Jaye Nelia

Wrackingly beautiful and painfully funny!

Reviewed: 11-19-24

I can’t even….this is a kind of story about all stories, about how every person you know or see is living a story…and it reminded me to be careful, to be clear and kind with others because all the stories are spinning our experiences around even as we have them. That’s how I felt reading it, though this may just be me. A book this great invites you to feel any and everything as it goes deeper, gets bigger, and surprises you again and again. I couldn’t get a good grip on it and after awhile I didn’t want to.

I don’t think there’s a need to describe the plot here. Listen to the first few minutes and the hook is in. Akbar is brilliant with words and ingenious with images, and I found the presentation of his culture stunning — his love-hate for it, its love-hate for him. I will certainly buy a copy of Martyr so I can experience it on the page, but I’ll also listen to many portions again and again. Also, the reader was magnificent. I could feel him loving the words he spoke, and convincing me with every character he played.

Am I making this book sound beautiful and boring? Believe me, woven in and around all the perfect words is a wild, passion-driven story full of risks, peopled primarily by college students on all kinds of fanciful drugs. Funny? Omg. So funny. I have no idea how this writer crammed so much detailed hilarity as well as longing and suffering into a book of average length. All I’m saying is Kaveh Akbar is my new dude!

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Brilliant, heartrending, sexy, funny!

Reviewed: 06-11-24

It was like listening to a friend tell me about an agonizing, ecstatic, norm-busting episode in her fantastically unusual life, if that friend were 1) a world-class storyteller, and 2) capable of deep, particular, rare emotions and 3) able to describe those emotions with stunning affection for herself and everyone around her. And her voice is so perfect—hoarse and sexy, intimate and smart. I found myself talking back to her, encouraging her, like sista, you got this, and I got you. Miranda July made me feel known and understood, as if I were telling her MY story. This may be the advantage of listening over reading: to be led with perfect assurance through a great book by its author.

Note: in places the intimacy is unfiltered and raunchy and messy, like the acts it describes. Don’t cringe, because in the end this book will help any woman get through anything. I experienced it as a privilege to have access to Ms. July’s unbridled self. But I did hit the pause button whenever the kids came in. Or anyone who didn’t love me.

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3 people found this helpful

If Murphy wrote a dishwasher manual, I would read it

Reviewed: 12-18-23

This book is so full of feelings, the huge, illogical, irresistible feelings that build over lifetimes and flash out when their owners are exhausted from holding them in check, that I found myself wondering how the things we feel don’t kill us outright. Everyone, Murphy knows, has made at least one terrible decision in his or her past, But he also recognizes that the decisions that doom us may arise perfectly justified from many smaller, innocent actions taken before. We may drop our banana in a sudden, ill-fated dash after a bus with no destination sign, and we have no hope of knowing how our discarded peel has devastated the person behind, sprinting with a fifferer

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Much more commercial than I expected…

Reviewed: 10-11-23

I do love this author and would never pan him, but I was surprised to see him pull out all the tropes of commercial historical fiction. The narrator is in the right place at the right time to make himself indispensable to the Romanov family during WW1. You can take it from there…the writing was good, but I felt the narrator needed a break sometimes and a second voice would have helped. The narrator actuslly sound like a bleak period in Russian history, like a tour of the Steppes!

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Absolutely wonderful

Reviewed: 09-20-23

Morris Swift is one of the most evil people ever to walk the literary earth, and I totally love him for it! Listen and be amazed at the ever-widening swath of destruction he creates in the world of high-stakes publishing. The sinister seeds are planted early, and begin to flower in the interludes between the chapters of Morris’ life as he narrates it. To say more would spoil the revelations and the fun, but the voices of Edith and of Gore Vidal are especially moving and powerful. The performances, all of them, are brilliant. John Boyne continues to be an international treasure. Don’t miss this fabulous book!

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This gets a big yes from me…

Reviewed: 09-08-23

…although I found it saccharine in places. I felt very safe reading it. Once the big mid-novel “thing” happens, the rest the story is how that thing is resolved. Maynard handles her readers and characters with equal care, dispensing almost divine justice to the good people and biblical punishment to the guilty. I never worried for a moment that things wouldn’t work out.

