Rosanne

Slechtste boek ooit gelezen! De schrijver onderschat zijn lezers door alle ontdekkingen die Langdon doet ‘briljant' te noemen. Langdon zelf is een onsympathiek persoon en zijn hele obsessie met Vittoria verveelde me. Het enige ‘ohooo' momentje was het feit dat de paus een zoon heeft dmv kunstmatige inseminatie, leuk gevonden. Het is dat ik dit boek als studiemateriaal moest lezen, anders had ik hem niet kunnen uitlezen.

"It seemed like just another Monday, innocent but for its essential Mondayness, not to mention its Januaryness".

This brilliant line immediately set the mood for me. I loved Taylors writing style from the beginning. The way she portrays the beautiful city of Prague or the lively souk in Marrakech. Her characters come to life and even though at first I thought they were a bit ordinary, I soon found out that's definitely not the case. Then comes the part where there are monsters, and angels, and a big mystery surrounding.. teeth? Everything is explained later, in a ‘let me show you, ‘cause talk is cheap' kind of way. Needless to say, I was hooked!

I liked Karou and her strange family of monsters. You can say what you want about the morally grey Brimstone, but he did give Karou some pretty good advice about her love life and any “inessential penises” she may encounter in her life. I laughed so hard at that.

“Someone who was for her, as she was for him, whose blood and butterflies sang to hers and answered them, note for note”.

❤️ "That, just for a moment, I can hold my breath and be with you again, in a dream, in a thousand rooms, nowhere at all."

This book totally lived up to the hype. It was funny, heart warming, heart breaking and deliciously romantic. Casey McQuiston has a way with words, and the story she wrote is going to mean a lot to so many readers. There is so much pure and joyful love between Alex and Henry🥺 I'm not a hopeless romantic, but I swooned when I read the love letters😍 my favourite read of June, for sure!

Shout out to the translater by the way! Most of the time I feel like something is lost in translation, like the little jokes or powerful statements. But in this case, the translater nailed it👍🏼

Another quote I chose for this review is not from the story itself, but from the acknowledgements. It was the perfect last sentence for this book. I translated it from Dutch, so maybe it's not completely correct, but it's a strong message all the same:

✳️"Keep on fighting, keep writing history and look after one another."✳️

The Song of Achilles is one of my favorite reads of 2021. It's a magnificent and heartbreaking love story about Patroclus and Achilles, the last one you may have heard of because of his significant role in the Trojan war. It's a story about a love so pure and unconditional, and about how you can make your own choices even though your path seems already laid out for you. Unfortunately, it's also a story about how fate determines your life course, no matter how much you try to outsmart it.

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell, I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”