Wonderfully colorful and powerful stories. Deep ideas exploring through all the characters. Overall a great piece of modern literature and a great book club choice too.

Shut Up You're Pretty by Tea Mutonji
is a fascinating brief novel that follows Loli, a young woman whose family emigrated to Toronto, Canada from Congo. The story begins following the move, when Loli is 13 and living in a poor neighborhood with sometimes lacking family structure. The novel follows Loli through her teenage years and early adulthood as she is enamored by her female friends, suffers from anxiety/poor self-esteem, and makes self-sabotaging choices.

Reading in Loli's perspective brought me back to young adulthood and the numbness and uncertainty I felt. Loli acts destructively and is seemingly unaware of or simply doesn’t care about the consequences that may result. The writing style drew me in immediately and kept me interested throughout. Jemeni deftly narrated the audiobook and was an excellent choice.

Thank you BeSpeak Audio Editions and NetGalley for providing this ARC.

Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to listen to the Audiobook.

“Shut Up You’re Pretty” is a coming of age story of the main character Loli. There are a few side characters that intertwine throughout the chapters each serving purpose in her development as a young adolescent. No stone is left unturned when it comes to descriptions in this book. The book was very detailed which at some points served the story and others made the story drag for me.

This slightly reminded me of the movie the Florida Project in terms of setting and gritty characters. It is a great story to be told but did not resonate with me.

The stories in Mutonji’s collection weave so well together it’s almost like a novel, granted it would be a LOT to happen to one person, but it’s not so far fetched. In the stories of this collection, “a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides to shave her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic” (publisher’s summary).

Off and on, I felt a little uncomfortable reading these stories, but not in a bad way. Sometimes the unfiltered, unromancitized descriptions of sex, particularly straight-people sex make me a little squeamish. This collection is unfiltered and brutally honest about what it’s like growing up as a woman. It’s not romanticized as a lot of the escapist fiction I read, and I really appreciated that. It humanizes the stories in a more authentic way than some flowery prose does.

It’s been out since June, so keep an eye out for it wherever you get your books and or request it through your local library. The narration on the audio version is excellent.

Shut up your pretty

This recently released book is collection of short stories by Téa Mutonji, and is the first book published under the imprint VS Books, an imprint of Arsenal Pulp Press. This new imprint is specifically featuring work by Indigenous or Black writers, or other writers of color.

The goodreads description reads like these are essays about different people, but in fact they are all about one person, Loli, as she is in the range of coming of age. It reads as kind of an experimental novel, or maybe a fictional memoir. She is Congolese and emigrated with her family to Canada, and that adds an inherently interesting layer to the stories.

These stories cover a lot of ground, a lot of it requiring a trigger warning. Rape, abortion, just for starters... but honestly many of the memoirs I read by women include these types of situations. Unfortunately, it’s not as rare as I wish it were. The protagonist throughout these stories was an interesting character. She was sex positive, pro-choice, feminist, and I rooted for her, though she engaged in some pretty self-sabatoging behavior.

I like the way the author is so unfiltered and raw in the content. I listened to the audiobook, provided by Netgalley, and I also really liked the narrators voice. This was a good and quick read, though it had some heavy content.

After seeing that this book was published under Vivek Shreya's imprint, I knew I wanted to give it a try. It's written beautifully and brutally, exploring a Congolese girl's journey through life after her immigration to Canada. It's painful and strange at times, and I think that's what I enjoyed most about it. It doesn't shy away from difficult topics. I think this is great for anyone who might have enjoyed books like or The Death of Vivek Oji or My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

This is a short and sweet collection of short stories, all tied together with an overarching narrative. Loli and her family move from the Congo when she's a young girl, relocating to Galloway, Canada - the book tracks her development from a young immigrant girl to a fully-formed woman, the strange and impactful people she meets, her addictions, her bad habits, her friendships, her losses. It's not a pretty book; in fact, her life is often quite ugly, dark, and sad. Mutonji writes about difficult issues: sex work, abortion, drugs, forced marriages - with raw, powerful emotion.

The book overall and the stories within are so short, though, that I didn't really feel like I connected to Loli as a main character or any of the side characters. I found it hard to track her life - if all of the stories are written about Loli, I might have preferred a narrative format rather than a collection of stories. I felt like I got a brief, cursory glimpse into her life, the darkest and ugliest parts, but nothing more. Thank you to the publisher for the ARC!

This was really interesting. It’s follows the a Congolese immigrant in Canada. It was quite eye opening and covered many important topics - like poverty, abuse, drugs, and so much more. Definitely a great read!

