Pink Fiction Club

  For a while, it was impossible to exist in any of the book review spaces on the internet without someone bringing up this book and praising it intensely. However, a few of my friends whose opinion I cherish have read it, and hated it. This is also the story of how I ended up adding it to my goodreads want to read list that my husband stalked in order to buy me books for my birthday. Since I had a physical copy, courtesy of my amazing husband (love you very much) I decided to see this for myself. This is just as much of a train wreck as I expected it to be. The premise of the novel is that we follow Violet (or Violence as her enemy-to-lovers guy insists on calling her) who was supposed to be studying to be a squire get thrown into school where they will learn how to become riders or die trying. Violet has no personality beyond being small, not like other girls, has silver hair (how many times can an author remind us how special Violet is because of this) and horny to all hell. The...

This book has been on my TBR for this year since the start of the year and as we are nearing the end of 2024, I decided it was finally time. Perhaps, the fact I did not check the novel summary before reading it influenced my experience reading it, as I was not in the mood for the post apocalyptic novel where the end of the world has been caused by a disease. Fair or not, I did not enjoy this novel at all, as I found it rather dull and uninspiring, leaving a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, it was another case of a somewhat interesting idea done not so well. The main character and the narrator is a young woman of Chinese heritage, Candace Chen, living in New York city. The narration is split between the now where the world has already ended and the past. In the new, Candace joins a group of survivors, who are all led by Bob as they try to make it to ‘The Facility’, scavenging for what they need along the way while her past is showing her mostly dull daily routines until the two timel...

  ‘Wild and Wicked Things’ is imagined as a sapphic retelling of ‘The Great Gatsby’ , set in the jazz age with a sprinkle of magic and historical fiction. What’s not to like? Unfortunately, while  ‘The Great Gatsby’ will remain etched into the American and world literature, not because of the glitz and glam of the age, but because of the criticism of it, I am afraid that ‘Wild and Wicked Things’ has not even gotten close to the level needed for that kind of veneration. The story follows Annie, a naive young woman, who came to Crow Island, a place filled with magic and mystery to settle her father’s estate. However, as she moves about, she gets intertwined with the forbidden magic and meets Emeline, the local witch. This, in combination with the idea that all of this is set post WWI in which magic is very much real but forbidden drew my attention. I really wanted to like it, but the author did so little in so many pages I found myself skimming through so many pages of Annie’s q...

  I have not heard of this book at all until I have seen two of my best friends read ‘Follow Me to Ground’ and love it on Goodreads. As I trust their judgment, I decided to give this one a go. I have not had a very good reading month in September, so I was very excited to announce I have adored everything about this novel and found it incredibly eerie, haunting and magnificent all in one. The book is very ambiguous, but I believe it gives the reader just enough clues to follow the narrative and understand the horrifying things happening in the novel. It is one of the best uses of magical realism I have read in a long time and I truly hope that Sue Rainsford’s other work (that I will definitely be reading) is just as successful as ‘Follow Me to Ground’ The novel follows Ada and her father, who are not entirely human, but creatures who have the ability to heal humans, or ‘Cures’ as they call them of most illnesses, either by breaking them apart or burying them in the ground and allow...

  I am not even sure where I came across this book, but the title and the overall plot looked interesting enough to download it on my kindle. Additionally, I have been on a mission to read a bit more books outside of my usual genres and cannons, so a contemporary novel by a well renowned Japanese author seemed like a very good idea for that. However, I believe that I was simply not the right audience for ‘Lonely Castle in The Mirror’. It is far from a bad book, but at times I found it quite childish and not mature enough to be dealing with the themes it has tackled. I do have to put a disclaimer here that I am thirty years old, while the characters in the novel are much much younger than that, as they are all pre teens. In that sense, it is logical that I would not relate entirely to them and their problems and I could imagine that somebody much younger would appreciate this book more than I did. Also, I have read this in English translation, so I am leaving the option that some o...

  One thing about me is that I have FOMO, so I will read almost everything that I see is popular just to see what all the cool people are talking about.  Morgenstern's prose is magnificent, truly a lyrical experience in the prose. Her sentences are lush, gorgeous and they truly feel like poetry at times. Her writing made me want to purchase a physical copy of this book just so that I could underline them and keep her sentences in my head. However, the problem is that this is not a 600 page epic poem, but a novel. Unfortunately, I found myself getting kind of bored at times. The overall idea is absolutely fantastic, but I wish it had better editing. Shaving off like a third of this book would have made me enjoy it so much more.  The descriptive nature of the overall story became repetitive after a while. The amount of time the author mentioned bees and honey in the last 100 pages made me start hearing buzzing.   I am not a stranger to a novel that does not reveal...

  This book was another one that I picked up because I read about it everywhere on the internet. It was advertised as a sapphic novel with elements of body horror and mystery. I am not the biggest fan of any kind of horror, least of all body horror, but the more positive reviews I have read, the more interested I was in finding out what was happening in this novel. I finished it a few weeks ago, and I am still not completely sure how I feel about it. ‘Our Wives Under the Sea’ is the debut novel by Julia Armfield and it follows the story of two women- Miri and Leah. Leah has just returned from the deep sea mission that went badly and took longer than anticipated. Although Miri is excited about her wife returning, it becomes painfully obvious really quickly that something is seriously wrong with Leah. As the story progresses, the narrative is intertwined between the present day falling apart of their marriage and Leah and their past as we try to piece together this story and understa...

  Although I have not read very many good reviews about the debut novel of Coco Mellors ‘Cleopatra and Frankie’, I still decided to read ‘Blue Sisters’ as I liked the topic and the concept. This follows three sisters-Avery, Bonnie and Lucky as they all grapple with the sudden loss of their sister a year prior. They all receive an email from their mother that their family flat is being sold and they need to go back and go through their deceased sister’s things before they are thrown away. I expected so much from this story. Even though I don’t have sisters, I was always fascinated by how well (or in this case not really well) these sibling relationships are presented in fiction as they are such an important part of so many people’s lives. Unfortunately, I found ‘Blue Sisters’ attempt to tackle so much that what this ended up being was an incredibly superficial and surface level discussion on grief, sibling relationship, addiction in many forms, adultery etc. Each sister has somethin...