Liz Rapp

As someone who regularly jogs through a cemetery in my neighborhood(Ivy Hill), and has done 5Ks through Congressional Cemetery during their annual Dead Man's Run, I found the author's interest in cemeteries very relatable.

The book was interesting, if a little dry at times. I skimmed some long rambling descriptions of architecture and cemetery layouts. But, overall the subject matter is fascinating, and parts of this book were deeply moving—the sections on Arlington cemetery, and the missing burial locations for the enslaved people at Monticello especially. There were also many fun and lighthearted tidbits, to think that cemetery planning may have influenced suburban neighborhood design! And Abraham Lincoln may be loosely responsible for the American tradition of embalming!

I do feel like Melville missed a huge opportunity when talking about Congressional Hill Cemetery. He mentioned that they have apiaries, but not that they sell the honey, and it is called “Rest in Bees.”

Overall, well worth a read!

I think one of the reasons that I didn't love this, is that I love the Temeraire series so much. Perhaps that is unfair, considering that the books have very little in common other than dragons. However, how Naomi Novik described dragon riding makes so much more sense than the world of Fourth Ring. In the Temeraire books, there is also extensive training for riding a dragon, but it's about using gear to assist you in staying on board, such as straps, saddles etc. It was ridiculous to me that these people were expected to go through what seemed to be a ninja warrior-style gauntlet to prove they could stay on a flying animal they had no experience with, instead of just giving them some riding gear. And the Tairn shows up wearing a saddle! Why would you not just give everyone a saddle from the beginning? The cadet death toll seemed to be entirely avoidable. I was wondering if there was going to be some kind of population control issue, or maybe it's a whole system of government control regarding the threat of conscription into a high-mortality death school, but I guess I'll have to wait for the second book to find out more.

Overall, I enjoyed the story, but I felt it was weak in world-building. I didn't have any clear idea of what their land was like outside of the war college. When Xaden gives Violet a saddle for Tairn, I was honestly wondering where it came from, is there some sort of leather artisan on the premises? This would have been a great spot to use a couple of sentences to flesh out the community they are living in.

My other big issue with the book is that I could not figure out what the dragons were getting out of these bonding relationships. Do they even like the humans? They don't seem to care whether they live or die, even after bonding with them, with a few exceptions regarding our main characters.

I found Violet genuinely annoying. She wants everyone to respect her, but then she does things like insist she be allowed to stay in a battle when she has no experience and has to be practically dragged away. She is also presented as being the smartest cadet in her year, but she lacks any curiosity about why they are there, or why the rebellion happened, or whether the things they are being taught should be questioned - even when evidence is right in front of her.

Also, there is a whole conversation about how we need to hide that feathertails are juvenile dragons, but it is going to be abundantly obvious to everyone when Violet's bonded dragon turns into an adult in a year...

I enjoyed this, but it was slow going at the beginning. It kind of reads as if it is the second book in a series. There's not enough world building / exposition at the beginning, which made me feel kind of lost.

Overall though I really enjoyed the characters, and it did pull together at the end.

Art is beautiful, but plot is convoluted, horrifying and hard to follow. Not for me.

Though I might read the next volume just for the cats.

...what was up with the wagon full of bats?

Interesting, but feels a bit like starting a book half way through.

I really enjoyed this, though found the sections from Henry's POV rather dull. If it had been entirely about Adeline I would give it 5 stars. I would have loved to have many more sections of her wandering through history, instead of the small glimpses we get.

This was a pretty good, short read. The characters were well developed, the story heart felt. I wish it had delved more deeply into the scifi elements, or questioned further the ramifications of bringing people back to life, even if only for a short period of time.

I did enjoy reading this. The sections describing his family adapting to life in Lyon, learning French, making friends, going to school, were really engaging. The descriptions of the city, its food and history were likewise interesting.

But the book also felt a bit disjointed. For example, near the end of the book, Buford takes a trip to a lake where a unique freshwater fish can be found. He goes to some trouble to convince the local fisherman to take him out on the lake, however the next page Buford is instead tracking down he local flour miller, without ever again mentioning the lake or describing the fishing he went to such lengths to experience.

