Liz Rapp

5 stars for creepiness, and Lois was a complex, well written character.

However, from the first few pages it felt pretentious and insular, at times feeling as if the author was name dropping and referencing obscure directors, films and artists for the sake of showing off, not for any larger character development or plot.

It shines more when discussing ancient folk stories such as Lady Midday. It felt like the author shoe horned in a truly creepy myth into her own passion for filmmaking, and the mix didn't quite work for me. For example, she created a blind character, Sidlo, who has an X-Gene level mutation that allows him to telepathically translate another person's memories onto film. This was so weird-like how does that work, mechanicaly? He touches a person, and also a reel of film, and then what?

Also, Lois' husband -just, there is no way a person so accepting, loving and self sacrificing exists. With all of the stuff Lois puts him through I expected him to reach his limit any second, but instead he decides to help her basically ghost hunt (while their son is in the hospital...).


Definitely worth a read if you're looking for a good horror novel, despite my grievances.

The more I think about this book the more irritated I become.

The crux of the novel is discovering that the missing Sylvie commits suicide, which is not exactly a surprise considering that her disappearance is fueling the entire plot. Narratively the options are either one of the other characters has murdered her, she runs away to do something else with her life, or she she has decided to end things. However, it is hard to build any suspense when Sylvie herself is one of the main perspectives in the story. We are less searching for Sylvie that she is just flat out telling us what is happening. She's discovered that her husband had an affair with a 16 year old, loses her job, and her grandmother passed away. All of which might understandably cause grief, anxiety and depression. However, the impetus for suicide was just so weird, it felt like the novel took a hard turn into soap opera territory. Her love interest is revealed to be her half brother, because he notices that she has birth mark that matches his father's? (I actually started googling whether birthmarks can be inherited.) I thought it was a real stretch for both of them to realize “Oh! Look at this funny birthmark, it must mean we have the same dad! Let's not have sex.” I did not understand at all why her reaction was to get in the car and drive into a canal. Why didn't she go confront her parents? Why didn't she use her ample credentials (it was hammered home many, many times about her Ivy League and MIT degrees,) to go find an awesome new job, divorce her husband, and live in a cool new city?

Also, what was the point of the grandmother's “treasure?” Which as described, seemed to be some old gold and jade jewelry? I kept wondering if this was like how my grandma collected china figurines that were probably an extravagance when she bought them, but were really just cute little trinkets? It was such a random plot point that didn't go anywhere. It seemed like the set up was leading towards Sylvie's grandma giving her this jewelry, and telling her to run away and go live her life, but instead....they fake a break in and hide the jewelry so that their aunt can't take it.

I also found some of the character's observations to be really strange. At one point Amy has just landed in the Netherlands, her first flight, customs and airport experience, which I understand can be stressful and novel in a lot of ways. But, she's grown up in New York City, she's not exactly coming from an insular, sheltered location. But she goes to the bathroom and notices that everyone else is so much taller than her, and in fact the sinks are so high she can't even see into the mirror over the sink. What? How tall is she exactly? Are sinks in the Dutch airport dramatically taller than those in New York? Every airport I have ever been in has full length mirrors. This was super minor but I kept finding weird little things that made it seem a bit like the characters were aliens.

Meh. There's a lot I didn't like about this, aside from the issues raised by a totalitarian social network.

The sex scenes were bizarre and unnecessary, with lines like “...so deep she could feel his swollen crown somewhere near her heart,” and Mae daydreaming about how “She wanted to be back in that bathroom sitting on him, feeling the crown of him push through.” Bleh. I can't imagine a woman ever thinking about sex this way.

The dialog seemed largely interchangeable, so most characters working at the Circle could well have been the same person, Bailey seemed exactly the same as the people working at HR. Most of the plot was driven by pedantic dialog of some higher up person grilling Mae until she agrees that she was wrong, and the Circle is wonderful. Mae lacks any depth and just serves as a sponge to absorb the Circle's dogma.

