February Three: All the Flowers Kneeling, Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? Bibliolepsy (Spoiler-Free Book Review)

I want to thank Penguin Random House for gifting me these ARCs in exchange for an honest review

All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran
⭐⭐⭐
Premise: Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran’s debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn
⭐⭐⭐✨
Premise: Meet Yinka: a thirty-something, Oxford-educated, British Nigerian woman with a well-paid job, good friends, and a mother whose constant refrain is “Yinka, where is your huzband?”

Yinka’s Nigerian aunties frequently pray for her delivery from singledom, her work friends think she’s too traditional (she’s saving herself for marriage!), her girlfriends think she needs to get over her ex already, and the men in her life…well, that’s a whole other story. But Yinka herself has always believed that true love will find her when the time is right.
Still, when her cousin gets engaged, Yinka commences Operation Find-A-Date for Rachel’s Wedding. Aided by a spreadsheet and her best friend, Yinka is determined to succeed. Will Yinka find herself a huzband? And what if the thing she really needs to find is herself?

Bibliolepsy by Gina Apostol
⭐⭐⭐/⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Premise: Moving, sexy, and archly funny, Gina Apostol’s Philippine National Book Award-winning Bibliolepsy is a love letter to the written word and a brilliantly unorthodox look at the rebellion that brought down a dictatorship

Gina Apostol’s debut novel, available for the first time in the US, tells of a young woman caught between a lifelong desire to escape into books and a real-world revolution.

It is the mid-eighties, two decades into the kleptocratic, brutal rule of Ferdinand Marcos. The Philippine economy is in a deep recession, and civil unrest is growing by the day. But Primi Peregrino has her own priorities: tracking down books and pursuing romantic connections with their authors.

For Primi, the nascent revolution means that writers are gathering more often, and with greater urgency, so that every poetry reading she attends presents a veritable “Justice League” of authors for her to choose among. As the Marcos dictatorship stands poised to topple, Primi remains true to her fantasy: that she, “a vagabond from history, a runaway from time,” can be saved by sex, love, and books.

Spoiler-Free Reviews Below

All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran

When PRH presented the titles available, this was one of the books that immediately caught my interest. As an aspiring Psychiatrist and occasional poetry admirer occasional meaning I rarely read them btw the premise with both of them mixing made an intriguing read. And here I am, after 2 reads, about to tell you what happened when something too good to be true collides.

At first, it’s good. It’s filled with beautiful, and magnetic poems that will grip you from the start. It’s lyrical, it will make you think. I love poems that are written in a way that can be interpreted by the readers, let them connect to the words, and reminisce. All the while, the author is still writing their own story.

However, with this one there are poems that are entirely left for the readers to decipher. There were poems I can see what it’s about, there are some that I know what it’s about, and there’s somewhere I just have no idea and I had to reread it a second time around and some even third after I saw the ‘about’ sections of the book.

Around the end of the collections, it’s mostly layered about retellings and inspirations, if you will, from certain historical events or lore. I love retellings, I love reading about how authors can completely twist the stories while still being able to retain their original context.

Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? By Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

I was ecstatic when I saw this book in the box. I found out about this book not that long ago and was immediately hooked. In this book, we follow Yinka as she navigates through her career and especially her family’s expectation of Yinka finding a husband and starting a family. This was fueled more when Yinka’s circle started to get married and have their own kids.

There’s just always been a stigma about how women can’t really complete their life without being a mother, but it’s completely acceptable if a man decided to become a bachelor their entire life. So, it was interesting reading this book, because I wanted to see how the romance in the book won’t cancel out the entire plot of the book- which is being happily independent is completely alright, and for some, much better.

And it was delivered! Though there is a romance in the book, it didn’t shadow over the book, it was just lingering over by the side, noticeable but that’s all. I loved reading about Yinka’s family dynamics and the different characters, they were all fun and unique. (But we’re going to go and expand on this further later on)

However, there are a lot of moments where they were just sped through. A lot of moments were just told instead of shown, it occurred throughout the book. A major example of this would be on the part where Yinka and her mother finally talked after a while and were talking about her (Yinka) father and her parent’s wedding. Another one would be when Yinka apologized to Ola, it was just mentioned how she apologized to her and that was it. For scenes that were very vital to Yinka’s growth, it was swept under the rug.

Another problem I had with this is how Yinka’s friends would belittle her. Sure Yinka finally stood up for herself at some point and they all explained their side, talks happened, the end. Still, it was frustrating how much they would undermine her.

All in all, this is what one would expect in a debut novel. It was good, but not great. It’s fast-paced and would give you what you would expect from the blurb, and it will resolve the way everyone would be happy about it. This book and the author have a lot of potentials, will be looking into more of her works in the future.

Bibliolepsy by Gina Apostol

I was disappointed. But not too much, I feel like this one was on me. I was expecting a little bit more, it did give more, but in a different form. This is why I kept pushing off this review, I don’t know what to say, but I do know how I felt. Because I do know there are people who can appreciate the book and the way it was written, but I do know that there would be people who may want to read about the Marcos Regime and how the Martial Law era violated a lot of human rights- then I would not recommend this.

This book is lyrical and poetic, and the writing is beautiful. Though I wouldn’t recommend it to people who just started reading, those who are not familiar with the English language (because half of the words in this book requires a dictionary), And those who would want to educate themselves about the Marcos-Martial Law regime. Maybe some Spanish that I was thankfully familiar with because I’m taking lessons.

Bibliolepsy is told from the perspective of Primi from childhood up until her adulthood, you can tell that the narrator is someone who likes to read, and the scale from when she became an adult can also be told since the voice matured and the outlook changed.

To wrap it up, Bibliolepsy is an amazingly poetic book. It feels like walking on a field of colorful dandelions but you’re left wondering “What’s going on? What’s happening? Why am I- How did I get here?”

Again, thank you so much to Penguin Randomhouse for the arcs!

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