I also found his defense of the abusive working conditions he experienced at a top tier kitchen to be strange and off putting. (Where pots are thrown at workers, people are regularly hit, name calling and cursing or expected, all in the name of holding up some ideal of cuisine.) Kudos to Hortense for getting out of there and getting into the fashion industry. I imagine her perspective on that kitchen would have been a lot less favorable that Buford's.

The ren faire setting caught my eye, overall I'm glad I picked this one up. Fun and fluffy.

This was pretty fun. Picked it up at a used book store because I loves the retro cover, worth a read for the 80s nostalgia and horror vibes. Wish it had pushed further into the darker elements, there were a couple of plotlines that seemed like they were really going dark only to veer away at the last moment, which was not really what I was expecting in a horror novel.

I will keep reading these as long as she keeps writing them.

This is some pretty great escapist fun, along the lines of a soap opera in book form. If you're looking for a light read this is a good choice, however, I was really bummed that the ending is just one big cliffhanger. You get to the end and realize it's just all just been one long setup for the next book, none of the storylines or romantic entanglements have resolution. If I'd known that I probably would have waited until I could read both books together.

I think I fall into the category of people who wished they were reading Station Eleven instead.

Some parts of this book I thought were really great, descriptions of the Hotel Caiette, glimpses of ghosts you're never really sure are there, Leon's moments of happiness with his wife in their RV, Vincent's remembrances of her mother. But these moments felt really short, and then we'd be back to the Ponzi scheme that seemed to take over the plot about a third of the way through the novel. I don't know, if you're really interested in rehashing Bernie Madoff and the financial crisis of 2008, give this one a try. There's a moment near the end where another character describes Vincent by saying something like “You know how rare it is to meet someone who really loves their life? She would work 8 months and then spend the rest of the year traveling the world.” And I found myself thinking, wow, I really wish that had been part of the book, instead of mentioned in passing by a character who is only around for two pages.

The Nerdette Podcast had a really great discussion about this novel. It was nice to hear that the guest reviewer shared my “meh” opinion, though the host herself did really enjoy the book.

I really liked this. However, I had a real problem keeping the characters straight.

Conversations were kind of a mess. Imagine a rapid conversation between 2-16 newly introduced characters, where the characters are referred to alternatively by their titles, first names, last names, nicknames, or just their house number. I assumed I would adjust as we learned more about each character, but even past the halfway mark I kept finding myself going back to the online character guide to figure out who belonged to what house, who was a necromancer and who a cavalier. At one point I thought that Dulcinea's nickname was Corona, though that is an entirely different character. Later I was often confused if Coronabeth was one of the twins, or the twins' cavalier. It was incredibly confusing to sort out the cast of characters, and thus everyone's motivation except the two main characters was largely a lost cause. I was so relieved anytime it was just Gideon and Harrow cursing at each other, which were also by far the best parts of the novel.

At one point it seemed like even the author couldn't keep the characters straight- Harrow says to Palamedes “Sextus, your necromancer is wounded,” when Sextus is the necro, and his cavalier is the one wounded?

I am looking forward to the sequel. There are a lot of unanswered questions about the universe I am looking forward to seeing fleshed out.

I never thought I'd cry over finding a microscopic organism.

Overall this is a quick, fun read. However, I didn't feel it quite lived up to The Unhoneymooners, which I really enjoyed. If you're a fan of the genre and a fan of Christina Lauren, I'd recommend it.

The characters felt a bit flat and the plot was a little flimsy. Rusty and Melissa, the show co-hosts and the novel's antagonists, were really sad. I was sort of hoping they would have a sweet reconciliation arc of rediscovering why they fell in love, but the further we got into the novel they became almost cartoonishly unlikable.

I did enjoy James and Carey's relationship, but kept getting hung up on aspects that didn't really make sense.

-Why did this HGTV-esque show need to hire an engineer, and if they did need an engineer why was James getting coffee for Rusty, who was doing the actual engineering?
-James working as Rusty's assistant due to lack of job prospects was odd (especially since he almost immediately gets a civil engineering job after the show implodes)
-I'm assuming a lot of these reno shows are largely fake anyway, so what does it matter if Melissa is the stage talent and Carey is the designer? Couldn't they have worked this out in a professional way? Lots of artist work for companies that technically own the art they are produce, it's just part of business
-James and Carey's break-up motivation didn't make any sense. Him having a private conversation about his job with his boss is in no way a betrayal of their barely week long relationship
-Carey's motivation to stay in her job is about finances and health insurance - but when she quits she immediately buys a house and discovers she can live a year without a job and still afford health insurance
-Sorry, I am really stuck on this engineering thing. They mention a hundred times that he is an engineer but never elaborate. It just feels like the authors didn't really do any research into fleshing out their characters. They didn't even mention what kind of engineer James is - computer, electrical, mechanical etc. was he building bridges in his previous job, was he writing software? All it would have taken was two or three sentences of exposition to clear this up. It would have made way more sense to make James a designer.

