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A review by analenegrace
Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
I'm left feeling very complicated with this one. I think there are so many things here that I was excited to read but I was left feeling very frustrated with this in the end. I loved the idea of queer rep, vampires, and archives but each of these things was too much for this short book and I was left unfulfilled by all of these things.
Our main character is also just deeply odd in a way that was just so weird. Like, he just could not grasp how he might be impacting other people at basically any given moment. But honestly, my biggest issue here was how this book almost pushes trans men and lesbians against each other in a very uncomfy way. There was a constant use of the D-slur to describe lesbians and a lot of treating being butch and being trans as one and the same.
Finally, our MC, Sol, and Florence break what is to me one of the most important aspects of looking at history through a queer lens: assigning people labels when they aren't alive to choose them for themselves. When going through Tracey's papers in the archive, they attempt to assign some aspect of discomfort with their gender to them, when from everything we know from her choices and from her WIDOW, she was a stone butch who was okay with that. Sol claims to be deeply in love with the archival field but as someone with an MLIS who spends all her time with other people with MLISes its basically agreed that that just simply isn't cool.
This was a let down for me...
Our main character is also just deeply odd in a way that was just so weird. Like, he just could not grasp how he might be impacting other people at basically any given moment. But honestly, my biggest issue here was how this book almost pushes trans men and lesbians against each other in a very uncomfy way. There was a constant use of the D-slur to describe lesbians and a lot of treating being butch and being trans as one and the same.
Finally, our MC, Sol, and Florence break what is to me one of the most important aspects of looking at history through a queer lens: assigning people labels when they aren't alive to choose them for themselves. When going through Tracey's papers in the archive, they attempt to assign some aspect of discomfort with their gender to them, when from everything we know from her choices and from her WIDOW, she was a stone butch who was okay with that. Sol claims to be deeply in love with the archival field but as someone with an MLIS who spends all her time with other people with MLISes its basically agreed that that just simply isn't cool.
This was a let down for me...