Katie

This was a little overwrought for me. It was more about... something else than about the nuts and bolts of living with a person with psychosis, which is what I was looking for. More about the author's feelings? I'm not sure what.

I so loved this beautiful book. The characters are people you want to hug and spend time with and laugh with. The stories are fascinating glimpses into other lives, and the whole arrangement of the book felt like a beautiful mystery.

This was exactly the book I've been looking for. It was so insightful and clear. I skipped over a lot of the more touchy-feely stuff, but it still taught me so much.

This was fun, like all of Emily Henry's books. Maybe not as many laugh out loud moments, and they definitely all follow a pretty distinct pattern, but good for when you need a comfort read.

This was a book, and art project, an experiment. But it did such a great job of getting its feelings and messages across.

Well, this just took the taste of the generic, cardboard book I read before this right out of my mouth. This book is unique, specific, original, and pretty amazing. Yes, there are lots of books out there about terrible mothers and traumatic upbringings, but this one still felt new and different. It's funny and very sad. So glad I read it.

This book deals with complex issues but reads as sort of simple, basic, formulaic. The afterword says it's a fictionalization of the author's research for her thesis, and it feels wooden in a way that makes sense from that explanation.

This was probably a 3.75 for me. Lots of interesting ideas in here along with plenty of filler–it probably could have just been an article. But the filler stories were pretty interesting, so I mostly didn't mind.

This is probably a 3.5 for me. There so much packed into this book–the pandemic, climate change, anticapitalism, physics, nature, and much more. Odell obviously read a LOT and quotes extensively from so many different authors. Unfortunately those quotes are often more interesting and thoughtful than her own reflections. I about lost it when she said, “Maybe the point isn't to live more... but to be more alive in any given moment.” This is the kind of Hallmark sentiment I don't need to read 300 pages to get to. I guess I'm not sorry I read it. But I'm also not sure what, if anything, I'm taking away from it.

From the title I honestly thought this was going to be a dictionary of terms that you should and shouldn't use. Luckily, the book was nothing like that! It was compassionate, funny, thoughtful, and smart about how to deal with those tricky conversations and interactions where you're so worried you're going to say the wrong thing.

This was unexpectedly a lot of fun. Great characters, swiftly moving plot, and two people showing how to work out their issues in a relationship. Looking forward to reading more by K. J. Charles.

P.s –the sex scenes, including the first one right at the beginning of the book, were way to...descriptive for me, but I just skipped over them. YMMV.

I thought this book was well written and the author was genuinely struggling with and through a lot. It was good to see her growth in the book and how her family and history helped her get through it all.

This was so, so good. Great characters. Believable, complex story. No one being dumb just for the sake of advancing the plot. I couldn't put it down.

This was a lovely collection of stories, most of them centered around aging, love, and grief.

The first 100 pages of this were an “I was right, everyone else was wrong” recap of 2016-2021. Then there was a center junk of Bernie's platform, which I pretty much agree with 100%. Then then end veered back into I WAS RIGHT. It just made me wonder if there's a more productive way to achieve what Bernie wants to achieve.

Why did I check this book out from the library? I think I had JCO confused with an author I like. The narrator of this book was a terrible person. There were numerous plot threads that were just dropped, and the ending was hella confusing. No thank you.

This was almost as great as Firekeeper's Daughter. I guess what I didn't like as much was that the evil dooers seemed less realistic. Otherwise, the characters and story were fantastic and moving. Looking forward to the next book by this author!

I gave up on this one. I agree with everything they're saying, I just didn't need to read it in so much detail. I would have loved this as a long-form essay in The Atlantic or New Yorker.

This is probably a 2.5 for me. I'm not sure why the author made the main character a woman. I wasn't even aware that she was a woman for the first few chapters–till someone referred to her as “she” and I did a double-take. There was nothing in there about actually being a woman–unless you count her obsession with vacuuming up dog hair? Is that what Chen thinks women think about and experience?

Anyway, the story itself was pretty thin, with random flashbacks thrown in with no warning. It mostly seemed like a vehicle for the author to show off his impressive music taste.

This was pretty darn bleak.

This was fantastic. Interesting story, mostly realistic-seeming plotlines, and a compelling story that helped me learn about something I knew almost nothing about.

This was very compelling and hard to put down. I liked the complexity of the story, though some of the resolutions felt a bit unrealistic.

This was probably more like a 3.5 for me. It was a good story but felt sort of...slim. Everything seemed to happen pretty quickly, including the main character's growth. Also, she was pretty funny in dialogue with other people, but didn't seem funny/witty like that in her thoughts. Maybe those are small quibbles.

Goodreads needs an easter egg of a special 20 star rating for books like this. I cried through so much of this book, not all from sadness–just from emotion! It's an amazing exploration of trauma, growth, friendship. It's also a wonderful story of life on a ship–you can really see how Cashore put her experiences at sea into making the ship portions of this book feel so true. I can't wait for the next one.

This was maybe even a 4.5 for me. It was weird but I appreciated that every character acted in ways that made sense for them–so often you can't figure out why characters are doing something, but here all their motivations explained their actions. I think there was a lot in the book about what it means to do the right thing, and it was interesting to examine that from different characters' perspectives.