Gluku

Competently written but with the exact sort of emotional beats and flows as every other MFA writer that gets hailed as “luminous” and “thought-provoking,” without anything particularly outstanding. Formulaic, but well-executed, hence three stars.

 I can't in good conscience give this anything higher. Being excruciatingly tedious was its first sin, but that could have been graciously ignored for the fact that after, y'know, 20+ books, not every installment can be a winner. But the epilogue was awe-inspiringly bad, like... guys? Guys, are you writing satirical fanfiction of your own books? Guys? 

Girlypop, this RPF self-insert AU should have stayed on AO3.

Woulda been more fun if they played the supernatural cult plot straight. Instead it becomes a mess so convoluted it trips over itself in the final quarter and took my 4-star rating out with it. 

This is such plebeian poetry, I'm amazed it won the Pulitzer.  It's maybe two rungs up the ladder from Kaur and her ilk. 

Intriguing start (lots of atmosphere and dread and intriguing curiosities), followed by a slackening middle, and an embarrassing stumble at the finish. 

One star for the lovely art. Zero stars for the banal, Instagram-poet-level platitudes.

A perfectly pleasant read, but the ending was wrapped up too quickly and tidily compared to the rest of the novel.

The prose and translation were pretty clunky.  Some nice insights into the characters beyond what the manga portrayed, but probably only worth it for previous fans of the series.

Ironic for one of the characters in this novel to mention something being “a little heavy on the allegory” while Russell is writing one of the most heavy-handed novels I've read so far this year. Does no one do subtlety anymore?

Unrelentingly mid. Kept waiting for the author to rise above feel-good talk show platitudes and base-level “but I'm one of the good ones” white lady politics and it just never did.

I was vacillating between 1 and 2 stars and then I remembered the main character's name was fucking Misery and I had to remind myself this wasn't, like, satire.

Already calling this as a contender for the rare “the movie was better” listicle inclusion before the film even drops. 

Bong Joon-ho, baby, you're so much smarter than this source material.

The biggest crime this book commits is describing many other, more interesting works and other, more interesting ideas without giving any additional information about where to find these interesting works and ideas.  I think I might have preferred reading those to this meandering, inane, out-of-touch navel gazing.

A potentially interesting series of connected stories bogged down by a panoply of virtue signaling diversions on every conceivable leftist issue.

Like watching a bad Lifetime movie in slo-mo.

When I cracked open The Archive Undying, I read the first chapter and then said to my wife, “I bet you anything this person's written fanfic.”
Dear reader, I was correct. 
According to Candon's Tumblr, The Archive Undying in fact has its roots in a Pacific Rim AU. I am not, in and of itself, opposed to the filing off of serial numbers. And this isn't even really a case of that: the storylines and characters are far removed from much that could be considered Pacific Rim-ish, other than the big ol' robots and a neurotic scientist-type. 
No, my issue with TAU's fanfiction roots are that it, like fanfiction, is built on a scaffolding of prior knowledge that the reader is presumed to have. Unfortunately, unlike with fanfic, the new reader of TAU has none of that background information, so tromping through its multitude of locales and terminology ends up leaving one with a sense that they SHOULD know some specific tidbit of canon in order to figure out what the hell is going on, but no way to access it. Some people like this, or at least don't mind it. Me, not so much.
TAU's characters also suffer because of this assumed familiarity: you get a gist of character archetypes and relationships, but at a remove, and without ever fully getting to know them as anything beyond diverse moving pieces skittering across an admittedly fascinating landscape.

One could argue that books that reveal themselves fully only after a reread are more rewarding, but if one finds the book a slog the first time because of its indecipherability, how inspired to reread are they going to be?
Also, perhaps a petty complaint, but there were far less giant mecha than I was led to believe. Despite the Evangelion joke in the summary, there was very little of Shinji Sunai getting in the actual robot.
Bomb-ass writing though. Lovely stuff. 
Unfortunately, pretty words can only carry you so far.  Two-point-five slightly disappointed stars. 

The Alchemist (with a side of pseudo-incestual nonsense) for well-off white women who aspire to be more inspirational than your average social media post but also want their excerpts posted on Instagram alongside pale, artful arrangements of flowers and porcelain teacups. 

Horse girl Warhorse-inspired AU fanfiction about the specialest, smartest, rarest, most beautiful horsey in the world but it's a talking dragon instead.

An interesting premise bogged down by its own attempted cleverness with a rushed and dull ending that was as rote and predictable as the main character's beloved television show.

Mopey, tiresome, and distinctly amateur.

Would have been a fun, if somewhat dry and predictable, 3-star historical fantasy read if it weren't bogged down by endless moralizing that leans cloyingly modern given its 19th century setting (I say this as a mixed Asian person: I am so tired of performative literature that wants to bludgeon you unconscious with Social Justice 101 lessons taken to bewildering extremes, such as “Racism bad! Colonialism? Also bad! Thus, white people bad!” Are you writing for adults? Or is this an overzealous after school special masquerading as literature?).

Mind-bogglingly bad, flat, and weirdly derivative. Every single story here feels like something I've seen done differently and better by other authors, without the pasty veneer of pandemic misery schmaltz.

Absolutely cannot fathom all the hype for this book. I wanted to be done with it after Part One. Alas, I endured, but to what end? Annoyance, mostly. At least my dog got some cuddles out of it. 

Acts of Service is a disappointment, another book that tries to grapple with sexuality and control and fails to do so.  The book it reminded me of most was K.M. Szpara's Docile, in that they both try to be something deeper than they are, which is schlocky smut where a powerful man seduces someone much poorer and more vulnerable with them, and then try to grapple with the whole power imbalance and the twisted threads of compulsion and lust, up to and including legal depositions about how fucked these relationships are, only to ultimately settle on a limp shrug and a, “Well, it's hot and I like it-slash-him, so what can you do?” which is a) miserable and b) an embarrassing waste of the pages and pages of navel-gazing they both do.

It's the frustrating literary equivalent of a friend who keeps telling you about her hot but cruel boyfriend and refuses to dump his sour ass no matter how many times you tell her to, because the make-up sex is too good. Like, congrats on boning down, but after the seventh time we've rehashed this, it's a little tedious.

But who knows, maybe my mistake was reading them too close together.

(There's also a thread of deep, ugly narcissism that seems to me to come from being perenially online, and I couldn't relate to any of it as a hermit and someone who literally does not care about being “fuckable” in the Instagram-obsessed way that so many “disaffected 20-something women” apparently are in modern literature. Reflections on how dismal your life will be after your youth has faded and you aren't sexy anymore are boring and reserved entirely for people who have been hot from the get-go, which generally isn't a very interesting subset of people to read about.)