Review: ME VS BRAIN by Hayley Morris

 

Me vs Brain: An Overthinker’s Guide to Life by Hayley Morris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brain: We left the oven on!
Me: No don't say that, I've not got time for this!
Brain: The house is probably on fire!
Me: Stop it, I need to write this book description.
Brain: But the blazing fire.
Me: We didn't even use the oven today.
Brain: But what if -
Me: No. We're not doing this, I'm finishing this description.

Hello there! Hayley Morris here. Or you might know me as the Brain Girl, and don't be fooled...it's not because I'm outrageously smart. Just an avid overthinker. I'm on a mission to prove once and for all that You. Are. Normal. Running through imaginary arguments whilst showering, hiding your knickers in the nurse's office before they look directly into your vagina, or not knowing how to be a normal human when you have the plumber over. I've spent the majority of my life saying and doing embarrassing things that wake me up in a cold sweat at 3am as my Brain reminds me of every minor detail.

In this book, I've overthought absolutely everything so you don't have to. I'll be talking about everything from dating to discharge, mental health to menstrual cups. I might not be able to banish your anxiety or make you feel 100% comfortable in your skin, but I hope I can at least give you a break from the constant brain chatter and we can rejoice and laugh at how similar we actually all are.

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I follow Hayley Morris on Instagram and think the videos she makes are wonderful, so I was interested in reading this as soon as it came out. And it's the first book I've read in a long time that I devoured in less than 24 hours.

This is a wonderful memoir-style book, and it's great for people like me who've got anxiety as it's reassuring. It's normalising so many symptoms of anxiety and saying it's okay to speak about them, it's okay to laugh about them, and it's okay to get help for them.

It's fun, and it's powerful, and it's sad at times too. You'll laugh and cry as you read this.

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Review: I'M THE GIRL by Courtney Summers

 

I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The new groundbreaking queer thriller from New York Times bestselling and Edgar-award Winning author Courtney Summers.

When sixteen-year-old Georgia Avis discovers the dead body of thirteen-year-old Ashley James, she teams up with Ashley's older sister, Nora, to find and bring the killer to justice before he strikes again. But their investigation throws Georgia into a world of unimaginable privilege and wealth, without conscience or consequence, and as Ashley’s killer closes in, Georgia will discover when money, power and beauty rule, it might not be a matter of who is guilty—but who is guiltiest.

A spiritual successor to the 2018 breakout hit, Sadie, I'm the Girl is a masterfully written, bold, and unflinching account of how one young woman feels in her body as she struggles to navigate a deadly and predatory power structure while asking readers one question: if this is the way the world is, do you accept it?

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I am a massive fan of Courtney Summers, and this book is one I am also now a massive fan of.

It's dark, this one. And uncomfortable. Disturbing. Everything I 'like' from a dark contemporary YA read. But this one also hit differently. I'm normally fine reading disturbing content, but I was not fine after reading this. And that's how real this all felt.

Georgia's a great character. She's lost. She's angry. She's trying to work out why things are the way that they are. And she's looking for a mother figure as her mother recently passed away. And so when Cleo steps in, she wants to get close to her. Cleo and her husband run Aspera, and Georgia wants to be an 'Aspera girl'--a beautiful girl who works there--precisely because her mother said she wouldn't be one. Georgia is vain too, in an entirely normal teen girl way. Before the book begins she's had some nude photos taken by a 'professional' (who later turns out not to be a professional.)

And this is a story about grooming and child sexual abuse. We watch as Georgia becomes a victim of this, first being employed in small roles at Aspera, then seeing it turn more into what it actually is. There's graphic sexual content between Georgia (a sixteen-year-old) and Cleo's middle-aged husband Matthew. Cleo appears to be on board with this. And this all happens even though Georgia tells them she's a lesbian. She has in fact got a crush on Nora, who's the sister of Ashley--and the book starts with Georgia finding 13-year-old Ashley's body, so there is a lot packed in this.

It starts off as a murder mystery, but the actual murder mystery doesn't really control much of the plot. It's very much secondary to Georgia trying to become an Aspera girl.

