misireads

[misireads]

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

[ physical book, read in finnish & english ]

the story of a man who starts off as stale as if the colour beige was a human. he's a diligent office worker in a government department that evaluates orphanages for magical children. he's so good at making bland, objective reports that the stuck-up management of the department decides to send him to an orphanage for particularly troublesome monster children, hidden away on a remote island in the middle of nowhere. the man takes a train there, fearing for his life because he's pre-emptively so scared of these children. on the island, he befriends the children and learns that he's been living a stupid, prejudiced, boring life with no colour in it whatsoever all this time. also he falls for the leader of the orphanage and they have a gay little romance.

➕ obvious first things first. this is a gay love story, i'm all for it. a really soft and sort of mundane one about two middle-aged men too, where them being gay isn't a big deal, actually it's probably the smallest deal of them all. lol the romance was incredibly cheesy but you never see THAT in literature

➕ it's a hearty story about prejudice and acceptance. magical beings in this world are so viscerally hated that nobody cares about your sexual orientation or skin colour, but if you're a dragon or some shit then YUCK! EW! STAY AWAY FROM THE CHILDREN YOU HEATHEN! it's kind of amazing. this is also completely void of any mention of religion which i enjoyed. all the bigoted hate and prejudice in the entire universe is truly just packed into there existing magical people in this book. i personally felt it first and foremost symbolised the lack of empathy for people with disabilities (both physical and mental) because there are so many nudges towards that, but it's probably just in general also. angry goodreads reviews are saying it's a very poorly executed nudge towards native americans actually but i'll run with my own interpretation anyway

➕ hands down my favourite thing in the entire book is lucy. he's the reason i originally kept reading at all because i was so enamored by a little 6yo satan. i could have read a whole book just about him really.

➖ well this is a tough one to review. basically what happened was that i took the finnish translation from the library. and i kind of fucking hated it. it's a very literal-feeling translation, a lot of the dialogue is so stiff you barely understand what the characters are sometimes talking about, the language felt very infantile. i don't think the magical creature translations really work. they turned talia into a goblin instead of a gnome, that's a whole fucking different creature? there are just many many things i don't like about it. then i suddenly had to return the book to the library so i put a reservation on the original english one, thinking if i'm gonna finish this, it has to be in english. so i got that one and had no issues with the language or anything else whatsoever. i should definitely have read in english from the beginning. i didn't return it to the library yet so i might go back to the beginning and revisit some of the scenes in english to actually understand what happened

➖ this is like.. well it's not a very small children's book, and not exactly for teenagers either because the contents are so softcore, i feel. it's either for rather childish adults or for pre-teen children, maybe. edit: actually i don't see anyone call this a children's book online, just "YA" which it fucking isn't. much confusion. are you telling me this nonsense is a book for adults. either way, although the message is very good and all, the whole book is hopelessly childish in a way that made me feel like it didn't need to be. it's just a bit too simplistic at times, like helen's character, she does a 360 in a matter of a couple of lines with very little basis. idk how to well put it, maybe that it felt like there's ingredients for more here and that the characters are built in such a way that they could have been so much more if only the book took itself more seriously and went deeper at all instead of staying so surface level and turning everything into a joke. the entire plotline was also very predictable, basically you can tell what happens as soon as linus it sent to the island and that doesn't make a very exciting book to get through.

➖ i hated linus so fucking much in the early chapters lmao i get it that it's all about his growth but man. the premise of his character is that he's excellent at his job, very good at being objective, does his background work super well. then he goes to this island job and is immediately mad prejudiced (although working with magical kids is literally his job, this job he's supposedly so good at, but now he suddenly can't take them anymore), proceeds to not even read the files of the children. he goes to this orphanage that HE KNOWS from THE INFORMATION HE GOT has been as it is for some time, and the first thing he does is hate all the children on sight and decides that lucy will kill everyone in the house any minute now and he's the only force stopping him. although he knows perfectly well from the beginning that lucy has been living with the other kids all this time already without anyone dying. the only difference is that he's there now so why would lucy suddenly blow the place up (other than to kill linus because he's so insufferable, which would have been 100% fair). it was so nonsensical, it felt like the story was just made up on the go without any thought put into if it makes any sense how linus is reacting to things. actually i just hate reactionary characters in general like stop being a fuckign buffoon imbecile and use that brain of yours that's so big. he's literally even complaining about his fucking cat all the time, jesus christ let her be a cat. is it supposed to be funny? then mark down the humour as another minus because it's not

➖ i seem to be the only person on earth who thinks this (edit: goodreads says i am not, in fact) but i wasn't that big a fan of how hard this kept hammering in the EVERYONE!!SHOULD!!BE!!ACCEPTED!!! message, i prefer subtler ways of storytelling tbh not every single scene needs to be about this.

➖ the world building could have had a bit more substance. not much was said about the system of magic existing in this universe so it was all a bit vague.

⭐ score: 4- -- a lot of negative thoughts again but overall i rather liked this, despite my ranting (and being shocked that this isn't for children). i guess something about this touched me deeper than i realised because i was AGAIN crying at the end. what's with me crying at the end of books these days??? what's happened to me. i don't cry at things. i'm probably ill and should call in sick to work

[misireads]

Misery by Stephen King

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

a writer gets in a car accident while drunk driving in the middle of nowhere and finds himself both legs broken at the mercy of a woman who has taken him to her house in the remote countryside. she's an ex nurse, the NUMBER ONE FAN of his books, and, as he very soon realises, crazy mentally……. challenged. she's beyond mad that he has killed off the main character of his book series named misery, makes him burn the manuscript of his newest novel which he was on his way to get published before the accident, and forces him to start instead writing another sequel to the misery series where she comes back to life. this turns into a psychological game of the author knowing she'll keep him alive for as long as the new novel is still in the makings, all the while knowing that he needs to find a way to get out of the house eventually.

➕ misery is one of my favourite king movie adaptations, so i went in knowing this is a story i like. this kind of despaired slow burn setting with complete helplessness involved is one of my favourite psychological horror tropes. (and i mean actual helplessness. like physically unable to get out of it. i guess there's also a body horror aspect there that i enjoy)

➕ i don't remember the film version super well, mostly just that it's the setting i liked about it. in this book version, it's A Lot about all the quirks of the main character's inner monologue, i realised while reading that that's the thing giving so much life to this story. this may be my favourite king novel for the prose, honestly. i don't remember any other giving me this kind of entertainment with words.

➕ the first novel in a long time that made me genuinely queasy

➖ how should i even put this thought. this is a long book, the audiobook is twelve hours long. that's a lot of hours about a man being stuck in a room. i realised kinda early on that this is going to drag, and that the setting actually kind of.. bores me…. or it doesn't but it does, at times. maybe five hours in i felt like i was really tired of listening to the story already and there's so much left still. definitely The most boring part were the new misery novel chapters. it's only a few short-ish(too long if i'm asked) segments of the whole book but it just… went on for too long anyway. and somehow managed to get racist later also, the finnish translation makes the african man speak totally incomprehensibly, my god. then when at some point i was like, alright clearly all the story points have now been handled and this is about to come to an end, i noticed there's still 5 hours left. and after the storyline really was over, it's STILL way too much left. it was one of those.

