Ash

Oof that ending was yikes. The rest was ok. A little too chaste for my taste.

I think this one was my favorite so far.

I relate to Nesta more than I relate to Feyre. I loved this book. It would have also been 5 stars, but I feel like it should have been edited down. Like with most of the books in this series, the beginning was unnecessarily slow. Still amazing.

I spent the entirely of this book uncomfortable. I didn't hate it, but I also did not enjoy reading it. I'll have to try out a different Colleen Hoover book, because this one was just not the one for me.

Classic rom-com “fake-dating” trope, classic main character who feels super insecure and almost ruins everything at every turn, and classic brooding male lead who is soft and gentle only to the main character. Just classic. I loved the science background and the constant quippy banter. It was a good time.

Heartwarming and wholesome fantasy books are the greatest. This book made me laugh and cry multiple times. Definitely one I would recommend to anyone who loves children. The author did such an amazing job with the children's dialogue. Ugh so cute but also so meaningful with the moral discussions and circumstances.

I hated this book. The plot, the pacing, the perspectives. It lacked depth. I didn't feel attached to any of the characters because they were one dimensional and cringed through the whole thing. Trauma-porn, but written with no emotion.

So I didn't keep track, but I'm pretty sure it was close to ten times that I had to full on weep while reading this. I'm curious as to how the series will change moving forward...

I'm not going to lie, I did not think I was going to like this book half as much as I did after the first one. I hated Tamlin in the first book and was mad they were together. Feyre was also overly petulant and prone to making stupid decisions. Then there's this one. I love Rhys! I love the rest of the gang too. I love the powers and the folklore. The slow build of flirtation was great. I'm excited to start the next one right away.

I generally don't like catfish/liar love stories. It's just not a red flag I can overlook. Stacey's character was far removed from the way she was portrayed in Well Met. The author tried to cover this up as a masking reflex the character had in order to seem more aloof to her friends, but it didn't work. Daniel was a creep and the fact that Stacey wasn't suspicious at all during the entire year she was emailing/texting him was too unrealistic. How do you not have a phone call or a FaceTime in the modern age once during a year long exchange, especially if you are obsessed with social media? The saving grace was the 1 sex scene. It was worth all three starts. I'll read the next one and see if I the series recovers for me.

I love Emily Henry's writing. It's witty and her male characters are always realistic non-assholes. Which is an important stipulation in the romance genre for me specifically. I don't feel like I'm reading someone's Wattpad creation. The characters have depth and pain and aren't good for the sake of being good. Both Poppy and Alex had less than desirable traits that made them feel real. I'm slowly adding all of her books to my library. Great read.

This series is still my favorite among the romance genre. I love Lucian and Hattie. I love that the three women in the series thus far, have had very specific voices and drives. There's nothing posted anywhere on the author's website about there being a 4th book featuring Catriona, but I really hope that is in the works.

After falling in love with Daisy Jones and Evelyn Hugo, this book was somewhat of a let down. Mick Riva is interchangeable with Billy Dunne and was one of Evelyn's husbands. The being cheated on but sticking around trope is not one I can stomach anymore in a TJR book. Nothing new was given with this book.

I really wanted to like this one...
I didn't realize how much it annoyed me until I was relaying the plot back to someone out loud. The whole book was just poorly thought out. All the women wanted, with equal measure, to have babies and to kill men. All the men were unfaithful and/or too stupid to find a concealed door in the span of 200 years. Don't forget the psychopathic child that thought her period was the ghost of the man she murdered. Nope.

This is the kind of book I'm talking about when I say I love historical fiction. I became attached to each new character as they were introduced in the smallest amounts of time. Yaa Gyasi has a true gift of storytelling.

I would happily consume any form of content Rachel Bloom put out. That's all.

The jaded pick me girl falls for the feminist puppy guy. The end. Lol jk. It reminded me a lot of the movie Life as a House. Sick parent tricks angry child to move in, child finds love and cleans up their life, parent and child bond and parent dies, and finally, child lives the rest of their life well adjusted. Overall, I liked it. Lots of trigger warnings though.

This is one of those books where the main character does the opposite of what I would do if faced with the same circumstances. I think that made the story more addicting. The ending was very sweet.

This book, while having a poignant plot, fell victim to flat writing. I know the whole point was for it to read like a piece of journalism, but the informative style bored me. I missed the florid language of fiction writing. There wasn't any meat or emotion behind any of the words the way they were written. And with a subject as resonant as this, I felt there should have been. It may have been that I had really high expectations for this book before reading, but it was just a slog to get through. Took about 2.5 months to read all the way through. That being said, I loved Virgil and moments of Opal. Don't think I would put this on any recommendation lists though.

Honest take: didn't love it.
According to my book club, it's an unpopular opinion.
I got to hear the author talk about this book and how she based all of the characters on either real people or realistic experiences that the characters would have faced historically. And while I respect that aspect of the writing, some of her choices fell flat for me.
I don't like reading books that make me distrust the author. When they kill off the main character and write characters that can be interchangeable, it doesn't make me want to continue reading. Evangeline and Hazel ended up with the same personality as soon as the author killed Evangeline off. She wrote in a Tasmanian historical figure that was an indigenous little girl stolen from her people and forced to learn English ways, but was abruptly abandoned. I thought she handled the writing of this character delicately, even if the whole character felt like an oddly placed name drop to bring more intrigue to her main story.
There were parts that I genuinely liked while reading, like the poisoning, Olive and Ruby, and I liked the constant descriptions of the smells and scenery that made the conditions of the convicts palpable.
It was interesting to read this one in a book club where every other person loved the book.

