“You will understand that everything you are is enough. You, with your…”

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The last time I was up to date with reviews was 2022-01-31. Since then, 260/415 books (62.7%) have been reviewed. We'll get there … eventually.

You will understand that everything you are is enough. You, with your desperation. You, with your hope. You, with your dreams. You, with your secrets. You have never felt like you were enough, for your parents, for your teachers, for your bosses, for your friends, for the strangers. But here, what makes you not-enough makes you enough. You, with your indecision. You, with your fragility. You, with your uncertainty. You, with your immortality. You, with your mistakes.

This Rebel Heart

by Katherine Locke · published 2022 · read 2023-03-17

★★★★☆

Historical, fantastical fiction about the 1956 revolution in Hungary, and it has absolutely everything. It’s Jewish. It’s queer (gay, bi, poly). It’s a good adventure and it’s written so sensually that it’s also more than that. And it’s HELLA well-researched. That’s what impressed me the most, I think. It’s not just that the author got her facts straight (which I’d appreciate in itself, of course), and then used the historical moments she embedded in the story super well to play with the story. It’s not just the obvious respect she has for the complexity of the situation and the big fucked up tangle of history that produced the situation. It’s the vibes. Budapest as a city where there are no colours left after the war? The depth of despair and trauma of families decimated in the colocaust, and then only further hurt and murdered in Stalinist purges? The mistrust, the hunched shoulders, the checking-who-is-in-the-room, the police, the dread, the greyness of it all. The grief. The life with despair for decades for all of them, and embedded in the context of millennia for the Jewish protagonist and her family. It’s bang on. As are the local vibes. The marches. The bridges. The river, oh, the river that is nearly a protagonist. The angel of death. The pathos is getting a bit much in places even for me, and will be worse for … probably everybody else? I can think of like two people who might like this book as much as I did. But man. Not five stars because I reserve that rating for life-changing stuff, and also because I’m not convinced that some of the plot (the golem) was necessary, and because of a fair bit of black-and-white despite the author’s best intention. But still, great stuff. Oh also, the Author’s Note at the end not only explains why she wrote the book, and that her first contact with (or rather first time in) Hungary was in 2018 and fell head-first into a research hole, no: She also acknowledges how the revolution is nowadays used for propaganda, and how antisemitism was and is present on all sides. And then she provides a bibliography. My standards for author research have been raised and I’ll feel more justified in grumping about badly researched books from here on out.