➖ this iiiiiiis… well it was published in 1987 so in many ways it's a work of its era and this is VERY pervasive in the genre anyway. but it's very definitively the "mental illness = evil" type of horror. annie never has any motive for anything she does, she's simply "crazy" so she's "evil" and therefore does bad things to people. yeaah…. i didn't feel super great about that.

⭐ score: 3+ -- i went to read the movie synopsis after i finished listening and while i don't remember the film super well, i feel like that one was more about the horror of annie in a trimmed-down package, while this book is like, at heart, about writing books, and in a very drawn-out way at that. it's a LOT more about, well, words. i think i like the more condensed movie edition better in this case. it just seems like i can't make myself like stephen king novels no matter how much i try. also i kind of picked this up at the wrong moment, this was my october halloweeny season read (one of them), and i realised at some point that this really isn't a halloweeny spooky book so i was feeling kinda meh but also like i needed to keep going. fgdklgmkdfmgf

[misireads]

I am Legend by Richard Matheson

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

one White American Man(TM) is apparently the only remaining human alive after a virus pandemic has turned everyone else into vampires (or just killed them). he has barricaded his house against the undead creatures and come up with all sorts of more or less clever ways to deal with the situation. eventually he starts scientifically researching why exactly the generic garlic, wooden staves etc stuff from fiction seem to actually work against the vampires. he has his ups and downs throughout the story, sometimes coping better, sometimes worse.

➕ it's pretty fun that reading this you think, ah okay, one of the run-of-the-mill post-apocalyptic survival zombie virus stories we all know. but this here is THE original zombie apocalypse novel! fascinating. and the zombies aren't zombies, they're vampires. i actually always thought this was a legit zombie story, all i knew about the book before was an edit of the will smith movie poster saying "i am leg: the last man on earth is not a toe." i haven't seen the movie by the way and don't intend to watch

➕ this is short and concise in a way i like. you get the feeling of time passing and robert's moods coming and going without hundreds and hundreds of pages. this took me like, four days to read. exactly what i like for my horror novels

➕ apart from already being the first ever of a lot of genre things, i thought it pretty innovative for an ordinary guy to try to scientifically prove all the generic vampire banishing stuff.

➕ i liked the ending, nice title drop as the last line there.

➖ this is so hopelessly american, reading as a european you just go, and the rest of the world? what happens in the rest of the world?? is this america only??? since it's never addressed in any way and one american town is consistently called the entire world in this, i assume americans are just out there dying and killing each other while the rest of the world is watching like yeaah… amurricans huh.

➖ the main character is just kind of… well. i felt no connection to him at any point, he's very White American Heterosexual Man coded. and i felt a lot like, for the sake of feeling the feelings that this story is trying to evoke, you are meant to relate to this man. so the story didn't do much for me in that sense. i was the most immersed in the dog part. then when ruth came in, it was very Whatever.

➖ speaking of the dog, why the fuck is he feeding it bowls of milk. who the fuck feeds dogs bowls of cow milk. it gives just about any animal diarrhea. you give animals water. idiot

➖ the details of just about anything are vague at best. i mean i came here from frankenstein that completely skips describing anything about how the monster even happens so i almost let it slide. almost. but it's very true this never goes into the specifics of where exactly robert gets all his supplies. how does he have so much food. so much garlic. how literally all the circumstances just happen to be so perfectly right for him.

➖ the finnish translation is another abomination, and it's not supposed to even be very old… but idk. the punctuation mistakes are out of control here. like, after a point it becomes more of a rule than exception that the punctuation is incorrect. i can not like nor respect a book like that

⭐ score: 3 -- another checkmark for my horror classics bingo card, but other than that… eh, it was nice reading another genre origin novel and i appreciate the "OoOoOoOO MAN IS ACTUALLY THE REAL MONSTER" theme in here (again coming here from frankenstein) but i wasn't hugely into the story. BUT i can't believe i read hell house from matheson before this. that's someone's fault for sure. like some "actually scary horror novels!!!" reddit recommendation thread's (neither is very scary IMO but this by far more than fucking hell house. jesus)

[misireads]

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

[ audiobook, listened in english ]

an occult scholar doctor invites three people to join him to look for solid evidence of the phenomenon of haunting in an 80-year-old mansion named hill house that's said to be haunted because people keep dying around it. the central character is a young woman with fragile mental health who steals a car to go to hill house in order to escape her own life. she's scared of the house but things get bearable when she quickly befriends another woman who's been invited to the house. during the day, they seem to be enjoying the house. during the night, it's scaring them out of their minds. gradually she starts to sense things that the others apparently don't.

➕ i very much like the boo haunted house genre where a group of strange people go stay in a house to prove it's haunted, or to appease it or whatever.

➕ the real horror here is eleanor's mind, clearly. i enjoyed her unreliable narration a lot, this bitch got some issues. (what i liked a little less is that i related to a lot of it in the earlier chapters. she's overthinking every single thing, and thinks of theodora as her bff after knowing her for two hours because she's being nice to her, gets worried that theodora might start disliking her, then ends up disliking theodora herself for some petty little shit she says that can be interpreted as her making fun of eleanor. bonkers and unfortunately relatable for anyone with poor self esteem)

➕ i liked the prose… mostly. it's very poetic which i think works great for creating an atmosphere in horror.

➖ for an iconic work of the haunted house genre this sure had a lot of filler-y scheisse outside of the house being haunted. the characters just kind of go around doing random things. sometimes i wasn't really sure what they were even talking about anymore because the dialogue and their random actions go so off the rails. but it's like this from the beginning, eleanor does a couple of random stops on her way to hill house so the story takes a very long time to get to the point, and nothing really happens during those stops. like she looks at a child drinking from a cup and talks about the cup for five minutes or something.

➖ i wasn't really sure what luke was doing here. he didn't do much anything (until the very end anyway) nor did he have any personality or notable character traits. you have a cast of only four main characters and you couldn't even come up with a personality for one of them. the doc's wife also, she just appears and.. is a bit bitchy and.. nothing happens to her.

➖ relatedly, the pacing is weird. the only consistent is eleanor's succumb into madness but the rest was like see-saw where aooohh a spooky thing happenin!!! hehe never mind, we were just silly now we frolic in the sun. ouuuhhh now a spooky thing happenin again!!! hahaha never mind how silly it is to think there would be ghosts. there's no escalation or tension or progression of any kind and i found that very weird. actually just no plot. eleanor is the only character that matters and has any progression, the rest are just "shrug i guess i was a bit scared back there! but it's okay."