Also, there's an allegory throughout the book involving a shark harvested from a deep sea exploration of the Mariana Trench, and they put it in an aquarium and watch it eat an increasingly weird selection of animals, sea horses, a tuna, an octopus, an entire sea turtle, for seemingly no reason. It's such a heavy handed metaphor for the Circle, which is annoying in it's own right, but also was so scientifically impossible that I just got frustrated every time they kept coming back to this stupid aquarium. You can't take a creature living in the conditions of the Mariana Trench, raise it to the surface, and then expect it to survive in a normal salt water coral filled fish tank.

I finished the book feeling entirely frustrated. The upside was that the audiobook narrator was excellent, and it did keep my interest well enough to want to finish it.

This was amazing. Waited months to get it at the library, then promptly bought it the second I finished it. What a delight.

This was ok. Murder mystery is not my preferred genre, but the mashup of magic style school and crime drama sounded interesting. Unfortunately I found the main character kind of unlikable from the beginning, for example her unrelenting jealousy of her sister was off putting. Though to be fair she does experience a lot of growth over the story.

What a fun book.

I was really not feeling this one. The descriptions of falconry sounded horrible, veering into animal cruelty. It was immediately off putting that our introduction to the main characters was while taking their tethered bird to compete in a fighting pit. I thought I'd give it more of a chance, maybe there'd be a redemption arc involving releasing the captured birds at some point? The twin's mother spends the book telling them to release the birds, because she believes that what they're doing is wrong. But they just treat her like she's in some kind of bird liberation cult and everyone else goes on their merry way capturing, fighting, racing, hunting or whatever the heck else you do with birds. Anyway, the actual plot is about hunting down a giant telepathic eagle, that for some unexplained reason is the key to winning a war.

Also, all of the bird metaphors got really old real fast.

And the audiobook narrator did these really insane bird caws, which made me think whole sentences must have been written like “Caw caw caw caw caw SCREECH.”

That was pretty bleak all the way through.

I feel like I'm in the minority here, but overall I did not love this. I loved the concept of these mysterious huge statues appearing in countries around the world. I also loved the viral Dreamscape and the puzzles everyone joins together to solve. I would have loved it if a lot more of the book was focused on that.

My main problem was that I found the main character, April May, to be so profoundly unlikable. She discovers that getting attention on Twitter and other social media platforms feel good! Welcome to the 21st century April! A great deal of the book is about her philosophies about how people interact online, building her brand, making money, and turning herself into an internet personality, all the while torpedoing all of her personal relationships (breaking up with her girlfriend, hiding in the bathroom during her brother's wedding reception in order to check Twitter).

You think you're picking up a book about mysterious alien robots, but the book is a whole lot of this - “I maybe had $2 million in the bank at that point, and we burned through a full $300,000 of that in the first month of development. The money was officially going out faster than it was coming in, but everyone seemed confident that that would change as soon as the book came out, so that's most of what I was focusing on. The good news was there was a solution to the money problems just on the horizon. April 24 @AprilMaybeNot: When did “makin' love” become “makin' love” because they talk about makin' love in lots of old songs and I don't think they're talking about fuckin'.”

I guess since the book is told from her perspective, and she presents a tone that's very self aware of her own failings, it's supposed to garner sympathy from the reader? It didn't work for me. You don't get a pass for being a jerk just by saying “Oh yeah, I know I was a total jerk here but...” I really, really wished that the book had been told from Maya's perspective. While April is out there building April May™, Maya is in the dream solving tons of the puzzles! I really felt like we missed out on so much interesting story there. And her cat comic the Purrletariat sounds amazing. Andy also would have been a great protagonist. I want to know more about his podcast, and his barely mentioned roommate Jason. One of my favorite parts of the book was the very last chapter, which is told through Andy's perspective. It was the first time since the start of the book that I found myself liking April, when filtered through his perspective.

