Spring crushes and slop squelching
👻 💒🪄🧀📚 Everything I read in May
Welcome to June!
The year is half over, and I’m looking at my list of goals like 🫠
Next week I’ll be coming at you hard and fast with another totally normal summer bucket list so you can all hold me accountable….
Side Piece Spotlight
A huge shoutout and thank you to this subscriber1 who started a 5 a.m. fight about my review of 11/22/63 despite never having read the book.
This is exactly the kind of controversy I aim to inspire!
What is a Substack for if not to incite rage?!
Why do you read if not to harass me before sunrise!?!?
This reader is a hero, both for responding to my pleas for engagement and for their impassioned support of the tummy issue community:
It is worth noting that they went out of their way to distance themselves from said community, but they are a vocal ally nonetheless.
A good example to keep in mind as we enter Pride Month.
Onto the books…
The theme of my May reading was “Problematic Lusting.”
We have characters yearning for married women, best friends, enemies, and grooms.
Spring is all about cheeky little crushes, after all!
At least that’s how I’m justifying the surge of this content on my TikTok feed….2
👻 Tell Me I’m Worthless, Allison Rumfitt (4)
A haunted house story about the trans experience, cancel culture, and fascism.
This one is not springtime crush-forward, but holy heck was it good!
It’s also divisive! So many people on GoodReads didn’t finish the book because it was too transphobic, misogynistic, and racist - not realizing that was the whole damn point. Throughout the novel, The House (fascism) seeps into the city and moulds the characters’ viewpoints in polarizing directions that exploit the grey areas of intersectional feminism. It also narrates with some of the most poignant and disturbing political discourse I‘ve ever heard:
Now, if three girls enter a house and only two leave, who is to blame? And if both girls tell a different story, but you read online that you have to BELIEVE WOMEN, what do you? Do you decide one is a woman and one isn't, so you can believe one them but not the other? Do you take the side of the woman who is most like you? Or the most intersectional one? But one is rich, and white, and trans, and the other is rich, and Asian and a lesbian, and cis (?), and fuck, who wins here? In the end it's so hard to choose where your sympathies settle. So, you go online and find an `intersectionality score calculator' on the internet…' Numbers have been known to lie. Numbers have been known to show bias, statistics often have racist undertones, for example.
So, there's just two girls leaving a house and maybe you don't have to take a side, maybe you can empathize with them both and hope they get the therapy and help they need and can learn to forgive one another.
No. You can't do that.
Like come on! How perfect! I have never seen woke commentary executed so well - and in a horror novel!?!? This probably should have been a 5-star, but some of the violence felt gratuitous, and it was so rooted in present-day politics that I’m unsure how it will age. Ask me again at the end of the year.
💒 The Wedding People, Alison Espach (4)
A woman at rock bottom accidentally books the only available room in a destination wedding hotel block.
This book was delightful! The characters were quirky and interesting in a way that felt genuine (more on that later), and at least three mini-twists moved the plot forward in a book otherwise centred on a woman’s mid-life crisis. It lost one star because some sections dragged, especially after delivering one of THE BEST opening chapters I have ever read — for real, everyone should go read those first pages right now.
🐉 When The Moon Hatched, Sarah A. Parker (1)
A romantasy about…something…with dragons that turn into moons…sometimes?
I need to ban myself from BookTok, because this was billed to me as “literary fantasy” with “beautiful prose.” They meant that this book had 730 pages of nonsense that kept it from being erotica. Reading this monstrosity was a feat of endurance, and I am still not sure what happened? We shifted from a #girlboss bestie assassin revenge story to a royal family drama with an amnesia plotline? There was an Ocean’s 11-style poker scene for no reason?? Someone we’d never met was revealed to be someone else’s secret daughter??? There was a 20-page glossary that I did not read (and then paid for dearly when not a single magical creature was described beyond name). Basically:
🪄 And He Shall Appear, Kate van de Borgh (3.5)
A Cambridge music student becomes obsessed with the campus f*ckboy who also happens to be a magician.
Based on this description, you’d think this book was made for me. And you’d be correct!!!! I am a goth-adjacent nerd, and my deepest desire is to slurp up dark academia novels in a Pinterest-inspired book nook.
And He Shall Appear has been added to the never-ending list of books that want to be The Secret History. It — like most — did not live up to the source text. While I found the characters and prose mesmerizing in the first act, the plot didn’t delve far enough into the occult elements to fully pay off. If I had a nickel…
Ultimately, reading this was kind of like eating a gas station hot dog when you really want barbeque: it’s not right, but it’s okay.
🧀 Big Swiss, Jen Beagin (2)
A depressed transcriber starts an affair with a woman whose therapy sessions she’s been listening to.
This was fine. It had some insightful commentary on trauma and donkeys that I liked, but the rest of the book felt like it was trying too hard to be quirky and interesting for the sake of being quirky and interesting. Similarly, the dialogue felt unnecessarily vulgar throughout, and it takes a lot to make me say that! I’m all for being strange and yucky and visceral as long as it feels purposeful in a way that this did not. I’m sorry, Jen Beagin! You’re a funny writer, but I didn’t love this story.
Last Thought:
Me reading any dark academia release ever…
Epilogue
What did you read this month?
Anything I should add to my TBR?
Who else wants to fight me???
Feel free to comment and reveal yourself to the masses
I’m begging any of you to tell me you’re being served these thirst edits, too…Please don’t leave me hanging!
I do t want to fight you, but I’d love you to recommend a book just for me. I don’t think I’ve read any of your recommends since Lessons in Chemistry!!! Love ya anyways