NJ
I was fully prepared to give this 4-stars until I hit about 75%. The introduction of the hero's mother ruined the book. The hero should not have been pressured into forgiving her. Additionally, the story only seemed to refer to the trauma the hero's father had faced without really working through the hero's own trauma. When his mum finally came back into their lives, she didn't even come and ask the hero for forgiveness or try to rebuild a relationship with him; instead, she was ready to start cohabitating with his father without even once having a conversation with the hero. The hero's father also didn't think it was necessary to talk through their trauma or even request that the hero's mother seek his forgiveness. He was just going to up and leave him in that dreadful house?!?! The ending was trash but for the most part, it was still a solid romance.
While I liked the book, I didn't enjoy the central relationship. I was so happy with that ambiguous end. I thought: This is a healthy move, Marianne; you absolutely did the right thing.
Rooney does a good job of highlighting the harm we do to ourselves, and other people when we depend on others for validation and acceptance. So I think it is so interesting that even in the final version of their relationship, Marianne seems so dependent on Connell. There's a particular passage I can't get out of my head:
She was laughing then, and her face was red. She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed. It was so unlike him to behave that way in public that he must have been doing it on purpose, to please her. How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not. She knows he loves her, she doesn't wonder about that anymore.
Rooney critiques a need for social acceptance to such a large degree in this novel, that it seems an odd choice to have Marianne and Connell this dependent on each other. Even in the end, they haven't necessarily found a middle ground. In this particular passage it reads (to me anyway), that Marianne is accepting that she and Connel are co-dependent and that is ok. I think that an over-reliance on social acceptance and an overreliance on one person, are both perversions of what could otherwise be healthy relationships between ourselves and the people around us. So it is an interesting choice Rooney makes to have Marianne ‘accept' her codependent relationship, getting to the end of her book. To me, it reads as an indication that Marianne and Connell have not yet managed to be independent while maintaining healthy relationships. There's an all or nothing quality to their relationship that is present even at the end, which is why I think the book absolutely had to end the way it did.
In the book, we got to see Connell get therapy for his anxiety and depression, but we never got to see Marianne work through her own trauma and abuse. I think this may in part contribute to the state of their relationship. Considering Connell himself had contributed to her feelings of unworthiness, I couldn't believe in the health of their connection. Even in the last chapter. So I was overjoyed when the book ended with their separation. I feel perhaps they could reconnect later when they are healthier more mature versions of themselves and have a better relationship. For now, I was happy that this iteration of their relationship was dying.
The book made me feel many things, it is rare that I inhabit characters as fully as I inhabited Connell and Marianne. In fact, I'm absolutely certain that my strong feelings about this book have made this review an incoherent mess but
This barely counts as a read because I started skimming through the pages at about 50%. Not even the murder mystery was gripping enough to keep me invested. For a book titled A lady's guide to mischief and mayhem, there was very little of either.
Kate is a widow who inherited a newspaper company from her late husband. While attempting to report on the spate of killings that has gripped London, she becomes entangled with Inspector Eversham, whose professional reputation is in tatters partly due to the unintended effects of her reporting.
Kate and Eversham are boring. They are supposedly fighting their attraction to each other, but to me their chemistry was nonexistent. I was far more interested in Caro and Valentine, who at least seemed to be repressing some strong emotions.
I will say however, that the author's commentary on women's rights/suffrage in this period was one of the few highlights of this book. I like that HRs are consciously adding social commentary. I just think that other books manage to talk about feminism while also being interested and this book filed to achieve that.
I'll probably end up reading the next book because I enjoyed Caro and Valentine. However, this book failed to impress. Leaving it unrated on the off chance that I change my mind upon a reread.
Despite how popular the psy-channeling series is, I've never really enjoyed any of the books I've read. This anthology was no exception. The only novella I liked was Declaration of Courtship and even then my enjoyment was lukewarm at best. I think I just have to accept that this series is not for me.
This book was so sweet. Very little angst and next to no conflict.
It was nice to read a romance about two mature characters who had a lot of stuff to work through, but still managed to treat each other with care and respect.
This book also had positive representations of therapy and a hero who struggled with self-worth but was not a raging asshole.
Overall, there's a lot to like.
This was excellent. Westover has a strong narrative voice that grips the reader from the first sentence.
A friend recommended this book to me because she was fascinated by Westover's ability to overcome her lack of primary and secondary education to earn a PhD from Cambridge. Thus, I went into this expecting to be intrigued by Westover's survivalist upbringing. While that part was certainly interesting, I think the most potent aspect of the book, is Westover's portrayal of abuse and the ways in which families often protect abusers in the name of ‘family loyalty'. Something I found powerful about her portrayal of Shawn's abuse, were the tender moments interspersed between the more brutal ones. Even though I hated Shawn, there were times I had to remind myself that he was horrible and whatever niceness he was showing Tara at the moment could disappear at the drop of a hat. Despite familial neglect and abuse, Westover portrays her parents and siblings in a nuanced, balanced manner. Nobody is all good or all bad. But she does not make any excuses for their behaviour either.