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There are no parents in B.E.E.’s world…

Reviewed: 07-28-23

…or at least, no adults who function as guiding spirits to the rich, blank, and privileged Gen X kids who populate this book. Though Ellis insists it’s a novel, it reads—-and this is most of the book’s conceit—like a memoir. Whether or not Ellis was raped as a teen by Terry Schaefer, whether he challenged and defied and lusted after the young serial killer Robert Mallory, whether he compiled the clues that pointed inexorably to the murders of his friends, Ellis has made a puzzle for his readers that defies storytelling convention.

But there is no doubt that he is describing his teenage self as he really was in 1981, along with the hard fact that he was left utterly alone to face horror. All but abandoned by his parents, snubbed and ostracized by his friends, coolly dumped by his several gay lovers, and most perplexingly, dismissed and almost shunned by school authorities, he is a shockingly poor little rich boy. But of course, Ellis is so stoned most of the time that he might not notice any of this. His privileges and his spendable cash, while his parents loll in Greece for months in 1981 and leave him in the care of a housekeeper, seem completely unlimited. But where to apply either our envy, our revulsion, or our sympathy? To Brett Easton Ellis, or to the fictional character who is Brett Easton Ellis?

There’s no need for me to recap the plot. What struck me most is how Ellis continues to sift that handful of 80’s years in which Generation X was labeled “alienated.” He remains committed to unfeeling and to endlessly describing those unfeelings, where the novelists who debuted alongside him in that time have wisely left that anesthetized period behind. Ellis insists tirelessly that the early 80’s aloofness he experienced was relevant, is relevant, though what that passage might mean to readers 40 years later remains obscure. Most of us have turned that page, gently or not, and moved on.

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Yes. Read this one.

Reviewed: 04-28-23

The true crime genre—and this is fiction, not true crime—but crime has its tropes. In reality, we can only guess at what drives people who kill for neither money, nor love, nor revenge. They do it, according to the profilers, to scratch an irresistible itch. It is presumed that they disassociate from it afterwards or they couldn’t live with themselves—-or we can’t live with the thought that there are people who kill without remorse, only concerned for their own freedom afterwards. Here we have that exact killer. He does it for spite, for rage; and he does it in the grips of massive self-pity, but it isn’t personal, not usually. He barely remembers the women he kills, but the details of his own sad story play in his mind like a film loop. He’s out there killing with impunity until a detective he had known in childhood, in an orphanage where she almost fell in love with him, doggedly pursues him all the way to the execution chamber. The killer’s thoughts are with us till that moment, which is disturbing, compelling, and different. I couldn’t stop listening to this!

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Times have changed, thank God

Reviewed: 04-28-23

I saved this book for “someday,” considering it a seminal story in the true crime genre. I’m frankly baffled. You know, the whole point of this book was supposed to be that Ann Rule actually KNEW Ted Bundy, and her inside knowledge was what makes this the last word on His crimes. —except she didn’t know him, not really. Apparently she was important to him because she stayed doggedly in touch and carefully refused to judge him. He confided in her, but it was mostly complaints. Bundy remains a complete cipher, a handsome thrill-killer whose selfishness and disregard for lives not his own was near complete. He told Ann no secrets and complained bitterly till the end of his life (in the electric chair, which Ann obscures from reader view). There was no breakthrough moment when his humanity could be glimpsed.

And author Ann never….quite….believes he’s a heartless killer. She clearly wants him to be innocent, and brilliant enough to prove it. Her language is formal and carefully non-accusatory. She pays appropriate homage to the Bundy victims, but mostly she muscles them out of the way so she can hug her knowledge close and dispense it in crumbs, all eyes on her. And surprise, there’s no surprise. Ann knows no more about Bundy than we do. Though she’s regarded as a premier true crime writer, she’s a dull and methodical story teller. In the end, she was nothing but an older woman, uninteresting to Bundy, who made his acquaintance and lived to sell the tale.

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I don’t know why I didn’t love this…

Reviewed: 04-28-23

It had everything I generally like in a novel—a spacious plot that was tightly managed, good if not strikingly original characters, plus I learned new things about a niche of time and place that I hadn’t known before. The problem for me was that the characters seemed to stand for traits as in an allegory, and they did what I expected them to do. The author tied the past and present together adeptly, showing the astonishing tenacity of racism through the years, by introducing a crime in 2020—notably the year of the important Black Lives Matter protests. I felt that the investigation and subsequent rush to judgment were hasty and sloppy, when they could have generated nearly unbearable tension. They felt symbolic, where crime is never just symbolic but dreadfully personal. Brooks is s fine, serious writer, but this somewhat dour book needed a commercial twist or two to get it over the finish line. For me, that is. Mine is a minority opinion.

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