This Spring, we at WWAC are reading everything from lyrical fairy tale retellings to sob-fest memoirs, to Absolute Classics. Join us for the ride!
Carrie: So I am a fan of Japanese Breakfast and Michelle Zauner, singer and guitarist of the musical project. Yet I never got around to reading her memoir, titled Crying in H-Mart released back in 2021. So I read this book within a week: while it absolutely had its hard parts to read through, I was really moved by Zauner’s easy way of pacing me as a reader through her life. Crying in H-Mart is very much a book about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and ultimately forging her own identity as a person and moving forward. I felt it was very much a coming of age story that I felt very honored to read with food—Korean food—as a guide. Can I state that reading this memoir has led me to evaluate my own relationship with my own mom? These pandemic years have exposed some of both me and my mom’s flaws and had us colliding and avoiding each other for small periods of time.
It is an experience to see not only your parents’ age as they deal with health conditions, but also to be able to start to see that your parents…are people, outside of being your parents? Our mothers had lives before they birthed us, some dreams we may never know about and some secrets we may never be privy to. So I must say that with a certain level of privilege, with sincerity and sympathy to Zauner, I still have my mother. I feel a kinship to the author and creative because she has written about the complicated yet loving relationship that I also have with my own mother—something that has validated me as I continue to love and deal with my own living mother—for better or worse.
Lastly, I also deeply, deeply appreciate Zauner’s commitment to pouring out on the page how realistically grief doesn’t disappear overnight, after the funeral or after you clean out that loved one’s room or sell the house. I think of one of my favorite quotes from the book, perhaps the most liked and popular one, in fact: “It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.” Not all memoirs are written well—yet Zauner’s addition to the genre is fleshed out to show that she eventually survived and surfed the waves of loss and mourning that threatened to swallow her up in the years before. This memoir serves best as a beautiful tribute not only to Zauner’s mother but to the life her mother led and the love that shaped and continues to shape the creative in all that she does.
Christa: On a recent trip down south I really needed to pack light, which meant I could only bring one paperback with me (a true nightmare). I stared at my to-read pile for days until finally settling on Everyone in this Room will Someday be Dead by Emily Austin. In it, Gilda, a young atheist lesbian, reluctantly takes on a job at a Catholic church after being mistaken for a job applicant. Juggling her new role, terrible anxiety, a secret girlfriend, and impersonating a deceased receptionist via email, she faces a moral dilemma when the death of the previous receptionist is investigated by the police.
As an anxious, queer, lapsed Catholic the premise of this book immediately appealed to me, even more so when I found out the author was local to me. And it may not have been the stereotypical vacation read but it was the perfect fit for my trip. Gilda is such a compelling character, you can’t help but want her to succeed, but she also keeps you on your toes. Just when you think she might be making progress she’ll take a left turn.
It’s also funny: I often found myself snorting with laughter. There’s a line about electric chair earrings that still makes me giggle when I think about it. But it’s a dark humour, so depending on the company I was in, I couldn’t always explain why I was laughing, which was somehow even funnier. If you enjoy dark comedy, slightly unstable characters, or just books that are delightfully weird I would encourage you to pick this up. I loved it so much I’ve already picked up her latest, Interesting Facts About Space, to read next.
Emily: I read Everyone in This Room will Someday Be Dead for a book club a few months ago! I enjoyed it, but it felt weird to me that characters named Gilda and Eli didn’t seem to have any connection to Judaism. Both of those are names I think of as Jewish names! Similarly, in Sheine Lende, which I read this month, there are characters with the family name Park, who are described as white people! I definitely assumed they were Korean until reading that description.
Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger came out from Levine Querido on April 16. It is a prequel to Little Badger’s celebrated novel Elatsoe. Illustrated with Rovina Cai’s dreamy swirly drawings, Sheine Lende tells an adventure story from Ellie’s grandmother Shane’s teen years in the 1970s. Like Ellie, Shane can call the ghosts of animals, and uses this power with her mom to find missing people. When Shane’s mom herself goes missing, the stakes escalate.
A highlight of this book for me is the way that in it, teens are competent, and appreciated for their competence by adults, children and each other. There’s a lot wrong in this world, but none of it is the teens’ own fault, and that’s refreshing.
