Flori

I couldn't put this down! I was so compelled by the world that Gilman has created in this novel. I raced through my first reading in just a few days so that I could learn the answers to all the questions that came up in the reading and find out how the stories intersect. I've now read it multiple times (more slowly) and I've found it even more interesting and thought-provoking than the first read.

There are so many themes that are touched on in this book. Some are brief, some are more fleshed out. This book may appeal to you if you're interested in themes of gender, sexuality, asexuality, class oppression, the ethics and practices of anthropology (or xenology as they call it in sci-fi), or culture clash between alien planets. Not to mention the many other provocative topics that will probably leave you thinking about this book for a long time.

In terms of structure, the book alternates between narrators, switching from third-person to two different first-person backstories. I personally like this style - where the plots intertwine and meet in the middle of the timeline. Tedla's backstory is very compelling, and contains a lot of beautiful and interesting world building. The backstories also have another interesting component: the author does a really nice job of introducing the idea that one or both of the narrators may be unreliable. Something that I found wonderful and frustrating about this book is that some ambiguities like that one are never resolved and the reader is left to speculate about what the truth might be. Like I said, I've been thinking about this book so much even after reading it twice.

Some other reviewers may have noted this, but there is some disturbing, graphic material in the book. It's pretty short and isn't referred to explicitly after the scene ends, but it's something to be aware of. Don't let it stop you from reading the book though; it's not a vital scene so you could definitely skip it if you wanted to.

All in all, I recommend this book highly! I'm actually surprised that it isn't more popular, but I hope people will continue to discover it and enjoy it. I think it would make an excellent book club selection, because there is definitely a lot to talk about when you're done.

Also, if you enjoyed this book I recommend checking out Gilman's most recent novel Dark Orbit. You'll find some familiar characters referred to, and one that even makes a cameo appearance.

So much to think about with this book. It is very weighty and of course the topic is incredibly disturbing. While I was reading I was thinking about how incredibly put-off Vanessa is by basically every man in her life, from the teenage boys in her classes, to the teachers she interacts with and the men she hooks up with as an adult, right down to Strane himself. So many descriptions of the mens' lecherous behaviors and repulsive physicality. By contrast, Vanessa is so tender with all the women. Even the ones she feels antagonistic toward, she humanizes by noticing sweet little details of their personalities and their appearance. As I was thinking this, and pondering if Vanessa might be attracted to women, I wondered why she seemed to only be in relationships with or date men. I don't know if the author was saying this intentionally, but for an insecure young woman it's pretty easy to get men to pay attention to you, to get men to compliment your looks, etc. Vanessa seemed to want, more than sex or love or anything else, to be told that she was special to someone and I think that's the root of why she was targeted and ultimately abused by Strane.

I ended up liking how thought-provoking this book was, although it was horrible to read the scenes of Vanessa and Stane getting phsyical. So disturbing. I also thought the book was much longer than it needed to be and probably could have been cut significantly.

This wasn't bad, but I always feel let down by Kim Fielding novels. She hooks me in with dark, intriguing premises and then about 40 or 50% into the book it turns into the most bland, milquetoast, sweet romance with no darkness, no drama, nothing to hold my interest at all.

I was especially disappointed with Miner. He has so much mystery and potential angst surrounding him and his backstory. What could he have possibly done to merit such a harsh sentence as 1000 years in stasis? The anticlimactic answer? He was a common guard that fell in love with the prince he was guarding. He made a failed attempt at regicide. Ok...? That feels like very well-tilled ground, and I wanted something shocking and dramatic lol.

I'm also not 100% convinced of the concept of stasis as a realistic punishment. I mean I get that if you go into stasis it means when you wake up everyone you knew will be long dead. But you could accomplish basically the same thing by banishing someone to fantasy Siberia, so is it really necessary? I don't know, I really wanted to like this book and it started out promisingly but it lost me big time.

I'm not a frequent reader of thrillers or crime books, so I did enjoy the fast-paced “beach read” quality of the writing. There's nothing to really think too hard about, definitely nothing you'd need to stop and look up in a dictionary. Basically, this is a junk food snack of a book, which is totally fine. However, I think it should still be believable and not full of plot holes. I had a lot of moments throughout this book that had me raising an eyebrow thinking that it was just too implausible. Burke, sorry Jace remembering exactly the name of his sister's dance teachers and her imaginary friend when they were both only 6 years old. I don't buy that, I barely remember the names of my OWN teachers from that age let alone my brother's. Also, Margot having already interviewed Wallace, who was supposed to be a murder suspect in an active investigation (no effing way his lawyer would let him do a press interview under those circumstances) years before the story started - too convenient. Everything was just so easy. No wrong turns. No dead ends. Very little suspense. 

