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[fureverbookworms]

the validation i get from seeing my goodreads tracker say "you're 2 books ahead" is rivaled only by the endorphin rush i get from actually reading

[fureverbookworms]

How about in 2024 we stop it with reading books with the goal in mind to finish the book so you can add it to your list of read books and start reading books slowly and intentionally with the goal to rip it into pieces with your mind and be touched by it and formed by it and changed by it

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Plain Bad Heroines review

This book has EVERYTHING. Eerie atmosphere, vintage lesbians, contemporary sapphics, apples, a French curse, yellow jackets, some Blair Witch shit, a reminder that HP Lovecraft was a racist, and a boarding school!

This book tells two stories. The first follows a cursed all-girls boarding school in the early 1900s, where sapphics are dropping like flies (or yellow jackets?). You get glimpses into the daily lives of the students, the school’s founders (a closeted lesbian and her secret lover), and the land itself. It’s very gothic, very atmospheric, and the yellow jackets will have your skin crawling.

The second story follows a trio of young women in contemporary Hollywood who are trying to bring the school’s story to the silver screen. Here, they have to dodge the trials and tribulations of filming in a haunted school while also trying to discern what is real and what is movie magic.

I really enjoyed this book! The dual timeline felt very cinematic and reminded me of a season of AHS or The Haunting of Hill House. I also liked how both storylines achieved a differing degree of spooky. The older story is more ostentatiously spooky, but the film story does a great job of blurring the edges of its reality. Sure, there are elements of each “spooky” scene that are clearly put there by the movie crew. And then there are the unexplainable parts, the ones that start wearing away at our trio of heroines.

I’ve read a few other reviews for this book and they take issue with the ending. I disagree with the claims that one timeline is anticlimactic. The Hollywood story works best as a slowburn on the spooky elements. If it went too big on the scares, it would detract from the build up in the Brookhants story and its twist. Additionally, for me, the dread in the Hollywood story is derived from the characters never being sure who exactly is pulling the strings: the director or something unseen?

This isn’t the most gruesome book or a scared sleepless tome. But it’s engrossing. I couldn’t put it down once I got invested. Danforth does a great job of bringing life to both storylines and her characters. The girls feel human, especially Libbie and Alex. They get jealous, they get flustered, they get mad, they fall madly in love. They fit so effortlessly into their stories.

4/5 stars

[fureverbookworms]

Mister Magic review

Do you also have a fascination with the idea of lost media and wonder what ever happened to that show you watched growing up but no one else seems to know about it? Do you also have a metric ton of religious trauma? Well, this is the novel for you.

This story follows Val, a woman who was essentially yanked off the grid when she was eight years old. She doesn’t remember anything from her life before, until her father dies and suddenly people claiming to know her arrive at the funeral. They tell her that they grew up with her on a children’s TV show and that they can take her to meet estranged mother. Against common sense, she feels drawn to them and gets in the car. What follows is a whirlwind of revelations, grief reconciliation, and religious trauma.

I loved the premise of this story and I think using a TV show as an illustration of children’s religious indoctrination was a bold move. Does the metaphor get very heavy handed? Absolutely. But it reminded me so much of when I was younger and attending Vacation Bible School just to have something to do over the summers. We were singing the songs and playing the games and making the crafts and generally having fun, all while “lessons” were being whispered into my ear.

I did enjoy Val and seeing the conflicting emotions she went through as she processed everything thrown at her. White does an understandably great job of capturing the guilt that compounds after leaving a tight knit group such as the Circle of Friends (or the Mormon church). Val seems to always be feeling an array of different emotions, often snowballing off of each other throughout each page.

But, there are times where the other friends simply feel like a checklist. We have a gay black man who is also a suppressed artist. We have a smooth talking, mischievous likely Latino man (I cannot remember if it was explicitly stated) who was sent to a Troubled Teen group to sort himself out. We have a stay at home mom with six (6) kids and a husband who couldn’t be more of a misogynistic asshole if he tried. I can see the point the author is trying to make, that folks like this were dimmed by the church’s influence and still rejected. But it ultimately feels like there is just a lot of pointing out and telling rather than showing.

I had a similar gripe about the “villains.” They felt so cookie cutter, just some generically bad evangelicals who are trying to brainwash the youths. This book might have been shocking to the senses a few years ago, but the fictional evil feels very lackluster on the coat tails of the real evil religious groups exposed in the last decade or so. I wish this book had been a little longer and gone a bit deeper into the side characters, the Big Bads, and magic system at play.

