Campbell Andrews > Recent Status Updates

“We all have things we don’t talk about... more often than not, those are the things that make us who we are.”

I call bullshit

warning! 8 endorsements on the back cover— all by women, the first whose Nightingale was one of the worst I’ve encountered...

pages 59-61 might be worth the whole book... surprised I haven't already run into them excerpted

origin of the world “clue”— these are the details that draw me to this kind of narrative research

funny how even a world devoid of humanity resorts to a Christ story

the inevitable speechifying grinding the narrative to a halt. I should’ve known

Upping the stakes every chapter mitigates the back-and-forth. This is making Robopocalypse seem like a picture book.

these alternating chapters might portend structural problems...

an R-rated WALL-E, eh? ok

SO, SO much exposition... shouldn't be that way 35 pages from the end

Better have a damn good reason for switching between first & third person

there is no reason why I should read this except it's been hanging around the house and I'm a sucker for time-travel tales

"some sensitivity that she has long kept in abeyance awakening within her"

there is a LOT of this kind of vague self-knowledge intimated; while such confusion reflects a teenager's state accurately, there's just too much of it. one note played over and over

This prose is too fussy, lapsing into the indefinite and ascribing thoughts to characters who wouldn't think in those words (or so many of them)

"There are green tide lines scrawled on the porcelain of the tub, claw-footed and enormous."

Diagnose the problem with this sentence and the prose style itself begins to unravel.

sweet Lord it gets right down to it, doesn't it... nevertheless, it is evocative enough that I will continue.

annoyed by all the withholding but appreciate the moral dimension to the narrative and the acknowledgement of regrets

Her prose isn't particularly distinctive or deft but boy oh boy is she ever great on human behavior and her characters' pressure points.

Ms. Ko has a keenly tuned sense for a person's limits, the point at which he will break and share his secrets rather than be burdened with them any longer.

'Daniel envied people who could take their origins for granted, who could decide to hate their parents."

So many mixed emotions, especially as I'm a foster parent myself.....:

- change his name???! that's straight out of the DO NOT DO THIS playbook

- aquisitional/aspirational/transactional parenting? yep, (wealthy) people do this, though not as many foster parents IME

there's a lot going on here- a whole Netflix series' worth, you could say -but it's simultaneously underfed and over-cooked.

A character just compared another to a new tattoo inked on his back. Quite the contortionist, it seems.