I'm not as upset about the ending as a lot of readers seem to be. Unfortunately, I think it's because I just wasn't attached enough to Margot to really care that much. I was more interested in resolving the mystery, which we were completely spoonfed so no worries on that count.

I listened to this as an audiobook and I didn't like the performance very much, especially when the female narrators did male voices. They all sounded the same and none were very good.

While I enjoyed  some of the characters, this book was kind of uneventful and overall quite boring. It was a nice summer palate cleanser after finishing the Liveship Traders but I don't plan on reading the rest of the series. 

Unfortunately, not much of this was new information to me at all SMS the section on how to fight against this movement was very short and vague. 

I had a lot of thoughts while reading this and I probably can't remember everything well enough at this point (the downside of not stopping to take notes while reading) but I do want to try and get at least some of my thoughts written down before I forget why I liked this book!

I went into this novel expecting an unlikeable protagonist because that's what I had read in a review before I picked it up, but I didn't actually find Natalie unlikeable. I found her mean and hypocritical, yes, but she was also sympathetic, funny, and sometimes even relatable. 

Overall, what I liked most about this book was how well it showcased the ugly truth that I often try to forget: America hates women. Natalie says it outright, but ultimately the book is a long series of examples of how, no matter what a woman does or when in history she lives, she is a prisoner in a society that is built around hating and oppressing women. Natalie and the women around her are all trying to mold themselves into the “perfect Christian woman” and none are even remotely succeeding. Even at the top of the Christian-woman-ladder, married to a rich and handsome heir to a fortune, Natalie is a prisoner. She owns nothing, not even the revenues from her own Instagram account, because a Christian woman would never try to have her own separate bank account. She has no freedom, and the more she tries to get some the more she digs herself into a hole (even saying at one point that her Instagram has fans around there world and there's nowhere she could go and be anonymous).

The 1805 Natalie is just as much a prisoner, even more so. As I was reading those sections I was struck with how religious past-Natalie was. It seemed like the author was trying to make a point of how religious beliefs might have been the only respite a woman would have had in such a situation. There was no escape for Natalie in the real world. Eventually her daughters would grow up and leave her, her sons would never respect her as a person, her husband would never love her, and all she really had at that point was devotion to god and hope for heaven, I guess?

I have loved you all my life. See you after the next bang  . Hearing that line read by the narrator with a hitch in her voice absolutely broke me. 

Damn, this book surpassed my expectations. The excerpt from Céline, the philosophical discussions about the afterlife, the way the narrator is in love with her husband and Yash at the same time, there were many things I loved about this book. 

Even though I've been on reddit long enough to not be remotely shocked by the 4chan behavior described in this book, I still found it well written and sourced. My favorite part was probably the meta-details about Reeves' journalism work: how she got hostile misogynistic men (and a few women) to tell her so many embarrassing and incriminating things. 

I wish she would update it to reflect on trumps 2025 pardons for the rioters. 

There's something about the way Robin Hobb writes that speaks directly to my soul as a reader. She could be writing the most random nonsense and I will find it inexplicably enthralling. I love it and I love these books.

There's nothing egregiously wrong with this book; it just felt shallow to me. Basically I was bored the entire time. 

I forced myself to finish this because I was expecting something really amazing right at the end. I wasn't completely disappointed, but it wasn't as amazing as I had hoped. I think if this were written today Maxim would be the villain and the twist would actually be that Rebecca was simply a woman who wanted to maintain her independence inside her marriage to a cold, controlling jerk. I like that story better lol. Someone needs to write a Rebecca's POV version of this story I think. Justice for Rebecca! The only bad thing about her that the reader knows from any source other than her murderer is that she has terrible taste in maids. Danvers was awful!

I did like how incredibly atmospheric the writing was. I really got a strong sense of Manderly and the vibes overall were just on-point. However the narrator was so annoying and Maxim was mostly an ass to her which was incredibly frustrating. 

~~I decided to DNF this after forcing myself all the way to 61%. I was constantly giving it the benefit of the doubt, waiting for all the contradictions to resolve and for SOME consistency to the characterization and world-building and it just never came. The final straw was when Edith got shamed and chided for being a bit taken by surprise that the woman she was crushing on was transgender. She was surprised ok? You don't have to make her feel bad about that, Kit! It's not like she was mean.

But basically, I really can't get over how random and inconsistent the characterization was throughout this book. It was giving me whiplash as we swung from Locke trusting Kit to not trusting him, from Kit wanting to sleep with Locke and being super lewd about it to Locke saying “oh but you don't actually want this, you're manipulating me.” It just seemed like wheel spinning for hundreds and hundreds of pages. My theory is that the author wanted to write a story about a traumatized young man with major PTSD surrounding intimacy, but she ALSO wanted to write a bunch of smut for some reason. And just decided to do both. So yeah, that's a no from me.~~

I decided to un-dnf this and I'm actually glad I did. I enjoyed the last 25% more than any other part in the book. Although it still wasn't good and all my previous criticisms still apply.