Overall, I was hooked for the concept and early chapters. I had really high expectations based on how things were being set up but the story does get lost in the sauce.

3/5 Stars

[fureverbookworms]

100 queer books: horror edition 🔪🩸

disclaimer: i have not read majority of these so cannot guarantee good rep! please feel free to add any i didn’t include

with fall right around the corner, i’m in the horror mood! queer horror (or horror in general) is a genre i never thought i’d be interested in! i have always avoided horror movies because i am a massive scaredy cat and have very vivid nightmares but for some reason i am really loving horror in book format! i will admit, i haven’t read anything TOO scary yet though haha i will be adding a lot of the books mentioned in this list to my tbr and hoping to read a lot of horror this fall 🍂💀🕷️

[fureverbookworms]

The Ultimate Dark Academia Book Recommendation Guide Ever

The title of this post is clickbait. I, unfortunately, have not read every book ever. Not all of these books are particularly “dark” either. However, these are my recommendations for your dark academia fix. The quality of each of these books varies. I have limited this list to books that are directly linked to the world of academia and/or which have a vaguely academic setting.

Dark Academia staples:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

Dead Poets Society by Nancy H. Kleinbaum

Vita Nostra by Maryna Dyachenko

Dark academia litfic or contemporary:

Bunny by Mona Awad

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

White Ivy by Susie Yang

The Cloisters by Katy Hays

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Black Chalk by Christopher J. Yates

Attribution by Linda Moore

Dark academia thrillers or horror:

In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

Ghosts of Harvard by Francesca Serritella

Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

The It Girl by Ruth Ware

Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian

Dark academia fantasy/sci-fi:

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Vicious by V.E. Schwab

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

The Betrayals by Bridget Collins

Dark academia romance:

Gothikana by RuNyx

Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake

Dark academia YA or MG:

Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

Crave by Tracy Wolff

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Dark academia miscellaneous:

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip

[fureverbookworms]

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez

Note: I read this book about four months ago and I am writing this based on my brief Storygraph review and what I can recall from it.

This book is a multi-generational saga that follows a man and his son trying to escape the clutches of an Argentinian cult through some of the country’s most tumultuous decades. It has horror elements, but I wouldn’t hold it in the realm of your typical King or Hendrix novels. Rather, it’s more of an overarching gothic, heavy atmosphere that mainly focuses on the horrors of generational trauma, colonialism, and political unrest. There is also just a hearty dose of gruesome body horror and magical realism.

I was enamored with the world building. I wish I could go back and erase the first two thirds from my mind to experience them again. Enriquez does an amazing job nesting this cult and its history within the actual historical atrocities surrounding the characters. Some of the more harrowing parts have some foundations in reality, such as the exploitation of indigenous children by plantation owners and the mass graves of the politically disappeared.

Another key element of this book is Juan and Gaspar’s relationship. Enriquez does not craft a morally perfect father figure in Juan. We are first introduced to this man who is desperately trying to save his young son from the clutches of this cult, Gaspar, but then he later morphs into a man who will do anything to protect Gaspar from his own fate, including being his son’s abuser. I think that swapping from Juan’s point of view to young Gaspar’s point of view at the time she did was a genius move for tension building. The reader has more of an understanding of Juan’s motivations and reasoning for his actions than Gaspar does, but we experience those actions through the lens of his victim. It adds another layer of gut twisting dread to the reader every time the two interact because we simultaneously know that Juan is doing what he sincerely believes is the best thing for his son and we have to watch this man be his son’s monster.

I am deducting just a fraction of points purely because it was so long and the story did seem to get lost in the weeds at times. I wouldn’t gripe about it, but the ending was confusing and a bit lackluster in my opinion. There are so many parts of this book that I remember vividly (such as the AIDs vignette, Juan and Gaspar’s road trip, the World Cup saga, “Haunt me,” the reveal of the children on the plantation, etc) but I cannot for the life of me recall how the main issues of this book were resolved. I do remember being confused and needing to go back a couple of times in an effort to figure out what the hell just happened.

That said, I’d be down for a reread or revisit this via audiobook if I have the time. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to be utterly immersed in the author’s work and read an incredibly heavy, slowly paced epic.

4.5 stars

CW: child abuse, body horror, violence, racism, classism, homophobia, the AIDs crisis, death of a parent, graphic sexual content, gore, torture. (Essentially, if it’s bad, it likely makes an appearance in some form or fashion).