I received an advanced copy.

This is a face paced, thought provoking read. However it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. I picked it up after listening to an interview with the author, and the description of the opening chapters really grabbed me. With the perspectives jumping back and forth from Emira, and her employer Alix, I was hoping for a story about race, growing up, female friendship and motherhood. However, with the introduction of Emira's boyfriend as the antagonist, it really started to lose me. Alix goes from being a kind of quirky, somewhat self obsessed mom, to suddenly being the full on villain of the story. I would have bought that more if the story had been told solely from Emira's POV, but since you're in so much of Alix's head from the beginning it felt like a weird twist.

I was also surprised to learn that the author lives in Philadelphia, because I felt like she was kind of negative towards the city. Alix treats moving from NYC to Philadelphia as if she's moving to a farm in Kansas, and I never really understood why. The train ride between the cities is like an hour and a half. Philadelphia is a big, vibrant, historic city with a lot of cool neighborhoods, with the bonus of being much more affordable than Manhattan. Given a choice, I choose to visit and live in Philly. I was so confused about why Alix was hiding the fact that she moved to basically an equivalent, if not better, city.

There were also some weird elements that I thought were confusing choices on the authors part. She uses Emira's sibling's success to illustrate Emira's own dissatisfaction with not being able to find her own passion in life, but the example she uses is that her brother wins a barista competition and lands a job at a fancy coffee shop in Texas? This was so unusual and specific that I was wondering if this actually happened to someone the author knows? And the locker / letter reveal at the end was a real stretch, it would have been better to leave it ambiguous for the readers. I can't think of any reason why Alex would have been cleaning out everyone's lockers at the end of the school year - the author's reasoning that it was traditionally the job of the student council just felt like nonsense.

Overall it's not a bad read, I can see why it's getting a lot of buzz this year. The ending was underwhelming, the jump forward in time added little to the story.

What a delight.

This was a really fun holiday read.

This is a solid Y/A fantasy novel and a fairly quick read. The characters are interesting, but the overall plot was fairly obvious. I found myself skimming sections without feeling like I was missing much. The frequent shifts in POV helped drive the plot along, but also led to a lack of character development and world building.

In the middle of the novel Beru mentions having a train ticket and I was honestly surprised that trains exist in this universe - it otherwise feels like a pre -industrial fantasy world. Trains imply an advancement past the swords and crossbows other characters are using. They also mention one of the graces allows people to create magical inventions, like incandescent lights and trains, but I wish this concept had been more fleshed out. If a graced person makes an incandescent light, do they have to use their own energy to keep it lit? Or does it just exist separately from its creator? Does each train have to have graced person acting as fuel and conductor? Can people pool their esha's together to make bigger things, like the Lighthouse in Nazirah (that is supposedly so impressive, though they never really explain why)? Can people have more than one grace? What percentage of the population is graced? I wasn't entirely sure if it was supposed to be a rare gift, since it seemed like so many characters had it, and other than the Witnesses most people were kind of blase about these magic powers.

The scale of the world was also murky - at one point Jude mentions it will take 5 days to get from wherever their mountain hideout is to Pallas Athos. But later, traveling by boat and train to Nazirah and Medea seems to take no time at all, making it feel like Herat is the size of Delaware.

Also, ends on a cliffhanger, which was frustrating.

Loved this. Just wish it wasn't so short, and ended with a cliffhanger.

I didn't like this as much as I thought I would. I felt most of the essays were very pessimistic, and I found myself either disagreeing with her premises, or confused about what she was trying to say. I also felt she relied too much on quotes from other works as examples instead of using her own writing.

I wish this was a real pumpkin patch

If you're looking for a funny, fast paced rom com this is the book for you!