Review – Becky Boer

Lullabies for Little Criminals | Heather O’Neill

February 15, 2020

One sentence: A kid grows up with a heroin-addicted father and it goes exactly the way you’d expect. Three thoughts: I really want to know what ended up happening to Baby! Like, okay she got out of her bad situation, but you don’t just suddenly not become addicted to heroin. I realized multiple times while reading this book that I have no idea when it takes place. It felt very 70s to me, but I could be very wrong about that. I’m not sure that it ever actually said when it happened. I was ...

Reviews

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler | Italo Calvino

February 13, 2020

One sentence: Uhhh… I think I loved it but I’m not sure? Three thoughts: I love all the metacognition (if that’s what you’d call it). This book reminds me a LOT of S. So much that I wonder if this one influenced that one. Some of these chapters were dense AF and I flew through others. Rating Characters: 5/5. This book was based on a weird, interesting premise. It’s told in second person, so that the reader becomes one of the active characters in the book. Calvino pulls it off really ...

Reviews

Rubyfruit Jungle | Rita Mae Brown

January 11, 2020

One sentence: Pretty decent fictional memoirish bildungsroman. Three thoughts: I kind of despite the way kids are written in literature. It’s so rare to find an author who can portray kids the way they actually are. I was super into the whole Mad Men part of the book, where Molly works in an office. Fuck the patriarchy and all that. I found it odd that Molly really never questioned her own feelings, despite being told by literally every influence in her life that her feelings were ...

Reviews

Bellevue Square | Michael Redhill

January 6, 2020

One sentence: What the fuck did I just read? Three thoughts: I was very caught off guard by the switch from this being a creepy novel about a doppelgänger to a creepy novel about someone’s mental health. But I liked it. I read the first third of the book very slowly, unsure whether I wanted to continue. I absolutely flew through the rest of it. When it picked up, it really picked up. I’m still confused by the ending. Who was actually alive, Jean or Inger? Or both? Rating ...