Throughout the book, Westover contrasts her own memories with those of others who experienced the same events. She sometimes mentions that there are gaps in her memory regarding certain key events. In my opinion, these choices, rather than making her an unreliable narrator serve to highlight the questions Educated raises about who gets to tell history and why. Westover prizes her education because it allowed her to read multiple narratives and construct her own, when before she had been forced to accept her father's narrative as truth. Therefore, by highlighting her own fallibility, she does not force the reader to accept her own narrative as truth either.
I probably won't read (or listen) to the entire book again because I found some scenes difficult to get through but I will definitely be thinking about this book for a long, long time.
Throughout this book, I was really irritated by the duke (whom I mistakenly assumed was the hero). I found he was often condescending towards the heroine and the other members of her village (as a man of his station would likely be). The book was written in both his POV and Libby's as such it was easy to assume that he and Libby were going to end up together. However, I couldn't help thinking about how much I loved the doctor and how I wished that he, instead of the duke, would end up being Libby's husband. Imagine my surprise when that was how the book ended!
This book subverted so many of the established romance conventions (and it was published two decades ago!). There was a wealthy, reformed duke who wasn't the hero, an overweight, clumsy doctor who was the hero and a spurned suitor who didn't leave with bitterness/animosity. There's so much of this book to love and I can see myself rereading it in the future.
This book had a nice, quirky concept but its execution was weak.
Our protagonist is informed of his impending death and offered a deal with the devil: for every extra day he is alive, he needs to choose something that will totally disappear from the world. From this setup, I was expecting to read heart-wrenching moral dilemmas about the ethics of making things disappear for the whole world while wanting to eke out a few more moments out of life. I also thought I would be getting a deep exploration of grief when confronted so directly with one's own mortality. Instead, it was pretty blah.
The main character is selfish and apathetic and doesn't seem to consider any opinions, thoughts or feelings outside of his own when choosing the things that can disappear. Granted, by the end, the devil is the one choosing which things disappear (no surprise here, he is the devil after all). However, even then he should have considered what it would mean when he accepted the bargain. For example, when he is considering whether or not to make movies disappear, he doesn't seem to think about what that absence would mean for his ex-girlfriend - who loves movies so much she now lives above a cinema. What would the absence of movies mean for her? Will she forever feel incomplete? He neither considers no cares about what the answers to these questions are. The protagonists self-centredness would be okay if the book was seeking to highlight how inherently selfish humans really are, but by the end, we are supposed to buy the idea that humans are actually selfless because the protagonist cannot bring himself to make cats disappear. However, even that final decision is selfish, he doesn't decide to keep cats around because he's thinking of other people, he seems to do it because of the sentimental value cats hold for him . Besides, he hardly seems remorseful for the other things he made disappear.
Additionally, there seem to be no real-world implications for the things that disappear. How did the world not come grinding down to a halt when the clocks disappeared. What happened to all the people who worked in phone manufacturing, or in the movie industry, or even in the clock industry. Millions of people must supposedly have woken up unemployed. How did the world simply go on, when big changes had been made. I think this concept would have worked better if each bargain gave him an additional 2 months - 1 year, then he could really sit with and consider the impacts of his decisions, see how the world was different because of the self-interested choices he had made.
This book promised to deliver one man's journey of self-discovery, but in my opinion, it fell short.
This was my first audiobook and I absolutely loved it! Ruby Dee narrated with emotion and it sometimes felt like I was in a conversation with the characters. Hurston's book is wonderfully written, the language is often beautiful and poetic. It was a joy to listen to.
