abbie_'s reviews
1776 reviews

Liquid: A Love Story by Mariam Rahmani

emotional funny reflective medium-paced

4.0

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my digital ARC of Liquid! A chaos bisexual, freshly minted with a PHD but no teaching prospects and armed with a spreadsheet seeks a rich spouse. But when a personal tragedy takes her to Tehran with her mother, her plans go awry. I really enjoyed this book, the narrator (unnamed) is witty, sharp, self-aware, apathetic - I can see her dividing readers, but I personally couldn’t get enough of her.

.

I definitely preferred the vibe of the first half, the narrator’s dating escapades were hilarious, and pretty tragic in their own rights. The second half, where she travels to Tehran, was also interesting and engaging, but also had the feel of a slightly different book. The narrator is Indian-Iranian, and I appreciated the commentary on how her mother, an Indian woman, is treated in Iran. I also loved the little peek into the underground queer community in Tehran.

.

I feel like it lost a little steam towards the end, lost a bit of its vibrancy. But still overall, thoroughly enjoyable!  If you enjoy novels centred around academia such as History. A Mess and The Idiot, plus messy bisexuals and family dynamics, consider Liquid!

Fragile Animals by Genevieve Jagger

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

3.5

I picked this one up because it was queer and had vampires, but the second part literally could have not happened. It was probably the least vampiric vampire novel I’ve ever read. It focuses more on Noelle’s emotional and religious trauma, which overall is fine! But don’t promise me a sexy queer vampire tale only to have them actually be disparate storylines and the most anticlimactic vampire you’ve ever met.

I did enjoy the setting and overall vibe of the book - Noelle takes herself off to a tiny Scottish isle to recuperate and work on her second book of poetry. Cue lots of sad girl vibes, heightened by Catholic guilt over queerness and a desperately troubled relationship with her mother. All of this is shit I’d usually eat up, and did for the most part, but I just have to agree with other reviewers pointing out that this isn’t what the book is marketed as. It’s not what I went in expecting, and so I ended up a teensy bit disappointed. 

The narration is wonderful, would recommend the audiobook and if you go in not expecting a gay af vampire novel then you’ll probably have a great time!

Dance by the Canal by Kerstin Hensel

dark sad fast-paced

2.0

My second Peirene book in as many weeks, as I’m trying to prioritise a few of my translated unread books. I didn’t like this one nearly as much as The Empress and the Cake, which was already a bit of an odd one. Dance by the Canal is a disjointed and jarring story that flips between coming of age and the downward spiral of a once prosperous doctor’s daughter who finds herself living under a bridge. I think part of the reason this novella didn’t work for me was that I’m not fully familiar with the historical context. I stopped reading a lot of German historical fiction years ago as I found myself tiring of it, oversaturated. This book is strange and unnerving, confusing and not in a good way, I did enjoy the writing and some of the coming-of-age passages, but overall I’d say underwhelmed. 

Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis
Did not finish book. Stopped at 10%.

I can’t find an audiobook to hold my attention for the life of me at the mo! 

Mean Little Deaf Queer: A Memoir by Terry Galloway
Did not finish book. Stopped at 9%.

The storytelling is not holding my interest unfortunately. 

A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

3.0

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC! I read Jeanne Thornton’s Summer Fun back in 2023 and I absolutely loved it, so I was really excited to be approved for her latest offering on Netgalley. Unfortunately I found A/S/L to be lacking the spark I so loved in Summer Fun. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m just not a video game person, but I struggled a lot to maintain my interest during pretty much the first half of the book. The second half did pick up, but I’d go so far as to say the first half is a slog.

I did love the inclusion of emails and instant messaging threads - I was not in the internet in 1998, but in her afterword Thornton says she used real message archives to get the tone down and it shows. Some of the group text threads were EXCRUCIATING to read, perfectly encapsulating the feminine experience in male-dominated internet spaces. PhilippeDarke, a curse upon your family. 

