Lisa Eckstein > Recent Status Updates

"I've always thought there was a certain irony to it, the way that successful deception requires what might otherwise be considered empathy: the ability to accurately imagine someone else's point of view."

I have been reading this in short chunks and savoring the mystery, but it's also a book that could be devoured in one sitting, and I may end up finishing it that way.

Off to an intriguing start!

Wow, a LOT is happening here!

Multiple perspectives, multiple time periods, very exciting!

Cool the way the story is developing. I'm hopeful these characters can reach a happier ending than most in this situation.

These characters are going through so much!

As expected, this is already harrowing. The young main character has been sent off to serve a sentence at an infamously cruel institution (based on a real reform school also fictionalized in Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys).

Caught up in the protagonist's story and the pieces that are gradually being revealed.

Glad to be getting another side to the story of Annihilation!

I'm into this, but I don't understand why Zelu's family is so against everything she does.

I'm interested in the frame story, which is more involved than I expected, but the tenant stories seem pretty arbitrary and mostly not that compelling.

This has been sitting on my shelf attracting my curiosity since last year. There's more to the frame story than I expected. Will be interesting to see how the tenant stories tie in or don't.

I'm really getting into every level of this story!

I enjoyed the final story, "Cemetery Sisters", which combines several creative elements into a satisfying whole.

"Four days ago, she’d come to class full of rage because the student whose 'story' they were workshopping that day had written twenty-five pages in which none of the sentences related to one another. There was no system or logic to the sentences. Nothing. Just gibberish. Like a robot attempting to be creative and getting the very concept of what that means all wrong." Entertaining and intriguing so far!

"And They Will Rise From the Oceans" is another story about demonic possession that escalates tensely.

Such an interesting range of stories. Overall they all lean toward horror, but while in many stories the horror is supernatural, sometimes it's just the horror of how people treat each other, as in "Miss Black Little Hill of 1965" and "The Invisible Son".

This is absorbing and definitely weird. I do hope there will be explanations by the end, and hope I'm not expecting too much in wanting that.

Not all the parts of "The Wishing Well Off Fordham Road" worked for me, but I found the ending really satisfying.

Finally giving this a try. Unusual and intriguing!

"The Curl of Emma Jean" is an intense scene between two sisters who are trying to come to an agreement while focused on very different concerns.

The title story, "Doll Seed", is from the point of view of a Black doll who just wants a child to love her but instead is pulled into the 1950s doll tests (designed to show internalized racism among children) and the general racism of the era.

The ending was not in fact very satisfying. I liked all the moments in the story but wish it had come together into something more.

A very character-focused story (as I expected). It's interesting, but I do hope it ends up somewhere satisfying.

Enjoying the close observations of the family relationships.

Cool seeing the range of stories, though there are of course some interests the author returns to. "Etta, Zora, and the First Serpent" is surprisingly about Zora Neale Hurston summoning a spirit. Another spirit is invoked in "Family Line", which packs some emotional power into a few pages.

"The moment was itself and it was years of moments spiraling, becoming something new each time we sang these songs and asked these questions." Nice to read a scifi novel that involves Jewish characters and a Passover seder, using tradition and belief to good effect in the story.

A lot of interesting ideas in the first story, "Nussia", about an earth family hosting an alien youth not long after first contact. It ended up much my darker than I was expecting.

Neat bit of synchronicity that the first story involves alien first contact while I'm also reading another book about aliens landing on Earth.