Tag Archives: book-review

March 16, 2026 · 1:47 pm

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil: In which I try to convince myself this vampire book is something more than a vampire book

Victoria Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is the kind of book you will see on racks promising it will be an absorbing read (and it sort of is) and that is also literary (I’m less convinced) and also important or thematically rich (not really). But if you want a bit of a romp through lesbian vampires who are also complex because they Hunger (and at what point does hunger erase the vestiges of humanity?) and because they extract and exact Power – then sure, go for it.

I guess the parts most interesting are the way the different women-turned-vampires experience power and control. Sabine, the oldest and most badass of the vampires abuses her lover-turned-vampire-companion, Lottie. Lottie then exercises the limited control she has as an abuse victim – reckoning with her powerlessness against Sabine and demonstrating the oft trod adage that ‘leaving is rarely an event,’ which is to say, leaving an abusive relationship takes (according to the AI overview), on average, seven attempts. This part of the book – the reasons people stay in abusive relationships that are real (money, security, even love), the cycle of remorse and honeymoon and building tension and trigger, the way in which the past can haunt (in this case literally) – was the most interesting to me.

That said, I found it – in the end – over-the-top and as satisfied with itself for being intense as if it could just be the book without being so sure of its darkness and thematic complexity. I guess a similar reaction to reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – same themes there (tortured immortality and the disintegration of self). So while a million places will recommend this book to you, take it from me and skip it – it is not nearly as interesting as it wants you to think it is.

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March 16, 2026 · 1:09 pm

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: Necessary Edits

Dear Suzanne Collins,

What were you thinking? Maybe you were thinking that writing a prequel to the Hunger Games was a necessary extension of its literary universe. That you wanted, in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, to understand the motivations of the villain in the Hunger Games universe (Coriolanus Snow) and you thought giving us an epic 500+ page deep dive into his history would demonstrate the (repeated with a brick to the head obviousness) theme that people are complex and no one comes to bad choices without context.

While I hold the possibility that you were driven by artistic commitment to further exploration of these characters and their world, I’ll admit there were moments – tiny moments, really – where I doubted. Where I thought it might be possible you were writing this bloated and thematically obvious book to make a little more money. Cashing in, if you will.

And sure, the book started with a promising premise: Coriolanus and his family have lost everything and he needs to find a path back to fortune using his wits (and his female cousin’s body)(and his female tribute’s body). The Hunger Games are going to be that path and it’s interesting to see the games before they are ‘the games’ we know from Katniss. And maybe, just maybe, if the book had stopped at the point of the completion of the hunger games and we’d had something like a resolution there it might have avoided becoming (as it is) an exhausting slog through Who Even Cares Anymore to get to his eventual restoration.

It is a book that did not need to be written, and when it was, would have – should have – benefited from a sharp edit. That’s just my opinion though, and I am but one reader among the millions who bought the book or watched the movie. (To be clear: I borrowed my copy from the library and wouldn’t encourage anyone to spend actual dollars on it).

Respectfully,

E

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March 16, 2026 · 12:56 pm

Awake: A Memoir

You might be forgiven for thinking it a tad masochistic to read Awake: A Memoir which is, among other things, about the journey through divorce, at a time when I am doing the same. But! Hear me out. This is a very bad book, and there’s nothing misery loves more than silently judging something for being terrible (or in this case, publicly judging).

Jen Hatmaker writes Awake in the years after she awakes in the middle of the night to hear her then-husband on the phone with his mistress. Hatmaker had been married for twenty odd years, having wed young because of God and Christianity and Etc. In what follows we get short chapters that may or may not have been written with the intention of having them transcribed in cursive script onto a poster to hang – motivationally – on a kitchen wall. Live, laugh, love etc. We are, I think, to believe that Hatmaker’s journey from puddle of emotional ruin to self-actualized independence is one we can all travel are we simply to Focus and Let The Light Shine.

Alas, what Hatmaker spends zero attention on (at all) is the gross privilege she swims in. Oh sure, there’s a chapter where she is aghast to discover she doesn’t know a single thing about her finances or how they work, but there’s never a moment where financial insecurity poses a real threat. Implicit is the knowledge that this is a rich, white woman for whom things like the hydro bill have never properly kept her up at night. This financial security and abundance has the effect of affording (literally) Hatmaker and her children opportunities for ‘self exploration’ and ‘healing’ that include a month of (I kid you not) ‘me camp’ where Hatmaker can simply follow her bliss and #discover herself.

It would be one thing if this privilege were acknowledged and recognized as a security net for self-discovery and confidence that most divorcing women/people do not have access to, but alas, Hatmaker cheerfully narrates the memoir as if the abundance of hoteling and patio remodelling is a given.

Where I do credit her, and what I know I am learning on my own #journey (irony intended), is the incredible strength of community and the friendships that will find you when you need them most. I have been – am – overwhelmed by the care of a network of people (a constellation if you can imagine them all working in tandem to make something for me) who have surfaced – some after years of my neglected communication – to hold me, R and L up. And in this Hatmaker is right: you can pretend that you can survive something as uprooting as divorce alone, or you can submit to the humility of asking for and accepting help. And neither path is easy (how I have bristled at the realization that I alone cannot unstick my outdoor faucet or hang my own TV) but one path opens to more love.

I guess Hatmaker is also something of a Christian celebrity, and I do not envy her the microscope of judgement that must have accompanied her divorce. So while her memoir is kind of gross, I admire her willingness to write her journey publicly and to remind each this reader that shame has no place in this experience – we are all, in the end, just doing our best. Some of us happen to be doing it with enough money to spend a week in a villa.

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February 13, 2026 · 1:52 am

The Correspondent: The courage to connect

I know I’m late in praising Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent. It’s on a million best-of lists and many of you have recommended it to me. What can I say. I was busy reading romantacy novels and separating from my soon-to-be-ex-husband (whee!). Fun fun.

But actually go get The Correspondent. It is fun (or at least in its formal elements) and helpful. Epistolary (that is to say, written in letters) the novel follows the aging life of Sybil through her correspondence with all manner of people.

A book in praise of human connection – not just the letter writing kind of connection, actually this is only a tiny part of it – more a book about how bravely reaching out to someone (sometimes a stranger, or a famous stranger, or a family member, or a friend, or a salesperson, or anyone) to tell them you’re thinking of them or what you like about something they did or what they’ve done to hurt you or what you admire about them or what you are reading or really anything (write about anything, Sybil says) is courage and connection and what we all need most.

The courage to connect at a time of intense loneliness for so many. The courage to say oh hey, yes, me? I was thinking of you and am just writing to say as much. And then the shock – the shock that never tires – of having this desire for connection reciprocated.

What Evans does best (I think) (and truest to my experience) is to have Sybil instruct young people in this art of courageous connection. She promises them that sometimes people will not write back (and this may be for many reasons and the arrogance of assuming it is you) and that is fine. The joy is in casting the line and that in knowing that sometimes – enough, actually – there is response, and sometimes – enough, actually – there is reciprocation and deep connection.

That these lines can – enough, actually – become thick connections that can hold us over years, through the hardest things, through the most joyous.

Sybil teaches these young people (and through them the reader) of the arrogance of assuming we can Go It Alone, or the cowardice of expecting others to come find us. We find one another when we bravely say ‘oh hey’ and then write back.

It’s a book about many other things – grief (of dead children or lost marriages or lost time), friendship, motherhood, guilt, romance, aging bodies, and trust – but for me (for me the reader right now) it was most of all this message of courage and connection. Certainly when I the individual human have needed it most, but no less, no less, when we the world most urgently do.

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