Adrienne

you really had me in the first half

I am not an evangelical Christian and I think many aspects of that kind of Christianity are harmful to its adherents and the larger community.

I am a religious person and I am interested in the rise of Nones.

The first half of the book is an informative, evidence-based look at why people are leaving churches, often without actually losing faith in the Christian god.

The second half speaks specifically to inviting people back to Evangelical Christianity, using Bible verses for inspiration and very little research or experimentation. There are a few insights in the relational chapters which might prove useful to those outside their audience.

I do want to commend the authors for explicitly rejecting Christian nationalism.

2 minutes convo and there would be no plot

If mutual pining is your thing, this is the book for you. Its not my thing, the protagonists reasons for not clearly talking about their feelings in a marry or die situation were not compelling. it made even less sense when their friends got involved.

I was also frustrated that in a no homophobia queer friendly fantasy setting, we were so locked into soul mate=romantic love scenario, especially when that was clearly not a requirement of the magic law.

This book consistently surprised me. I was well seated within the protagonist's POV, and as events unfolded in ways she didn't expect or couldn't have predicted, I was caught off guard, too. This was great.

I also like very much that this book tells a complete story. It ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, but the problems this book centers on are satisfactorily resolved.

For a book about returning to an alien space fleet, the part of the book I wanted more of and didn't receive was personal relationships between Tina and the aliens. This is not to say that the characters were interchangeable or not well drawn, I just wanted more of them (and possibly a little less Tina introspection.)

A useful lens

This is a useful lens by which to view or relationship to responsibilities. It's written in a breezy, engaging style, with lots of examples. I'm most pleased that it offers insight into how people's tendencies may interact. Didn't take long at all, explained why I have so much difficulty keeping a planner or doing a personal project and my life gets better when I start working with a therapist, and then it falls off. (I'm trying to buy external accountability, they're trying to fix my mental health.)

Might have to give her other books a try

A book that is compassionate and loving and encourages you to know yourself well enough to be compassionate and loving, both towards yourself and towards other.

The simple English language mantras are deep without being mysterious. They're things that, without realizing, I've been waiting all my life to say and to hear

This book is difficult to read because of its specialized vocabulary. It is firmly situated in an academic audience, specifically a communications audience.

However, this difficulty does not mean the book is unclear. It's actually quite straight forward, once you've begun to incorporate its vocabulary into your understanding.

The description of intercultural communication features, barriers, and skills and attitude required was very helpful, and I hope to apply its insights more as I interact with others in my personal and professional life.

Bought this book for the interspecies non-monogamy, which turns out to be a relatively small portion of the book. Fairly decent world building, at once an ode to the power of art and a bit obscure about it, because it's almost entirely describing art I don't know which can't move me.

Very much a story about art being not something anyone can own, feels a bit like an argument that cultural appropriation isn't real.

Nonetheless, I almost really enjoyed it, but it had an extremely gross fathating portrait of the villain, all the more ridiculous because it the romantic interest was a giant snake.

Like looking into a loving mirror

There's one book that I've held close to my heart for 20 years because I turned every page and I saw myself or I saw the dyke I wanted to be, and that's Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men.

Dr. Perry's Breathe is the second such book for me. I want to buy a million copies and hand it to every Black woman I know, even my enemies.

This book talks about loving ourselves while Black and loving Black people and centering love as a ground for justice.

It's written so beautifully, my Kindle version seems like it's now 50% highlights. I frequently found myself struck by the wisdom and craftsmanship of a sentence, rereading it, highlighting it, then after reading the following sentence, deleting the first highlight to make sure I got the whole paragraph in one piece.

This book is very thick. It is thick with kindness and support and lifting us up to do the work of liberation.

I will definitely be returning to it many, many times. It is a gift.

Just talk to him

This was extremely frustrating because the central conflict was one character refusing to tell another one something important. And then, one the secret was told, instead of seeing anything about how the characters dealt with the repercussions of the secret, we pretty much skipped to the moths on the future when it was resolved through therapy.

