Asta

The first half of this was on par with the first two books, even though Pip's insistence on "being fine" was just frustrating. Go to the effing doctor you idiot.

Then the last half, even the last two hours, happened and everything fell apart. There was potential for a good ending, and while I have to give Jackson points for not taking the expected route she will not get any for what she did instead. It was cringe, overly dramatic and just plain selfishness under the pretence of self-sacrifice. Was that on purpose? Was I supposed to hate Pip by the end of it all? I don't know, but I sure did!

It really feels like the author had the first two part planned very well, and then the last one was done in a hurry. There were points in the beginning, such as Josh casually mentioning a man who's watching the house???, that felt like they were put in to have meaning later in the book, but just never did. What's the point of giving someone a new character trait if it's not actually used in the plot?

There was also WAY too many conveniently empty streets. I don't know about the small towns you all lived in, but I grew up in a tiny one and there's NO WAY all that could happen without someone seeing something.

That ending made me mad, how dare you Holly Jackson.

A strong sequel, more so than I'd expected! There was some similarities to the first part, but it was just on the good side of making things feel familiar rather than repetitive. There were, again, some red herrings that made very little sense since they were never actually explored further, but less so than in the first part.

I appreciated the planning ahead that Jackson had done for this plot, and I felt for Pip's struggling with right and wrong and the unfairness of the justice system. Interestingly the heavy themes walked hand in hand with very chaste relationship-building (an I love you and what felt like a first kiss, what?), which kind of threw me off. Sure, YA stuff can absolutely be heavy, but surely it's okay to mention the fact that an 18-year-old might have a sex life with her - gasp - boyfriend?! It just felt very off, tone-wise. (Twilight-vibes anyone?)

I did tear up a little at the end and hope that Pip can finally have some peace in her life.

I've listened to a few of Jackson's YA thrillers and it's clear why this is the most popular! Well paced and makes you feel closer to the characters than in others (possibly because there's less of them?) with a well built mystery. Naturally the MCs insistence of doing everything herself gets rather painful at times, but that's just the burden of the genre.

On the bad side the main character supposedly has a friend group of five, only one of which gets to have an actual personality, the "say no to drugs and alcohol" -message is very blatant but apparently littering is completely okay and doesn't deserve even a guilty conscience and some of the "suspects" keep being brought up but are never actually looked into, which makes their inclusion feel rather forced.

As a whole a good listen, but not quite worth five stars.

Read(sounded?) very much like a debut book in the worst possible way. There was a lot going on and a lot of it could've been cut out without losing anything of importance. I might've forgiven all this if the ending had been satisfying at all, but instead it was rushed and made very little sense, WHY was the six-year-old alone at the cliffs right after the nanny was kicked out?

Just so many things were flat out bad, if I had been reading a physical copy I'm sure I would've DNFd. As an audiobook it made for tolerable background noise.

Oh, and apparently having any kind of mental illness equals to seeing and hearing things. I'd expect this sort of thing from a book published in the 1800s, not 20-bloody-20.

The author tried to add too many things into one book, ended up with a mess that was confusing and contradicted itself. The inclusion of the connection to Scarlet Letter felt like it was shoved in in an attempt to get more people interested in the book rather than genuine interest on the authors part, and it was mentioned occasionally as if put in after the book had already been finished. I also found the constant criticism of Dawson's "co-author" to be petty and the author herself to be quite self-indulgent.

I didn't realise this was the same author who wrote "American Sherlock" before she mentioned it in the book. I DNFd that one and won't be trying Dawson's books again.

I don't normally listen to sci-fi because of the amount of detail they tend to contain, but this was simple enough for me to be able to keep up yet also interesting enough to make me want to know what's going to happen next.

I didn't realise this was the first book on a series, but at least I have something to look forward to now!

A very interesting story about growing up with a diagnosis that healthcare professionals don't acknowledge even though it affects every aspect of your life. The audiobook read by Patric Gagne herself was a great listen.

I was sceptical at the beginning, as the author made it sound like she was very aware of the nuances of how her mind worked as a child and teenager, rather than that she was looking at her behaviour through the lense of experience, but when I followed her into college and working life the feeling abated and I was able to enjoy the way she explored her own mind and that of those who were close to her at one point or another.