⭐ score: 3 -- a lukewarm three because i'm not really sure if i liked this or not. i zoned out a lot but then found the rare creepy parts decently entertaining, and i didn't mind that there weren't all that many of them, but this really did lack escalation. i've also watched the netflix show and liked it but don't remember it being like this book at all lol

[misireads]

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

a swiss boy named victor frankenstein moves to germany to study science with the ultimate goal to create life artificially with his own hands. after a manic episode of hyperfixating on the task, he creates a humongous man with an ugly face, then immediately regrets the decision and runs away from his own creation. he proceeds to pretend he never created anything until the creature catches up with him, explains that he's lonely and sad because humans all hate him for his looks, and asks the doc to create him a partner. frankenstein says Nope and runs away again. the creature keeps following him and murdering the people closest to him as revenge.

oh and this is actually all told by frankenstein in past tense in one sitting to some british guy who travelled to the arctic to study science and saved frankenstein from the ocean (and is real fucking gay for him also. is shelley aware she wrote a gay man in 1818)

WHICh is actually told by the brit to his sister in letters that he's writing her. and i kind of forgot about all that already in the middle

➕ well! it's franksenstein. it's a classic. it's the first sci-fi novel in existence, written by a 20yo woman. it's got legacy. i feel a bit bad i have so few good things to say about it

➕ i'll give credit for the social commentary about ostracisation which probably honestly was pretty striking for its time.

➖ i can see why that legacy equates "frankenstein" with the monster and not the doctor. the doctor is a pussy. a bona fide unlikable Woe Is Me asshole who repeatedly makes the dumbest fucking choices and then runs away and moans like a bitch and never faces nor resolves any of them. this book would be 50% shorter if you cut out every mention of him feeling sorry for himself. i'm not sure if shelley wrote this thinking she's making a sympathetic character or if she was fully aware that the reader is just gonna want him to die? my questions immediately started from him apparently spending so much time making the monster, and very deliberately choosing how it's going to look like, spent YEARS AND YEARS on it, and apparently he not even once during those years gave it a single thought like hmm this is turning out a bit scary-looking! a bit spooky i'd say! why am i making it so grotesque? oh well here it comes anyway! and also not for a second considering what the creature will be like, and what he'll do with it once it's done. and then he's just eeeek D: and runs away from his house as soon as the creature comes alive, and he.. doesn't.. uhh.. go back? doesn't care that it's now in his house and just leaves it there i guess?? i was already done at that point, that's such nonsense, i'm sorry mary shelley i appreciate everything you've done for us but you wrote one dumbass incomprehensible imbecile fucker of a main character who is so thoroughly unbelievable and unrelatable that this is one of the most comical horror novels i've ever read.

➖ that's pretty much all my thoughts summarised. i could go on and on about how every single thing frankenstein does is stupid as shit but i think you get the idea already. (just make the fucking partner!! you are literally the one making it, you can make a guy or a woman without a womb. because the fucking monster just told you very elaborately that he's lonely and he just wants a friend. also why is victor literally so fucking unimpressed by the monster knowing how to speak french?!?? no???? we just gonna be like ahh noo here is the horrible monster of my creation oh noooo poor me… alright. alright….. i'm so normal and calm about this.)

➖ i know this is a literary style from ye olde times but i'm so done with novels with a frame story where it's apparently one person telling the entire story to someone else and then the narrative is nothing like a person telling someone a story. it breaks my immersion completely and i don't like it. there's also a part in the middle here where it's the monster telling his own story inside frankenstein telling his story to the british scientist. look me in the eye and tell me if our lovely victor here would really ramble on and on about the monster's backstory to this extent if he didn't give a single shit about him otherwise yES I KNOW YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TAKE IT LITERALLY…. BUT THEN WHAT'S THE POINT OF A BOOK IF YOU DON'T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY AND JUST KIND OF PRETEND AHAHA EHEHE WELL WE'RE PLAYING TELLIGN A STORY HERE IT'S NOT REAL NONE OF THIS HAPPENED ACTUALLY aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa KABOOOOOOM

➖ i am supremely. SUPREMELY annoyed. that this story takes place in switzerland. and. the characters' names. are in english? the fuck is "henry clerval"? shouldn't he be henri or henrik or something?? and victor's brother is "william", not wilhelm??? an italian girl named "elizabeth" instead of literally any italian name??? not to mention that "victor" isn't a german name either like frankenstein is. he should be viktor. you can't give me a book that does this nd tell me it's a very good book, a good classic you should enjoy. NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WILL NOT

➖ a lot of this sounded like flexing with geography trivia which, i mean, yes very good from a female writer in 1818. but. it's flexing with geography trivia. in places where it wasn't really needed. cut out this and every line of frankenstein feeling sorry for himself and the book would be like 100 pages long

⭐ score: 2 -- good, i read one of the ultimate horror classics for halloween season, great…. now i crave euthanasia

[misireads]

Lohikäärmeen värit ("Colours of the dragon") by Pasi Pekkola

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

a story spanning two generations that's actually three (or four!) different stories set in different times.

in chronological order, the first story is that of a small girl named xiaolong, born to poverty in a remote village in rural china in the era of mao zedong. she's raised by her sickly father, but their life is alright until mao's campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries fucks the whole village over.

the second story is xiaolong's adulthood, starting from her moving to finland in the 80's with a man named tomi, they move to helsinki together and are about to have a baby. she knows that finland is a far better environment to raise a child, but she struggles with the culture shock and the loneliness brought with it.

the third story is that of the child as an adult, kimi, born and raised finnish. he has never met his mother because she disappeared when he was only a baby and has spent his entire life wanting to know why she left. he has a strained and distant relationship with his father who travels for work a lot. after his long-term relationship with a woman falls apart, kimi decides to take his father's offer to travel to shanghai to go look for his mother in china.

this is the starting point of each story, and the book keeps jumping between all three to fill in the details and the gaps in time. the recurring theme carrying through the whole book is the clash of love vs money, as well as momentary personal fulfillment and greed vs the harm it causes in the long run. or something such

➕ said this so many times on this blog but i really enjoy layered books with many intertwined stories, where you only get the big picture of each by finishing the book.

➕ i also enjoy stories about cultures and places (and their history) other than finland and USA, china in this case. this one also compares china and finland to each other and highlights their similarities and differences in an interesting way. that's of course supremely entertaining to a finn because we love comparing finland to anything

➕ what i liked early on was that kimi is half chinese but has never had any connection to china because he's born and raised a finn. which is relatable to me as a half ukrainian with no connection to ukraine. the relation was kind of short-lived but i still jotted that down as a positive so it's something

➕ the book very thoroughly and successfully established why the characters are the way they are, what their motivations are and what's the impact of their respective environments….

➖ …but they are aggravatingly unlikable. i mean they're well written and fleshed out but that doesn't make me like them any more. xiaolong is naive and her story is basically just a sequence of making poor stupid decisions [spoiler] and then she dies. while kimi is vividly painted as an unlikable guy from the beginning and it never gets any better. it's the sort of book that's well written but everything is extremely unrelatable to me and i just keep thinking the characters are fucking stupid in everything they do and you just want to scream HOE DON'T DO IT at the book.

