Finally a DNF?? 🙌 Read It or Unhaul It Reading Vlog #6

The publisher sent me an arc and I really liked it overall. I gave it four stars for the entirety of the collection and I remember there being a lot of sort of quiet, detached, little everyday moments and also surrealism kind of woven throughout.

I think it could have been even weirder and wilder and more off-the-wall and unsettling and I would have eaten that up. But I also think that it was interesting for what it was and I enjoyed the process as it was and I liked that very dreamlike fairy tale feeling and I liked that it left me asking questions about what it was saying and the characters fates and the situation.

But in that case, that protagonist in Luster felt like a real person. She felt fully fleshed out. It felt like her sort of edgginess, her grittiness was coming from a real place, and it felt like the author was being authentic in the portrayal.

It's charactercentric storytelling, relationship ccentric storytelling. There's a lot of humor and heart as well as gory and weird and scary things.

It kind of reminds me of Private Rights by Julia Armfield, which was my favorite book of 2025.

I found this really beautiful. I found this very moving. I found it intellectually stimulating.

I've also read Leu's short story collection, The Tangle Root Palace, which is a collection of speculative fiction stories, mostly fantasy, but a little bit sci-fi, which I also loved.

And that's when I picked it up around the time that I picked up The Vegetarian, which I read and adored and gave five stars.