Izzy

Look at me. Forget Hannigram and Sasuke/Naruto or whatever the hell you think is the prototype for toxic homoeroticism. I am going to tell you this once, and I want you to engrave this into your memory: Wolf Larsen and Humphrey Van Weyden are the ancestor of all gay and violent erotic tension.

Wolf Larsen is perhaps one of the best male characters ever conceived of, and were this novel published in the 21st century, I am convinced that young men everywhere would have modeled his behavior after him. His name is WOLF. He's self-educated. He regularly shanghaies people into working for him. He beats the shit out of like five men at once. He beats the shit out of a shark. He engages in philosophical debates, and is described by our narrator as handsome and good-looking, and his physique has our narrator literally speechless. His eyes are beautiful. He makes his own navigational tools. At some point in the book I was expecting Hump to describe the perfect shape of his dick, such was the insanity of the descriptions that Humphrey kept laying down on him.

Humphrey is fine. He's very much an ideological vessel, going up against Larsen's individualistic and violent beliefs, but the great joy in Humphrey's character lays in how utterly besotted he seems with Wolf Larsen, and how utterly he loathes him in equal measure. Larsen favors Van Weyden in a weird sadistic way, and Van Weyden hates him for it, but also takes great pride in his new duties. It's bonkers. The first half of 60% of the book is just them being violent and tense around each other, in between discussions about mortality underpinned by intellectual sexual tension so thick you could cut a knife with it. If the entire book was just this I would've loved it, but unfortunately Maud Brewster arrives, and Humphrey remembers that he's a heterosexual and that women are important, and the rest of the book is spent as Humphrey whines and tries to act masculine for Maud and Wolf Larsen is relegated to the sidelines as a boring and bland romance just...occurs in between Maud and Humphrey.

Now. Do you think this book had women in the early 1900s acting like fujoshis and saying shit like “UGH why did Maud even arrive things were sooo good between Wolf and Hump

Nice world-building but I feel like this was a pretty aimless kind of high fantasy story. Maybe that's the point, I'm not sure—but I feel like after reading how clever and smart Kvothe is and how his only flaw is that he's reckless I kind of just stopped being interested and powered through sheer force of will. Kvothe should have sucked Bast's dick at some point. Feel like that would've spice things up maybe

the invisible life of Addie laRue? More like the (giggle snort) BORING life of Addie LaRue

You'd think a book with a premise like a woman from 18th century France makes a deal with a devil who is literally her customizable male love interest, like some sort of Sim, and she lives through historical moments would have more excitement in it, but it unfortunately does not. I don't know why all the unfavorable reviews of this book are whining and saying stuff like “THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A ROMANCE BETWEEN ADDIE AND LUCCCC” but frankly speaking Luc is about as interesting as drying paint, and his only saving grace is that he's behind the accomplishments of most historical figures somehow, which just makes him more akin to a comedic figure than anything else.

Addie is boring. She is bland white bread. Not sure how that's even possible when you're a bisexual immortal from the eighteenth century, but this girl has had three hundred years of living and the book shows us her life only in France and America. There is constant allusion made to her escapades in other parts of the world—Turkey, Argentina, Portugal—and the fact that she's gone mad multiple times, and maybe this is the SJW in me speaking but I would like to see how and when a 300 year old woman discovered she was bisexual, but alas. All of that, the potential storytelling anyway, is thrown away in favor of hopping between Luc's tortured, emo, broken

Lowering my rating from a four star to a three star because where the book excels, it doesn't make up for the confusing pacing, for how points of conflict are brought up only to be quickly resolved, and the frankly confusing romance between Ead and Sabran that felt like it came from out of nowhere. For seven years Ead didn't give a shit about Sabran, and then just...started liking her? Okay, whatever. I liked the world-building, even though Seiki and some of the Eastern and Southern countries were just vague Orientalist fantasies, while Inys felt like the only nation to be fully fleshed out. A good book in the first half, dragged down by the weight of its own plot lines and mistakes by the middle, only to have what felt a bit like a rushed ending (weird, for a book this size to have one.)

Now, I don't ever write reviews. Usually, I'm more than content to sit back in my chair and reduce a book to the number of stars I give it. Whatever my opinions on any particular book may be, someone's already probably written about it much more articulately than I could have ever hoped, and to a much larger audience, besides.

Sometimes, though, a book will incite such strong feelings in me that I don't feel like a one star rating would suffice. No, I have to sit down on my ass and ramble at the uncaring void of the internet, why, exactly it is that I absolutely, passionately, ardently despise a book.

Oh, man. This book. It's not that I wasn't emotionally invested in any of the characters or that the writing was absolutely horrendous–quite the contrary! The writing was gorgeous, and the characters–though they felt insufferable, at times–I grew to like. But, Jesus Christ, can anyone in this goddamn book catch a break? The first few times anything bad ever happened, I felt sad. And then bad things just kept happening. And happening. And happening. And happening.

Listen, I get tragedy. I get sad endings and bad things happening. However, when an entire book is literally just one gigantic sobfest piled on top of another sobfest, like it doesn't know how to evoke any other emotion in a reader other than absolute soul-crushing sadness, you really have to stop and think. What frustrates me most is that every now and then, I caught glimpses of something this book could have been. Something well and truly beautiful. But all of it was overshadowed by the ‘hey, let's make something bad happen to this character, again, for the sixtieth time, and make you feel bad.' Also, there's something to be said about how badly all of the gay characters here are treated but if I start on that I'm going to burst a vein or something, and I am not going to die over a book this bad.

Anyways, if tragedy porn is your thing, go ahead!