book review

My Year of Rest and Relaxation
by Ottessa Moshfegh
Katya Mills‘s reviewFeb 12, 2021  ·  edit
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Our antiprotagonist gets progressively mired in her chosen selfish sedentary life for a year. Like a life experiment with a careless interest in self-transformation, in NYC, 1999. She lies to her psychiatrist about her use of prescriptions for no apparent reason, as the psychiatrist has no moral or ethical compass to begin with, just a professional hiding behind a lot of jargon and bullshit. Ever met anyone like that? The character closest to real is her best friend Reva yet she is the most annoying and pathetic of them all. Materialistic. Superficial. Zero self-worth. Dependent on guys who use her. They both are. Maybe this is why they are friends. I liked the book, laughed a lot. Some very funny one liners. But not as much as Eileen. Maybe the main character was too sad and jaded. A product of her environment. Maybe it came too close to how life can feel in 21st century America when it’s at its worst. When you give up and are rich enough not to have any responsibilities, and you care but not really.

Book Review

 The Luzhin Defenseby Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Scammell (Translator)
Katya Mills‘s reviewOct 27, 2020  ·  edit
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It took me 9 months to finish this book but that’s not terribly unusual. Anything written by a master like Nabokov can be taken up like a special chocolate your traveling cousin brought you from overseas, kept in the freezer and partaken once in a while for an instant of exceptional flavor. I would only read 5 pages at a sitting and I had other books and magazines vying for attention. Nabokov’s writing style will never disappoint a careful reader, unless perhaps the translation is weak (and you’re not likely to come across that problem if you live in an English, German, or Russian-speaking land, for he lived in many countries and translated his own work). The story revolves around a boy who takes up chess and becomes obsessed by the game, easily chosen over a community of peers who have little to offer and mostly pick on him for his appearance and demeanor. There is an obvious antagonist in Valentinov who takes Luzhin around to coffeehouses in great cities around the world, setting up matches, promoting him widely and checking him into hotels and pulling him by the collar without any heart for how he may feel about his insular life as a budding chess master. Valentinov reminded me of Elvis infamous ‘doctor’ always in recess with his bag full of ‘medication’. Luzhin naturally decompensates under the rigors of traveling and the hyper focused spotlight of competition, performance, and obsession with the game. You could call his nervous breakdown the Luzhin ‘Defense’ as it ultimately acts as a defense mechanism to protect his ego from being swallowed whole in this world. The remainder of the novel is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (another book I am reading very slowly lol) as both protagonists are half-baked moving about with watchful eyes of worried loved ones. Line by line I certainly wasn’t feeling drawn into the ‘suspense’. This was a character driven book. Clearly not one of Nabokov’s most popular. It is a touching study of what it must feel like to exist inside the mind and heart of a man who was fated to play the part of a pawn on the chess board of life.

book review

 

 ReadRate this book1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 starsTrouble ’99
by Katya Mills (Goodreads Author)
Sarah Carney‘s reviewSep 17, 2020
liked itbookshelves: giveaways, my-kindle-list

I really liked the story and the message of this novella. I don’t think I’ve read a stream of consciousness styled book in a long time and parts were hard for me to get into.

It surrounds four 20-somethings in the Chicago area in 1999. The point of view is through the eyes of Kat and her experiences.

Overall I liked it, but probably not loved it. I would read more from this author, especially if there was a sequel to find out what happened in Kat’s life after 1999. 🙂

book review

Here is the latest 5 star review of my book, which you can download and read for free on Smashwords. Here is the link to the free book:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/550226

 

Christi Massey’s Reviews > Grand Theft Life

Read

My rating:

1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars[ 5 of 5 stars ]

Grand Theft Life (Daughter of Darkness #1)

by

Katya Mills(Goodreads Author)

Christi Massey‘s review

Apr 20, 2020

it was amazing

bookshelves: bought, kindle, under-200, finished-giveaways

I really enjoyed the grittiness of this book. Very atmospheric and engaging. Great read!

 

book review

Ame and the Tangy Energetic

by

Katya Mills (Goodreads Author)

Nick Reeves‘s review

Dec 01, 2019

liked it

Katya Mills comes on like Douglas Coupland’s pill-addled street scion in this skid row helter skelter psychic tumble through a downtown United States of Imagica.

Ame & The Tangy Energetic rails against the sheen and shite of corporate pop culture and captures both the hyperreality and the blur of the high, the bleed-out of the sidewalk comedown.

Mills will dose your soda with her magical, druggy, otherworldly cocktail when you ain’t looking.

A tale of getting clean, with washing machines.

