As a queer woman with a passion for reading I spend a lot of my time digging through all the f/f I can get my hands on. A beautifully necessary story.
As a queer woman with a passion for reading I spend a lot of my time digging through all the f/f I can get my hands on. This is a narrative that I haven't seen nearly enough, especially in YA, and I celebrate Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me for highlighting a necessary discussion for queer women, young and old: dysfunctional relationships. This is about the danger of building your entire life around one person, especially when that person doesn't seem to care nearly as much about you as you do about them. I've been in this relationship. This helped me work through things I still need to work through.
And beyond a necessary story, this entire graphic novel is utterly gorgeous. The limited color palette was incredible to look at. There were numerous pages I wanted to have framed up on my wall because I'm just obsessed with the light pink accents and how they worked to tell a story visually.
Mariko Tamaki is one of my favorite writers today. She tells vibrant, difficult stories that I love every time. I can't wait to continue reading her work, and I'm dying to discover more of Rosemary Valero-O'Connell's work as well....more
Bleak overall but has small bits of hope. The comparisons to The Road and 28 Days Later are absolutely deserved and definitely give you the right ideaBleak overall but has small bits of hope. The comparisons to The Road and 28 Days Later are absolutely deserved and definitely give you the right idea for the tone. But as a survival story set a while after a zombie apocalypse it doesn’t bring too many new ideas to the table....more
Longer review to come with a more detailed review of each story.
This is equal parts horrific and beautiful, tragic and grotesque, dark and divine. ItLonger review to come with a more detailed review of each story.
This is equal parts horrific and beautiful, tragic and grotesque, dark and divine. It’s my favorite short story collection that I’ve ever read and I’m already eager to get my hands on whatever Armfield writes next. Not to mention, multiple stories in this unsettling collection are about queer women and queer relationships. I heartily recommend it.
Update 11/5/19:
Eyyy, updating with longer story reviews a hot month after reading this. If you were waiting for a more in-depth look at these stories and what I thought of them then I'm glad you're here reading this.
Mantis - 5/5 Terrifying and engaging in a way that's impossible to look away from. This story about puberty and changes you can't go back from is incredibly haunting and it is a perfect introduction to the rest of the collection. It introduces you to Armfield's writing style, which is evocative and bone-chilling, and also sets the tone for these stories of horror and surrealism that center on women.
The Great Awake - 5/5 This is one of the softer stories in the collection, full of longing more than abject terror. It's about a world where one day peoples' sleep just leaves, lifts from their bodies and becomes a new figure that follows them throughout their now never-ending wakefulness. It also has a soft romance that just perfectly balances the gloom of being awake forever, no matter how tired you get. Plus that romance is queer! The first queer story of the collection.
The Collectibles - 4/5 Sometimes after a breakup you just have to set out on a Victor Frankenstein-esque path to avoid yet another rebound and also to avoid your PhD thesis. This story is strong and suitably disturbing, but the writing isn't quite as evocative here as it is in the others. But the lengths to which some of the characters go to avoid their theses is honest to god the biggest mood of all time. Just build yourself a boyfriend, it's fine.
Formerly Feral - 4.5/5 A celebration of girls who refuse to confirm, who allow themselves to become feral and frightening. Fuck yeah, feral girls. Really, this is a story about a girl whose new step sister is a literal, actual wolf and slowly but surely she gets to realize her feral personality can be shared and celebrated by her new wolf sibling. This was angry and creepy in the best way and it was such an adventure to read.
Stop Your Women's Ears With Wax - 5/5 I forgot to breathe while reading this story. It's full of the frenetic energy of women who are passionate, but with that twinge of horror. The power of female singer/songwriters and their clawing lyrics and the frenzy that follows if that frenzy was cranked up to eleven. Plus it has an angry, road crew f/f romance. If you happened to read Scotto Moore's fascinating novella Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You that was released earlier this year and you've been looking for more then this has got to be your follow up. I think my enjoyment of this story increased even more considering I read it immediately before I went to a female singer/songwriter concert and got to feel the obsessive passion of that live performance firsthand.
Granite - 4/5 Loved the imagery of this one, but I didn't quite understand the conclusion it came to. There's a lot of reflection on love and of letting another person into your life, and the slow building dread was perfect, but I wish there had been a bit more. Still really eerie and interesting.
Smack - 2.5/5 This was my least favorite of the collection, clearly. The speculative element is basically absent, which I thought was unfortunate, and I just didn't understand this narrator or the story that was being told. Honestly I think the biggest failing was that it wasn't bad, necessarily, just forgettable amidst all of the other incredible works in the book.
Cassandra - 5/5 A ghost story that hit a little too close to home. It's haunting and regretful, full of messy queerness and the confused process of mourning. It's sad and kind of hard to read, but it's also a beautiful way to process the loss of someone especially when you had a relationship full of contradictions and confusion. (This is the word for word note I took upon finishing this story, which left me feeling raw, so that's going to be my full takeaway from Cassandra)
Salt Slow - 5/5 I couldn't have been more pleased with the final story in this collection. Salt Slow is an apocalyptic world of water alongside the terror of new motherhood. This is a story about a pregnant woman, adrift with just her partner in a world that has been completely flooded, as she realizes that the thing in her womb might not be entirely human. It's a horrifying read, which makes it an absolutely perfect conclusion.
Average rating: 4.44 Final rating: 5/5
I know I bumped the average a bit on this one but I simply couldn't imagine not giving this collection 5 stars. Its strong stories far outweigh the couple that don't land quite as well and I was utterly obsessed with ever page. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for short fiction, particularly speculative horror. ...more
A cinematic and taught spy thriller with a sapphic main character! This is way outside my comfort zone genre-wise but it was an incredibly engaging boA cinematic and taught spy thriller with a sapphic main character! This is way outside my comfort zone genre-wise but it was an incredibly engaging book and hit just the right amount of darkness to make the story compelling and complex. I can’t wait to read more about these characters. SO so good....more
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