This was fascinating, even though I kept having to ask for people to explain baseball basics to me. The cultural differences between how Americans and Japanese players approach the sport was really interesting. The main issue I had with the book was how dated it feels reading it in 2019. A friend mentioned that only a couple of years after this was written, Japan suffered a huge economic crash, ushering in the Lost Generation. I would love an update on how modern Japanese baseball has changed in the intervening years.

Overall I really liked the conclusion of this duology. It was an engaging read with great characters and a really intriguing world. The ending was satisfying, where all of the characters basically go off to have more grand adventures.

The book suffers a bit from being too short and cramming in too many points of view. I loved the world building, but there is so much left unexplored, especially considering the introduction of infinite other dimensions. They also briefly mention that the portals eventually led to some sort of dark world, that almost destroyed the universe? So they should maybe worry about that at some point? On the bright side I loved most of the characters, so the many POV shifts weren't always a negative, but I was often left feeling kind of short changed, I would just get to know and love a character only to switch to someone else.

Minya is consistently annoying through the first half of the book (not helped by how the narrator acts out her yelling)- but I liked how her story arc was resolved.

There were also some missed opportunities. A lot of mysteries (such as how did baby Lazlo escape Weep? What happened to all of the missing children? Where did the citadel and Mesarthim come from?) are revealed in quick info dumps, almost as an aside to the reader, to the point where I'm not even sure if the main characters actually know the answers to these questions. Also, Sparrow discovers she can heal and revive corpses, undoubtedly a highly useful skill. She brings back Eril-Fane and Azareen. It seemed like the natural progression of the story would be for her to then use that gift to ‘fix' Sarai. Imagine a scene where they go back to the Citadel, lay Sarai's body in the garden, and anxiously wait and see if Sparrow's gift is powerful enough to perform this miracle. Imagine Lazlo and Sarai's joy as her body is reawakened. But instead they cremate her body early in the book?

I felt like Lazlo and Sarai's saccharine love scenes were my least favorite parts of the book. I loved Lazlo in the beginning of Strange the Dreamer, he is such an interesting character. But I feel like his personality is subsumed by the romance plot as soon as he meets Sarai.

Also, I thought the reveal that Skathis was interdimensionally selling the children was nonsensical. He has an immensely powerful gift - if he wanted to play god and amass treasures and torture and rape he could do that without a weird nursery and human auction. And in what way were the buyers supposed to control and direct the extremely powerful children they were purchasing?

I really enjoyed this, it was one of those books that I could not put down. Definitely has the same world building and drama I enjoyed about the first book.

But now that I've finished it, I'm left wondering why I enjoyed it so much? The ending left me not terribly excited to read the third book. Throughout the first two books people question Jude about her decision to stay in the Faerie realm, when by anyone's standards it is a horrible place. Jude never truly explains her goals, even to herself. I'd be totally fine if Jude just stayed in the human world. In many ways it feels like she's finally been set free by being exiled.

This book is amazing.

That was an excellent snow day read.

This story is bananas, and I'm so glad I read it. It's wonderfully written and engaging from start of finish. It has the pacing of a thriller but the subject matter ranges from Victorian hat fashions, rare birds, science and exploration, fly fishing, and museum heists. Highly recommend giving this book a try.

This was ok, though I don't think I'm going to continue with the series. I thought the premise was great, a school for children who have been recovered from various magic worlds, but the book was too short to really delve into any of their stories. Also, it's a fantasy novel that turns into a murder mystery halfway through, which is kind of where it lost me. Day two of Nancy's stay at this boarding school and her roommate is murdered, and the successive murders are addressed by the headmistress with lines like “Stay together and try to survive the night.” There is a legitimate serial killer in your school, you need to do better than that. And since there is a relatively small pool of characters I was left assuming they were either going to get murdered, or were the murderer, and since they had all just been introduced I really didn't care either way.

Also, Nancy's fantasy world sounded incredibly boring, I honestly could not understand why she wanted to go back. It was a land of the dead, and her duty was to stand statue still and let them pour pomegranate juice against her closed mouth? Gee, where do I sign up.