➖ could have been more compact with the storytelling overall. there's a lot of verbose rumination of the same things over and over by both xiaolong and kimi, i found myself going "yeah yeah we already know you feel like this, let's move on" many times. i didn't feel like the stakes here were high enough to warrant keeping up some kind of tension so much between the three different POVs.

➖ speaking of stakes [spoiler] the whole existence of wu jiang in the story was kind of… it just felt flat to me. considering that it's an enormous drive for xiaolong's character to be in love with this character. but that love wasn't based on anything? or it was based on him being a murderer? lol. i don't know, i just thought this great gatsby character would turn out to be something much more dramatic for the way his character was foreshadowed, but then it was just. he's just some guy. there's nothing likable about him. he doesn't do much. he's the biggest influence in xiaolong's entire life, basically. and then he just sucks

➖ why so much sex. it was so unnecessary. yes i get it, girls from rural china end up as prostitutes in the big cities because they have no choice. i didn't need all these sex scenes to hammer the point in really, truly.

⭐ score: 3½ -- a good book but a depressing one. the kind that i'll think back to as a well constructed story but one that didn't evoke a single positive feeling in me really.

[misireads]

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

[ physical book, read in english ]

set in a (post-apocalyptic??) world with nine planets, or "houses" that basically function like countries in this universe, gideon is a grumpy sword-wielding butch living as a servant on the ninth which is a dark planet inhabited by old people, animated skeletons, and some sort of skeleton cultists. gideon has tried to escape numerous times, but her attempts are always thwarted by her childhood nemesis, harrowhark, who is the princess of the planet and a necromancer with bone magic powers. this time harrowhark promises gideon her her freedom if only she accompanies harrow to the first planet to participate in some sort of intergalactic event where the heir of each planet has the opportunity to become a lyctor, i.e. some sort of immortal hero who serves the necrolord emperor of the whole universe, but the heirs are supposed to have cavaliers fighting for them so harrow wants gideon to be hers. gideon reluctantly agrees and they take a space shuttle to the event site on the first, along with the other necromancer&cavalier pairs from planets two to eight. all of them are strange characters, but gideon befriends a few. little by little, through some budding cooperative friendships, it's revealed that the trial they're supposed to conduct is made up of solving necromantic puzzles with the help of the cavaliers that then grant them keys to open doors to new spaces in the enormous delapitated mansion they're staying at where they find more clues to what they're actually there to do. it's all necrofun and swordgames until one heir&cav pair is found dead.

➕ this is like, the (gay) gothic body horror YA fantasy of my dreams. this book was made for me. i'm superglad for my habit of not reading the covers or nothin because all the contents came as a COMPLETE surprise to me. well i knew this was fantasy but other than that. nothing prepared me for the very first pages talking about gideon "walking down to her mother's nameless catacomb niche" and "skeletons going to pick at the snow leeks in the planter fields." i had to take a double take like wha wha WHAAAAT exactly did i read just now? but you get used to it. the whimsy never ends but you get used to skeletons cleaning houses and bones growing from unexpected places in this book

➕ the language. oh i am a lover of words. this book has so so many strange words, and strange ways of using those words. i didn't look all of them up because that would take forever, but i feel like every time i did look a word up, the meaning was somehow related to death, graves, or bones. delightful! also just a lot of looking up how something is pronounced because i need to be accurate for my audience (which is me)

➕ related but this is SO VISCERALLY VERBALLY VIOLENT, doesn't shy away at all from the main characters almost bleeding to death several times.

➕ what is there not to love about a setting with character pairs who work in tandem tbh. this also did everything right in this regard that fucking throne of glass did wrong lmao. even with the mild romance undertones. of which there weren't super much, mostly gideon being gay over some of the ladies. and gideon and harrowhark have a kind of an enemies-to-lovers thing going on which i am so fucking here for. the male characters really took a back seat here, it was all about the ladies. and the main ladies walk around in black robes and skeleton face paint. man. the aesthetics are so good. i don't think anything can top this anymore, i'll now forever be thinking "this is good but it's no locked tomb"

➕ although guys took the back seat i still managed to get a fucking cupid's arrow through my heart, i was so oooooooooo in love with palamedes, like, from the moment he and camilla first appeared, love love. i even managed to have dreams about him already i'm not joking, i fell hard, him and his beautiful eyes……… guh. i've never been so worried over a character's fate while reading a book!!!! [spoilers] but then i rather enjoyed how he went out anyway so.. i wasn't super mad… it was also becoming evident at that point that the rest of the trilogy does not feature this set of characters anyway so i knew he'd just fucking die any minute now so it wasn't so bad, i was emotionally prepared. writing love letters since he was a tiny little child tho. UGH I LOVE HIM!!!!!!! PLEASE WRITE ME A LETTER TOO I'm DYINGH

➕ gideon is so… like i just really enjoyed her being like this metal as fuck gal who's constantly cursing and goofing around and shit but then she surprises you by being so kind about other characters, mostly girls. she's surprisingly sentimental also. her characterisation is amazingly strong too for a story in third person instead of first, it's very effortless to be in her shoes here.

➖ the eccentric language wasn't just all positive, sometimes i didn't really follow what the dialogue was about. it all came together from context and just character actions in the end but i feel like a lot went over my head anyway. the beginning also confused me so much before i really grasped the vibe here. this prolly warrants a re-read

➖ relatedly a lot of this felt like... well basically the characters didn't really explain themselves much, which read a bit weirdly sometimes. like they just know things and that's it. there's almost under-exposition here, where things are just already known by the characters and the reader (and gideon) is always lagging a bit behind. it made me feel stupid

➖ i really became quite attached to the characters and was hoping the whole trilogy would be about them… alas……. they started dying

⭐ score: 5- -- VERY nearly a full five. but. i have this unspoken rule to myself that there needs to be a ship for a book to be a five to me. i mean, gideon and harrowhark… yes they are good. buuuuut… did i get The Doki Dokis? not really, more like i just, appreciated them? yes.

[misireads]

The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

a suspense story told on three layers. in chronological order, the first layer is an 18yo teen mom's PoV where she struggles with not wanting to be in a relationship with the baby's father but feels pressured to stay, then she falls in love with an eccentric artist girl from her school who lives in an ancient mansion and the two start a secret relationship. the second layer is the teen mom's mother's PoV during/right after the girl and her bf both have disappeared during a pool party at the aforementioned mansion, and the police starts a lazy investigation into it but are mostly just "well maybe the teens got tired of being parents and ran away" and the search is eventually closed. the third PoV is that of an outsider, a young woman and cozy crime novel author who moves to town after marrying a guy who starts as the local school's new headmaster, and she ends up doing some real life detective work trying to solve the disappeared couple's mystery. there are also the rich family's daughter's suspicious friends involved and whatever else

➕ i don't have a whole lot to say tbh, jewell's novels feel like a well oiled machine, every piece of the suspense puzzle is very calculated and neat and it just works. i also liked how nobody was a particularly good person here, everyone was a bit guilty and/or wrong. it wasn't a story of, like, one psychopath treating everyone else badly boohoo.

