“Oh, but history moved in such vicious circles.” In the grand finale of the Poppy War trilogy, R.F. Kuang writes with increased pace and skill. Rin’s journey is more hard-hitting than ever. The circumstances begin to fall into place with her as a truly monstrous yet compelling anti-hero. Rin, now…
I’ve had Boy Parts by Eliza Clark on my to-read shelf for a while now, but I never actually got around to tackling it. But readers know all too well that sometimes we need escape from the romance and fantasy through blunt contemporary works. And how else through the lenses…
The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus. With the emergence of a deadly, incurable virus within animals, humanity has turned to cannibalism to satiate its hunger for meat. Now, the field of slaughtering and domesticating humans is a large one,…
I won’t tell you whether it has a happy ending or a tragic ending…neither you nor I nor anyone can ever really know whether a story is happy or tragic. There is a melancholy that permeates through this entire book. It toes the line between alienation and friendship, hope and…
This was a pretty difficult read. Given the history of the author, it’s easy to surmise that Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar isn’t just some detached piece of literature; it’s eerie how likely it is that the musings of our narrator, Esther, were articulated through Plath’s thought process in how she perceived…
Persuasion is my second Jane Austen book after Pride and Prejudice. Stylistically, there are some major differences that I can assume make these books appeal to different groups. If I had to sum it up simply, it would be that while Pride and Prejudice excels in wittiness and character development, Persuasion embraces more of…
Valerie Solanas is the perfect example of a woman angered by society and her own views of the world. Perhaps not inherently a lunatic, but she’s definitely taken it upon herself to rant on the shortcomings of men. Her language is crude, her descriptions brutal, yet theres something invigoriating to…
I have mixed feelings about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. On one side, I want to appreciate the lyrical mastery of the prose; on the other, I’m disgusted at how this very prose portrays our narrator, Humbert Humbert, not as much as a monster as it does a mere protagonist in passing.…
‘Can I take your coat?’ Cupcake offers. I turn to her. She’s looking at me so hopefully. So willing to take a coat I’m not wearing, I almost want to give her my skin. Mona Awad, Bunny Bunny by Mona Awad is a delightfully bizarre and experimental book that is…
The Dragon Republic is R.F. Kuang’s second installation to The Poppy War series, and a hard-hitting punch that fantasy needed so badly. This book has been so unpredictable, so action-packed throughout. It is, undeniably, a striking display from an enormously talented writer—600 pages of pure, readable goodness, chock full of ferocious rage and…