River of Teeth / Sarah Gailey

River of Teeth is a hundred pages and change, which results in a four hour-ish audiobook, and my biggest takeaway from it is that I wish it was longer. Here again we have a great concept well-executed, but it is Very Rushed, and listen: I like a good twist and/or turn, but if a novella has a "but theEeEeEeEennn" moment every single scene it gets to be a BIT MUCH. And the action moved so quickly and I couldn't get a grasp on how much time was meant to be passing and I was like "I know I'm SUPPOSED to feel betrayed/shocked/happy about what these characters are doing, but I haven't had time to get attached!!!!!!!" 

A definite strength of this book is the very varied cast of characters. There's a non-binary character who is always referred to as they/them, even by people who don't like them or want them gone. No one uses gendered language as a weapon against them, and there aren't scenes where they have to explain what their pronouns are, or explain what being non-binary is, they just ARE, and it's refreshing. There's a scene in the book (mild spoiler ahead) where the crew has to decide what to do after losing the only white man on the team when there's someone expecting a white man to come and get something, and it was nice to read about a book where the world looks like the world actually looks. 

I WANTED TO LIKE THIS MORE, is what I'm saying. I'm hoping the second book is a little less break-neck and a little less "but it turns out"-y with one or two fewer Shocking Reveals. You know? Gimme them good hippos. 

Bird Box / Josh Malerman

Yesterday I saw the trailer for netflix's adaptation of Bird Box, and my reaction was to immediately (after watching Jeopardy, of course) go get my copy of the book and start reading it because IT WAS FINALLY TIME. I've owned Bird Box for several years, and just never brought myself to actually read it, until now. I started and finished it last night and now here we are.

Usually when I read a spooky and/or scary book, I have to either not read it at night or read a VERY GENTLE palate cleanser before falling asleep. So when it was time to go to bed but I wanted to keep reading, I bundled into bed with Bird Box almost finished and with Age of License / Lucy Knisley to get me to sleep sans nightmares. Now don't get me wrong, Bird Box has some good, evocative scenes, and pages that I read very quickly because the action and the tension were moving so quickly. But when I read the last page and closed the book, I didn't feel like I needed to read something non-scary. I still did, because I luv 2 read, but I didn't neeeeeed it. The ending of Bird Box is fine, it's just a little lackluster. It's a fine book! It feels like it could have maybe taken another round of editing? The way I feel about Bird Box is about the same way I feel about Horrorstor: it's a great concept executed well, it's just not a Triumph of Literary Genius, and that's fine!!! I think what may have happened here is that my expectations for Bird Box were off from what Bird Box actually is and that's why I'm feeling a bit weird about my reaction to it!!!

Bird Box was fine! It wasn't bad, and it wasn't amazing. It was nice. I've lifted a gif rating from Alley to explain how I felt about this book: