Maya > Recent Status Updates

What the fuck is this book I can’t stop turning pages

Written so precisely to make you feel so horrified every time they drop something like “she was in fact such a hard worker that she brought her radium paint home with her”

Interesting character dynamics with the main couple's identities and relationship complicated by dynamics of race, ethnicity/"belonging", and sexuality. I don't think I've seen such a sober straightforward example of the harm cultural appropriation can cause in any media

Re-listening to the goat of YA romance for pride month

Plenty of gripes I have w the writing but more than that, eeeeeek!!!

The brewing paper is about usage of downward-punching insults like “gay” and the r-slur from characters with low social status themselves (and is probably deconstructive if not pure structuralist). I can’t write this paper but I want to read it

Technically beautiful but the heavy tell-don’t-show is making it hard for me to get invested…since it’s a story about a very aesthetic-forward sport being told thru a visual medium I’d expect the art to carry the skating sequences instead of such heavy narration

Love reading this w the context of a journal article I read last semester about how Hinton as a high school girl at the height of Beatlemania and how that may have impacted how she created a cast of boys w distinct personality archetypes who are emotionally vulnerable and affectionate towards each other, much like a boy band

Finally reclaiming my life after Mrs. Lowman made my group read Gulliver’s Travels in 8th grade instead of this

Feels like far too many specific people are named and their hair/eyes/personality are detailed, but that also makes it terrifying - we were letting thousands of young women poison themselves with radium in a near enough past that we remember their eye colors!!!

Stunningly good pacing and characterization so far

Ooooohh the feminist and gender crit paper I could write on this book

“One kid comes out and before you know it everyone else feels empowered to be themselves from the football dudebros to the suspiciously single history teacher, everyone clapped” is so incongruent with my lived experience of quiet acceptance that every time a YA book does it I feel like we’ve slipped into an alternate dimension. I love hopeful queer stories but the circumstances feel so fabricated (classic McQuiston)

I would probably enjoy this a lot more if I didn't hate McQuiston so much (I thought it'd been long enough that I could go in neutral but I was wrong). I do think they made the jump to YA well. There's a lot of emphasis on how you don't know everything about your friends + classmates even if you think you do

McQuiston sure loves a detective

Adult book April

I know this may shock you about Dad Rock Dragon Quest but the prose isn’t amazing me

For a huge hot dark queer scifi novel of last year this writing style sure reminds me of 18 y/o me (my library loan is due in 3 hours so I'm cramming lol)

"She's eighteen at most, though he'd guess lower if he had the capacity to mentally withstand the implications of it. Her belly shows through her dress, barely. Certainly not big enough for this to be anything but a tragedy." <- exact cadence 18 y/o Maya loved

This is the third book I’ve started reading this year without realizing it’s about autism

Utterly charmless.

Treadmill audiobook - writing is just as obnoxious as I remember and knowing that the girl narrator dies at the end to deepen the male narrator’s perspective on life, and that it will definitely be revealed that his mean childhood prank where he stood her up for the dance was actually orchestrated by her mean girl friends, the internalized misogyny is running rampant. Men can do no wrong!

Gang I've had this checked out from the library for over two months and this is as far as I've been able to get. Sonora please pull through

It is such a breath of fresh air to read such nice prose

Someday I’ll return to a physical copy of this but the audiobook is not working for me :/ apologies to the author but she should’ve had someone else narrate

Put this on hold 1 year+ ago but going to pick up again ahead of this year’s trans day of visibility

Confused if I'm just really out of it or if this is truly just one of the most disjointed books I've ever read

My favvvvvv favorite as a kid. It’s still super overwritten but the jump in quality and richness of story is ridiculous

Again this series covered much darker topics than I remembered (I remembered that this book was about a hateful plantation daughter who died in the uprising but the first book's ghost was a mother wrongfully executed for her sons' murders and the male lead's biggest regret is not being able to help a classmate who was facing bullying that drove her to suicide)

Read an adult book challenge fail. Burn through my kidlit TBRs at unprecedented rates going swimmingly!