10 Reasons to Read The Rifter

1. You enjoy being dropped into the middle of a plot that's a little confusing but you trust the author to make it work.
2. You want slow-burn romance that features lots of conflict with the world around them but never with each other.
3. You like it when your faves get put through the absolute ringer - suffering abounds.
4. If you collect books, the first edition paperbacks are out of print and hard to find. It's a rewarding experience to snag one when they do occasionally go up for sale.
5. You enjoy super creative world building that includes a fictional language and marsupial weasels.
6. You'd like to support a wonderful lesbian indie author who's entire social media presence consists of beautiful pictures of nature.
7. You like reading survival stories with hyper-competent protagonists. John's not Bear Grylls, but he is a rugged outdoorsman and it helps him survive in the very crapsack world he ends up in.
8. If you enjoy a friendship-version of Grumpy/Sunshine, John and his best friends have that kind of vibe going.
9. The quality of the writing, especially given that this is basically self-published, is incredible. Ginn Hale is just so talented and criminally unknown.
10. The fandom is truly one of the nicest and most welcoming and fun I've ever been a part of. It's obviously very tiny, but it feels big because the fans are so lovely and passionate and have so much to say about this series. I've made my best fandom friends in this fandom and I really want more of us to have that same experience!

99.9% of this book was 5 stars for me. I loved pretty much all of it, especially Kristy's personal stories about growing up in poverty in China, her family history with money, the Chinese attitude toward money and debt, as well as her personal struggles with anxiety around money. However, I HAD to deduct one star because Kristy cited Robert Kiyosaki as an investment guru (specifically a “hustler” guru) and I really can't believe that a woman as smart and well-read as she is would actually give any credibility to a fraudster, which is what Kiyosaki is in my opinion.

I've done a lot of reading about personal finance already and I consider myself pretty familiar with most concepts around FIRE, but I still found a lot of unique and valuable advice in this book. I resonated a lot with Kristy's approach to “building her rocket ship”, aka getting all her finances in order and mitigating as many risks as possible before blasting off to early retirement. I enjoyed the discussion of the academic study that looked at the sustainability of various retirement portfolios and what might cause your plans to fail. I loved the cash cushion and the “yield shield” ideas. I listened to this as an audiobook but I plan on buying a paperback copy because the advice is so valuable and concrete that I want to make notes and refer to it more as I work on my financial goals.

Some pros:
- I liked how the author showed how easy it was to start slipping into a more expensive lifestyle as your income grows.
- I also liked reading a woman's perspective on frugality, especially the section on deciding to give up makeup and professional hair styling. Not relevant for everyone, but it's something I wrestle with.

More cons though:
- This book makes it appear like the author and her husband came up with all these ideas on their own. Like there isn't already a huge community of FI/RE practitioners who are paving the way for everyone else, including this couple. Sure, they seem like people who were pretty financially responsible anyway, but I doubt they reinvented the concept from whole cloth. The entire book was framed so strangely with Thames and her husband as the main-est of main characters.
- This is probably my fault for showing up late to the party, but it's 2024 and rich white people buying a homestead and pretending to be farmers feels really cringe at this point.
- Actually no, Liz, eating out every night of the week is absolutely not as ridiculous as owning 5 houses and 3 yachts. Not even in the same universe of ridiculousness.
- They are landlords. Enough said actually.

Honestly, this book kind of gave me second hand embarrassment. I think this is how Gen Z feels about millennials most of the time. I get it now, Zoomers, and as a millennial I am so sorry.

It's nice to be reminded that busy-ness is not the primary objective of work.

My takeaways:
- Build an “off-season” for yourself by intentionally choosing a few months out of the year to have a lighter workload
- Project overhead increases exponentially so try to decrease your total number of projects worked on at one time. If a project requires 1 hour of overhead and 7 hours of hands-on time, then working on 5 projects at a time leaves 3 non-meeting hours for work. In this scenario you would take 12 days to complete 7 projects that you could have completed in 7 days if you would have worked on just one at a time. 
- Think about time on a larger scale. Lots of major breakthroughs took a lot longer than people realized and many required long periods of restful down-time where the writers/artists/scientists got to relax.
- There is no standard definition of productivity so you can pretty much define it in a way that best serves you.

I actually started this book in 2015 and thought it was SO chock full of amazing insights and actionable advice, but time has moved on from a lot of what is written here. What might have seemed quite innovative ten years ago now just feels like common knowledge. There is a LARGE section on how to create secure passwords that feels very dated. There is a long, rhapsodic discussion of the power of crowdsourcing. Vine is listed as one of the apps that is very dangerous for it's attention stealing, addictive nature. Despite some outmoded advice, there were some really insightful and interesting ideas in this book.

