and the characters. Well it's more of the same...sort of. There are some fun interactions, some “oh so that's what happened” moments, a bit of background info and simply more content. But what I said before still applies – it's just not well written. But does it need to be well written – is it not enough to listen to lightning criticize peoples fashion for a whole chapter? Maybe. I don't know. I wish there was more of lightning actually, whether shes criticizing people or not. This girl continues to elude the spotlight despite being the poster girl.

Basically, this isn't essential info but if you love the game you'll find it at least moderately interesting.

(stand in for the whole series because I don't like adding multiple volumes of manga)

It's Madoka! I love madoka. Except Madoka is barely in it. I don't really love the characters this focuses on (Sayaka, Mami, Kyoko) though this made me appreciate Kyoko and Mami more. It's essential to understand them. But a lot of what makes madoka so great is in the aesthetics and sound. The manga is pretty but it's just not the same. I liked it well enough but if it got animated I probably would love it.

If nothing else this was an interesting read that thought me how to mediate and about various nebulae. I don't know that I believe all of what the book says, or even most of it. The author invites you to see for yourself. I don't really know how to rate this but If I ever attempt and succeed I'll bump this up to 5 stars. If not...well It was still a very interesting book to read.

I feel like this either should have been longer and focused more on the sirens or left the sirens off completely (even though I loved them) because they ultimately didn't do all that much that someone else couldn't have done. Especially Afrit, I'm not sure why she even was there. In general the plotlines felt..very disjointed. I think it'd be better if it just focused on the search for Bettan.

Efa saying that "children are always a good thing" and that "bettan will turn around" about bettan being pregnant by her (basically) rapist was gross and I don't know where it came from it seemed out of character. Ninka did ask whether Bettan thinks so too but she didn't seem that bothered by it and it was just left there and the book ended a few sentences after. It was really annoying.

I love Ninka she deserves a book that focuses more on her. Considering how the siren plotline ended (“ended”) I'm hoping there might be a sequel in the plans.


Also, this is the third lesbian mermaid(or otherwise sea creature) book I read this year and I gave all of them three stars. I think overall I did like this one more than the others despite all.

This was kind of pointless. It was very short, and nothing much happened. The twist at the end was not even a real twist, it was obvious from page one. I honestly thought the twist was going to be that was not true after all. Even for a kids book. On the positives: there were some passages here and there that I liked, oh, and the cover is gorgeous.

Considering every piece indie lesbian lit had disappointed me so far this was a surprisingly solid read. I read highly reviewed books with 1k+ (a huge amount for lesfic lets be honest) and came away feeling disappointing. But this was fun even though I never heard it anywhere before. Literally the only reason i picked this up is because the authors name is a variation of my girlfriends name.

4.5...might roll up to 5

I'm sad this book isn't more well known despite being out for 10 years. It's about different generations of lesbian women and how they interact and intersect. The two main point of views are a modern lesbian woman from the 2000s who got dumped by her gf and visits her lesbian aunt she never met, and said lesbian aunt who is nothing like what she expected her to be. The story follows different time lines and spans decades.

Representative of the ~15-16 volumes I read.

The first 4-5 volumes are by far my favorite comedy manga. Afterwards it gets increasingly repetitive and non-sensical. Plot points keep repeating. Every new character introduced fits one of two molds. I feel for manga-kas strict deadlines but this was just getting tiresome no matter how much I initially liked it.

So I am just stopping reading before I start to completely detest it. I do recommend the first few volumes still, and since it's a slice of life comedy you do not need to worry about any loose ends when reading.

This review is for the whole series

Very strong beginning, and it keeps it up for the first 3/4 of the manga. After that it becomes increasingly ridiculous. Also throws not 1 but 2 random rape scenes at you at the end. I don't feel like rating it any lower than 3 stars because I don't regret reading it and the majority of the manga was enjoyable, and the art is beautiful. I generally find manga hard to follow but the paneling in this flowed very well. I still wouldn't really recommend it to others.

Beautifully written, but if there was a point to those stories I missed it. All of the stories ended the exact same way, with a twist or new development at the last sentence and no resolution. Open ends are one thing, this is another. Also I'm unsure why this is packaged as a horror collection when it's dark literary fiction at best.

This is one of the rare books I dreaded to finish because I was loving it so much. I really expected so little from this book but it gave me so much. It was perfectly paced and every pov character (3 of them) was so perfectly realized, even if they might seem stereotypical at first.

This is NOT ya I don't know why people shelved this as such. One of the 3 povs is a teen but this is definitely an adult book. It's also very very dark and rather depressing so keep that in mind if you're interested.