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Month: June 2023

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin

I think I have a pretty good sense of humour. I love comedies such as Arrested Development, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Community, Schitt’s Creek, Party Down, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place, The Other Two, I could go on and on. I try to see the humour in every situation (within reason – I am not completely heartless). But it seems like every book I have bought lately that is supposed to be “hilarious” I do not find funny at all. Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is the latest such book, but the reason I did not find this book funny is because it hits way too close to home for me.

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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Okay, so I totally get the hype surrounding Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, although I would not go as far as John Green and call it the best book I have ever read it. It is a fantastic novel, though. It is a compelling and epic story about friendship that will suck you in and shatter your heart before putting the pieces back together so you feel content with the end. The characters are so well developed and complicated and mostly likeable, that you cannot help but become invested in their fictional lives. Not many books can make me cry, but this one certainly did.

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Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

I think we have an unhealthy obsession with true crime. There is a plethora of true crime podcasts to listen to, and Ryan Murphy keeps churning out one true crime miniseries after another on Netflix. A recent series of Murphy’s, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, is about the serial killer who killed at least seventeen men between the years 1978 and 1991. Evan Peters played Jeffrey Dahmer and there was some online chatter about how empathetic he portrayed Dahmer, which led to some viewers developing a crush on him as he portrayed a serial killer. The family members of Dahmer’s victims said they were not consulted about the series. They have had old wounds ripped open and watched their lives turned into entertainment without their permission. But nobody cares what the people who survive monsters like Dahmer think, so long as they can produce content to satiate the public’s thirst for these “intriguing” men who commit murder. Danya Kukafka subverts this disturbing mania for serial killers in her thought-provoking novel Notes on an Execution, where the serial killer’s life is told through the perspective of the women in his life, revealing that there is nothing intriguing about serial killers after all.

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Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley

Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley

Warrior Girl Unearthed is a sequel of sorts to Boulley’s debut novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter. Perhaps not quite as good as Firekeeper’s Daughter, nonetheless I still enjoyed reading Warrior Girl Unearthed and wish there had been more novel to read. I appreciate the opportunity to revisit the Ojibwe community on Sugar Island, Michigan, and the characters from the first novel. I hope Boulley writes more novels about them.

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