One of the things I really liked was Georgia's relationship with Tyler, her brother. He's always looking out for her, and this, alongside Nora's relationship with Georgia, helped balance this book so it didn't feel like it was being devoured by all the slime. Because that's how I felt while reading a lot of this--slimy.

The language is also beautiful in this. So, so lyrical.

This is an important book to read. It's about beauty and appearance, privilege and wealth and poverty, truth and lies, policing and the cover-up of crimes by those with money.

Content warnings for: rape, child abuse, child sexual abuse, grooming, murder, implied incest (though I don't think that actually happened and was just set up to look like it had, by one of the characters, to set someone else up for murder).

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Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit in with her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut, who talks to her. He tells her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. One summer, on vacation with her family and her cousin Yuu in her grandparents’ ramshackle wooden house in the mountains of Nagano, Natsuki decides that she must be an alien, which would explain why she can’t seem to fit in like everyone else. Later, as a grown woman, living a quiet life with her asexual husband, Natsuki is still pursued by dark shadows from her childhood, and decides to flee the “baby factory” of society for good, searching for answers about the vast and frightening mysteries of the universe--answers only Natsuki has the power to uncover.

Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world, and cements Sayaka Murata’s status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe.

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This was... weird

Weird. So weird.

I need to think about this one… a lot. It’s disturbing and creepy and… weird.

Content warnings for child sexual abuse.

Edited to add: Yesterday I finished Earthlings by Sayaka Murata and it’s one of the creepiest books that just gets more and more disturbing and weird as you read.

The plot is ridiculous, but it’s also dark, about child sexual abuse, and I’ve never seen that tackled in this way before. I also wasn't quite prepared for how dark this book was going to be as the marketing blurb doesn't really indicate that. I was expecting a semi-dark story about a woman whose best friend is her childhood toy and who believes she herself is an alien.

But this book is so much more than that, in a very dark and twisted way. Natsuki's sexually abused by a teacher as a child, which leads her to have sex with her cousin when she's eleven years old--she does this as a way to 'survive, no matter what', and the POV is so close to her as a child that you can kind of see why she'd think that.

This book is well written, there's no doubt about that. But then we have the rest of the plot. Natsuki's shunned for her actions with her cousin, and she's abused physically and verbally by her family. She murders her teacher, and eventually marries her husband in a marriage of convenience. He definitely seems to be ace-coded and they say multiple times how they're not friends. They're marrying to get their families off their backs.

And their families are so obsessed with them having children. Natsuki refers to this as 'the factory' and she wants to be an 'earthling' and want this, because she wants to fit in. But she doesn't--as she still thinks she's an alien... Yet marriage and babies are all society wants from Natsuki. And so the book also shines a light on acephobia too. There are so many conversations between characters that Natsuki witnesses/overhears/has directed at her that really focus around the acephobia, though it's never named as such.

I’m not really sure how I feel about the ace rep in the book either. Like, the term asexuality isn’t even used on page, but it’s in a lot of marketing copy, and just… I felt at times that celibacy was actually being looked at in relation to Natsuki... but then other times it did seem to be ace-coded. Yet if this is supposed to be ace rep then it’s problematic. —hello ace husband who at one point tries to commit actual incest to be normal, and likening an character to an alien/having the ace character be one of the three in the book who think they are aliens as they're not indoctorined into the family.

And, like, that ending—I have to talk about it. Natsuki, her husband, and her cousin can't fit into society so they live together outside of society. They talk about how they don't have sex but now don't mind nudity (before this was triggering for Natsuki and her husband). I thought the romantic attraction discourse was quite interesting, as I believe all three characters were also coded as aro too at the start of the part of the book where they choose to live together as their own platonic unit... But then we watch these three characters almost 'degenerate', becoming animalistic... They talk a lot about sexual attraction and how they either don't experience it or they do but don't feel any need to act on it. And then they turn into cannibals. ACTUAL CANNIBALS.

Is this what supposedly happens to all ace or aro people? Is it the factory/society that tries to keep ace-spec people on track? And when these people escape society, they turn into cannibals? If so, then that is so, so offensive.