An incomplete argument

This book makes three arguments

1) Universalist history is ignored or downplayed as we talk about UU history and theology
2) We should lean into the Universalist focus on Christianity as a source of language, practice, and theology in UU spaces
3) The best UU theology is drawn from the Universalist tradition, rather than the elitist, humanist, detranscendent Unitarian tradition

This book has really clearly drawn characters, both the heros and their families and friends. There's a strong sense of community and of why the two men are attractive.

A little less clearly drawn is why they're attracted to each other. Once the relationship is established, the kind of care and appreciation they have for each other is clearly drawn, as are the relationship issues they have, which are firmly grounded in their personalities and histories.

I'm not Dominican or an immigrant, so I don't speak to the authenticity of Nestor's portrayal in that sense, but the presentation of it felt good to read, with Nestor's background being foundational and present but not substituting for a characterization for him or anyone in his family.

One big plot thread is the Christian homophobia of Jude's family, and one thread is the weaponized xenophobia of the cartoonish villain of the piece. (She's not cartoonish in that she's over the top, but in that every interaction with our heroes is the result of her being petty, spiteful, or mean, so there's no indication that she has any pleasant human relationships, and one wonders how such a terrible person hasn't been fired and divorced.)

I really liked this book

Warm with self generated angst

This is a very nice threesome romance. There's a sense of the relationship between each pairing within the threesome that I really appreciate. The boys treat each other well and want to be kind to each other, they just have some pretty bad communication habits.

Warning: There's an emotionally brutal coming out as part of this book

I enjoyed this book, laughed in a few places, and stayed up way too late breathlessly waiting for them to get back together.

Warning: this text may contain spoilers This is pretty run of the mill without being bad.

Both characters are competently drawn without either being very attractive or interesting to me. It's not very clear what the heroes love about each other, since their emotional connection was forged 8 years before the book started.

The conflict between the heroes is largely caused by poor communication and assumptions, fueled by cartoonish homophobia from relatives.

Some color is added by a light gesture at the issue of homelessness, but while the hero who had been homeless occasionally tells us that he has seen some shit, it is always a non specific, detail free assertion. Neither does he seem to have been affected by having been homeless, except that we're told he's more distrustful than when he was kicked out as a teenager, but his distrust doesn't seem remarkable for an adult.

If you like small town gay romance with a bit of feel good defeating homophobia thrown in for good measure, that describes this book.

...Makes Avengers “Most Ambitious Crossover of all time “ joke, months and months too late.

Anyway, this is FAN SERVICE, the novel.

Did you like reading about these guys being in love? Did you like reading about them being friends with these other guys you liked watching fall in love?

Here's some more friend times and some more hot sex.

I'm not so attached to Innes' characters that I really want to go back and revisit them beyond the point where they've HEA'd, so these are a bunch of post-HEA bonus scenes that didn't really tickle my keys. But if you really liked her characters on an individual character basis, it would be kind of fun.

It was like fanfiction for a show my mom watches, where I know the characters but I'm not personally invested in them and their happiness, so the book didn't speak to me on that level.

And because there wasn't exactly a relationship problem (will the littles have a fun playdate or will it all end in tears was, honestly, sort of low stakes for even the most nervous of the littles), I didn't care about it on that level either.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you're an actual fan of the settings and characters of the ABDL college stories MA Innes writes, this will be great for you. If you just find them to be reliably satisfying romance novels on Kindle Unlimited, this is not actually a romance novel, and you probably want to skip.

This book is more hopeful and less sad than Volume 1. It seems like she's starting to manage her depression instead of being defeated by it

Definite mixed bag. The coloring on Etta Candy goes wonky at one point, like Romulo Fajardo Jr forgot that she's Black.

I didn't care for the Steve Trevor story, but I liked the Vita Ayala story and n Stephanie Hans' are; too bad it wasn't the same story. Okay, but a definite step down from the Rucka stories

Sweet romance about an older couple. Not much plot, and what there is involves the hero not talking about his feelings, but not in a protracted nonsense way.