I love how addictive YA is in that it makes me read consistently. This is my first time reading a faerie series. I've read plenty of other mythological/magical fantasy books, but never faeries. This book has all of the classic dark fantasy YA tropes. Every single one. Not a bad thing necessarily, but it made the whole thing very predictable. As with most YA books, I wish the main character had more of a personality. The “selfless and unknowingly pretty girl who makes logically unsound decisions the whole book but somehow everything turns out okay” main character and plot is tired.
The three male characters were also very classic, but I liked ‘em. I know world building can be a slow process so I'm not too upset about the pace of this book and the last third made up for it. I was warned that the first book was not as good as the later books in the series. So I'm looking forward to picking up the next one.

This book was long-winded and not worth the time invested reading it. I'm not sure if that can be attributed to the fact that it was translated or to the gothic romance style the author was trying to emulate. And while I understand that the language and themes were meant to match the place and time period, it was just so glaringly obvious on every page that this was written by a man. There were several instances of rape/molestation, countless slurs, domestic abuse, and romanticized incest. Lining it up, it reads like the search engine of a porn site.
There were multiple plot points that were brought in that went nowhere. The whole concept of the cemetery of books was the most interesting part and it had only a minor role in the story. I would have thought it would be more important seeing as how the whole series is named after it. The first portion of the book was dedicated to this Clara character who's sole purpose was to make the main character have a first crush? For what?
I guessed at most of the ending. The only part that threw me was the incest. I was worried that Daniel's life was mirroring Julián's too much to where Bea would be his sister too. Also, why didn't they explain The significance of Tess of the d'Ubervilles to Bea. That's one of the worst stories on the planet... if that was the book I found in the labyrinth, I would be pissed. Overall, meh.

This will be more of a comparison than a review. To start off, I prefer the show over the book.
There were creative choices made for the tv series that helped the audience humanize Joe and it's just a personal preference that I like my villains complex with personable characteristics mixed in with all their evil-doing. Most of the show remained accurate to the book, but almost all of the additions made for a better story. For example adding Paco's character in was a good change, but adding Candace's reprise was meh. I haven't started the second book yet, so I'm not sure if Candace will indeed pop up, but I hope she doesn't. Penn Badgley captured Joe Goldberg perfectly, and Shay Mitchell's Peach was a million times better in the tv series. I didn't like either Beck so it's hard to compare the two. I loved the references to literature because I have read and strongly disliked most of the books Joe recommended that every “well read” dude suggests. All of them have undertones of misogyny, racism, or are simply pretentious af. I especially liked the criticism for people obsessed with King novels. (Still hate his writing.) These references helped me map out who Joe was on a deeper level and understand why he, as a psychopath, would relate to these books. The biggest feeling crossover from the book and the tv show is my love for Karen Minty and I'm so glad she got out. The only Karen I'm okay with relating too. I loved King of Queens.

Why not end the year of a world altering pandemic reading a book about a WORLD ALTERING PANDEMIC? It definitely felt like more of a probable parallel universe than a random post-apocalyptic fantasy. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes dystopian sci-fi/fantasy, especially those that have an appreciation for Shakespeare. (I feel like that describes my entire friend group from high school...) This book was amazing. I loved the premise, the characters, the non-linear plot lines, the scenery. I was hoping that Jeevan would end up at the airport with Kirsten and Clark at some point, but that's a very minor qualm. It also would have been cool to see Tyler's evolution into the Prophet after he left with Elizabeth and to know why or how he decided on the branding of the plane symbol. I also wanted to know August's back story, but I get that a lot of these things were supposed to be intuited. I'm just greedy.

I watched the show first, so I feel like this will be more of a comparison than a review. They took the shell of this book and rewrote it to fit an entirely different agenda. The conflicts, the characterizations, the actual plot and the entire ending, all different. The show and the book were good, but these are very different stories. The book focuses on many types of ethical gray areas, class disparities, and micro aggressions towards Asians. The show tended to be less gray and more glaring in all aspects. Naturally, this made the book slightly less satisfying. I missed the showdowns between Elena and Mia while reading, though the show put a lot less emphasis on Bebe's story. I enjoyed the show more than the book after consuming both, however, I strongly feel like the author's story was hijacked and reworked in a way that was disingenuous. And while I feel that the show had so many important educational scenes regarding micro aggressions towards the Black community, it took the focus off the Asian communities. Asian creators in general, rarely get the space to share their input on topics regarding their unique struggles in American society. I feel that it was unfair of the team of 4 white female producers plus Kerry Washington to piggyback on this story to fit in race issues from other perspectives of color and not even include any Asian producers outside of the author herself. Even worse, the show eliminated every other Asian side character. The best friend Serena and her mother, and the downstairs neighbor Mr. Yang was barely featured. I know Celeste had a hand in the show's production and even had a cameo, but I wish I could talk to her about these eliminations and what she thinks about the complete overhaul of her characters and her voice. Like I said I really enjoyed the show, but after reading the book, I feel less good about it.