Shane and Ellie’s world is a kitchen sink fantasy, with vampires and fairy rings as well as Apache Lipan Ghost raisers, and the intersection of magic from different realms turns out to be key to this plot. Overall, however, kitchen sink fantasy is not my genre of choice, because at the end, I feel like not enough threads are wrapped up to my satisfaction. The end did not offer the payoff scenes I expected about main conflicts, and some loose ends turned out to be part of the background world-building and never addressed again. That is like real life, of course, but it isn’t as tidy escapism as I like my YA fantasy fiction to be.
A Snake Falls to Earth is Darcie Little Badger’s one book so far that is not in the same world as Elatsoe, and it continues to be my reigning favorite of her work. I feel A Snake Falls to Earth wraps up extremely satisfyingly, so I’m pretty sure my dissatisfaction with loose ends in Sheine Lende is a genre issue and not an author issue.
So: I recommend Sheine Lende as an engrossing nuanced world, with enjoyable character interactions—with the caveat that not all plot arcs have satisfying conclusions.
Alenka: I patiently waited on the holds list for Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad and just barely managed to finish it before it was due back to the library! (Disclaimer: I have not read her Odyssey translation. I might someday, I just haven’t been in the mood for Odysseus’ whole deal.) Wilson is the first woman to publish a translation of both poems, which is one of those milestones that feels really sad when you step back and think about it. She chose to translate The Iliad into iambic pentameter, which makes it technically longer than the original poem but very easy to follow—even the catalog of ships was a breeze!
I’ve started to tell people to pick it up just for the introduction and translator’s note, because they’re fantastic. Wilson discusses several themes of the poem in a very fresh and relatable way; her focus on emotion, the mortal body, the “portions of life” and on women all heavily colored my reading of the poem.
I have joked with friends that The Iliad is a poem about whiny men, but the incredible, often paralyzing fear these warriors feel is understandable in human beings constantly staring down death and spending their days watching living humans fall to the ground as corpses. Achilles in particular really got me with his speech about how the victory he’ll earn for the Greeks will ultimately end his life, and the emotional turn he takes when Patroclus dies is stark and intense. Helen was also very sad to reflect on as a tragic figure; she has very little agency in her life, and has to live with a brutal type of infamy. I’m glad I read it, and now I very much want to reread Song of Achilles!
Kathryn: To venture even deeper into the realm of classics re-examined, I’d like to recommend Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher of the Forest, which was published by Tor in February 2024. The Butcher of the Forest is a dark fantasy novella about a middle-aged woman named Veris who must navigate a cursed forest to rescue the children of the tyrant who waged war on her homeland.
The story starts simply enough as Veris wakes to a rude summons from the castle, but the narrative layers gradually unfold to reveal the mysteries that govern the subtle magic of the woods. Veris has already survived one excursion into the forest, and her past is slowly revealed as she once again confronts its dangers, from sly foxes to shambling zombies to a small cottage where nothing is as it seems.
Even though this novella can easily be read in one sitting, it’s rewarding to take your time exploring the intricacies of Mohamed’s prose as Veris makes her way through the trees. The Butcher of the Forest is a beautiful and haunting place to get lost, and the slow but inexorable unwinding of its ending presents an intriguing portrayal of creatures that are deeply inhuman. This is a fairytale that takes the concept of “fairies” seriously in order to present the reader with an intriguing meditation on the limitations of the power that humans wield over the natural world. I was frightened, and I was disturbed; but more than anything, I was grateful for the chance to journey alongside Veris as she peers into the forest shadows.
Emily: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle is coming out from Tor Nightfire (their Horror line) on July 9th! Taking place in the same world as Camp Damascus, Bury Your Gays stars Misha Byrne, a successful screenwriter with a great boyfriend, living the Hollywood dream and currently nominated for an Oscar. While on the surface his life looks great, cracks in the picture start to appear immediately. His boss tells him he has to kill off his gay characters in the season finale of his TV show. He’s chatting with an elderly cartoonist when a piano falls on the guy’s head and splatters him horrifyingly. It turns out Misha is still technically closeted to his family and friends back in Montana.
And then monsters from Misha’s own horror films and supernatural TV show start showing up to menace him. What’s going on? Tingle presents a fast-paced plot with engaging characters and a timely threat. The ethical issues of using actors’ dead likenesses and LLMs generating scripts are interwoven with a not-subtle message about how creating art about our trauma can be cathartic if we use that art to give ourselves agency. The real monsters are the corporate contracts we sign along the way.
As Chuck Tingle himself says on Bluesky, “read the book that made the macmillan legal department say ‘i dont know about that chuck’. LOVE IS REAL.” It sure is, Chuck!