Shut Up You're Pretty follows the coming-of-age of a Congolese immigrant in Canada. It is gritty and addresses topics such as poverty, eating disorders, abuse, drug use, sexual identity, and more. This book is written as a series of vignettes throughout Loli's life and was a bit scattered at times as the topics and times in her life changed. It did not shy away from hard topics and was a very eye-opening read. Worth the read!

Everything about this book is shocking in all the most amazing ways that a reader could be shocked. I mean, that cover! The title! Shut up with that title! I love it!

This collection of stories is told in the first person, making it feel so raw and honest and personal. I kept assuming these stories were true parts of the author’s life (even more so than a memoir, which I always assume is exaggerated).

The POV is so unique in a variety of ways: our protagonist (I felt as though she was a singular character, but I have no legitimate reason to believe that—it’s a collection of stories, remember?) is a girl who is sometimes mistaken for a boy, a teen who experiments with love and sex in all kinds of ways, an immigrant from Africa living in Canada, a student who loves and hates school. Her eyes on the world provide a lens that we don’t normally get to look through.

The stories here wrap themselves around a central theme of finding oneself and personal identity in a world where so much feels taboo or inappropriate. People who tend to fit in well to a variety of settings may not find the world so restrictive. It’s the people who break these norms, who shock us, who provide a necessary hole in our society’s barriers. These holes shift the paradigm so that society can become a more accepting and open-tent kind of world.

*Thanks to Net Galley for the free ARC.*

This book is captivating, intimate, and beautiful- even as it deals with a number of difficult and unsavory subjects.

It's a collection of short stories about a girl who is trying to discover and understand herself as she grows up.

The writing was great and the narrator brought it to a new dimension withthe rhythm of her storytelling.</p>

This is a great book for those looking for stories that deal with a broad range of themes that involve Intersectional Feminism.

Many thanks to Bespeak Audio Editions and NetGalley for the ALC.

I really enjoyed the author's voice. Her word choice and rhythm left me both mellowed, taking in the world, and attentive, taking in the harsh realities of Loli's life. I think Ms. Mutonji's abilities are great, and I look forward to seeing the development in her future writings. However, I feel like as "real" as Loli's young adult life seemed, it was fairly one-sided. In a way it feels like the author found a subject she wished to explore and created a character to deliver that subject, not letting the character truly develop into her own story. 3.5 stars.

Tea Mutonji has written a collection of 18 short stories that are all connected through the main character, Loli. Loli is a Congolese girl who has immigrated to Canada on the pretense of being a boy since it is a boy's passport she has for the journey and now she has buzzed hair to go along with it.

The stories are connected by Loli and some of her friends, especially Jolie and are about her coming of age. The stories are quite short, each only a few pages long, and somehow Mutonji is able to write about difficult topics without making the reader feel overwhelmed by their heaviness.

Topics that are covered in the stories are: teenage pregnancy, gender issues, sexual identity, sexual exploration, abortion, rape, racism and suicide. With a list like that, you know that these short stories are not a light read, but maybe having them as short stories is what makes them bearable and digestible.

This is definitely a book about feminism and how this particular woman struggles to be more than just her looks and more than just a thing to be used for pleasure. That journey is then even trickier because of the trauma she has experienced. I think the book is really about finding out what love is and trying to find that love for herself.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bespeak Audio Editions for a free audio of this book. I was able to read and listen and I think that Jemeni was a fantastic narrator.

A series of raw vignettes about a Congolese girl, Loli, coming of age in Canada. I couldn't really relate to Loli in many ways but still thought it was interesting to peek into her world and enjoyed Mutonji's writing.

I am going to be very honest about this book. I could not finish it. But the reason was entirely my own. I am very uncomfortable with the topic of having sex with kids. I understand that children and teens mature at different ages but this was entirely too young for me to handle. Some books are windows, and I was excited about the VS Books imprint. However, about halfway through, I gave myself permission to not finish this book. I enjoyed the writing style very much. There were several areas where I could identify with the main character and several where I was offered a fascinating look into another life. The narration was good, even, and easy to follow. I do wish it had been more clear that it was a weaving of several short stories. These are cues that are easy to miss in an audiobook. It sounded like a novel to me. If it hadn't been for the sexual predation and very underage sexual behavior, I believe I would have really enjoyed this book.
Thank you to NetGalley and Bespeak Audio Editions for the advanced copy of this audiobook.