This is a classic for a reason; nothing else I say can really do it justice
I don't know how I feel about this book. Mostly because I have more questions than answers and this review is me trying to work through those questions.Uprooted is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast with a beauty that is neither so beautiful nor helpless and a beast that's not really a beast ( at least that's what Novik would like us to believe). There's no denying that Novik writes beautifully, Uprooted was as much a joy to read as [b:Spinning Silver 36896898 Spinning Silver Naomi Novik https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1513872748l/36896898.SX50.jpg 58657620] was (still one of my favourite books this year). However, in my opinion, Uprooted lacked the strong world-building and tight plotting of Spinning Silver. Agnieszka's magic is largely imprecise and instinctive while the magic of the wizards is exact and almost scientific in its application. The only other person who apparently had Agnieszka's kind of magic was the witch Jaga, who died 500 years ago and whose spells have mainly been rubbished as nonsense. This made me wonder:1. In the past 500 years had there been no one who had that same brand of magic?2. Had no one been alive during Jaga's own time whom she trained to carry on her legacy? It is mentioned that the other wizards needed to be apprentices for 7 years before taking the test yet during Jaga's time she had not trained any witches?3. Also, it is said that Ballo didn't realise he was a wizard until he hit 40 and it became obvious that he wasn't ageing. Wouldn't the same have been true of anybody with either Agnieszka or Jaga's brand of magic? Wouldn't they have stopped ageing too?It just doesn't seem clear to me why all knowledge of that magic died with Jaga when she had been alive for 100+ years.Additionally, the reason for the differences in magic wasn't really explained. Initially, I thought it might be gendered because only Agnieszka and Jaga were recorded to have practised the intuitive kind of magic; however, the presence of Alosha (the female wizard) led me to believe that might not be the case. And to be honest, I was relieved to realise the magic wasn't necessarily gendered. The idea of a system where men practice precise magic while women cast instinctive spellls has such misogynistic implications that I was glad Novik hadn't stooped to that. As a black woman in STEM, I still encounter people who believe that women just aren't good at sciences and I would have been absolutely revolted to read a version of that belief in this book. However, that still led me to ask why Agnieska and Jaga were different from the rest and what made their magic so rare??????????Finally, I hated the romance and I hated Sarkan. There was no redeeming decades of kidnapping. I also couldn't get over both the power imbalance and the 100+ age difference. There was too much I had to ignore to enjoy this romance and I couldn't do it. I don't really enjoy bully romances, I prefer reading about two sweet people being kind to each other.
CW: sexual assault
Lavinia and William start a ‘relationship' because William overhears a conversation between Lavina and her brother which indicates they need to produce 10 pounds or face imprisonment. Thus, William coerces Lavinia into sex by buying up her brother's debt and insisting she pay with her body.
For me, there was no redeeming William or the book after that. Unless he became a true champion of female rights who helped ensure fewer women had to be in Lavinia's position, I was always going to hate him. Additionally, I feel like Milan doesn't address the rape as she should. The resolution is too pat and fails to really contend with how awful his actions were. Apparently, he doesn't really coerce her because her brother was a minor and thus she didn't really need to pay the 10 pounds. But he didn't know that, and that's the important bit here. He selfishly exploits her vulnerability with no regard for her personhood and instead of being the villain of this story, he is the hero. In fact, by the end, he has both a better job and the woman he has always fantasised about (I won't insult love by suggesting that he loves her). At one point, he tells her he's not the man for her and she replies with: I knew that the minute you tried to coerce me into bed. This should have been the end. Honestly, this would have been a 5-star novella if the book had ended here and they never got together.
I believe that this book should never have been a novella. In order to truly rehabilitate a character as despicable as William, Milan needed at least 320 pages. This is Milan's first effort and it obviously lacks the nuance that she now brings to most of her stories (even the novellas).
This is the slow burn I wanted [b:Yours to Keep 51000583 Yours to Keep (Man of the Year, #2) Lauren Layne https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585339888l/51000583.SY75.jpg 75847892] to be. It was swoony and a tiny bit angsty and there was enough pining and sexual tension to keep me happy for the next week. Considering how well written this was, I'm surprised this was only a debut. Bastone's characters were layered and interesting. None of them was one-dimensional, even the side characters. Perhaps more importantly, it was interesting to see how much character growth she could squeeze out of <350 pages. It was also lovely to read a book in which the main characters' other love interests were not vilified. I really enjoyed this book; if this is what Bastone can produce on her first try, I can't wait to read her next books. Keeping my fingers crossed she doesn't disappoint
Courtney Milan doesn't disappoint. I loved Chloe from the start and while Jeremy took some warming up to, by the end I was a full convert. I think I initially struggled with Jeremy because I'm personally attracted to ambition and competence so the idea of a hero who didn't really do much of anything was a hard pill to swallow. I was fully on board with Chloe's mandate that he get serious . I should have trusted more in Milan's ability to create complex, compelling characters because by the time more of Jeremy's true nature was revealed I was a little bit in love with him.
The romance between he and Chloe was sweet and cute, mostly because he loved her so unabashedly from the beginning. I will most probably be rereading this in the future.
This wasn't as good as [b:The Wicked King 26032887 The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air, #2) Holly Black https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1520620414l/26032887.SY75.jpg 45959180], but that's okay. It would have been very difficult to beat the standard set by that book. The ending felt a bit rushed and several plot points could have been better developed. Taryn deserved to have been slow-cooked in a vat of oil, barring that she needed to do some pretty serious grovelling/ character development but we didn't get that here. I kept expecting her to betray everybody