Thought Train to Pusan

Much like many fellow Cannonballers, I was highly anticipating this novel from Emil St. John Mandel after loving Station Eleven. Much like that book, The Glass Hotel offers a series of interconnected characters throughout different moments of their lives. The biggest difference, I felt however, was in the setting: while Station Eleven presents a hypothetical future world, The Glass Hotel is firmly rooted in reality and modern history, including the economic crash of 2008. Specifically, the narrative of The Glass Hotel centers on a woman named Vincent who is a bartender at a luxury hotel in British Columbia, and how her life becomes entwined with the owner of the hotel named Jonathan, who is involved in a long-running investment scam. Other characters that come in and out of focus include Vincent’s half-brother named Paul, various people who invested with Jonathan over the years, and other friends and co-workers of the two along the way. The picture painted by these passing moments ...

I will be honest: I am not into series right now. I genuinely didn’t know that this was going to be the opener of more than one novel (I just snagged it from the “available now” section of my library app after reading a short synopsis), so when the ending was approaching I just had a feeling I knew where it was going to lead: leaving things with that particular YA dystopian ending to lead you into act II. And while this book certainly kept my interest and developed its own lore amongst its contemporaries, I found the back half to be far less-engaging than the first. We Set the Dark on Fire follows Dani, a girl who is about to graduate from the Medio School for Girls, where distinguished young women are trained for one of two roles: to be the ever logical, unemotional wife who runs the household (called a primera), or to be the emotional, caring child bearer to her husband (known as a segunda). High-class men in Media purchase the hand in marriage of two women for the family (one prime...

The premise of this novel immediately drew me in (a vampire story examining race, sexuality, and female empowerment over time and space: who wouldn’t be interested!), but I soon found myself slogging through it, despite my initial excitement. The Gilda Stories starts with an unnamed girl who is on the run after escaping slavery in 1850s Louisiana. She is taken in and taken care of by a woman named Gilda who runs a brothel, and as time goes on it is alluded that this Gilda is a vampire, who eventually passes on her power and name to the young girl, now known as Gilda for the rest of the novel. From here, we see a series of vignette-type stories following Gilda across 200 year throughout America: moving through California in 1980, Missouri in 1921, Massachusetts in 1955, New York from the 1970s-1980s, New Hampshire in 2020, and finally a place known as “Land of Enchantment” in 2050. Throughout her life, Gilda meets different members of her greater vampire “family”, and forms bonds of he...