Catship finished reading In the Lives of Puppets by Tj Klune
In the Lives of Puppets by Tj Klune
From New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune, In the Lives of Puppets is a queer retelling of the Pinocchio …
We're a plural system who loves queer & anarchist scifi.
But recently we just read a few randomly picked up mystery books in a row, in German, and we tend to review books in the language we read them in. That or similar may happen again, be warned.
No reading goals, just feelings.
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From New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune, In the Lives of Puppets is a queer retelling of the Pinocchio …
Of the TJ Klune books I've read, this one is definitely the most stressful, with the most on-screen violence too. It's super sweet though. It hits hard on cliches in a way that I enjoyed. The memory loss trope is stretched very far, which is also fine.
I suggested this for #SFFBookClub, and so I gave this a reread so I could enjoy it again. I love the way this novel takes Hollywood and its obsession with stars and all of its racism and homophobia, and mixes it with fey magical realism. Overall, it's definitely a book whose strengths are in its setting and its writing, rather than in a tight plot, but I still love the characters.
In particular, probably my favorite part of this book are the constant turns of phrase that bring in fey elements at unexpected times. You're just reading along and then you get hit with a line like "The cameras were better now, I told myself. They had tamed them down, fed them better." Silent movies steal people's voices. Film stars are (ambiguously but also maybe literally) stars in the sky and wield their star power. Names are sacrificed, or …
I suggested this for #SFFBookClub, and so I gave this a reread so I could enjoy it again. I love the way this novel takes Hollywood and its obsession with stars and all of its racism and homophobia, and mixes it with fey magical realism. Overall, it's definitely a book whose strengths are in its setting and its writing, rather than in a tight plot, but I still love the characters.
In particular, probably my favorite part of this book are the constant turns of phrase that bring in fey elements at unexpected times. You're just reading along and then you get hit with a line like "The cameras were better now, I told myself. They had tamed them down, fed them better." Silent movies steal people's voices. Film stars are (ambiguously but also maybe literally) stars in the sky and wield their star power. Names are sacrificed, or hidden for protection. These pieces give the story some extra teeth and a darker edge of danger that always feels present at the margins. The extra ambiguity over what's real in a story about movie magic is delicious.
I have mixed feelings about parts of the end, especially with the trip to San Francisco. I think this is probably the part where the novel loses me a little bit. The pieces work well, but the pacing is a little jarring. It's nice to have a moment to come full circle to Luli's sister, the reveal of art outside of Hollywood that Luli has been too tunnel-visioned to see, and the continuing contrast of the realness of Tara and other places with the fey world of movies. I like the depth that this journey adds, and I'm not sure where else arguably in the novel that it would go.
"What so great about being seen?" Tara demanded. "What's so important about that?"
She might have had the words for it, but I didn't. They locked up in my throat, about being invisible, about being alien and foreign and strange even in the place where I was born, and about the immortality that wove through my parents' lives but ultimately would fail them. Their immortality belonged to other people, and I hated that.
One thing I saw in this reread was how much the book played with "being seen": fey bargains to get seen in pictures; pressure about being seen in "wrong" ways; being mis-seen as Mexican instead of Venezuelan; being asked to make do things to be seen as straight and married; the fear of being seen as crossing class lines or being seen as queer and butch.
From New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune, In the Lives of Puppets is a queer retelling of the Pinocchio …
I like this one a lot. It's very trauma-heavy, building on Antsy's story and on those of the Whitethorn escapees. But it goes the way I'd expect a Wayward Children story to go – not the way Lost in the Moment and Found went. (I also like Lost in the Moment and Found, but, it's on a totally different level of everything is bad and sad.) I have warm fuzzy feelings. This is about.... not passing on trauma. It's sad, and scary, and one person's happy end can be difficult for someone else... but mostly, everything just goes really well and some things are much less terrible than before. Soothing, but in a pleasantly complex way.
Antsy is the latest student to pass through the doors at Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children.
When her fellow …
A deep dive into the spectrum of Autistic experience and the phenomenon of masked Autism, giving individuals the tools to …
Sooo it looks like my loan will run out before I finish this – it's 22 hours and I didn't crochet much recently. So far it's pretty much as I expected. Interesting thought experiment and a lot of "ooooh so that thing wouldn't work either, aah", a bit dry and repetitive and humans-are-mean, a sexist vibe. What surprised me is how bad the audiobook narration is – everyone gets their own unconvincing accent, it's terrible.
On the surface, this is a future sf book about discovering sentient octopuses and trying to communicate with them. But, this is no Children of Ruin or even a Feed Them Silence; it hinges less on plot and characters, and feels more about worldbuilding in service to philosophy.
I quite enjoyed this book, and the strongest part was just how tightly the book's themes and ideas intertwined through the book's different point of views and the worldbuilding. It's a not-so-far future book with sentient octopuses, overfished waters, AI boats that drive themselves in search of profit, drones driven by humans in tanks, and the first android (but one reviled by humanity). It's a book about language and communication, memory and forgetting, what it means to be human and exist in community, and about fear of others.
Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in this defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San …
It's a petty high school rivalry/love story, so, don't expect anything else. Buuut. I like it a lot.
I don't usually appreciate those marketing comparisons of different authors. But I kept thinking two of them: - "this is like John Green (and maybe David Levithan) but without all the stuff that makes me roll my eyes" - "this is like Courtney Summers, but without all the terrible bad things happening"
It's fairly lighthearted, it has a lot of queers, and I like how the big plot/character issues are at the same time shown as deeply important and totally everyday.
Inheriting your mysterious uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might imagine.
Sure, there are the things you'd expect. …
A classic Scalzi one-shot novel--a fluffy snack with some good twists.
The basic setup is that down-on-his-luck Charlie Fitzer unexpectedly inherits his estranged billionaire uncle's villainous empire and now has to fend with other villains who were pissed at his uncle.
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