Some highlights that I took away:
- Externalize memory from your brain to the physical world
- Make time for imaginative thinking and daydreaming
- Information overload is a huge problem in the modern world and you should protect your brain as much as you possibly can. 
- The best ways to protect your brain from information overload are to have consistency, predictability, and simplicity in as many aspects of your life as possible
- Multitasking is counterproductive

The higher my expectations, the greater my disappointment. I really thought I was going to truly love this. I was on board for about 50-60% of the book. I love multiple timelines, unreliable narrators, light exposition that hints at a deeper backstory, feisty characters with tragic pasts, etc. However, I realized around the 60% mark that this book wasn't good enough to make those things work in a satisfying way. There would be no payoff for all the confusion and hinting and implying that was being done. I did still manage to force myself through to the end. 

There are so many plot holes and plot threads that go nowhere. Characters are thinly drawn. Relationships between characters are told not shown so there is very little investment from the reader. There is the makings of a great book here, but this reads like a first attempt. It reads like the author was more caught up in the setting and one or two characters than writing a good story. The best way I can describe it is if concept art were a book. It's a very great concept, but you can't stop there and expect people to be satisfied.

A difficult book to rate. On one hand, I appreciate the hard work and passion that was put into compiling SO much information about longevity and diet. I am vegan and love that Dr. Greger advocates for a vegan diet and backs up his advocacy with good science.

However.

This book is just not enjoyable to read (or listen to, in my case). It reads like an endless recitation of abstracts from scientific studies. It's basically a directory of topics that link you to his website if you want to know the details. How can a 30 hour audiobook not have time to go into the details? If you use this book like a reference to look up specific topics and refer to the videos he links to get more information you might enjoy it more. It doesn't work well as an audiobook though, because you can't easily go back to a specific section or use an index.

I'm also bummed about the conclusion of this book and his “anti-aging 8”. I was really looking forward to this part but the actual “8” are really not 8 individual recommendations. They are:
1. Nuts
2. Greens
3. Berries
4. Xenohormesis
5. Prebiotics and Postbiotics
6. Calorie Restriction
7. Protein Restriction
8. NAD+

I wanted this section to offer clear, layperson-accessible instructions on what to eat/do in order to maximize longevity. Instead we get MULTIPLE HOURS of MORE studies that support (or occasionally refute) the recommendations that he is making. These are not actionable steps. “Xenohormesis” is not an action that a person can take after reading this book. Why not title that section “Organic produce”, “Ugly food”, or “Wild gardening” - something that a real human person can actually do to achieve the benefits of xenohormesis, not just the concept in and of itself. I have the same problem with numbers 5-8. They aren't actionable and in some cases (looking at you, calorie restriction) the entire recommendation is called into question within that section.

Here is MY Anti-Aging regimen, synthesized from what I personally took away from listening to this book:

1. Be vegan, or at least as vegan as possible
2. Eat whole foods, in particular fiber rich legumes, dark leafy greens, and intact whole grains
3. Eat a wide variety of colorful produce
4. Eat homegrown, foraged, or organic foods
5. Limit added salt and sugar in your diet
6. Drink coffee, or tea, or herbal tea (pick your fave - they all have different longevity benefits) but take them plain without milk/sugar
7. Wear mineral sunscreen (literally CANNOT believe this wasn't one of his final recommendations)

There ya go. I truly think my list is actually more helpful for the average reader.

I never cry. Almost never. I cried during this one though. So good, so sad. 

Review aside, I laughed out loud when it was revealed that the author's alcoholic deadbeat father was an outspoken Oxfordian. 

I really liked the plot and characters of The Storyteller, but the dreamy writing style felt like it held me back from connecting emotionally sometimes. The interludes of the fairy tale took up too much of the book, especially at the beginning. Once the fairy tale segments started to dry up and we started to spend time in the real world, the pace of the book picked up a lot for me. 

I thought Anna was a pretty boring narrator. Her “good girl” persona was just maybe too relatable to me? I think a lot of women can probably relate to having a crush on a mysterious “bad boy”, so I suppose it was pretty realistic. Maybe it just struck too close to home. However, I do wish Abel had been given his own POV sections or something. The mysteries around his character was pretty much the only thing getting me through the story, but the revelation that he was a hustler felt like it could have had more emotional impact if we'd been able to get his perspective - feel the dread and shame that he must have been feeling. Same goes for subsequent revelations: they didn't exactly fall flat, but the impact was a little blunted by learning about them through Anna's dreamy, rose-colored glasses..

I have a lot of thoughts but what it all basically boils down to is: Ginn Hale is an outstanding writer and an even better world builder and I ultimately love everything she writes.

This served as a good introduction to the concept of telomeres and the concrete ways we can effect them on a daily basis. I found the sections on stress management and response especially useful. I also thought the mention of how telomere length can be passed as genetic material to a baby was very thought-provoking.