But like, also, is any of the plot at the end even real?

This book has confused me a lot and I’ve got all these tangled thoughts about it.

Review: DEPT. OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill

 

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.

Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page. 

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I came across this book recently when reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works; he spoke fondly of Jenny Offil’s second novel, and I love more ‘experimental’ literary styles, so I decided to give it a go.

This is a constantly shifting epistolary novel told in fragments and snatches about hope and grief and life. It follows an unnamed narrator as she gets married, becomes a mother, discovers her husband is having an affair, and then how their relationship eventually survives it. Time is ever-shifting in this novel, and it’s the first book I’ve read where the narration mode changes swiftly and deftly (the woman is both ‘I’ and the husband ‘you’; they become ‘the wife’ and ‘the husband’ when she discovers his affair, before the first-person narrative resumes at the end when their relationship is beginning to repair.

There are a lot of profound thoughts in this book, and the writing is simply beautiful.

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Review: GIRL FRIENDS by Holly Bourne

 

Girl Friends by Holly Bourne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Men see women in two separate categories. There are the women they sleep with, and the women they fall in love with. And they will treat you differently based on that."

From the day they first meet as teenagers Fern and Jessica are best friends. Despite their differences, they are there for each other throughout everything, navigating the difficulties of growing up and fitting in. That is until Jessica crosses a line that Fern can't forgive.

But now, more than ten years later, Jessica has unexpectedly reappeared in Fern's life.

A lot has changed for them both - but can their relationship be different now they are older? Is it possible for either of them to rewrite the role that they have been cast in? Or will their shared history ultimately be doomed to repeat itself again?

Set between the present day and the past, GIRL FRIENDS is a blisteringly funny and devastating novel: both a joyful celebration of female friendship and a razor-sharp look at the damage we can all cause to those we claim to love the most.

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So, I am a massive fan of Holly Bourne's YA novels, and I've been meaning to pick up one of her adult novels for quite a while. So when I discovered I could get a signed copy of Girl Friends, I was so, so excited. And it's... different to what I was expecting.

I was intrigued to see how she delivers a book for an adult readership. There's a lot more contemplation in this book, a slower pace, and more time to explore important themes and topics of debate, such as feminism and the different kinds of friendships. The writing was definitely denser, and structurally, it was a little slower too. We have dual timelines: when Fern is in her thirties, and also Fern as a teenager. These timelines alternate, but even within these timelines, we have some pretty big time gaps between their chapters--this was something that felt noticeably 'adult' to me rather than 'YA', as I'm a YA writer who's now writing for adults as well, it's something that really interested me.

Characterisation, as always with Holly Bourne's books, is great. Seriously great. Every character felt so real, but we could also see their flaws too. They weren't perfect. They felt authentic and genuine, and we could see how no one person was 100% 'all good' or 'all bad'.

This book covers a lot of important topics: sexual assault, rape, peer pressure, drug and alcohol abuse (particularly among teens), self-harm, mental illness, jealousy, and self-esteem issues. I'm probably forgetting some others too, but I'd say the heart of this book is about relationships, both romantic and sexual relationships, and friendships.

This novel makes some pretty strong statements about men and how they act and behave--insinuating that all straight men are like this. Of course, these statements are from the mouth of Jessica, I think, and she's a pretty opinionated character, but we see how these things sit with Fern for years and change the way she looks at her own partner. And of course this makes the reader do this too. One scene in particular made me feel quite uneasy, as I wondered if this would also apply to my husband...

Jessica is also a fantastic character. She's the popular girl at school--but mainly popular among boys for her 'sex uses' and not popular among girls. Fern is pretty much her only friend. Fern feels plain and boring compared to her. Jessica is the one all the boys want. And, across the teen years, Jessica also gets with three boys that Fern is either interested in or with--which really paints Jessica in a not-so-great light. I was right on Fern's side with that, but then the ending twists things magnificently. Jessica points out that each time when this happened, she was either drunk or high and being taken advantage of. She needed help from her girl friends (Fern) but Fern had begun to see her as just the 'slut' that the boys painted her as. And this just really got me thinking, as I fell into this trap too, judging Jessica and thinking she wasn't a great friend.

