Folklore Book Tag

Little Fires Everywhere is a book about what it means to be a mother – does it mean carrying a child or caring for it, adopting or giving birth to it? Celeste Ng starts with a tragedy and goes back in time, as everything slowly unravels. The ending had some ambiguity and left some things unanswered, but all in all it was a very interesting portrait of morality, with an explosive ending.

We Are Okay is about a college girl struggling through depression and mourning a loss. A friend of mine is actually writing a play script for this so it’s pretty fresh in my mind. The ending was hopeful and sweet, but it was definitely an understated, quiet book exploring a difficult topic. Very bittersweet!

I read the Iliad and the Odyssey in school and thought they were interesting, but the prose was dry, clinical and repetitive. Madeline Miller really brought myth to life with Circe. It was all the same stories I’d read before, but in a way that was human and had me emotionally invested as a reader.

Cool title? Check. Cool cover? Check. Cool concept? Check. Cliche, overwrought, too long and with a meandering plot? Unfortunately, yes. For me, this book just wasn’t it.

A Little Life is so gorgeously written and really just absolutely devastating. Definitely a tear-jerker and not necessarily the happy-ending type.

I was in high school when this book first came out. As an introverted teenager who was often depressed and sometimes felt isolated from my peers, this book just hit me in the feels. It experienced a surge in popularity years later when it came out as a movie and I’m glad a new generation is able to relate to it. Really a Catcher in the Rye for our time.

My mom recently reminded me of the Max and Ruby series of books by Rosemary Wells. I especially have a special place in my heart for Max’s Chocolate Chicken. I used to love hearing stories about these little rabbits as a kid. Max was especially naughty, which I think I related to as the second child, who was constantly testing boundaries.

Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a book about transitions, a book that takes place in that amorphous space between college graduation and adulthood. That last summer before your “real” life begins. It’s about fleeting youth and entanglement and dissolution of relationships and friendships. The quintessential “summer” book.

Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine deals with social isolation and overcoming childhood trauma. It’s the story of how a broken and desperately lonely young woman finds friends, her place in the world, and herself after trauma. Really a beautiful and touching book.

We The Animals is just so lyrically and beautifully written. It’s about pain and childhood and coming into yourself, but the prose is just dizzying. I remember the words staying with me a long time after I closed the book.

I literally remember the moment Kurt Vonnegut was introduced into my life. It was the summer after my first year of university. I was at my high school friend, Colleen’s house, and another friend, Melissa, brought up Kurt Vonnegut. Melissa was (and is) a quintessential “cool” girl so when she mentioned Vonnegut, it was immediately on my to-read list. After all the “required” reading of high school, this book just hit in a different way. It seemed expansive and worldly and forbidden and my thirsty brain just drank it all up. I feel like I was so open to learning and soaking up new experiences at the time so it came at the perfect moment.

I loved Gideon the Ninth, so I couldn’t imagine loving Harrow The Ninth quite as much. But Harrow is such a badass – a necromancer who’s literally losing her mind and trying to piece together everything that’s happening. Someone who knows the weight of her birth and expectations and refuses to buckle beneath them.

Never Let Me Go was so sad and hauntingly beautiful. If you were made to die from the moment you were born, how would you find meaning and happiness and hope and love? If you were an “extra” in your own story, what story would you tell? Really just an awesome concept and book.

This book is all about longing. Longing for that forbidden romance, for a time in your youth, for your first love, your your first infatuation, that first time your heart breaks in a million pieces. Really beautiful, heart-rending book.

I know I’ve said it a million times, but I am a ride-or-die Ronan Lynch fan. I just love that bad boy with a soft inside trope so much. And not bad boy like “abusive” and an actual jerk, but just a guy with tattoos who dresses grungy and seems intimidating, but is an actual kitten.

I hate to keep using this book because the first book was so promising and I think diverse books are important. But this sequel was just not it for me. Long anticipated and super disappointing.