A Fun but Flawed Love Letter to the 2000s By Leda Serikoglu In her debut novel Axiom’s End, the first in a five-book series, Lindsay Ellis rewinds the clock to an alternative autumn of 2007: George W. Bush is still the President of the United States; the Iraq War still hammers on; but now the […]
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Covid-1918
A review of Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars By Renske Rademaker Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars takes place during a pandemic, but it is not the pandemic one might expect from a novel published in 2020. The novel depicts three days in the life of Dublin nurse Julia Power amidst the […]
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Welcome to the Self-Help Era
Where Reading Novels Is a Waste of Time By Laura Hoogenraad “As Charlotte looks at the titles The Woman’s Comfort Book; The Path to Love; Excuse me, your life is waiting; Please Understand Me Too – she couldn’t bear the thought that she belonged there.” We hear Carrie’s dramatic voiceover as we look at Charlotte […]
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The Importance of Identifying
A review of Kacen Callender’s Felix Ever After By Annika van Leeuwen From the moment I saw the smiling face, flower crown, and top surgery scars of the titular character on the cover, I was in love with Felix Ever After. Depicting a transgender boy’s quest for community, identity, and revenge, this novel by Kacen […]
By Siqi Zhu You can cancel a YouTube subscription if you find it dull and boring. You can cancel Amazon orders if you fill in the wrong address. And in recent years, we’ve come to the realisation that we can even cancel other people. In brief, to “cancel people” is to publicly oppose their problematic […]
A review of Adam Mars-Jones’ Box Hill By Mikołaj Bać If a book begins with fellatio in an empty part of Box Hill in Surrey, the mecca of motorcyclists in the 1970s, in my mind it signals that we are dealing with quite an extraordinary piece of writing. This unabashed novel by influential British critic and […]
By Lea Dokter Women Don’t Owe You Pretty, the literary debut of 21-year-old Instagram influencer Florence Given, is an exemplification of Gen Z feminism – aesthetical and empowering, but highly individualistic. Given’s book is essentially a brief introduction to some of the ways in which patriarchy still influences the lives of (young) women in modern […]
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When Summer Ends
By Juul Kruse Summer sometimes feels like a long day that will never come to an end. During those never-ending days, sitting in the sun whilst my shoulders burn and my hair is still wet from the water, I can’t imagine – and I mean that in a very literal sense – that it will […]
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An Introduction
“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” – Jalal ad-Din Rumi We are proud to present the very first issue of RevUU, a new platform for literary criticism edited and designed by an international group of graduate students at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. As a student-run publication, RevUU […]
