↣ red clocks | leni zumas

• a good book, but not great. the other's in my class that i read this for talked about how scary it is because of how much they can see it occurring. that seems so extreme to me, i just cannot imagine this every happening. i can honestly more easily imagine the opposite, in which abortions are legal at any time and forced upon women.
• i feel as if the motivations and inner thoughts of the characters were not as clear or as focal as they could be in a book about women having different motivations.
• i felt a little...apart from the story. the tagline of the story is 'what is a woman for?' and it clearly wants to include different viewpoints and type of women, but i find that there's an underlying message against motherhood. zumas seems to be saying that motherhood is only something forced upon women, something they are trained to want, something that opresses them. as a woman who very passionately wants to be a mother, and a stay at home mother at that, and has not made this choice out of pressure from society or my husband, this viewpoint does not sit well with me.

↣ boy, snow, bird | helen oyeyemi

• a soft retelling of snow white, not as prevelant as the blurb would have you think.
• it's a good book, i like the characters but feel they could have been fleshed out more
• boy's protection of bird is a more welcome depicition of motherhood than any in red clocks.
• the ending, and the reveal of boy's mother being the ratcatcher, aka her father, just felt so unnecessary and poorly executed.
• i wish we had gotten snow's point of view, but i understand the choice not to. but i do love a good generational story.
• i'd like to read oyeyemi's other books, she seems as if she's someone with a very characteristic voice.

↣ the haunting of hill house | shirley jackson

• this is the first of jackson's works i've read and i loved her style.
• this book is actually terrifying, by way of not actually revealing if there is something paranormal going on or not.
• everyone but nellie is frustrating, but it's great, because you never know if they actually are, or if it is all in nellie's head.

↣ mr. splitfoot | samantha hunt

• not my favorite, i felt as if there was a lot of potential, but it got off track somewhere.
• i'm just sort of eh about it.

↣ the house on mango street | sandra cisneros

• short and sweet.
• the ending, in which leaving a place and the people that stay behind, was so personal to me and it brought me to tears.

↣ another brooklyn | jacqueline woodson

• good, but unlike the house on mango street, i felt like it could have been a little longer.

↣ gemma doyle trilogy x[https://listography.com/maybemay/books/gemma_doyle_trilogy_reread]

↣ the incendiaries | r.o. kwon

• this is another tough read for my women in literature class. i didn't really like it, per say, it wasn't awful, but the characters don't seem to have redeeming qualities.
• i am glad that my professor has assigned the books she has, even though some weren't wonderful. they've introduced me to some new authors and have inspired me to read more female-written contemporary novels.

↣ home fire | kamila shamsie

• okay, but it took quite a bit of the book for it to be any good; isma's section was boring, and the dialogue (and character) were so stilted and boring; eamonn's first chapter was boring, but his second chapter was when it started picking up
• i thought ending with karamat lone's pov was an odd choice, but whatever
• (tell me i wasn't the only one to imagine the actress that played djaq on bbc's robin hood as isma)
• okay, an amendment to my thoughts, because i am gaining a new appreciation for this novel as we discuss it in my class. the latter half of the book is really good, especially now that i know it's a retelling of antigone.
• parvaiz' chapters especially are so, so interesting. this is a viewpoint that we do not often get in media, and it's so fascinating to me.

↣ emergency contact | mary h.k. choi

• no kidding, this is one of my favorites i've read so far this year. it reminded me of a mix between eleanor and park and fangirl.
• it was just a really cute book, i liked it a lot

↣ his favorites | kate walbert

• really short, and also not very good.
• it was so choppy to me, i just couldn't get into it.

↣ heart berries | terese marie mailhot

• i really like this memoir. it reminded me of lidia yuknavitch's chronology of water, which is stunning
• this was less stunning to me, but it was also much shorter and much, MUCH different, so it's hard to honestly compare

↣ a guide to being born | ramona ausubel

• odd, very, very odd. but still good. just might be weird for some people.

↣ the peach keepers | sarah addison allen

• the first of her books i've read and i quite liked it. it was a nice little magical realism story.
• i was honestly expecting more magic, but i did like how casual the magic was.

↣ the bloody chamber | angela carter

• my first carter and i am intrigued.
• she's dark and graphic and visceral and i really liked it.
• i'll definitely be reading more of her stuff

↣ mr. fox | helen oyeyemi

• second oyeyemi of the year and my favorite of the two.
• took me a little to get used to the format, but i generally liked that it was made up of short stories.
• honestly, the last story, the story of the red fox, made me cry, it was so beautiful and the perfect happy ending, but a real happy ending, not fake fairy tale happy ending

↣ salt fish girl | larissa lai

• a very odd but good book.
• i feel like the concept was really great, but lai tried to shove too many genres and themes into one novel.

↣ adele | leila slimani

• not spectacular, but way better than the nanny, the other of slimani's novels i've read.

↣ his majesty's dragon | naomi novik

• i listened to this when i found out i was pregnant, and listen, LISTEN, i would die for temeraire.
• also, fuck that asshole who mistreated his dragon and fuck everyone in the corps who treated their dragons like shit.