As always with autobiographies I was at times wondering how much was portrayed as it actually happened and how much was simplified for easier digestion, but Sociopath is all the same a book I would love to read again. It made me think about how I perceive myself and how it would be good for everyone (sociopath or not) to be able to like how they are and who they are. I have to admit I've never thought about sociopathy much at all, I can't even think of the word for it in my native language, and it feels like an interesting thing to look further into.

I wish Patric all the future success in deepening our understanding of the trait and on helping those who are like her.

I enjoyed the story but at the same time I felt like there would've been space for so much more. It has all the faults that the most awarded stories have in my opinion: it circles around an issue but doesn't solve it, even in its own reality.

So many interesting aspects that I would've loved to learn more about, all of it just dropped in as sidelines and hinted at, none of it actually explored.

After having read Pekkanen's books with Greer Hendricks and loving those this fell really flat. There's a lot, too much even, going on, everyone's a suspect, no matter how flimsily, and the climax was just.... eh.

I feel like I would've enjoyed the book more without Stella's backstory being thrown into the mix with all it's drama that just felt like it was there to add fluff. There was no need to go into her divorce or into the new fling, (which, btw, felt like a lousy copout for "fixing" Stella's situation of not wanting to have babies. The book was published in 2024, gay couples can have babies too!) the drama of her history would've been sufficient.

The ending felt like it would never come and was full of info dumping.

Had potential, but the characters were just too off-putting.

Maailma oli kiinnostava, hahmot ja mitä heille tapahtui eivät.

This is a really hard book to rate. On one hand it's good, and yet on another its unbelievably boring. I knew halfway through that I'd finish the first part but not bother with the last two, and that stayed through until the end.

If there had been more to the characters I might've been more interested, but as they were the characters were simply the means to move the plot forward, and the plot felt like it was simply a device with which to explore different ideas in physics. 

And the aliens.... Classic bad guys.

Ei vaan lähtenyt.

Todella lähelle viittä tähteä, mutta se, että Elinan kirouksen poistamista ei lopulta käsitelty lainkaan ja Jousian suhteen käsittely jää jotenkin vajavaiseksi. Toki kumpikaan ei ole kirjassa pääosassa, joten etenkin ensimmäisen voi ajatella olevan tietoinen päätös kirjailijalta.

Nautin tavattomasti Lapin murteen käytöstä paikallisten keskusteluissa sekä erilaisten otusten kuvailussa, väkiyö oikeasti vähän kammotti aamu yhdeltä lukiessa! 

Elina oli hahmona toisaalta tavattoman traaginen, toisaalta ärsyttävän saamaton, olisi ollut kiva nähdä hänen kehittyvän vähän enemmän hahmona ennen kirjan loppua.

Huikea suomalainen maagisen realismin teos, tällaista lukisi mielellään enemmänkin.

Todella Finlandiansa ansainnut teos! En ole varmaan koskaan aiemmin lukenut suomalaista nuorten kauhua, joten en osaa sanoa onko tarina lajityypillinen, mutta yksityiskohdat olivat toimivia ja hahmot uskottavia. Pohdin olivatko koronayksityiskohdat ihan tarpeellisia, saati sitten seksikohtaus, mutta eivät ne ainakaan tarinaa huonontaneet, vaikka ehkä saattavat tuntua vieraannuttavilta nuorille jo muutaman vuoden päästä. Pidin rasismin käsittelystä ja siitä, miten Laurin tausta oli yksi osa hänen kokemustaan muun juonen seassa.

Tarpeellinen kuvaus siitä, mitä on elää ja kasvaa aikuiseksi somalina suomessa. Ujuni käy rehellisesti läpi oman elämänsä käänteitä. Harmillisesti kirjan teemallinen toteutus jäi hieman kömpelöksi, kun asioita toistettiin ja tapahtumien järjestys jäi hämäräksi.