➕ bonus for girls kissing girls i guess

➖ i started this in a mood of craving more suspense mystery stories and ended it not feeling it anymore. i didn't find myself caring about the story much, i didn't care about the characters and what happened to them, i'm kinda done with these family-focused tragedies. i think the reason i tend to be more entertained by YA (and anime) is that nobody has babies and husbands. kinda at a point where i'd want something else from my books.

➖ this one also just rang a bit hollow with all the different PoVs in general, i would have preferred just a story about sophie the mystery book author who moves to the countryside and ends up solving a real mystery. now she and her story felt like just an afterthought plastered on top of thalula and scarlet and kim's more weighed story. which didn't really work for me because sophie was the one i was interested in

⭐ score: 3 -- so inoffensive that it got no flavour whatsoever. i think i'll put suspense stuff in the back burner for a bit now.

[misireads]

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

two women born on the same day, in the same area of london, have a chance meeting on their joined 45th birthday. one of them, alix, is a famous podcaster and the whole book is framed as a podcast and netflix true crime documentary series about the events that unfolded after the other woman, josie, asked if alix could do a podcast episode on her because her life is "about to thoroughly change" and she wanted alix to document it. josie is a bit unusual from the get-go and alix is intrigued enough by her to agree. both women also have problems in their marriages, which josie tries to use as some bonding leverage, but during the recording sessions for the podcast, she gradually reveals more and more about just how fucked up her marriage and entire life has been. things escalate when a badly beaten up josie appears at alix's door one night at 3am, saying that her husband attacked her. but this is only the real beginning of alix finding out what she's gotten herself into by connecting with josie.

➕ this was the first book in a long time that had me OBSESSED from the start, i couldn't stop listening for like three days straight. clearly a novel written for true crime documentary fans, which i am. the structure of the whole book follows the true crime doc format, with an innocuous enough introduction part and sinister hints dropped here and there, and then things start escalating little by little. this story even comes with baked-in descriptions of people saying something dramatic for a cliffhanger and then the screen fades to black and the netflix episode ends. jewell really nailed the mood with this one.

➕ given that the title literally says nothing about this is true, it was fun to try and guess which parts exactly were falsified. but the fucked up thing was that josie is written as a decently likable character in the beginning, so even the reader almost refuses to believe that she would be lying. she wouldn't, right?? the poor woman who's lived in an older man's shadow all her life and is only just starting to find her own spotlight!

➖ this too started dragging a little towards the end, it was on track to be a 5 based on the beginning because i was just that hooked, but then the excitement and momentum died a bit towards the end… the points were hammered in a bit too excessively during the uhhh climax. and the very end… could have lived without that.

➖ walter's character is so thoroughly disturbing, that left me feeling i have no idea what the fuck i just read. judging by reviews, everyone kinda feels the same way.

⭐ score: 4 -- i feel like i would have wanted to like this more than i did in the end. still, it was a really solid thriller experience, exactly what i look for. i think i'll try a couple more jewell novels next.

[misireads]

Myrrys ("Sage") by Anniina Mikama

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

a charles dickens-esque story with a sprinkle of magic set in the kainuu region of finland in the famine years of early 1800s, niilo is an orphaned boy living in poor conditions as a slave in a wealthy-ish farmer family. his life is shit, especially thanks to the cruel master of the house, but he cannot complain since the family bothered to take him as a small child when his mother died. one day a local sage takes niilo as his apprentice as the payment for curing the family's son's leg that's mauled by a bear. niilo is scared of the sage at first because of his reputation as a witch doctor doing black magic in the middle of the woods, but the man turns out to be a fine lad and the first person ever who treats niilo as an equal human being. they live together for almost a year, going through all sorts of experiences and little adventures together, and become close friends. niilo comes to love the wilderness and the forest and also learns some magic from his new master. although niilo's life has drastically improved, the fact that it did angers the asshole father of his old home who continues being a menace to both him and the sage until the bitter end. on the side, niilo begins to learn more about his late parents, what really happened to them, and what kind of future they intended for him.

➕ so this is a book for younger teenagers, it was in the children&teens area at the library, so it has a juvenile vibe that softens the harsh themes a lot. it's a mid-length book, almost 400 pages, and somehow felt simultaneously very long, like the story felt very big for a book of this length, but was fast to read because there's a lot happening all the time also due to the YA nature probably. there are several episodic chapters where niilo and martin go hunting, niilo helps a man out of a frozen lake, etc.

➕ martin the sage is a very sympathetic character, i liked him a lot. niilo has less personality but he's meant to be the young hero character coming from poor conditions and thriving when someone actually likes him and gives him the chance, i find that very dickens-like. there aren't exactly any flaws about him, he's perfect at just about anything he does in the entire book, his "flaw" is that the farmer family doesn't like him. the real MVPs of the story are the pastor who helps niilo to reconnect with his family and the farmer family's son who has the truest character development arc.

➕ the finnish mythology elements

➕ beautifully written, this author's commitment to descriptions of nature and especially the woods is no joke

➖ i don't really like stuff set in historical finland, like the aesthetics of this sort of old-timey living conditions shit are off-putting. i don't even care about museums with this theme or anything.

➖ i was expecting this to have more fantasy elements… the first spread before the real book begins opens with a spell in the archaic finnish style so i really thought that was supposed to set the tone, but it was just kind of a minor element in here after all. i mean it's important, niilo saves the day with his forest magic several times, but overall… just not as much mythology stuff as i expected. honestly my expectations got in the way once again because i was hoping this would be like teen lit about finnish mythology set in modern times so when i realised very early on it's not, it kinda flattened my mood and the start was very slow for me because i was like ehh… meehhhhh…. a farm house in northern(ish) finland in the 1820s….. bleh.... do i have to read this.....

➖ juhani the master of the farm house is such a comically evil character. but i feel like that too is a dickens-esque character archetype? there's the mean, wealthy man who turns out to be fradulent on multiple fronts and it comes down to the young hero to prove it to everyone. still, i just kind of wanted someone to grab an ax and toss it at his head like, five pages in

⭐ score: 4 -- i teared up reading the final page and am not even sure why, maybe some line struck a chord or it was just the story coming to an end. but i never cry at anything so that has to be the sign of a great book

[misireads]

What Kind of Mother by Clay McLeod Chapman

[ audiobook, listened in english ]

a woman returns to her hometown after becoming estranged from her teenage daughter, to work as a palm reader and live at a motel. she reunites with a highschool boyfriend who has become a sombre man who's been grieving the disappearance of his baby son and the subsequent suicide of his wife for the past six years. the woman agrees to help him look for his missing son and their relationship is re-kindled although he seems kind of weird. for a while, she entertains all sorts of paranoid ideas of whether the missing boy is even alive anymore, that perhaps his mother or even his father killed him, and is thoroughly surprised when one day the boy simply appears as if he was never missing in the first place. she soon realises there's something deeply fucked up about the boy, though.

