Carmen Maria Machado is a talented writer, but her favored structures and motifs do not mesh with mine. At the prose level, I appreciated this collection of short stories. And I was interested in several of its themes, but dismayed by others. I'll lay out my thoughts story by story and then provide my general thoughts in more depth at the end. The Husband Stitch- ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ I'm not hiding it. It just isn't yours. While I think this could have been expanded upon more cleverly,

A lover? Maybe. Something tender, anyway. But tender like a bruise. It was worth it completing the whole series, but this installment was a lot clunkier than the rest. Even though this book dragged at points, I actually think it could have benefitted from being longer , or split into two. Because the reason it dragged was not that the plot wasn't exciting—it's that it wasn't developed. It felt like much too short an amount of time to accomplish a convincing prison camp, amnes

We ate dinner, all of us together again, and I can still remember the tired, backlit image of an average man who thinks he's exceptional. After that, he cleaned his dentures and went to bed. And this is a day lived? This is a human being living a day of his life? A exercise in grief, a portrait of postpartum psychosis, and an existential temper tantrum all rendered in 150 pages of startling prose. First, I must thank Sara for gifting me a gorgeous copy of this book (we've met

Really great premise. Lackluster execution. Endless potential for a movie (again). I'll sprint my way through almost any game-centered dystopian story, but that doesn't mean all of them end up being winners. The Running Man had all the bones to get there, but a few of its vital organs were missing. The concept here is simple: a man has 30 days to be hunted by the nation or win $1 billion if he can survive that long. There's so much room for cool action sequences, clever esca