This book makes you think a lot about society and the way women and girls are programmed to look down upon other women and girls who are perhaps obviously more sexual. But then it makes you think about how men and boys also shape those same women to be more sexual, and opens your eyes to the abuse and sexual assaults that go on there too.

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Review: NOVEMBER 9 by Colleen Hoover

 

November 9 by Colleen Hoover
My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Fallon meets Ben, an aspiring novelist, the day before her scheduled cross-country move. Their untimely attraction leads them to spend Fallon’s last day in L.A. together, and her eventful life becomes the creative inspiration Ben has always sought for his novel. Over time and amidst the various relationships and tribulations of their own separate lives, they continue to meet on the same date every year. Until one day Fallon becomes unsure if Ben has been telling her the truth or fabricating a perfect reality for the sake of the ultimate plot twist.

Can Ben’s relationship with Fallon—and simultaneously his novel—be considered a love story if it ends in heartbreak?

Beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover returns with an unforgettable love story between a writer and his unexpected muse.

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November 9 is the first book by Colleen Hoover, and it feels very NA to me. Which was a surprise.

But I just couldn’t get behind the relationship ship as I couldn’t relate. Ben just seemed obnoxious and egotistical, and Fallon invited him to help her pack to leave for NY after a day of knowing her. He’s pretty smarmy and makes so many sexual references the first time they meet—and I guess there is sexual tension between them. Fallon seems to like what he says and does, how he behaves. Being ace, I just couldn’t relate and so I found myself not really backing their relationship. It seemed based on sexual attraction and maybe Fallon’s desperation, rather than romantic attraction and kindness.

But I just couldn’t get into this mostly because of Ben’s character—I just didn’t like the guy (hey, that’s strong characterisation!). What really annoyed me is how controlling and manipulative he is, and how it’s presented as a presumably romantic thing (though I couldn’t sense any actual loving romance). He controls what Fallon wears to their first date, lectures her until she sort of agrees/goes along with him undressing her, and he told her that how she feels about her scars is wrong and that he knows the right way to feel about them. I get that maybe this was meant to show him trying to boost her confidence, but wow is he arrogant. Fallon has major burn scars on her body, and Ben even says he knows how she feels because he has had small burns when cooking before. Um, that’s not the same thing at all!

By page 52 I’d already decided this was a toxic relationship, which intrigued me to read on to see if Fallon spotted this. I’d also heard a lot of Hoover’s books are criticised for romanticising toxic relationships, so I wasn’t expecting this to be outed. But still kind of hoped it would be...

The writing itself was okay on a craft-level. A bit clunky in places, kind of simplistic in others. But I kept thinking of other writers who I think are stronger in this genre, both in terms of craft and writing what I consider actual romance.

I was mainly super interested to read this book though as Colleen Hoover is a powerhouse-name and I know so many readers love her. There are such strong opinions about her books, and so I wanted to see why. And I can see how she is doing something a little different, giving us a New Adult romance that's relationship-based, with sex, and also plot twists. Of course, I know many other authors who do this too, but I think Hoover's marketing team (and when she was self-published) are great, and she's clearly pleasing readers.


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Review: CURSED BUNNY by Bora Chung

 

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.

Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous. Winner of a PEN/Heim Grant.

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Recommended

I picked up this book because of the cover, and quite simply, it is stunning. This is a tricky collection to write about because it contains so much. Each story is so different and the collection spans multiple genres. The darker, more disturbing stories are at the start—mostly—and I have to say these were my favourites. I definitely enjoyed the first two-thirds of the stories, where we’ve got the absurd, dark, weird, creepy stories. I found the ones at the end to be much slower and more contemporary, not really what I’d been looking for as I’m drawn to horror.

Out of all the stories, the first one was probably my favourite. Just the first sentence is amazing, and I still find myself thinking about the monster made from body matter that rises out of the toilet and forces its maker to swap places with it.

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