➕ the main reason i kept reading, other than the sunk cost fallacy of "well i only have 5 hours left so could as well finish. only 3 hours left. just one hour jfc i can do this", was that there's uh…. aquatic?? horror? in here that was pretty entertaining to me. some goodreads reviews called it southern salt-water gothic. i like water-related horror and have no explanation why

➕ i'd say it's a plus that this is short but i've never listened to a book this short that felt so fucking long

➖ what a bunch of crazy ass nonsense. i went in thinking this would be a mystery about the missing boy but he appears like half way through. this book has no plot, there's no real story structure, no real mystery to solve. random things just happen. the PoV is mostly the woman but jumps to the man a couple times and both ramble on and on about the most pointless shit. nothing much happens here, the actual events probably took about an hour of this 8-hour book and the rest is the two main characters being fucking delirious, it was very hard to follow at times. i also have zero interest in or drive towards parental love-themed stories so there's that

➖ this reads like the script of a B movie. the "horror" was rather silly, and the body horror is rendered completely pointless by the main character being so unfazed by any of it. and i did pick this up for having been on a list of recommended horror… yeaaaah.

➖ i'm just gonna spoil shit because i don't care, this isn't a good book so you shouldn't read it anyway: so this woman has a daughter, feels sad that she's chosen to live with her father, is happy that she can meet her once a week or something at least. then some eldritch horror creature pretending to be a child she first heard about approximately 2 days ago appears and she's like omg!! must protecc!! at all costs!!! and the monster child attacks her real daughter and tries to like, bite her head off, and the mother is like: aww :( don't do that :( i love u :( sweet child!! and takes the boy and. leaves. and uuhh. yeah alright. so that's how many shits she gave about her daughter actually??? i truly don't understand what this story is trying to say. and what the fuck is a "peeler"???? it doesn't mean anythiiiingggg

➖ every time i thought, okay. this is approaching the end, there can't possibly be anything else to tell in this story, we're done. it continues. and continues. and nonsense shit happens. and happens. and happens. the crab child is eating something weird again, ok cool. the crab child is being all kinda weird and strange again ooooo oooo ok cool. are we done now? no? no we're gonna keep talking about crabs coming out of his ass for another hour? mm okay i see. dear god. i think 90% of this was the author's unauthorised stream of consciousness

➖ thhhee mmmaaaallle nnaarraatoooorr oooff thhhee auudiiiooboookkkk haaasss thhheee slooowweest drAAAWLLLlll iiiiive eveeeer hheeaaardddd. still slurring at 2x speed. which by the way, didn't make this book go by any faster

⭐ score: 2-

[misireads]

Detroit by Katri Lipson

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

the story of two young ice hockey players whose careers abruptly end at the height of their NHL stardom: one of them, timothy, is paralyzed from neck down after a particularly nasty tackle in one of their matches; the second, nathan, goes haywire after the accident and gets himself fired from the team. despite their prior closeness, nathan refuses to go see tim in the rehab facility for over a year. the story's perspective jumps between the two boys, tim's nurse at the facility, and a random hooker that nathan hires to keep him company while he's psyching himself up to go see his best mate and the love of his life

➕ wow wow wow WOW, this was the first book in a long time that took me on a genuine rollercoaster ride. no expectations, many low moments, and i was blown away at the very end. honestly there were so many spots where i was about to drop this, and the fact that i didn't and was thoroughly satisfied and enamored by the end is just positive positive positive to me. this is a very strange book. in a good way.

➕ it's LGBT! lots of very complicated LGBT feelings too. i went in having no idea i was about to get some very dramatic gay hockey boys. damn. like this was some kind of modern gay romeo&juliet tier shit. absolutely blown away, again. this is the main reason i wanted to keep reading let's be real

➕ this author has a mad way with words. sometimes i didn't quite understand the allegories but it's the kinda thing that you just go with the flow. there were also some interesting style switches between different chapters which i just might steal for my next fic tbh

➖ initially i didn't know at all whether i even wanted to read this and was kind of ready to drop it after 20 pages because it's confusing as hell and you don't even know who the main character is. it starts with descriptions about timothy in the rehab facility but there's a lot of stuff from his nurse's and control freak mother's PoV and other random gunk that you're not sure which one actually matters. in my notes i've written "i just hope the boy is gay." well the boy turned out gay but then the hooker suddenly comes in, with nathan who is not mentioned as nathan at that point so my mental image of that initial scene was that we suddenly jumped to talk about middle-aged bums with no connection to the first chapter, "what even." then it dawned on me that oh. oh that's the boycrush? and the hooker is 19 years old? um… weird but ok.

➖ that's where minus number two comes in, the way the dialogue is written is kinda insufferable at most times. that's why the 20yo characters sound like middle-aged drunks. or alternatively like edgy 13 year olds, which i'm more aligned to believe from young jock men, but reading it is annoying as hell.

➖ janet, the blind prostitute, is such a… like why is she even here. does her character exist just to be a plot device in the last couple of chapters? because i didn't get a thing out of her otherwise. she has no character arc like the boys do, no background, nothing. i thought there would be an actual point to her being blind tied to tim also being disabled but no not really.

➖ up until the end i was so confused what this book was even about, like plot-wise. it sure is vague and just kind of. meandering?? as hell. originally it's set up in a way that makes you think that the boys' reunion will be the grand ending and that's the story, but no there's quite a lot still left at that point. although the ending was worth it, it was still kinda… like the arc of the story is strange.

⭐ score: 4 -- this purely thanks to the ending. i just liked it that much. i really mean it when i say this is the only book in memory i remember closing and putting down thinking WOW! to myself.

[misireads]

The Breakdown by B.A. Paris

[ audiobook, listened in english ]

on a stormy night, a young teacher is driving home from a party with friends and decides to take a shortcut through a winding forest path, where she sees a lone car parked on the side of the road. she gives the driver a chance to ask for her help but when they don't, she decides to keep driving and goes home. the next day, a story about a woman having been murdered in her car on the forest road is all over the news. weighted by the guilt of not having helped the woman in the car, the main character gradually spirals out of control with increased paranoia as she believes the murderer saw her that night and is now after her as well. at the same time, lapses in her memory make her worry she's on path to having early onset dementia like her late mother, and all of this combined is also making her previously happy marriage fall apart.

➕ yes i'm back giving ms paris another chance, because she was recommended to me. so did i like this better than behind closed doors? absolutely i did, here we have a genuine mystery thriller with all the cosy tropes and a plot with actual tension! i knew this was a superior book from scene one, it immediately set such a strong scene, i was just YEEHAAAW time to buckle in, finally. it's not the most masterful or unique story or anything and has a bit of a lacklustre deus ex machina resolution, but it's the good old thing. with an ending i didn't see coming, too! obviously behind closed doors immediately put me in the mindset of finding the husband suspicious but [spoiler] humouring that the best friend might be the bad guy was just a wild theory of mine, and i certainly didn't suspect two people. i thought it would just be choosing between the husband and the john guy, where either could be the culprit

➕ a spoiler-free plus point, more vaguely: there weren't a whole lot of suspects in here, but i think the story did a good job juggling with those it had and making you wonder which one it is, steering you this and that way as it went. i don't mind simpler mysteries like this because i'm not very smart so it makes me feel like i can actually participate in the guessing game GNDJGNDJ

➕ the main character is almost reminiscent of victorian era stuff, what a Woe Is Me dramatic bitch with larger than life emotions and melancholy. horrible but great

➖ these bitches be speaking all their stupid ass thoughts out loud in these books tho. sometimes you just wanna reach out a hand and put it in front of their mouths like shush…time to shut up. why are you saying these things in this situation. don't you have even a crumb of self-awareness. AND the fact that she immediately jumps into thinking the murderer is also after her (based on… umm… nothing???) because clearly she's such an important person, some real self-important buffoon behaviour. plus never once thinking the culprit could be a woman, not a man. heteronormative self-important buffoon behaviour?

