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The Poet X
The Poet X
Elizabeth Acevedo | 2018 | Fiction & Poetry
9
7.8 (6 Ratings)
Book Rating
This is another much-hyped book - and oh man, did it stand up to the hype. Told entirely through poetry, this novel was extraordinarily powerful, and had me sobbing near the end. Xiomara is an amazing character, and her poetry shows us her emotions more than prose ever could.

I've always loved poetry for that reason; especially poetry that plays with formatting - spacing and line breaks and size of stanzas. It's so much more evocative than simple paragraphs of prose. (My favorite poet is probably e.e. cummings, who is rather infamous for unusual formatting.)

Acavedo does similar things, making Xiomara's poetry explode across the page when necessary, and ordering it into simpler stanzas in calmer moments. It's not rhyming, even poetry; this is written slam poetry. And I love it.

Xiomara is Dominican, living in Harlem, with a very strict, religious mother. Her twin brother is gay but not out to their parents; Xiomara is fine with this but knows their mother won't be. Her poems cover her need to protect her brother and herself, both from their parents and from the outside world. She writes about street harassment and questioning God and falling in love with a boy, which is also against her mother's rules. Her poems are at turns heartbreaking and joyous, but always beautiful.

This is an amazing book, and is the second book on my Best of the Year list. I am blown away.You can find all my reviews at http://goddessinthestacks.com
  
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
1989 | Comedy, Drama

"It’s difficult to pick a Woody Allen film. In terms of my favorite person who’s been in a film it would be Woody Allen, so therefore it feels that I’ve got to pick a Woody Allen film. I think he’s the best performer that’s ever been in films, in a way; certainly sound-era films. Just his voice is the best voice that has ever been recorded, I think. Even if he had just been a writer of comic prose, he would have been one of the best writers of comic prose. His best films have so much life to them, and they’re funny. I know he often has a low self-estimation of them publicly, but Crimes and Misdemeanors, in terms of his feeling that he hasn’t made a film as good as Rashōmon or Bicycle Thieves — I think it’s definitely a film that could be held up with those films, really. It’s just very brutal, but funny as well. Just everything: the music, that professor and how kind of depressing it is, but how many great lines it has. And such a good cast: everyone’s really suited to his style. Not every actor is suited to being in a Woody Allen film. Seems like Owen Wilson is really suited to it [in Midnight in Paris], from what I’ve seen, in the same way that John Cusack was so good in Bullets Over Broadway. For me it’s just infinitely rewatchable."

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Suswatibasu (1701 KP) rated Just Kids in Books

Aug 17, 2017  
Just Kids
Just Kids
Patti Smith | 2014 | Biography
10
8.3 (4 Ratings)
Book Rating
Mesmerising memoir of the 1970s art scene
I was worried that this was another overhyped autobiography of another self-congratulating artist. But I was proved totally wrong. Patti Smith is truly unique and interesting, having had a life of hardship living on the streets to living with a partner equally mixed up, to engaging in a world that was the founding of America's modern art scene. More than the meandering, wonderful, dark tales is her liquid prose. She's not only an inspired poet but a fantastic all-round writer. She was known for all of her relationships with famous men, but this is about the one man who mattered the most. Well worth all of the awards.
  
Dead Witch Walking (The Hollows, #1)
Dead Witch Walking (The Hollows, #1)
Kim Harrison | 2004 | Fiction & Poetry
6
8.6 (16 Ratings)
Book Rating
The first in Kim Harriosn's Rachel Morgan series of books, I found that, while the novel has a nice conceit, this book is actually quite hard to get into and was a little on the slow side. I think this is due, in part, to the dense prose used throughout: there were more than a few occasions where I caught myself wondering if I had previously missed something, and ended up skimming back to see if I actually had or not.

On the plus side, the world it is set in feels pretty 'real', the charcters (even the villains) are all pretty well developed, and it sets itself up well for the inevitable sequels.