Danielle

Patience pays off with this book. I struggled to get into it for the first 100 or so pages; the world-building is slow and sometimes painfully opaque, and it's hard to get invested in characters. I actually considered dropping it to read something else, but other reviews encouraged me to stick with it and I'm glad I did!

I love books that offer new or fresh perspectives. This is the first fantasy book I've read A) by a black female author B) that has a trans character and C) that explores a spectrum of sexuality in a non-stigmatizing way. The author plays with timelines and character development in a different way that kept me engaged, and often surprised. The writing is straight-forward, casual, and accessible, so it reads much faster than your average fantasy.

But above all, it's the message of this one that really resonates: humans aren't destroying the earth – the planet will go on. We're destroying ourselves.

Can't wait to read the next one – it ends with a lot of questions.

Beautifully written. Really fucking powerful. A must-read.

This reading experience was very similar to when I accidentally picked up 50 Shades of Grey thinking it would be a mystery/thriller (it had handcuffs on the cover! I was so young and unaware!). I thought this was going to be a YA fantasy, and based on its popularity, a fairly good one.

Wrong!!

This is 100% fantasy smut. It was both a terrible romance and a terrible fantasy. The world-building was hand-wavy and horribly incomplete; the magic system is never explained, at all, based completely on the author's whims of romance and necessity of plot. Characters' motivations do not make sense and there is little to no complexity in thought. It's a macrame of cliches from the fantasy/romance canon: some mixture of Hunger Games, Beauty & the Beast, and Game of Thrones (among others). Nothing feels original. No character has a personality.

I had several other issues with the plot line; for one, Feyre had no complicated feelings whatsoever when she found out (through blatantly expositional dialogue) that her lover, Tamlin, had captured her because the love of a human would break his court's curse. Wouldn't that make one wonder, at least a little, about that ulterior motive? And the sexy scenes are just... not for me, I guess.

And when it comes to the trials Feyre must face at the end – for our “strong” heroine, I found it frustrating that she really only survived one based on her own merit. Everything else was accomplished through some other character helping her through completely unexplained “poof!”-type magic.

All in all, this series just isn't for me.

This book is – spoiler – about why we sleep and the importance of sleep. It starts with theories of why we sleep and dream (it is quite interesting that we still don't really know), how other animals sleep, why we need sleep, why we will surely die an early death if we don't sleep, why society is not set up to accommodate our sleep needs, and then, at the very end, literally 12 bullet points about how to improve your sleep.

I won't argue with the importance of sleep, nor that its importance is undervalued in capitalist hustle cultures. But I don't trust any author that claims one thing will radically change your health. Health is a complex myriad of things, only some of which are in our control.

For me, sleep often feels out of my control. Insomnia is barely addressed in this book, and when it is, it's treated flippantly. Just do some CBT and you'll be good!! The author makes it seem like it's so easy to just sleep more. Sleep does not, and probably never will, work that way for me. For over a decade I've sought the answer to consistent quality sleep. I've tried nearly everything (including CBT), and yet still go through periods of days and weeks (and in some very rough patches, months) where sleep eludes me. Despite all best efforts and having read a bunch of books like this. (Why do I keep reading books like this, you ask? In the dwindling hopes that one will eventually have the key to this particular misery.) I'm beginning to think that it's just genetically hard-wired, and like a chronic disease, all I can do is manage it.

If anything, this book should come slapped with a big warning for insomiacs – this book WILL make you panic if you put stock in its alarmist messaging, so maybe just don't!

This book starts with an incident in which Emira, a young black woman, is accused of having stolen the white toddler she babysits, Briar, in a grocery-store confrontation. The tone is set immediately to examine inherent racial biases, but less so these explicit moments of racism, and more how even “good white people” exploit black women in subtle, but nefarious ways.

The story follows Emira, a young black woman who, as with many twenty-somethings, is in a bit of a crisis regarding what to do with her life. She falls into a babysitting gig because it pays well, and ends up falling in love with the toddler she cares for, Briar, ostensibly appreciating not only the uncomplicated nature of children, but also a certain flavor of neglect that Briar feels as her upper-class mother is too worried about exteriors to be the best mother she can be. It's not hard to extrapolate out that neglect to upper-class white women generally (cough, myself included, which lent to some uncomfortable moments of introspection): the book asks us to question: how many of our “good intentions” are ultimately self-serving?

At the same time, Emira is developing a relationship with a white man, who fetishizes black bodies and black culture, exclusively dating black women: favorably, this can be interpreted as coincidence, or narrow attraction; less favorably, as black women as commodities (admittedly, a harsh interpretation, and one I would not go quite so far as to take – but gets you thinking).

All in all, I think the book plays on this idea of white people centering themselves in any American narrative as protagonists, including those, like Emira's, that are explicitly not theirs.