Paige's Lit Blog 🔥

     Usually, I am not a fan of Young Adult novels, even when I was young enough to be the demographic that was catered to. Akata Witch was a surprise for me, though because it was an easy and enjoyable read that didn’t hang on to the YA cliches like they were sacred. I had always hated YA novels growing up for their focus on romance and the politics and social landmines that come with navigating young love and lust. Romantic side plots in an otherwise decent fantasy novel had always felt like filler, nothing I could really relate to. Akata Witch makes a good balance between talking about feelings and relationships while having the main focus being on the fantasy and adventure elements.      It was also refreshing to have a book where the main cast of characters were actually enjoyable people to be around and actually felt genuine love and kinship for each other. The Oha coven felt like a group of close friends because the author, Nuedi Okorafor, took time...

     This was a book that I had on my "to read" list for a couple years now because I watched a Youtube review of the movie and the premise sounded really cool. I study botany as a hobby and the idea of an eldritch horror based on wildlife sounded like it was so up my alley. After finishing, I was not disappointed by the way Area X felt so familiar and so foreign, kind of like the horrible sweet sickness in your mouth after vomiting. The Botanist was such an interesting character to be put into the mind of, she was very similar to me in a lot of ways and where she was different was as extreme an opposite as you could go. From my research, the book was published in 2014, so fairly recent. Because this book got so popular, being basically a modern classic from what I know, I think it shows where horror is going to go in the future.      There is currently a lot of political and social upheval going on in 2020; a culmination of many decades of negligence and w...

     I have never read a book like this one. No matter how long this writing is, nothing will be able to articulate the ways which I love this book. It is odd, really, I picked out the book because I thought for some reason this was the book that inspired Jenifer's Body, a movie that came out 6 years before the book. It is also odd that I could stomach all of the sex. I have known myself to be asexual for some time, but I'm not sex-adverse, just uncomfortable. Despite this, I was completely enraptured by Carmen Manchado's writing.      Out of the lot of stories, I liked Inventory, The Husband Stitch, and (especially) Especially Heinous. The Husband Stitch felt like such a natural elaboration of what I can only assume to be the classic tale of the woman with a ribbon around her neck. I know the story from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, but I can only assume that it is a popular tale because of how Mancahdo tells the story straight, this tine from th...

Since Kwaidan is a collection of short stories, I am going to section off my analyses by story. The stories I chose were based almost exclusively on title alone. Mimi-Nashi-Hitoshi: I think what I like most about Asian, especially Japanese, folk tales is how spirits vary in their morality to the point of almost being a caricature of human personality. Like in this story, a lot of spirits are banal until disturbed. What counts as a disturbance varies a lot, sometimes being extremely silly, like the appearance of floating ears. Overall, I loved this story. It was very cute… except for the ear removal. Of a Mirror and a Bell: This was a weird one. The actual story was way shorter than I was anticipating it to be. The explanation of the term nazorareru was really insightful into the religious and cultural beliefs of the Japanese people at the time. Despite that, I can not help but be wary of how accurate the information actually is, because looking at the cover of the book, it seems to b...

I don’t think I have ever read a book that has left me as at a loss for words as The Terracotta Bride has. The tone felt akin to a YA novel up until the end where, just as I was expecting the story to start, it stops poetically. The only asian-centric media I have read are anime, so I found myself looking up a lot of words as I read. Despite that, I was entranced by this Malay-English amalgamation that was the afterlife. Hell in this novel seems to ideologically combine Buddhist and Catholic hells together to create this sort of punishment through damnation where everyone, even the spirits living in the tenth court, live though. Everyone experiences it differently: the physical torture of the lesser spirits, the constant paranoia of the wealthy spirits to keep surviving, and the romantic repression of Siew Tsin. As a self-proclaimed tragedy lover, I honestly did not see the twist coming at the end and how resigned Siew Tsin was as a result. Most likely because of culture differences, ...

I was not expecting to have as much of a fun time with this book as I did. I knew the basic plot points from my many years of binging youtube book reviews, but I was enamored with the constant shifting of perspective, from the interview to the recollection. I have only seen these types of storytelling methods in heist movies or comedies, but the cuts to the interview add a needed layer of retrospect from Louis that makes him a well-rounded character. Claudia was such an interesting character as both an examination of vampire culture and as another driving force in Louis’s life. Her and Louis’s relationship as a mixture of parental love, kinship, and partners was unique to me. Usually the roles are reversed, the older man being cold, calculating, and brutal and the younger woman being passive, emotional, and devoted. The reversal was such a nice change of pace, it kept me reading until things fell apart in Europe. Louie being such a passive character in general was such a nice balance ...

I honestly couldn’t tell you why, but reading Just Wanna Testify felt like walking through a shopping mall covered in a thin, almost unnoticeable film of slime. I have always been put off by the bougie lifestyle, but when Cleage describes the way the vampire coven lives and works, it makes me want to skip ahead a couple pages. Which, in hindsight, is kind of what she is trying to make the reader feel. I think it has something to do with how the vampire mythos is used in this book. For all intents and purposes, the vampire women could just be diet-crazy and rich just like a lot of people in the world today. This interpretation has given me an insight to how older gothic novels would have felt to the readers who were living when books like Frankenstein and Dracula were new. How Serena talked about her and the other coven members put me on-edge, hesitant and anxious from the sense of power she gives off, must have been similar to the fear within the readers of the 1800’s. Also, when rea...

I was expecting to know a good amount of the plot points and major themes of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde going into the reading because I am a fan of the musical Jekyll & Hyde. However, when I started reading I was very confused by the point of view character being Mr. Utterson and the genre being a mystery novel. Once I understood what was going on, I liked the original approach to the story more than the musical’s. (Although the musical soundtrack is still nostalgic and catchy. (I’m looking at you, Confrontation.)) By writing the novel as a mystery, Stevenson allows the readers to engage with the horrors he presents in a more active role by making the readers want to figure out the mystery. The mixing of mystery and gothic elements presents an interesting dichotomy in the readers of the time, making them want to emotionally distance themselves in the more horror parts, yet emotionally engage during the mystery. This conflict mirrors the characters of Dr. Jekyll a...

I have listened to and watched a decent amount of videos and podcasts that tell an abbreviated version of Frankenstein, yet had not read the full novel until now. Going into the novel, I expected the narrative to focus more on the time when Dr. Frankenstein was constructing The Monster than the period afterward, steeped in the doctor’s paranoia. I was pleasantly surprised by the focus instead being on Dr. Frankenstein’s views on death and tragedy. Shelly put emphasis on the way each of the major deaths of the story revolved around the doctor’s ego more than the tragedy of their individual character. Through this I can see The Monster being an avatar for death and the story being a way to work through the human horror of witnessing your friends and family die while you live on, helpless and grieving. From what I learned of Mary Shelly’s life at the time, must have been a very cathartic outlet for her to express her grief and rage. As well, I appreciated the nuance in the way Shelly wrot...

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