Sash, Lilith and Abraxa do sort of make up for the monotony of the video game aspects, especially Lilith and Sash. But sometimes the POVs (often using the second person) got blurred and confusing. It has so much potential but it feels just too stilted and bogged down in technicalities to garner more than 3 stars and I’m sad about it 😭

The Empress and the Cake by Linda Stift

dark mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

3.5

This book was so very odd, the most vomit I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across and yet strangely compelling and sort of fun? A woman is accosted by an elderly woman and her lady-in-waiting (?) to help them eat some cake. Before long, this old woman has completely grasped control of the younger one’s life, essentially kicking her out of her apartment, and forcing her to steal a bunch of shit from museums. Honestly, rarely knew exactly what was going on but it was definitely unique!

But amid the sort of (sinister) silliness and heists, there is the dark heart of disordered eating. If you have any sort of sensitivity around EDs please look after yourself and stay away from this book, as it’s extremely graphic about bingeing, purging, and restrictive eating habits. At its centre, The Empress and the Cake is all about control, or a lack thereof - the things we think we control but which actually have us in their grip.

I didn’t fully grasp the parts in italics scattered throughout, which were about an Empress named Sissi. There were some parallels with the three main characters, and I wondered if it was a runaway/empress in hiding situation? But I am not fully sure, that part remained nebulous. 

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Eating disorder, Vomit

Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella

lighthearted medium-paced

2.0

Listened to this one for a ‘silly’ prompt for Queer Your Year, and while it is quite silly, I unfortunately was often a bored gay abbie while listening 😭 How is a book about gay werewolves just living in the city and getting sucked into a MLM, manosphere scheme boring?? Not sure but sadly this book manages it. The ending was kinda fun, a bit out of left field. Not sure if I’ll read Shy Trans Banshee or not… possibly not. 

Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata

challenging dark reflective medium-paced

3.0

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC! Although this is the ‘new’ Sayaka Murata in English, it’s actually one of the earliest she wrote and I do think that’s evident. I didn’t find Vanishing World as compelling from the get go as I have with her others, but it did pull me in more as I reached the second half. It’s got her usual themes of picking apart modern society, with marriage and reproduction on the chopping block. In this world, sex with your spouse is seen as incest, and couples take lovers (sometimes fictional) instead, as well as use artificial insemination to have babies. I got a bit tired of the repetition of the MC’s relationships with various anime characters. 

But the second half where the MC and her husband move to ‘Experiment City’ kicks the weirdness up a notch. All babies are everyone’s babies, kept in a sort of communal holding pen where people go to spend time with them - utterly bizarre. It’s not a Murata novel if you don’t say ‘what the fuck’ out loud at least once. I certainly was by the ending, but I really don’t know how I felt about the end - apart from icky.

Not as strong as her others, including the collection of short stories she has out in English. 

Milktooth by Jaime Burnet

dark emotional hopeful sad fast-paced

4.5

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC! I absolutely loved this novel, it broke my heart but did do its best to put the pieces back together. TW, it does deal with domestic abuse in a queer relationship. I know the comparison is too easy since there aren’t many books dealing with the subject, but if you loved Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House then I’d definitely recommend reading this fiction novel to explore the topic further.

Sorcha is tired of the fleeting hook ups that litter her late 20s, so when she meets Chris, looking like a dyke Leo di Caprio from the 90s, at the farmer’s market, she lets herself be swept off her feet, tugged along by her desire for a stable relationship and a child. What follows is a devastating spiral which sees Sorcha trapped in an increasingly (emotionally) abusive relationship, all the while gaslighting herself that everything’s fine. This book really nails the ‘frog in a pot of boiling water’ analogy. Chris really gets under your skin, like I felt anxious and claustrophobic as a reader so I’d say Burnet does an excellent job of depicting an abusive relationship.

There’s also some mystery and intrigue in the form of a family drama, and I enjoyed the way Burnet wove Sorcha’s backstory throughout the book. I definitely agree with another reviewer than some of Sorcha’s behaviour/inner monologues in the second half come off as biphobic, but I think (hope) it’s meant more as something Sorcha has to unpack and unlearn than an actual representation of something normal to think - if that makes sense!

Overall, a fantastic debut full of emotional depth.