"My body is not my own." I'm speechless and my stomach is in knots. The social commentary in Sayaka Murata's Earthlings (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori), about the expectations and pressures society puts on people, and how people put those pressures on each other, is delivered so matter-of-factly and dealt with so aggressively that it heightens disturbing events to a level of disturbing I didn't think was possible. And THAT ENDING, what the hell?! Murata does not hold back. Earthlings is so incredibly weird, devastatingly sad, and deeply distressing, and then the ending got gruesome and even WEIRDER. This would make a good pick for the bravest of book clubs, because you would have endless things to talk about, and…

Alpha Bots is a take on The Stepford Wives with a robot-powered feminist uprising front and center. It's fast-paced, funny, satirical, and absurd, with some campy horror thrown in (some parts are downright gruesome). Other readers have said this is Stepford Wives meets Fight Club meets Truman Show, and I think that's pretty spot-on. These AI women represent the desires of bottom-of-the-barrel cishet men, from expectations of submissiveness to racial fetishism, but will they be able to push beyond their programming? The satire gets dark, and this is not going to be everyone's cup of tea. It's not for the faint of heart, for sure. I feel like Alpha Bots caught me when I was in just the right mood…

Kindred was my second experience reading Octavia Butler and I'm now convinced I must read everything she's written. Good thing I signed up for the Octavia E. Butler Slow Read! Over the course of two years, we'll be reading Butler's entire body of work. Plus, I need to discuss this incredible book with others. It's a damn shame this wasn't required reading in my high school. Kindred got me thinking more about history, ancestry, racism and colorism, enslavement, and intergenerational trauma. It was terrifying and real; Butler's writing style gets the reader fully absorbed in both the setting and the main character's state of mind. And the way she implemented time travel made it so difficult to put the book down.…

I read Erica Bauermeister's The Scent Keeper for a book club discussion. There was a lot I loved about this book, especially early on: how magical things seemed when Emmeline was viewing things as a child, and how that gently shifted as she matured; the mystery of why she and her father were on this island, and how she didn't know anything about the rest of the world; the way scent can trigger memories and feelings. The book fizzled out in the last third, though. What had felt like hints of magical realism didn't carry that same intrigue. There was more telling than showing, characters started to become flat and one-dimensional, and things wrapped up far too quickly and neatly,…