I really enjoyed the style of this book, with Sadie's perspective contrasted with the narrator of a podcast show investigating her disappearance. The audiobook reminds me of Illuminae, in that the fantastic narrators give it the feel of a radio play. You can feel the struggle as Sadie fights to get words out, even as her mental narrative slides smoothly along, it is beautifully acted. Sadie is a wonderfully complicated character, she feels broken and young, and all of her decisions seems kind of crazy but in a really honest way. She doesn't shy away from hurting herself in her pain and rage, blinded by her single minded focus. With nothing left to lose, why shouldn't she put everything into hunting down her little sister's murderer?

Also enjoyed this interview with the author https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/macmillan/the-girls-find-sadie/e/56218100

Highly recommend listening to the audiobook while walking alone in the woods.

Not for me, though I'll probably still see the movie version at some point. The book felt like a ridiculous list of extremely wealthy people doing what extremely wealthy people do. Very hard to like any of the characters. I skimmed entire chapters, especially the many sections that detailed how many karats were in someone's jewelry, or how much they paid for their outfit. This is where I suspect the movie would outdo the book, using an item's purchase cost or name dropping a designer is a poor substitute for actual descriptions. I felt like I was continually rolling my eyes at the level of excess and over the top characterizations. The humor/satire of it just didn't do it for me. Pros were that it made me want to travel to Singapore and eat a bunch of yummy satay.

Also thought the ending was weird and abrupt, but then I realized there are two more books that I probably won't read.

Fun!

I have a lot of respect for John Carreyrou's work and tenacity in bringing Elizabeth Holmes' fraud to light. The story is a fascinating one, and the book is definitley worth reading, however I feel like it could have been summed up more concisely, perhaps in reading Carreyrou's original Wall Street Journal pieces.

It just became really depressing to read all of the ins and outs Theranos structure, the rate of firings, the many different ways the supposedly ground breaking technology didn't work, the lengths they went to hire lawyers and private investigators to prevent whistle blowers. After awhile I found myself skimming since it was years and years of repeated heinous corporate practices. There's no real satisfaction in learning why Holmes and her partner Balwani acted like such megalomaniacs, similar to how detectives interviewing sociopaths must feel frustrated when asking “Why did you commit this crime,” often there's just no answer to be found.

This was a bookclub pick, and not something I would have picked myself. I sort of know Rush, as in I could identify that they are a band. I actually asked a few friends if they knew them and they had a similar response.

Well, the book itself is kind of charming and easily readable, I just didn't really have much of an attachment or nostalgia for the author. Tragically, Neil loses his wife and daughter in the same year, and the book covers his recovery through motorcycling through Canada, the US and Mexico. It can be very sad, but it will also make you want to travel, eat good food, and get moving.

However, halfway through the book he completes four months of traveling, and spends a snowy winter at his lake house in Toronto snowshoeing and skiing. And THEN, the second half of the book is him basically doing the same trip again. I skimmed the second half. I can see some people loving this book, those who are motorcyclists, and Rush fans, especially, but it was just not for me.

I did really enjoy this, but just like the first book I felt like the ending was rushed and a bit confusing.

Morozko actually has a brief paragraph explaining the ending of book 1 - where he says he gave Vasya's father the choice to fight the Bear and die, and that's how he randomly appears in the woods just in time to save Vasya. It was a kind of out of place explanation, and if the author had included it in the first book it would have been a better ending. I remember really liking the first book until the father basically teleported to the fight in the woods and deus ex machina-d the ending.

Anyway, there's a lot to like about the second book. Vasya is such an interesting character, and Solovey was wonderful! The depictions of medieval Russia, the folk tales, the wintery setting, were all beautifully rendered. The terem and depictions of the stifling lives of women were terrifying, especially in contrast to Vasya, a woman so unsuited to such a life. But it seemed like Vasya very quickly went from wanting to be a traveler, to telling Olga she will stay in Moscow to help her manage Marya's magical tendencies. It seemed like a very quick switch.

This is such a great comic.

Love it!