Just another writer
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store vs The Lost Journals of Sacajawea
This is the only non first-round match-up where my predictions matched the official judgment so things stay a bit simpler here. Again, we’re faced with two very different books. The Lost Journals of Sacajawea is a deeply challenging book, one that pushes the boundaries of structure and language offering a great deal of unexplained native culture…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Blackouts/Boys Weekend vs Dayswork
Today, we start the quarterfinals. I’ve talked about all of the books now, so here, I’m going to start focusing on the head-to-head matchups. Of course, the fact that there was a difference of opinion on what books should have moved on the first matchup. So I will start with Alternative history In my opinion,…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Monstrilio vs American Mermaid
The premise of American Mermaid as laid out on the back cover sounds promising. The author of a popular young adult novel goes to Hollywood to work on the adaptation of the novel to a movie, but as Hollywood does what it does to novels it adapts, some mysterious force starts fighting back. This sounded like…
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Librarianist vs What You Are Looking For Is in the Library vs The Bee Sting
Ah, the first round where I have to deal with my picks to advance not matching up with the official selections. So my format has to change a bit. First, a bit of alternate reality I’ll start with what I would have had the match-up be. The Bee Sting vs What You Are Looking For Is in…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Chain-Gang All-Stars vs Brainwyrms
I first encountered Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s writing in his short story collection Friday Black. The first story in the collection, “The Finkelstein 5” blew me away so much that when I finished reading it in the back seat of a Lyft in January 2019, I wanted to tell the driver that he needed to pull over…
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Guest vs The Shamshine Blind
The Guest promises chaos in the person of Alex, a call girl who’s on the run from a previous client from whom she stole a large sum of money and who had been hiding out in the Hamptons with a newer client until he grows bored of her presence and the fact that she damaged…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Big Swiss vs The Lost Journals of Sacajawea
Big Swiss was the only book in this year’s round that I’d read before the short list was announced thanks to my reading last summer’s Camp Tournament of Books selections. My thoughts on the book from last summer: “I found myself at turns fascinated and bored. The setup for the story was brilliant, but there…
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2024 Tournament of Books: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store vs Open Throat
Open Throat is structurally similar to Dayswork in that it’s composed of short paragraph-long sections, but the resemblance ends there. The narrative is told from the perspective of a dispossessed mountain lion, inspired by the real-life P-22 (who’s mentioned in the acknowledgments). The story takes a bizarre twist where the mountain lion befriends a young woman…
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2024 Tournament of Books: Dayswork vs Cold People
Cold People starts as a possible romantic comedy: an American college student is vacationing with her family in Lisbon and accepts an invitation for a private boat tour with a local who feels they have a strange connection. And then. Aliens. The aliens serve largely as a huge plot device: All of humanity is given…