I mentioned I was reading this in my September 18th, 2020 Friday Reads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na53OuwonYs&ab_channel=Josh%27sBookishVoyage

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-ARC of this in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I had mixed feelings about this set of short stories when I first started. I did not recognize that they were connected for the first four or five; that left me very confused. As stand-alone stories, I thought they were well written and had really provocative ideas they were exploring, but they never quite took it far enough. Every time they would introduce a fascinating idea or scenario and the author wouldn't take it to fruition.

Once I realized they were all connected as an overarching narrative, my opinion shifted. Interconnected, it makes for really fascinating coming of age story of this young woman. Overall it's hard to criticize because I really enjoyed it even if at times I felt like I wish it to get further in some places.

This is at least a 4star. If I was going to go in a different direction, it would probably be 4.5 but I think I'm going to settle on 4 because I don't feel strongly enough to take it that far.

It was overall a really interesting and well-written book and I'm very happy that I had the opportunity to review it.

4/5

Shut Up You’re Pretty // by Tea Mutonji // narrated by Jemeni

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I’m not sure if I’m just not the right audience for this book in general or if I am just limited in my understanding of culture and psychology, and therefore need to put more focus and work into developing this understanding. I struggled with it in the beginning due to the heavy focus on sexual activities of young teens at the start of the book. I often choose a book way before actually starting it and then refuse to read the description again to enhance my experience by having less expectations of what is to come. I could therefore not really remember the premise or genre of this one and kept wondering if this was a memoir, which then of course made me incredibly sad. After finishing it this morning, I did go back to find out more about the book and realized that it is supposed to be a collection of fictional stories — which always makes me think of stories that aren’t necessarily connected but in this case they definitely are. If I had to categorize it in a way that made sense to me personally, I would describe it as a fictional memoir.

The writing itself is incredible. I really enjoy the author’s style and the narrator’s performance really enhanced the experience as well. Together, they bring you a character that feels incredibly real, so full of emotions, so complex and beautiful. This book covers a lot of important topics, from race to poverty, sexuality and drug use to depression and suicide, identity and independence. Despite being a rather short audiobook, you will walk away thinking you have learned so much about all of these experiences. Despite the sad tone of these stories, the honesty and candidness of the character still leaves you with a sense of connection.

As I somewhat mentioned above, I still have a lot to learn when it comes to reading for more than just pleasure. I have been trying to branch out more and educate myself but I still have a way to go to become better at recognizing and reviewing books with own voices, themes, issues, cultural nuances, etc. This book has definitely made me take a step back and consider the many privileges I possess in our society and that there is no use in judging a book (or person) based on a first impression. There are many layers to every human experience that need to be seen and worked through.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I don't usually reach for story collections, but I totally fell for the title and the cover. Turns out my instincts were right - Shut Up You're Pretty is a beautiful, engaging and highly emotional story collection connected by one character, Loli, from her childhood to adulthood.

Tea Mutonji's writing is heartfelt and original. She is not afraid to explore the depths of sexuality, gender and class in a poetic way which has really stuck with me. I especially liked the parts on Loli's complicated sexual relationships because Mutonji put into words many of my own thoughts buried at the back of my head.

While I completely understand the reason behind it, this book is predominantly about sad, disturbing events in Loli's life - and I really wanted something good to happen to her, but it didn't.

On the other hand, as I got this publication in the audiobook version, I was blown away by the narration, so I highly recommend this way of devouring this book.

*Thank you to the Publisher for a free copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

This is a collection of stories connected by one character and moving across moments in time.

It is a raw, poignant, heartbreaking collection, refreshingly unafraid to look the realities of growing girls, poverty, and the emergence and ownership of one's own sexuality, right in the eye. It is unflinching in its approach to the realities of what a somewhat untethered and wild girl might do to come into herself and how she might perceive the world and its possibilities to her. The collection also embraces a Congolese heritage placed in America and confronts relationships between girls and their mothers, girls and other girls as friends, and girls and other girls as sources of intimacy. It also addresses sexuality imposed on girls and women by the world at large, and specifically how men treat the female body as a source of pleasure, worship, and target of brutality.

Tea Mutonji is a beautiful writer, honing in with piercing accuracy on all of these moments and observations. I look forward to her continued publications.

This is the type of book that hurts in a good way.

This is a short story collection about Loli through her hard life as a child and then as an adult. She meets people but no one ever sticks around.

It felt like every chapter was an episode of Loli's life. I wished that in the next chapter Loli would be happier but instead she's either prostituted herself or has become a mistress. The book is very well written but I was hoping for a proper conclusion or character growth.

The audiobook narration was pleasant. I love the voice she does for Loli's best friend.

This audiobook is provided through Netgalley for an honest review.