RiffMonkey

I loved this secret project. I read it quite slowly compared to normally. I enjoyed the story, although it did get a bit complicated at some point. Luckily, Hoid stopped a bit to explain exactly what was going on, which I believe he also did a little bit of in Tress of the Emerald Sea. Usually with Sanderson's books you really have to figure stuff out yourself, but this made it very clear, and it was a great addition in my opinion. 

I read this book mainly in the lab aloud to my friends and coworkers, which was a whole experience of its own and definitely made me enjoy the book more, especially in the beginning. I like the characters, or some of them anyway. All of them but Marx got on my nerves are some point. 

I loved the descriptions of the games and the references that the story got back to later in the book. Like Anne Lee and the secret roads. Reading the book did get very heavy near the end. The last part of the book didn't really have a point. It wound itself down a little. It became slow and just fully filled with sadness. The ending also didn't feel at all satisfying. Still a great book though. 

Loved the return of the characters once again. I did feel like it went very slow and then very fast. The pacing in general wasn't really that great and a bit all over the place. I loved the story and am very sad that this is the end of the series. I do think it is a good one. 

I don't really know how to feel about Alustin's ending. I didn't fully love it, but if it had ended the other way, I would also not have been satisfied. I'm not sure if it was for the best either way. Excellent books, can't wait to see what Bierce has for us next. 

One of the scariest, actually terrifying books I have ever read in my life. This book made me crawl in my skin. Absolutely one of the best horror books I have read. I loved the characters and their interactions. The vibes were wonderfully horrific. Holy fucking shit. I hope Singer and Bible made it. 

I feel like this would be better right after reading In an Absent Dream, because I forgot many details about the characters and world. I do think even independently its a nice little story. Because of this though I felt the characters were not as fleshed out. I really need to reread some of these. 

I loved reading this book. Mostly the magic system is what drew me in, the whole vibes of the two different styles, one based in science and one on tarot cards, is great. The cultures are so fleshed out and deep that I actually felt like I missed a lot of things. There were so many details. 

The thing however that made me stay and fall in love with this novel and how the characters ended is the way relationships are described. Their bonds and the different rituals for every single group, culture and relation you could possibly imagine. And that swearing these bonds immediately makes it so. When Vargo and Grey swore a bond, they because brothers in the text from then on. That is so beautiful. As was every bond that Ren made and how it all came together in the end. She had so much family, it made me want to cry. 

I loved the vibes of this whole book. The characters were great, and I loved every single one of them. The world was rich and the magic sufficiently dark. The goblin market was perhaps my favourite part, it made me wanna reread any fay-ish book I have ever read. Marra and Fenrir were amazing together, and I loved their little moments and their large ones. I had very different expectations from the first couple of chapters than what it turned out to be, but fuck was this good. 

As with many short story collections, not all of them can be bangers. But fuck, many of them were. I especially loved Hunting the Viper-King, Fiddler, Fool Pair and Fruiting Bodies. Some of them I felt didn't really fit with the theme of the rest of them, like Take Only What Belongs to You and Endangered Animals. They felt very disconnected and were my least favourite to be sure. But overall I think the stories were excellent and I thoroughly enjoyed them. They each created their own worlds with such vivid vibes that I felt very sucked into it. 

The first parts of this book read very fast, but after a couple more chapters I started getting immensely bored. The narrator/main character was, to me, incredibly unlikeable and annoying. She made the most stupid and nonsensical decisions. But I actually didn't like any of the characters in the entire book. Especially Daniel was super weird even after the revelation at the end. You can add as many explanations in the last few chapters as you like, he still acted super weird and ridiculous. 

The way many of the pages suddenly jumped between conversations in the past and at the moment was also very annoying and confusing. It made it unclear what has actually happing in the present moment. The whole book was very unpleasant to read in general as well, I disliked the narration style immensely. 

Maybe I read these book too fast after each other, but by this point I really didn't care any more. I didn't like this version of Shaffa, Ykka and Tonke could have been in this more in my opinion and Essun was just starting to get really boring. 

I also felt the ending was really anticlimactic. I don't know what I expected because they talked about catching the Moon in book 2 already, so of course that is where this book ends. But it just felt very useless. There was really no more conflicted by that point. We have known this was the plan since book 2, and then it just happened. They just do it. That not even in the middle, all the way at the end. I was just very done and bored by the end. 

As with all of these books, I absolutely love the characters and the story. Especially the first story, that one was by far my favourite. Something about the second one was very hard to get through, and though I did enjoy the last story about Christmas as well, I found it a little all over the place. When Tori sort of inhabits Fornax definitely had the most impact on the characters in my mind. 

The concept of this is very interesting, and I enjoyed the main character very much. I also loved the other characters. I do feel as though the story went very fast, and it was hard sometimes to know what was what since they don't explain everything. I was a little disappointed in the decision made for the ending, but I am aware this is a long series, so I will see what else happens. 

I liked this book. Thought Nassun's progression was a bit fast and did not care for Shaffa as a character in the first one not here but Castrima is really interesting and I like how Tonke and Essun are finally getting shit done.

Maybe I only care about History, maybe I am just not good at sticking by non-fiction books but fuck was this boring by the middle. I simply did not care about the contemporary bit of this book. I also felt it the chapter went on for way too long got longwinded and went into unnecessary caveats constantly.

I skimmed through the last half but honestly just didn't care anymore. The timeline of many events was also very unclear to me because it kept skipping back in time slightly for some reason. Not for me. I did seem very well-researched. 