➖ this isn't a massive complaint since i overall enjoyed the story but the pacing was a bit off. the beginning is a bangin' but then when we get to the silent calls and cass's dementia scares, well about half of those could have been halved or cut out tbh. and the SMS part in the end, it was not only some hyper turbo mode exposition stuff which seems to be a common problem in paris's writing judging by these two books, but also dear god, fucking insufferable to listen to in audiobook form LMAO

➖ speaking of phones. how are the characters in her books so dumb about phones? like, we are talking about mobile phones here, right? i had so many questions about the silent call sequences. why didn't she ever call the number back? track down where the calls came from? why didn't she just leave the line open to a forever stalemate/wasting the caller's time until they have to give up? how did she know the caller was a man? why didn't she just leave the phone be and only let the answering machine work when any important person needed to get to her? why do both the house phone and matthew's phone work but magically hers never does so she can't use it????? this all was some real tedious buffalo shit ass garbage plot-convenient turdmageddon stuff right here

➖ probably there was something else but i forgot because the phone stuff got me so worked up. oh now i remember! maybe the dumbest scene i've ever come across in any book (in recent memory anyway). the main character looking at a room, ""sensing"" that something is amiss (but not actually seeing a single thing, not going in to investigate, nuthin'), and proceeding to verbally freak out about it to the point of calling the police that someone has broken in, like, yes okay sure go ahead and have some fucking sixth sense, but did it not cross her mind for even a second that she could, oh i don't know, have like… evidence? to back her words up? and how it looks and sounds like that she doesn't??? i'm just, i can't. that scene was so fucking stupid, it made me second guess whether i like this book after all. like sure she's messed up from paranoia and drugs and whatever but that scene was very much set up as her being like, 100% confidently saying this shit and underlining how sharp she is feeling about it. well if you're so fucking sharp then put yourself in another person's position for five fucking seconds and think how what you're saying sounds like to them i beg you, jesus christ on wheels.

⭐ score: 3½ -- still, i liked it. maybe because i read it after behind closed doors, which i didn't like. so i was just so happy to have a genuine, atmospheric murder mystery to listen to that also managed to surprise me a little.

[misireads]

Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris

[ audiobook, listened in english ]

a woman in charge of her disabled younger sister meets and quickly marries a man who seems all around perfect and is prepared to accommodate both her and her sister in their shared dreamhouse. right after the wedding, however, the man reveals himself as a psychopath mastermind who only picked the woman because she and especially her sister are easy targets for him to lock up in the house for his Evil Deeds. the story jumps between past and present at different points, finally culminating in the woman's plan to get rid of the husband.

➕ the star of this novel is obviously the younger sister, she's the pivotal character that makes this stand out from all similar novels, and i appreciated that.

➕ i'm about to say a lot of negative things about this book but also need to preface all of that with the fact that i did finish this in a couple of days because i wanted to keep listening, so… criticism or not, i obviously still enjoyed this on some level of wanting to know what comes next. i enjoy the suspense/thriller genre a lot so it was still decently entertaining in that regard, and this isn't by any means one of the worst books i've ever read. it's just…

➖ …that when you're familiar with this genre of "young woman finds herself in a perilous situation because she didn't suspect the man in her life to be a psycho", it's hard to be impressed or surprised by anything anymore. at first i thought this book was predictable and not very interestingly written, but by the time i got to the end, i had started feeling like i'm probably not the target audience of this. i found the main character dumb, gullible and unrelatable and was particularly irked by the writing suggesting she herself thinks she's all witty and smart despite repeatedly acting like an idiot and doing all the most predictable things (and not STOPPING from doing them). this is like the housemaid but with none of its good points -- after finishing this story i actually felt like i was maybe a bit unfair towards that one because it had some genuinely smart and gripping elements that still resonate with me months afterwards. (it also has the ending that this book should have had but didn't because this one chickens out from going anywhere even NEAR that far) but… do all stories need to be smart like that, in the end? probably not. i figure behind closed doors is more for the ordinary normie housewife audience who aren't into the darker side of things and who can relate and wouldn't be particularly witty in a romantic heterosexual relationship with a handsome man they themselves thought was perfect. so, not for me, therefore i'm not sure if i can fairly assess it from my own point of view.

➖ then again, this is my reading blog where i tell MY honest opinions about books so wtf do i care. so yes: i thought this was uninspiring, predictable as hell, the writing was too straightforward and didn't introduce any tension because we are told from the start how things are going to end up and then it just rewinds back to tell how it got there but you already know the outcome so who the fuck actually cares. the husband is presented as suspicious from scene one, there was way too much exposition to the point i felt like the writer was underestimating my intelligence as a reader. the main character is dumb and slow as hell, the little sister with down's syndrome absolutely seems the wittier one of the two and i don't know if that's on purpose or if the protag is just that poorly written. the thriller part of this was very very softcore, i think as a horror hobbyist and a fan of all kinds of fucked up media this is just not for me, and i shouldn't have gone in expecting anything more than images of beaten up people and a room painted in red being the most horrible thing the character has ever seen. the author is clearly in love with her own ideas of how to make the husband as clever as possible but none of his actual atrocities are described in any way, only implied (seriously what WERE the husband's plans?? because this story is so vague about anything even remotely genuinely upsetting so it's only implied that he uuuhh planned to keep the women locked up in some rooms?? and that's the horror? what, no rape, murder, torture??). even the things he SAYS are just conveniently skipped with something like "he CUSSED at me and i was soo scaweeedd!!!" gosh. tough life. i've spent the last few days watching anime where having your limbs torn apart is a minor inconvenience so somehow this just didn't resonate in this moment. anyway

⭐ score: 2½ -- i think there was potential for something, i still like the little sister element in here, but this is not the book i expected it to be so it just kinda fell flat on its face and disappointed me. this was a PG thriller about horrors much more mundane than i thought it would be. i figure that's fine for people who are deeply touched by whatever this was bc the only review i saw on my book app said "the only book ever that made me cry" uumm yeah, well, sure. i almost cried too when the woman was speaking into a mobile phone saying she doesn't know how to call a taxi.