(Also well worth checking out are Katya’s YouTube readings of ‘Ame…’)

stories

Everlee & Lee by Katya Mills

I am the author of this title, Everlee & Lee, a dark tale revolving around a teenage boy and his sister trying to make sense of a family tragedy. Spirit life haunts the Queen Anne Victorian home in which they live. I use a rather formal (and unreal) type of dialogue on purpose. Temporal shifts accompany the telekinetic and telepathic powers of the characters. One other thing I will confide to you. I wrote this story out of the great and painful heartache I lived with, after my grandfather was essentially murdered by an awful gold digger of a woman he married. My family sued and got the money she stole from him back. Because she had the body cremated the day after his death, a case for murder was never made. Writing this story helped me find my own peace.

View all my reviews

book review

Drugstore Cowboy by James Fogle
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I loved the movie so I decided to read the book. Much of the material is based on the author’s personal experiences as a junky who knocked off pharmacies with his partners on the West Coast to maintain their habits, and as a result were marginalized and meshed into a subculture exposed to violence, degradation, incarceration, and often on the run. The narrator owns his experiences like an adventure he takes part in ‘by choice’ and as an exercise of free will. The tone is one of dark comedy. The book is a quick read with simple vocabulary and lots of speaking parts rounded out by short descriptions and visualizations in and around Portland, Oregon. I felt like I could care about Bob and Diane and Nadine and Rick, maybe even more than they cared about themselves in the end!

View all my reviews

review: The Dead Zone

book review…

The Dead Zone by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is definitely one of my favorites by King. If you are a child of the eighties (or older), gen x, you will get a real nostalgia kick what with all the references to American culture 1970’s. The characters come to life, the storylines thread well and weave into a fine fabric, and it’s not too gory or over the top with fantasy, less supernatural more psychic powered, and overall the book is pretty timeless. The movie’s not bad, either, what with Chris Walken. This ice cream cone is vintage Stephen King and stand alone sweet!

books

MAZE – an ebook

LINK 2 BUY: https://www.amazon.com/Maze-Daughter-Darkness-

AUTHOR: Katya Mills
PUBLISHER: Amazon / CreateSpace, 2015

SUMMARY: In modern day America, there are those — indiscernible from you and me — who thirst after (human) fear. Ame, in her twenties and the heroine of this tale, has fallen in with them. As a youth she had the same light in her eyes and androgynous form, which marks them. She was abducted and taken to Oakland, California, where she comes to terms with her own dark heritage. Her love interest, a resilient young punk named Maze, skateboards into her life and together they roam the streets, seeking and extracting fear from Ordinaries. Conflicted by her own violent nature, Ame has become nevertheless intoxicated by her new life and associations. Meanwhile, lurking around the boarding house where Ame and Maze stay, a Malafide is busy trapping and hollowing out Ordinaries and leaving them shells. Ame discovers her little sister Kell, in the grips of a terrible addiction. Just as Ame seems to have found her rhythm in the chaos of this new world and city, Kell disappears. Then, searching for her sister, Ame unravels a secret buried on the tapes of a security camera, which threatens to uproot her once again.

cover of Maze

BACK STORY: I wrote this novel as a way of making sense of a decade living in Oakland, California, which is where it is set. I consider it a creative nonfiction of sorts, but I pubIished it as a fiction, having touched up many of the characters with superhuman capabilities. Having an emotional connection to a place is the foundation off of which I like to build my fictions. Submission of this book won me a table at the Sacramento Library’s 2016 Author Festival. This is my third publication, and sequel to my novella Grand Theft Life, which you can read for free on Smashwords @ https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/550226 I consider Maze a freestanding book, and Grand Theft Life makes for a good introduction.

urban dictionary. constitution

made an urban dictionary out of our constitution

When you came into my life I was shooting pool, and neither were the other kids in school. There was a break and all the balls started rolling, and who could be prepared for a world administered by twitter feed, half-mad on fast food fry-batter, running down an uphill battle? The recycled oil had turned, the battery gone dead. A postmortem analysis found the conditions out of which the nightmare came to steam. All the way in the back of the tired rolodex of eighties-punctured index cards, we located the moment butter got sideswiped by Country Crock. Even the name gave it away! Yet we accepted the substitute and without any hardcore/softcore vetting. Consider us fucked right there.

Dare I look into these projects you are slumming? Somewhere in each one a person pushed out front, coat-tails blowing up egos in need of personality. Altruism was suddenly a four-letter word like media and Muslim. You made an urban dictionary out of the constitution. Wannabe celebrities still slinging their ghostwritten books, to get a stab at some easy cash before the crap inside all the margins falls out of consciousness and to your cutting room floor… now ankle deep in film, archaic, in a dark corner of ill-literatures.

Meanwhile…

Here we find a thorough & recent review of my work:
GIBNEYS BLOG: BOOK REVIEW