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Rachel Unkefer

runkefer@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 6 months ago

Reader, writer, mostly literary fiction with brief forays into nonfiction and poetry

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Rachel Unkefer's books

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Chéri and the End of Chéri (2022, New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The) 4 stars

Millennial Angst from the Previous Millennium

4 stars

The best part of this book is the second half, which was a sequel to the first. The first half depicts a middle-aged Parisian woman's affair with a late-teenaged boy, and the second half focuses on that boy/man after coming back from serving in WWI to a world that no longer makes sense to him. The writing is evocative but not flowery, unsentimental and sometimes scathing.

Klara and the Sun (AudiobookFormat, Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group) 4 stars

"Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the …

A lot of setup for not much payoff

3 stars

What even was this? A parable? A fairy tale? An allegory? Was it about religion? About artificial intelligence and how it can spawn its own superstition? This seemed to me a huge amount of world-building and excruciating detail just to say‚ what?

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (AudiobookFormat, 2021, Macmillan Audio) 4 stars

It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; …

Review of 'A Psalm for the Wild-Built' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I wanted to read this because I had heard about this genre of “hope punk” or “cozy punk,” and I was curious. As I expected, there was no real conflict, or any jeopardy or much in the way of stakes. But this is what the genre is about, giving a break from the catastrophe that is our current world, so on that count, I would give it a high score, but I prefer novels with more at stake and more conflict. But I can see how many who are very stressed in everyday life and stressed about the planet and technology might take comfort in this sort of a book (not that I’m not stressed about these things, but I guess I’m used to higher level of stress). I don’t expect to continue with the series, but who knows?

July's people (1982, Penguin) 4 stars

When South Africa is riven by war and the Smales, a white couple, take refuge …

Review of "July's people" on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

A compact gem that says so much in so few pages. First published in 1981, it is still relevant in its portrayal of relations between races, the threat of race war, and the precariousness and duplicitousness of being a “liberal” in a changing society.