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Upsetting but well done, this book is great in how it deals with grief, identity and the migrant experience. It's very scary too. Content warning for dog lovers :(

I've been pre-warned this one is going to be a bit upsetting

It's starting to feel like I'm dishing out five star reviews simply because I'm enjoying reading so much. Well here comes another one I very much enjoyed.

Unquiet is a mysterious, gothic, and almost romantic story of a young woman (Judith) faced with the return of her supposedly dead brother-in-law. He (Sam) can't remember what happened and is compelled to stay hidden; Judith is alarmed at the idea of keeping news of his return from her absent sister as well as the impropriety of having a man in her house while her family is away. You see, it's 1893, a woman can be rooned.

Unquiet mixes together folklore, superstition, visual art, ambiguity and a very strong feeling that something isn't quiet right. I loved how it stayed so tense without too much needing to happen. Very deft.

Started this a year ago, and left it for a long time before coming back. It's an anthology, so always a mixed bag. The best stories are brilliant - my pick is The Centre by Alison Whittaker. The rest are a mixture of good and great. Some are very contemporary, others told in the familiar style of Dreamtime stories.

This book is a near-perfect study of an author assuming their entire readership will be like them - USian white het dudes. It does better than John Dies at the End on this front, but once you notice it's hard to ignore: someone is a reporter or a lady reporter: a man or a black man etc etc. The author also goes out of his way to make jokes about black people, not wildly racist ones, rather expressing an urge to laugh at not with. My position on this kind of stuff is to read, use your brain and notice, and move on. It really just means I'm unlikely to recommend the book to anyone else. Aside from all that stuff, it's a much better book than JDatE. It is a novel rather than a series of episodes and it's a lot funnier. The story itself is a bit thin and while it's full of action it is missing some development of ideas (like about fear and the psychology of groups) and world-building for the spiders, baddies etc. Still, I read it quickly and stayed engaged the whole time.