giving realness

my first book (honor levy, 2024)

I had this idea earlier this summer that I was going to do a “buzzy books” capsule review thing—you know, consisting of things not only published this century but even this year. A little All Fours, a little Brat, and so on. The problem with this idea, however, was twofold: 1) I didn’t really want to buy these books since they were a bit pricey, being new, but 2) since they were buzzy, the wait times at the library were… unreasonable.¹ So in the end only one book actually made it through the crazy wait time before summer was over: Honor Levy’s My First Book.²

Does everybody hate this book, by the way? I kind of got that impression, but now that I’m revisiting the reviews I can’t really tell.³ I see a lot of what I’m about to say, which is that the book is good in parts but also a big mess.⁴ Granted, the first paragraph of the first story is sort of designed to produce that effect (hatred, I mean):

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b. She was giving d…