Uncle Dough Book Club

Uncle Dough Book Club 🍪The best New York cookies and book reviews in Lagos. Periodt.
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Is that… is that… biscoff?????📸 by the BEST
07/11/2024

Is that… is that… biscoff?????

📸 by the BEST

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5When you have everything, what does anything mean? What I Loved 😍Managing to make a story about bedrot i...
29/10/2024

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

When you have everything, what does anything mean?

What I Loved 😍
Managing to make a story about bedrot interesting, Moshfeg’s modern fable on privilege and overconsumption had me laughing out loud.

Our wealthy, unnamed heroine’s parents unexpectedly die forcing her to ask herself what she wants out of life. But after a lifetime of listless leisure she has no answers. So she decides to drug herself and sleep forever because after all, when you have everything, what does anything mean?

Moshfeg doesn’t ask this question self pityingly. Our protagonist is sympathetic but not enough to stop us from laughing at her expense. Moshfeg’s characters are not here to be likable, literally every character on page deserves a throne room in the VIP section of the ninth circle-and that’s the point. Here, wealth is a self-inflicted disease that traps its willing victims in amber, arresting development-until they’re ready to wake up.

Rich Girl A doesn’t miraculously discover life’s purpose other than come to a basic premonition that any child except one that grew up boating on their father’s winter yacht would write in their diary: “things are just things.” The joy here is mostly in the journey, and I must say watching rich, white girls flail through Level 1 id development is delightfully entertaining.

What I Didn’t 🤮
Too much profundity was given to very basic ideas in a way that showed the writer occasionally forgot this was a satire and began to actually sympathize with her characters 😂

👩🏾‍⚖️ Would I Recommend?
If you remember 2000s People Magazine calling Britney Spears fat, if you love A24 movies, if you had a brat summer. Three hilarious stars and a half for a protagonist who’s going into my character hall of fame.

🍪 Strawberry Cheesecake
Artificial looking but surprisingly fresh and authentically sweet at first bite.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️What I Loved 😍I think society often portrays parenthood like transformation, an absolving shift into a...
28/10/2024

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

What I Loved 😍
I think society often portrays parenthood like transformation, an absolving shift into a perfect, new future. When the reality is parenthood often means confronting yourself, your traumas, your fears, and breaking the cycle before it breaks you. Parenthood isn’t an escape, it’s a mirror and our nameless protagonist is forced to look as her only shield from her depression, her alcoholism, is torn away and she’s plunged into the deep end of an unexpected pregnancy everyone is excited about-except her. She latches onto Jenny, a homemaker struggling with her eight-year-old and the first person to tell her motherhood is a new kind of trauma of its own.

Pizza Girl’s mental decline is beautifully rendered. As readers, we feel the ache of her loneliness but can only grind our teeth as she makes the same brutal mistakes that land her alone again and again. We see the same cycles in ourselves and ache with the sorrow of the human condition, to desperately want to be and simultaneously hate being seen.

Frazier’s emotional deftness extends to all her characters. None feel faceless, all deal with deep issues in very different ways that imitates real life to such a degree I felt helpless as a reader like I was watching real relationships play out unable to do anything but simply hope for the best.

Pizza Girl asks all the big questions only to realize there were never any answers. It holds a mirror not just to its protagonist but also to its readers, challenging a society built around distraction to face our worst fears, or accept becoming them.

🤮
What I Didn’t
Seeing my worst mistakes on paper 🙃 Lmaooo Not a damn thing.

👩🏾‍⚖️ Would I Recommend This?
For rainy days and bleak mornings when you wake up and wonder if you have squandered your life away. For the ordinary sadnesses that creep on everyone and we hope if we ignore them, they’ll fall off like a dead limb. So we drag them along and try not to look back. Five painful stars

🍪 Chai Masala
Layered, with a spiciness that makes the hint of sweetness all the better.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5How far would you go to be yourself? Would you kill for it? 😍 What I AdoredMurata confronts conformity, ...
27/10/2024

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

How far would you go to be yourself? Would you kill for it?

😍 What I Adored
Murata confronts conformity, asking who benefits the most from a system that forces people to silence their natural instincts and prioritize appeasing others. We’re taken through Natsuki’s bleak childhood where she suffers the unbearable under the averted eyes of unfeeling adults. Some abuse scenes were so graphic I had to drop the book and pace before I could read again, yet I could understand Murata’s stylistic choice to write these in detail: if Natsuki didn’t deserve to escape neither did we.

Natsuki survives the only way she knows how: by internalizing she is an alien. Thus begins a descent into madness, the startings of what I suspect was a small cult and the most twisted, insane form of a happy ending I have ever read in my life.

With Murata’s simple style prose and careful plot reveals, Natsuki is endearingly sympathetic and all her later actions no matter how insane and terrifying are justified at the hands of her treatment by people focused more on upkeeping the pretense of normality than helping.

I found myself rooting for Natsuki throughout her fierce and foul story. Even at her craziest I found myself disgusted but weirdly satisfied that Natsuki had found her own agency and was at least, happy, if not healthy.

🤮 What I Didn’t
Murata has a minimalist style and follows the golden writing principle of showing not telling, but while that makes certain scenes absolutely fantastic, it can make characters’ reactions difficult to decipher. Characters would express emotions at random with no build up and I found myself re-reading certain scenes to fully understand character interactions.

👩🏾‍⚖️ Would I Recommend This?
When you’re in a reading slump, when you’re looking to be moved but only want to read for a few hours, for an ending that’ll leave you staring at the wall. Three crazy stars, and a half for pure ingenuity. You will never read another book like this, that’s for sure.

🍪Boli N Epa
A crazy, bizarre concept that ends up tasting unexpectedly familiar and close to your heart. Also a little nutty 😂

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