book reviews

I've really enjoyed writing about books as of recent. I love reading, which lead me to seek out content about reading. It was so easy to watch and listen to as I mindlessly knitted row after row of a jumper I am still working on (I will finish it, I promise).

This content scratched an itch in my brain I forgot that I had. It's not like I hadn't known it was there more so had been overtaken by so many other sensations I forgot what it had felt like to scratch it. I had actually enjoyed talking about the plot and themes of books in school (only really towards the end of high school). The conversation was engaging, my teachers cared deeply about making sure we all contributed and understood what we were writing about essays. It was deeper than the curtains being blue despite what a chorus of present day social media users who refuse to critically engage with a single thing they consume. It has always been that deep and a refuse to be that willingly shallow.

In my new pursuit of book content which YouTube had decuded I needed I discovered BookTube. First with Frankie Shelf's video about 13 Reasons Why. This immeadily captured my attention and I went on a binge of their videos. Now some of my favourite 'book-tubers' of the moment are Frankie's Shelf, Ainslee of Shitty Book Club and Lexi AKA NewlyNova. All of these creators never fail to give me something to think about no matter the quality of the book itself. These creators give considerate (sometimes bad faith), reviews and analysis of books of varying genre. Some of which I was never interested in reading but wanted to understand the references people made, and some I read and wanted to know what they thought. Sometimes their thoughts were challenging. It is easy to take that as a personal attack on you, but then you take a breath and realise that no, they don't hate you they just didn't like that one book you like. That is one of the challenging parts of consuming review content. Having your comfortable view of what you decided the book was about, the themes, the writing style, the atmosphere and characters, being turned on its head when someone provides their perspective. But that is also one of the most important and fun parts of reviews. Being able to have your views challenged and not taking it as a personal attack is something more people need to gain a tolerance for. I may have once thought that this comes with age but anecdotally I've seen the older you get the more stubborn you get. Let's hope that we all don't fall into such a trap.

These creators also opened my eyes to more books that I wouldn't have typically read. For a brief period, had horse blinders on and just read non-fiction and memoirs. For a while fiction just did not interest me. I couldn't find things that were really pulling at me, until the Handmaid's Tale. After watching the final season of the show I wanted to go back to where it started, it remains one of my favourite books of all time. Then with the release of Sunrise On The Reaping by Suzzane Collins I was out of my fiction reading slump.

Some of the books I have read this year

With all that being said I wanted to post here my review of a book I read recently, 'Kill Your Boomers' by Fiona Wright. It had some really good reviews I was looking forward to reading it, then I struggled to actually read it. I wish I liked it, I really wanted to like Australian written fiction with a cool albeit American style cover. Instead it fell tragically flat. All if this is just my opinion there are plenty of people who loved this book, I encourage people to read it for themselves.

My review:

So I think I was never sold on it the whole way through. The protagonist Kiera, was just never that appealing to me. While yes, I do understand the trials and tribulations of the Sydney housing market, and yes, I do blame previous generations complacency and complicity. I think Kiera had some work to do herself? The lectures from her parents about “no Uber Eats and going out every weekend” were of course stupid because it’s not like that money would ever be enough for a deposit but I think she should have at least been trying for other nannying jobs? It just seemed like there were so many other solutions before murdering your parents with some homeopathic drug? The whole time I felt like we never saw her actually trying ardently, it was all just low effort snarky comments and “dry humor” supposedly, which fell very flat for me.

The dynamic with the brother was infuriating but very familiar, the golden child who can do no wrong and also gets all the support he needs while the one child who desperately needs support, in more ways than one, is looked down upon. I do in some aspects understand what her parents did by supporting their grandchild (like hello makes a lot of sense to me?) not that it was fair for the attitude that they had towards her asking for a loan. There are so many parents like that though who, because of a gender bias also, favour one child over the other.

As one review I read said, it’s a millennial book, written for a millennial audience, I couldn’t agree more. It does revel in it’s own self pity a lot (very millennial), I feel harsh for saying it because the housing market has systematically been rigged against the lower classes but Kiera was not someone who didn’t start in a good place? She had the tools available to her it felt like she was holding them upside down and telling the reader they were actually the idiots. This is very harsh I know but that was how it read to me.

The ending was also quite abrupt, like you knew the death was coming but I was actually a bit shocked by it still. I wanted there to be some moment of realization of how ridiculous this idea was and that the sweetener would not work or something. Or even that it would work and the toll that would take on the people around her, most notably her parents?! Nope her parents die and she goes to bid on houses. No consequences at all for murdering. Her relationship with them was not negative enough or did not to me prove that the ends justified the means. Just seems a little insane to me. I know this book was a bit absurdist especially with the whole hole thing (oops). I also read one review that said that it wasn’t big enough and I agree. I think because the world felt so grounded in our current reality the hole thing was just never going to read well for me. It felt out of place in such a real world.

I really wanted to like this Aussie author, the writing style is actually really good and it was so comforting to hear about the Sydney landscape for a change. She did a great job describing all of it which is why the plot and humor of it was such a let down. Maybe I am just a little too neurodivergent for this because I did not really get that this was a satire for a while…

The last question of the book club questions at the back of the book is: All the characters behave badly, do you have sympathy for any of them?

The only people I have sympathy for is Kiera friends. Two of which are her housemates who seem to be perfectly normal people with their own struggles which Kiera never cared to learn about because she is an entirely self-obsessed character. Her other friend Dylan and his partner I also have sympathy for because they dealt with an actual death caused by unwanted circumstances in the family and ended up where they were. It just is gross to watch Kiera be like I guess this is the quickest solution to my problem. I think if I liked the humor more than I would have been able to understand how everything played out the way it did.