Jess

Voice was way too YA for me, dnf'd within the first chapter. I'm never listening to booktok again

Dnf at ~40%

dnf @ 21%

Felt real smart when I was comparing the prose to Near to the Wild Heart while reading and then at the end saw Clarice Lispector among the acknowledgements

it felt like it was written with the sole goal of getting optioned for a netflix series. dnf at ~20%

Evoked a very similar feeling to Red Pill by Hari Kunzru where I was couldn't look too close or linger too long for fear of recognizing myself in the text.
Doesn't quite stick the landing in the way Kunzru does. I also found myself wishing this book was just a little more subtle - I wanted it to let me make my own connections but I found it very prescriptive about it's own interpretation.

Extremely warm & cozy read, incredible characterization. Functionally zero conflict - which is the point I do get it, but still never felt like I was sinking my teeth into anything substantial.

AHHHHHHHHHHH

i like new weird
i like vibes-based writing
i liked borne well enough to pick this up
i do not like when one sentence has no connection to the next
i do not like when descriptions are so detached from a grounded reality that i cannot even guess at what information the author wants me to take away from any given scene
dnf'd after 2 chapters

Super fast paced and engaging even though I saw most of the twists coming and found the choppy, line break heavy style grating at times. Highly recommend as an airplane read.

this /is/ ya and i am just not in the mood lmao

About a third of the way through there is a thinly veiled lament about the “Great Replacement”

so i stopped there

Solid novelization. Would probably rec this over playing the game to most people tbh. The bit of diy translation at the back is a fun bonus!

Too saccharine and sitcom-y for my taste, may have liked it more if i was in a different mood

How do you even talk about works like this? I read it in just over an hour. I want to start it again immediately but also I'm sick to my stomach.

Unreasonably good. Takes true crime from genre to subject in and of itself. This gave me words I've been looking for for a long time to describe how I feel about the true crime zeitgeist and then some

Wildly smart and almost unbearably empathetic.

my new years resolution is to commit to putting books down quicker. i know when things aren't working for me and this one is not working for me! Language, tone, pacing, and characters are all a miss for me ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Overall was a ton of fun, but I disliked the scope creep in the final quarter. imo the stakes didn't need to ratchet up any higher and the finale felt rather melodramatic as a result. Still had a good time tho

i need to stop trying to be someone who likes memoirs

Really astounding. Every single time I thought I understood what this book was about it took a hard left turn. First it was maybe about how parasocial interaction feeds toxic relationships, then it was about how people change (and how they don't) with their environment, then it was about how grief and technology intersect. Very briefly it was about ghosts. With the last 10% of the book I'm not even sure anymore if it can be said to be about one thing but I do know I want to talk about this book with anyone who will listen.

finished this while waiting for a concert to start so i was literally crying in the club.

incorrect use of the :eyes: emoji drove me up the wall. I've also read fanfiction that does this concept (both the “stuck in a computer” and the “story told entirely thru internet chat”) better, so there's that.

The comparisons to Palimpsest are apt. Lovely framing for a short story collection, i wanted it to be twice as long.

Aesthetically and tonally right up my alley, but it really just felt like an extended prologue rather than a full story in itself. Also the voice, while mostly charming today, probably is going to age like milk.

Genuinely scared me, had to stop for a bit and turn on all the lights in my room. Really fun!