Tessa Portuese

Absolutely loved this, much of the book felt like it could have been plucked from my future self's mind (the motherhood and relationship parts, not the turning into a dog stuff). I am so nervous for the movie adaptation because I'm not sure how anyone could pull this off in film, but it deserves any traction it gets.

Took me a while to get through this. Something about this alternate universe where all the slasher movies are based on real events and Final Girls are a cultural phenomenon felt off to me–the way the public treats them didn't feel justified or make much sense. Still, the premise was fun and the end was really good, so I'm glad I stuck with it. It would make a great movie.

It took some time to warm up to the Marvel-esque sense of humor the voice has, but once I got past that it I really loved it. I kept thinking about it whenever I put it down. Such an interesting sci-fi story with detailed experiments and scientific ideas communicated without being boring. Granted, it still took me a while to get through, but it is a long book!

While this book wove together a lot of mysteries into a satisfying end, it was... not good. The storytelling felt redundant, the characters flat, and I felt the teenagers were written especially poorly (which it seems is hard to get right for most stories).

I think it would make a good movie or show, though. Read it if you want cursed church in the English countryside vibes and aren't looking for anything deep or flowery.

I really wanted to like this one but it took me months to get through. The end was great, and I think I would've liked the rest of the book more if it was closer to the more mundane parallel lives Nora visits towards the end; the rockstar/olympian/arctic scientist lives felt flat and cheap to me. But again, definitely appreciate the ultimate direction the story takes!

Couldn't put this book down, loved the writing style and everything tied together. I read this the same week as watching The Lost Daughter but somehow still want to have kids, shockingly.

Also, I feel like it would be fun to make note of which actors I visualized as the characters while reading–I don't always mentally cast characters, but I did for these three:

Mrs. Ellington: Gina Torres
Fox: Roby Attal
Gemma: Caitlin Fitzgerald

The way society treats fat people is one of the most outwardly accepted bigotries of present day. This book has some autobiographical pieces with Aubrey Gordon talking about her experience living in the world as a fat woman, but also many hard-hitting pieces of research that expose the medical industry and our own internal biases alike.

Some key takeaways:
- Anti-fat bias goes up during medical school, creating medical providers who perpetuate health risks by overlooking unrelated symptoms
- The most cited studies on health risks of “obesity” are blatantly biased to remove health problems associated with thin people and skew the truth dramatically
- Many health risks associated with being fat are likely health risks of experiencing discrimination
- Diets don't work 95% of the time and weight cycling causes health issues on its own
- Health aside, everyone should just treat people kindly and think about what small ways we're perpetuating anti-fat bias in the things we say and the way we treat others!

Super well-written, made me cry in the eye doctor waiting room. Backman is a great writer, although the dialogue in the first half of the book felt really cringey. It is translated from Swedish so maybe that's why.

Another book cover complaint–why does this cover make it look like a romance... It's about a group of strangers and while there is a slight romance element it is so minor! This book and my previous read, The One by John Marrs, need to merge their cover designs and meet in the middle.

I liked how gross this was but didn't vibe with the writing style. Sometimes the metaphors crossed over from poetic and creative to something that felt like a poor translation, and the multiple page sprints with no paragraph breaks were hard to keep focus on. Stylistically not for me even though I wanted to love it!

I read the first half of this book two autumns ago, got into a reading slump, and didn't pick it back up until now. Perfect, coincidental timing for the AMC show adaptation of it!

Definitely had some sections that felt like they dragged on, but I loved the vampire ennui of it all. Plus the character dynamic reminded me of NBC Hannibal.

This took me embarrassingly long to read, but it was one of my favorites. It's written densely, each word intentional and a bit unexpected to the point where it read like poetry: taken slowly and re-read to fully appreciate. Highly recommend if you liked Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties!

I loved the surreal/horror aspects and the writing was great. However, there are a couple major things I can't get past that prevent me from loving it.

Most importantly was that the story is about this group of women manufacturing men–then being torn apart by fighting over a man–without much textual evidence of real life men being dangerous, disappointing, or otherwise lacking felt pretty bad from a feminist perspective, right?? I think it could have worked if the theme leaned into why these women needed to make their drafts/darlings/whatever. It felt close to suggesting that the women only wanted to spend time with men created by other women, that they sought fulfillment in the minds of women and not men, but it didn't follow through on that or have much of a queer reading that would support that.

Secondly, I just couldn't get a mental image of the four “Bunnies.” Maybe it's a generational thing, but I just can't picture literary grad students who love Kate Bush and Sylvia Plath and also love kittens/cupcakes/sparkles. This just didn't compute to me, but maybe it's intentional to be off-putting.