Tarina oli ihana, kuten myös hahmot. Tykkäsin siitä, miten ketään ei kuvailtu kuvailemisen vuoksi. Ihmiset olivat vanhoja, nuoria, heillä oli ominaisuuksia joilla oli merkitystä tarinan kannalta, muu saatettiin mainita tai saatettiin olla mainitsematta. Backman osasi kuvailla tapaa, jolla naiset usein tuntevat syyllisyyttä menestyksestään ja sen vaikutuksista muihin. Hän tavoitti hienosti mielenterveysongelmien moninaisuuden.

Mistä en pitänyt, ja mikä teki kirjasta itselleni vaikealukuisen, oli kerrontatapa. Se poukkoili sinne tänne, ei pelkästään juonen tarpeiden takia vaan myös sivuhuomioina, jotka osaltaan toivat syvyyttä tarinaan mutta osaltaan harhauttivat. 

Olisi mielenkiintoista tietää, miten tämä olisi kirjoitettu jos kirjailija olisi ollut alunperin suomenkielinen, jolloin persoonapronominien käyttöä ei olisi tarvinnut kierrellä. Vaikka asiaa kyllä kierreltiin taitavasti!

Got 20% in the audio book before giving up. The MC has the personality of a turnip and things just happen to her. She gets horny about a gardener just because he talks to her, and also seems to be horny for her boss and her coworker, for similar reasons? I guess she's never been around people before despite claims of having boyfriends in the past.

Shocking to read about the kind of people who become parents and about the struggles they leave behind in their children, in more than one generation. I've never known anything about McCurdy before listening to this and I didn't feel like I would've needed to, but maybe there are things I would've understood the context of had I been a fan of hers through the years.

I loved this book. It reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Stardust and Neverwhere, which have been my favourites for a long time. The only reason this wasn't a five star read for me was the fact that there wasn't a lot of detail, which made things seem superficial at times.

However, I am now convinced all stories need at least one chicken. 

There was a lot I liked about this book; Maia himself, the relationships he built and the struggles he faced were well told and kept my interest. Unfortunately there was also a lot I didn't like; the overly complicated language (I had to read some sentences multiple times and still not understand what was being said), the plethora of names that all sounded like each other and that entirely blurred together and the way Maia immediately knew how to be an emperor despite having been kept away from court all his life.  There were also some plot points that I did not understand at all, maybe because the story was relying on the reader being able to read nuance that I'd did not grasp, which is frustrating as in a lot of other things l found the writing to be telling way more that showing.

It's really not an usual book in it's construction, there was no great final battle, but the end felt satisfying all the same. I don't know if there's continuation to the story but I would happily read any there was.

Too cringe to handle 

When I first read this trilogy in 2016 I LOVED IT. Seven years later I've read a lot more and grown to expect a bit more from a book than toxic masculinity and fridging women, so my re-read was a hell of a letdown.

It's a shame since the premise is interesting, although The Lottery-esque setting of Wayward Pines was not believable in the least, let alone how the main character was seemingly invincible.

I might finish the trilogy again if I'm feeling masochistic enough.

Interesting but much too complicated for me to go through as an audio book!

Edit. Turns out this was marketed in a very misleading way and is in fact not based on truth, which is kind of a bummer to find out and VERY confusing. Dropped a star thanks to that. The review below was written before I looked into it a bit further.

//

I was not expecting this to be a true story when I picked the book up, and finding out it was peaked my interest. The story of Dr. Spencer Black IS interesting, but more than that it's sad. There's clear trauma in his life that he passes on to his family, and that makes him more and more delusional through his life, despite his intellect and skill as a surgeon. There is not a lot of details about his life, although his journal entries and letters adds a lot to the overall image, and I think mixing the facts with fiction would've made this a more interesting read (and let me pretend the more upsetting parts were part of the fiction), but I understand why the author wanted to stick to the true story.

The second part of the book, that showed the details of Dr. Black's work, was all the more intriguing after reading about his life. It made me wonder about how he had convinced himself that creatures such as Ganesh, a goat/lion/snake hybrid or a minotaur had once been real, even though he wondered himself how such creatures would've survived.

One thing is for sure, though: dragons ARE real. A doctor said so.