I enjoyed this book very much and read through it in like 4 days. Which for me is very quick, especially for this many pages. I was apprehensive about the premise of the story, I feel it could have gone in a very bad direction and the topic is very delicate if some incorrectly. But it was done in a great way. 

Greaves does something I love which is, that she talks about heavy topics and very clearly unethical and morally grey things but doesn't make that the focus. We are not supposed to think something of it. The book doesn't push you into thinking this is horrible and great, it doesn't scream at you to look at society as something that many literary books do that I hate. It just lets you enjoy the story with these characters. It goes deep into this world but doesn't encroach on the real world. It doesn't puncture the story and sully it with pressing questions about how this should change your perceptions and shit like that. 

I noticed halfway through the book that these chapters are posted online and thus written a chapter at a time. It made me read the book in a different way. It felt very slow and didn't really have the arch or structure I would expect from a standalone or even a book in a series. But now that I know that it is just a much bigger story cut into pieces it makes more sense. Although I could argue this novel should have ended a chapter earlier for it to be more cenmented as a book 1, with a nicer ending line and closure I don't mind it as much as I would have had I not known the origins of the story in that way. 

This book had so much potential. I loved the premise and the idea of it. It started off very promising and I was invested quick. The format of her writing a letter to a lawyer because a lawsuit is happening kinda confused me and then it didn't end up having any payoff either. Which is a theme in the reading of this novella. 

Nothing has any fucking pay-off. She constantly keeps referring to a thing she did that is like crazy or something so shocking that is about to happen and then it's the most bland thing. The characters were largely unrelatable. Halfway through the book, I was so invested in what happens to them but most of the side characters are ignored in the ending. None of the crazy things they start to believe are led anywhere. I guess it just ends with all those people believing all these conspiracies and there is no payoff to that either. 

This could have been so good if it dug a little deeper and focussed on all the characters and how they got into and perhaps out of these rabbit holes but it fully ignored that as if it didn't just spend half the book setting it up. Could have been great, I did enjoy reading it but the more I think about it the more I hate it. 

Absolutely an amazing sequel. I loved to see how Chloe and her powers developed and all the development that Tori and Hephaestus went through during everything that happend. Again this universe is amazing and I could read a million of these books even though they are ridiculously long. 

Cannot wait for the third in the series

I read most of these books through audiobooks while playing a video game. I think this helped immensely because I would have been bored out of my mind if I had to read it at my regular pace with full attention. I don't really read YA anymore, and this book reminded me why. It all felt very childish and overly dramatic. The characters felt very flat and I just really wasn't that interested. 

I didn't feel like this really contributed much, besides the characters coming back. They didn't really do anything new. I enjoy emotional connections more and this book series just doesn't really focus on that. Sure the characters love each other but besides events in their lives, they don't really do much together. I just can't emotionally connect with this, which might also be because of the way it is narrated. I don't know. I just don't really enjoy it anymore 

It was an enjoyable book to read. It was written a while ago and has lots of those tropes I don't enjoy that were popular at the time. Like two boys who are in love with the same girl. I had a hard time differentiating between them as well. Only Sloane was really different from the other characters, the rest were very much the same to me. 

I did like reading it and it really wasn't a long book but it just felt like there was no substance. 

From the very first chapter, I knew I would enjoy reading this novel very much. I related to Iris a lot and her life was very interesting to read about. Especially near the back of the novel when things start going downhill. I just really loved it. 

The ending was left extremely open and the mystery of that ‘everyone doesn't know' is fully left unsolved, which bothers me in a way but it does make me able to fill in the ending the way I want to. What I chose to believe happens, which is also fun in a way. I just love reading books about people loving their minds. 

God what a long book, but so worth it. I loved everything about this. Many times the characters knew things that made sense for the story, and this wasn't just pulled out of nowhere. All the characters were unique and diverse in character. But fuck there were a lot of them. 

Many times I had totally forgotten either the power, code name or real name of different characters which made some parts a little confusing but I got through it. I also love the fact that being a villain of a hero in this particular context really says nothing of the moral compass of the person. There were bad guy heroes and good guy villains throughout as well. 

I also love Nexus basically just being a totally insane omnipotent pest. I don't know why, but I like that he just jumps in sometimes to confuse and frighten everyone while he is bored, super interesting. 

I had high hopes for this book, I loved queer horror and with the centre being a conversion camp I was excited for some good dark psychological fuckery. However, it turned much more into body horror than it did anything else. I also hoped the story would start before she got to the camp and not after she had already come back. 

The ending I did enjoy and I liked the implication that the demons have an okay moral compass of their own and don't actually have the same values as the church. But I did feel it ended much too abruptly and that there was more of an epilogue. The book was fine, not great but certainly not bad. 

Reading this book was a whole journey. Something about the writing stuck out to me immediately, although I am not fully sure what it was. This is truly fully about the characters and their interactions. Even though a lot happens in the plot, long journeys, kings challenged the focus is really on the relationships of the main characters. I don't think I have ever read such a deep and kind relationship.  

I don't usually read romances because I don't enjoy the constant troubles within the relationship, but this didn't centre their troubles with each other but their love within the troubling world. Which I always enjoy so much more. And it was truly also very dark and terrifying in many ways. Honestly probably the perfect book for me and I will be buying the next ones for sure, I usually love anthologies and expect this one to be no different. 

The first story was a bit of a bad start. It was immediately very repetitive and the dialogue was very stiff. Although I feel some of that was due to translation and maybe cultural differences. After I got into it however it became much less repetitive and more meaningful. 

The later stories were all about the people in the cafe which helped. The message was great in every story, and even though the dialogue still felt somewhat emotionless, the other text explained the feelings some more. I did feel the end stopped somewhat abruptly.