User Profile

At first, it was pretty funny satire. But the depression of the main characters gets to be depressing on its own and the book gets progressively darker and less entertaining through the end. I'm not really sure what was being conveyed by the end.

A re-read. I really love this series. The universe Leckie has created is inventive, but also clearly a reflection of our own. A menacing external threat, a mysterious internal threat, and a completely inventive and intriguing narrator. If it had a space battle, it might be one of my most favorite sci-fi books ever.

This is one of the most psychoactive books I have read in some time. A mother thinks maybe she's becoming a dog? And then just kind of leans into it. As a father who is the primary caregiver at home, I resonated with the main character's angst, her conflicts with career ambitions and parenting, her rage and her love. But, as a father instead of a mother, I was able to embody another kind of experience, one that helped me connect more with my wife and other friends who are mothers. The mother in this book is also an artist and the key parts of the book are meditations on the point of art and what it can do. Additionally, this book is a debut novel and in that sense it kicked my ass! Wake up and make art! (it told me).

This book was amazing. Lots of genre innovation for a memoir (repetition of key phrases and scenes, a device where the author imagines her imploding marriage as a play written by her husband years ago, etc.). The author sometimes seems angry with the readers for wanting to know the awful details of the story of her cruel husband and his kind of wacky decision to just take off on her and her kids. But in other places just really beautifully captures her pain and her growth. And doesn't justify one with the other or say it all happened for a reason or that they're better off even though it was difficult.

First, this novel has some pretty titillating stories in it, so it gets the blood pumping. But also the cultural context of the novel is fascinating, a really interesting look into the honor culture of this ethnic group in diaspora london. The main character is kind of snoozer, but she's that way to elicit different interesting reactions from everyone else. And the variety of stories throughout the novel, from the stories the women generate to those of the various side characters, are totally fascinating.

This book tells the story of a marriage, for the first half, from the man's POV and in the second half, from the woman's. The first half is ok, kind of a wild adventure but the second half is straight up nuts and kind of recasts the whole first half in an amazingly compelling way. Like reading a totally different book.

Picked this up because the NYT review was so effusive, noting that for a debut book it was incredible and exciting to imagine where the author can go from here. I didn't vibe with it as strongly as the Golem and the Genie (another great debut), but the story was pretty gripping and I was with it each step of the way. Ultimately, the focus on blood throughout was kind of off-putting and it makes for a less than interesting magical system. And I didn't really strongly connect with any of the characters or their emotional lives. But this was well-written, well-plotted, and a good story.