RaveGlamour... a heart-wrenching but honest account of living with an eating disorder ... a revelatory memoir by a dynamic young artist who is using her pain and experiences to forge a new identity. It’s also a book that speaks to countless victims of child abuse, including myself, giving us language to describe our experiences and further validation of those complicated feelings.
Christina Dalcher
MixedBitch MediaIt’s a bit weird to create fictional villains who continuously spout biological essentialist rhetoric but leave the main victims of that thinking out of the narrative. Outside of Miranda’s attempt to speak up about hypothetical trans women that might come to Femlandia for sanctuary, trans people simply don’t exist in this world. And for a novel about toxic feminism in dystopia, that’s wildly unrealistic ... Miranda reduces the villains of Femlandia to \'misandrists\' and \'man-haters\' ... Such failures of imagination are disappointing in a book like this. Dalcher has an impressive command of suspenseful writing, complex character backstories with fairly seamless time switches, and emotionally charged inner dialogue. On a storytelling level, Femlandia keeps you glued to the page. But it doesn’t force you to think beyond its basic premise.
Sally Rooney
PositiveBitch MediaRooney’s most interesting thoughts aren’t given the attention they deserve. And if I’m being honest, her most salient points feel salient only because they remind me of conversations I have with my friends and peers—in particular, fellow writers—every day. The thoughts her characters espouse aren’t original, but they are persisting. That’s not a negative: Validating what others have always thought and felt is its own kind of literary genius, speaking clearly to the interior lives of millions in a simple way. But the insistent classification of Rooney’s work as Marxist has long felt like a stretch, and that’s clear in Beautiful World, which just feels like a good love story, not something groundbreaking, although the characters are constantly fretting over huge social issues ... perhaps because an \'All’s well that ends well\' wrapping is the chief obsession of this story, its reflections on society and its characters’ vague admissions of white privilege feel superfluous. They would make sense in a collection of fully fleshed-out essays; within a novel, though, they feel contrived, as though Rooney planted them in order to give herself permission to write love stories ... It’s simultaneously a bit too much and not nearly enough ... I didn’t just struggle to think of something interesting to say about Beautiful World. I actually struggled to criticize it at all, because Rooney’s most stimulating passages feel like they’re wrenched directly from her heart.
Kristen Arnett
PositiveBitch MediaWith Teeth almost has the feel of an \'Am I the Asshole?\' subreddit ... It’s Sammie’s frustrating tendency to always choose the most myopic path or point of view that Arnett says is \'fascinating,\' and makes for a \'very messy character.\' It’s ironic that Sammie’s desire to be seen is so shamefully obvious to everyone she comes across because many of them do see her; they simply don’t like what they see ... Arnett portrays her hometown as a unique literary world full of queer people ... Many writers who create unreliable characters or obscured truths have a fixed version of their world’s reality contained within their heads, inaccessible to the reader but always known to the author. Arnett doesn’t ... With Teeth packs a huge bite.