[misireads]

Bolla by Pajtim Statovci

[ physical book, read in finnish ]

set before, during, and after the war in kosovo. an albanian man studying in the university of pristina has a whirlwind romance with a serbian man, all the while hearing that his wife is about to have their first child. the man proceeds to neglect his wife and child (and later another child) to spend all his time with the serb but then flees to belgrad with the family when the war starts a few weeks later. the serb, studying to become a doctor, works as a medic in the war, is severely traumatised, and ends up all kinds of fucked up. meanwhile the albanian guy in serbia treats his family like shit, goes to jail for molesting a 14-year-old boy, then returns to kosovo to be with the past lover who's too fucked up to be with anymore at that point, so the man just abandonds him too and moves to a house on his own. that's it that's the book

➕ i mean… yea. well, this was the first novel i've ever read that's about albanians and serbs, and i always enjoy broadening my horizons about culture and history and the human experience.

➕ there's a bit of albanian folklore mixed in, the metaphors were too philosophical for my brain to follow but i appreciated learning about it anyway. i liked that the author mixed a bit of queerness into folklore. that must make a bunch of people real mad

➕ from reviews i saw people say this is a fitting description of the bleak existence of queer people in a conservative society and i'll take it. it's not an uplifting story but a realistic one about the queer experience.

➕ and the best thing: it's short

➖ to put it simply, i didn't like this. this isn't a kind of book i like reading. everything is dirty and depressing, there's no silver lining to anything, the main character is frankly waste of space of a human being and the narrative doesn't try to hide that in any way, he's entitled and despicable. i find that i'm not really a fan of reading books about despicable people who repeatedly make the dumbest and cruelest decisions. maybe that makes me childish, i don't really care. the final part was particularly unlikable because this dude totally thinks he's playing the part of some kind of tragic hero abandoning his family to go fetch a guy (whom he thinks somehow divine because he slept with him for a couple of weeks 10 years ago) from a mental institution, then realises he's not hot and fuckable anymore and immediately ditches him to move on with his own selfish little life and starts missing his wife. yeah this was not for me.

➖ also again a bit too philosophical with the allegories and whatever. sorry, i'm dumb i don't get it

⭐ score: 2½

[misireads]

Pienen hauen pyydystys ("The catching of a small pike") by Juhani Karila

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

a sickly young woman travels to her small hometown in lapland where the magic and mythological creatures of finnish folklore really exist. she's determined to catch a magical pike swimming in a forest lake, but runs into näkki the dangerous water spirit who's trying to prevent her from fishing. meanwhile elsewhere, a policewoman from the south who knows absolutely nothing about the region arrives to investigate an alleged murder committed by that very woman.

➕ i'm a mythology enthusiast and finnish folklore is obviously especially close to my heart, so i loooove that aspect of this novel. there are some that are the author's own creation and some based on very well known mythology, so i really liked the mixture of both. this almost goes to magical realism territory because the existence of all this magic stuff is so self-evident to the residents of lapland.

➕ the plot here reads like an anime or a point-and-click mystery videogame and i'm all for either. it's very "elina has an objective, she needs to do thing x to get to point y. but there's this puzzle that makes her do objective z first before she can get to x." and näkki is the final boss, even the dialogue with it was very anime villain-ish.

➕ another story about a small community full of weird people, especially the POV of a stranger coming in to witness the normalised strangeness (and then learning to normalise it herself) was really enjoyable

➖ the beginning was totally magical, but somewhere in the middle with the long-winded exposition of the main character's past and relationship drama got a bit stale for me. i guess i would have preferred this to remain somehow more otherwordly throughout.

➖ the anime villain-like dialogue wasn't entirely positive, as you can imagine. it got a bit unintentionally silly.

⭐ score: 4 -- i don't have much to say, this was a rather short book and fast to listen to, and i liked most of it a lot. maybe the banger of a beginning raised my expectations a bit too high even so the rest didn't quite deliver, but whatever.

[misireads]

Män som hatar kvinnor ("Men who hate women") by Stieg Larsson

[ audiobook, listened in finnish ]

an investigative journalist and the head of a magazine named millennium is convicted of publishing a fradulent article defaming some billionaire guy and decides to step down from his position. he's then hired by an elderly former CEO of a powerful family enterprise to travel to some tiny ass town in the middle of nowhere to investigate what happened to this old man's great niece who disappeared 40 years ago. mikael the journalist accepts the assignment, not expecting to find anything new at this point, but is drawn in deep into the vanger family's troubling history and broken relationships with each other. his research is eventually joined by a very weird young woman named lisbeth who turns out to be one hell of a hacker, and together they not only solve the lost niece's case but also reveal how that billionaire that mikael originally wrote about is even shadier than expected.

➕ this is really three stories in one: the story of mikael and millennium and the wennerström guy he wrote the article about; the story of the vanger family and the mystery of harriet's disappearance; and the story of lisbeth, her past and present, a total deep dive into what made her the kind of person she now is and how she operates. and i looove that, i really enjoy layered storytelling. when you go in, you don't know what to expect and there's the intrigue about mikael's sentencing, then you're thrown a curveball about this really complicated family, all while lisbeth's story kinda plays in the background seemingly unrelated. this captured my attention wholly and completely.

➕ i adore lisbeth's character. she's implied to be neurodivergent, a total bad bitch who doesn't take shit from anyone, defies all expectations, is independent and resourceful despite nobody having any faith in her. she gets back at her tormentors in the most satisfying way.

➕ the vanger family deserves its own plus point because i just love stories about weird families with internal conflict and tons of skeletons in the closet and the protag has to kind of dig it all out because nobody is willing to speak but it's obvious there's something very wrong about these people. though the truth about them turned out to be so gross instead of just weird, it's really off-putting but

➕ i liked that this was a mystery solved by a journalist and a… well whatever lisbeth is, because i'm not really a fan of police or detective novels. i mean i've read some good ones but i dunno, i always prefer stories about laypeople solving mysteries and crime.

➕ this is soooo swedish.

➖ could have been a bit shorter, some parts kinda dragged on. although i liked the ending, there were like 3 hours left of the audiobook by the time the harriet mystery had been solved which made me kinda… okay time to speed the audio up to 1.25x because this is gonna drag the fuck oooon.

➖ content-wise this gets really really gruesome. it was almost a bit much even for me.

➖ not a minus about the book itself but i find it in such poor taste that the english translation is titled "the girl with the dragon tattoo" which is a reference to a very minor detail about lisbeth and it just does nothing for this novel or anything in general. i can understand maybe they didn't want to call this "men who hate women" (which is the literal translation they kept for the finnish title) for international marketing purposes because it would deter so much of the male target audience lmao (i don't think it does in sweden and finland??? just saying). but the original title packs way more of a punch because that's exactly what this book is about, it's about misogynism. and that title is so self aware. but no, instead you make it "the girl with the dragon tattoo" and lisbeth isn't even the main character. she's a secondary one, a sidekick to mikael. this book isn't about her per se and most definitely not about her tattoos. what a stupid choice. i don't want to watch the film versions because i worry they made this way more about her than it should be.

⭐ score: 4- -- one of the better mysteries i've read in a long time for sure. i don't think i'll go for the sequels though, i had my share of mikael and lisbeth already. the audiobook was like 18 hours long.