Catherine

It's really good, actually, it's better than I was expecting.

I've never read a book before where the third act break up made sense, at least not that I can recall off the top of my head.

I loved the first book, I told everyone I knew to read it because it was so good. The second book was great, the third book was good and this... I'm really sorry this is how it ends.

In the earlier books they went in all kick-ass, assuming they'd win. This book was just them expecting to die and telling each other how much they love each other (repeatedly). There was no sass or banter. There was a scene involving the throne room (too much like Iron Flame), there was a cabin in the snow filled woods (too much like ACOTAR). Just when I thought the end was near there was another Trial. It was all about forgiveness and not carrying anger with you, and whilst that's very noble that's not who the characters were through the first three books, and I liked them for that reason. They were real and hurt and wanted revenge. This was not revenge.

For something that started with grit it was too neatly packaged up at the end with no great sacrifice. I get why it had to be this way, but I'm sorry it was.

I don't know if I'm aging out of Karen Swan books or if Karen Swan is aging out of writing 20-something protagonists. I've spent Christmases re-reading her earlier books, but the last few have just been so flat.

Darcy's a PhD art student seconded to Copenhagen for a year to work on her thesis. She's there when they discover a hidden painting behind a classic and she's tasked with trying to figure out who the woman in the painting is. To do so she must trawl through the archives of the artist, held by the Masden family foundation who were the artist's patrons in the 1920s. Max is the corporate lawyer working for the foundation and one of the three men Darcy matched with on an exclusive dating app.

The characters were like the couple in the Christmas Lights - two dimensional and very hard to like. There were a few times I thought about DNF-ing but reading the KS Christmas book is a decade-long tradition. Unfortunately I think this is where it stops. We'll always have Christmas At Tiffany's.

I really like Fangirl Down, but was disappointed by this book. There are elements that are good but others that just really missed for me.

Like Tallulah's whole backstory, still trying to get my head around it. It got really dark, really fast then kinda got glossed over from there. She promised her sister it wouldn't stop her, but her whole family went back to Turkey and haven't visited in 4 years? She hasn't spoken to them on the phone but only sent post cards? For 4 years??

It was a slow start, an ok middle and a rough end. There was a lot of baggage to get neatly parcelled up and it feels like it should have been a longer, darker novel to properly deal with the backstory. I didn't buy it, some of the lines made me physically cringe towards the end and it felt like Tallulah gave up on a lot of her hopes and ambitions for something physical.

It was a good book but didn’t live up to all the hype. It ran on about 100 pages too long and I found Scarlett harder to like as the book progressed. The characters were well written with depth and it pulled you in. It was an enjoyable read that faded towards the end.