★★★☆☆ A well-worn Gothic premise in the novel setting of 1950s Mexican countryside. This book hits all the best Gothic cliches, i.e. a young woman is sent to a creepy remote mansion with prickly secretive inhabitants and uncovers a terrible mystery…

★★★☆☆ Unpleasant to read. Wong’s paints her recollections in lurid, sensational, and vindictive grotesqueness.

★★★★★ This book pre-dated and predicted the pandemic, manipulating the ruptures and revelations of a fictional plague event to comment on contemporary life and society. This book is set in my hometown of Vancouver and is deliciously local.

★★★★☆ The idea of extracting the bone marrow of Indigenous people is so chilling. But Indigenous people having the unique ability to dream in this post-apocalyptic future is a beautiful counterpoint, and something that is given several incredibly evocative narrative moments.

★★★★★ This might be the best book I’ve read all year, and certainly the best and smoothest reading experience I’ve had in MONTHS. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an adventure fantasy/myth retelling set in Mexico in the 1920s Jazz Age.

★★★★★ Anne Carson’s continued mastery of the fragment just makes my gay-ass heart sing. The book is a reproduction of a collage epitaph Carson made for her estranged brother upon his death in the early 2000s.

★★★☆☆ My experience reading the book was one of constantly being taken out of the story by how alienated I felt from the experiences and concerns of Offred as a white woman written by a white woman.