I really liked the clearly drawn characters, the way that the heroes came to appreciate the traits in one another that had been annoying at first, the emphasis on how hockey affected their relationship.

The issue of race (Mori is Japanese American and Army is Black) was treated sensitively, and their families portrayals were informed by race but weren't stereotypical.

Honestly, my biggest complaint is that there wasn't more book. This was a comfortable, happy works to sink into, and I could have spent more time there.

Merged review:

I really liked the clearly drawn characters, the way that the heroes came to appreciate the traits in one another that had been annoying at first, the emphasis on how hockey affected their relationship.

The issue of race (Mori is Japanese American and Army is Black) was treated sensitively, and their families portrayals were informed by race but weren't stereotypical.

Honestly, my biggest complaint is that there wasn't more book. This was a comfortable, happy works to sink into, and I could have spent more time there.

What I liked: the characters had distinct personalities, they had problems outside of their relationship, the story demonstrated what they liked about each other and why we should find it attractive, their relationship problems flowed from their previous emotional history, they could acknowledge when they were being a little bit ridiculous (for good or ill), the sex was hot but there wasn't too much.

What I didn't like: the queer subplot was about coming out, I would have liked to see more interaction with grandparents and parents, Lichtenbourgiesh was kind of a silly blend of French and German, so much news from Looking Glass Daily but nothing from Girls with Glasses

I tried with this book. The language is hyper self conscious, but sometimes it works. The world building is pleasantly built by accretion. The characters are...odd choices. Sketchy in a way that suggests the author is disguising lack of interest in people as lack of strong personality in his characters.

But I was 70 pages in and I had Daily Alice's nudity or breasts mentioned at least 7 times, and I don't want it. Let me be clear, this was not erotic, even when it came up in the context of sex. And it wasn't rape-y. It was just, for a book that invests relatively little in the physical description of characters, this thrumming repetition that said, way too clearly, a straight man wrote this.

And for a book that I was ambivalent about, for whom the chief pleasure was the language and, often, that felt quite precious and mannered, I just couldn't take the author obsessing over Daily Alice's body

I liked the girls and I really liked Jen, here. Her desire to just have a day without shenanigans felt very relatable. Mal was very sweet to Molly and April was very believably cringe in her shipping of her actual friends.

I would have liked the book better if the themes weren't quite so blatantly stated. I know the camp motto is Friendship to the Max. Even so, Molly and the antagonist literally telling each other that, you know, you shouldn't preemptively dump your friends and also, your friends like you even if your interests don't 100% align felt like it pulled the target reader age down from 12 to 8.

I liked the art a lot. I'm not a big fan of black and white comics so when I opened the book, I was disappointed it was a 3 color style, but it turned out there was enough variety that could be brought to the art with green to keep me visually interested. I thought the drawings were clear in highlighting valuable info and all of the characters were distinct and recognizable to their original designs.

The cover material made me think this would be a series of spiritual biographies, and it is HALF that, but it's also a series of essays on how aspects of religious life may be affirming and healing ways to love in the modern age, most often through the lens of the author's autobiography.

For me, this created a conflicting rhythm in the book, where I greatly wished we either could dive deeper with the congressional biographical subjects or we could dive deeper into the thoughts about religious life, but I was actively annoyed by what felt very self serious and narcissistic in the author's constant return to her own experience.

This was a frustrating, interesting read.

Lovely book about two people where I understand what they find attractive in each other, their relationship encourages them to be better people, and they have consequential lives outside of each other.

also, a central theme of the book is Labor organizing and the audiobook was made with the cooperation of SAG-AFTRA, so that's very cool.

I am, of course, having that classic lesbian dilemma: do I want to be Isabel when I grow up or do I want to be with her?

Deep dive into what unites and divides UUs theologically. Has some really good questions in the gathering and concluding chapters.

A lovely little story about a two poly people falling in love, with some emotional processing! Nice coloring.