Hannah

I'm not going to yuck someone's yum I can't see the appeal but please skip this book. This book is just poorly written and bland... and fucking boring.... There are other books that should take up your time that are sexier and actually well written.

This was a fun little adventure. I thought the story was a weird (in a good way) mash up of a batman comic, Six of Crows, and The Troop. It was original and refreshing. I liked that healing and friendship were the main focus on this novel rather than romance. That being said the characters were missing some depth and despite lots of dialogue and backstory I didn't feel very connected to them, there was a layer missing that I can't put my finger on. Regardless is was a fun read and I'll definitely read the second one!

There's not much I can stay about the plot without giving it away, but the book is wonderfully written and doesn't feel horribly suspenseful but more it gently holds your hand and guides through a flower garden until you reach the end and you turn around and see the flower garden was actually a graveyard. You spend the whole book knowing something is off and weird and you second guess yourself and try to figure it out but then the truth is revealed and you feel betrayed by your own mind and feelings and it's just wild.

This book was the kind of book I would have adored when I was in Middle school and high school. I would have read this whole series overnight.

Alas I'm a bit older now and my views have changed. I also had the great privilege to read Six of Crows first. Which is arguably written for an older audience. Shadow and Bone is obviously written for a younger crowd, it still covers heavy topics and covers them well. But the “very special girl” and love triangle tropes are written with a certain audience in mind and because of that I found some parts extremely predictable and blah. I felt the same way about the Shatter Me series. It's something a younger me would have loved this and I still do like it but just not as much as I would have.

This book was something. I didn't like it as much as the first one, not by a long shot and that mostly because nothing interesting happens for almost the entire first half. It drab and whiny, but the second half definitely picked up. And the way the author tells the story is truly fantastic the world is so well done I can imagine it clearly and fully without too much detail and the characters are all flawed and none of them go out of their way to change who they are just to placate any other characters which is so rare i think. (I wish someone would come to a fucking compromise at some point in this story 😭 just for the sake of my sanity). Overall though I liked this book a lot.

Fairytale retellings have always been a soft spot of mine but dark retellings? And I'm already swooning. This book was such a fantastic retelling it was a new take on witches and the idea of good and evil and redemption. There was no insta-love which I had been prepared for instead the love story went through the proper steps to get where it ended. There were a few plot holes like the fact that Lira had until the winter solstice to take the princes heart it was mentioned once and then never again, as if the author just needed a reason to turn lira human. And he ending was rushed and while the Lois ends were tied up nicely it lacked he umpf I really wanted out of a story like this. All in all a great read!

This book was fun, something I wish I had read when I was younger I would have loved it. But it's the kind of story I personally feel like I've outgrown. I probably won't read the other ones due to the fact I wasn't invested in the characters or the plot.

Let's talk about Warcross.

I have never read a Marie Lu book before so I really didn't know what to expect but I saw the great reviews and I got so excited.

I see why it got such fantastic reviews. The world building is some of the best I've ever read. With each page I found myself craving more and desperately wishing warcross to be real, like when can I preorder my lenses??? Huh? When!?!??

Lu brought Tokyo to life in a way I've never read before and I felt like I was there. She also did a stupendous job at the levels and the layout of the game, I really appreciated how familiar it felt to anyone like myself who is also a huge gamer. This book is like crack for gamers.

She also get a 10/10 for diversity. The characters are all of different races and backgrounds and some are disabled. And it felt so natural, I often find diversity in YA to feel forced, but not here, everything was mentioned in passing as just like real life. And I loved it.

If only the characters hadn't been so bland.

We have Emika rainbow-colored-hair Chen. Seriously the fact that her hair was described as rainbow colored so many times throughout the book passed me off to no end. We get it she very special and edgy let's move on.

The we have Hideo Tanaka who is about as interesting as a 2x4. He's the 21 yr old genius who changed the world but acts like a pompous 45 year old man who forgot to take his stool softener. I really wanted to love the “brooding lonely genius” thing but there was really no other side to him regardless of how often emika said things like “this was the real hideo” “he let me in to see who he really was beyond his walls”. Nope nothing he's boring and I felt nothing about the plot twist at the end because my two main characters were so meh.

Then there's the supporting cast.
Hello Phenoix Riders!! I would love them to have more. More personality more backstory more details. But for the most part they were just there to fill in spots that weren't just Hideo being a billionaire genius.

Also the romance. Ughhhhhhh
Not good. I dont like the pairing I thought it was forced and the spark just wasn't there. And even though the age difference is only 3 years it felt more like 10 because emika acts more like 16 and Hideo acts more like he's 25 or older. It just felt eww to me.

However the way the book ended left me wanting to read the next one and hoping that the sequel will be better.

After months I'm finally marking this as DNF. It's too boring and bland and ugh. I just can't.

Actual rating 3.5

Okay so I've digested this book enough that I can talk about it now.

I'm going to separate my review into two parts the first half and the second half of the book because it feels almost like two different books.

The first half of the book is the story many of us are familiar with. Seven fifth graders, or summer, and one terrible monster. The first half scared me so bad I would go outside at night by myself or walk past storm drains or hang out too close to any sinks for very long I was afraid I might hear IT.

It of course is a shapeshifter of sorts and comes to the kids all as different things and each iteration is a terrifying and fucked up rendition of a nightmare plus a clown. What makes these things so scary is when you remember that all the protagonists are children and how vividly children see things especially things that scare them, your bones will chill.

That being said, this book is bulky. It tops the list of longest book I've ever read. And it really doesn't need to be that long. Like really doesn't. You could cut the pages from 1400 to 700-800 and it would actually be better. There is a lot of repeating of thoughts and scenes and even more rambling like King didn't know where he wanted to go but he had a word count to meet so he just wrote a bunch of nonsense.

One of the other issues I have with the book is the character development. There are 7 protags and 1400 pages and at the end of it I feel like their still fairly generic, especially Beverly. Like there really didn't need to be a girl in the book if she was just going to be an abused love interest. She has so much potential to so much more she's spunky and playful and smart and I wanted more out of her but in the end her role is that of a convenience.
But more or less I enjoyed the first half of the book, it was scary and funny and all around fun.

It's the second half that got me. Plot holes and lack of climax and lack of resolve and just in general not enough.
Our protagonists are now adults and have returned to Derry to defeat It a final time. The first few chapters into this part of the book are some of the more horrifying in the whole story. But after and the further the story progresses the more jumbled and incoherent it becomes, at first you feel like you're in a rapid free fall towards an insane conclusion, and at first you're like “yeah okay cool this is getting crazy let's do this shit” but then it plateaus again and gets boring, but then picks up and is not longer scary because it's so insane and nothing makes sense. The climax of the story makes literally no sense. The author threw in bits and pieces from earlier in the book into the conclusion and none of it worked. It felt a lot like climbing Mount Everest but before you reach the summit you decide to BASE jump about 5,000 lower or to put it another way it's a long running joke with no punch line. King had too many things going at once and none of them got wrapped up properly so it's just chaos and leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth and overall disappointed.

I wanted so badly to love this book and some of it I did truly enjoy, but I would have enjoyed it more had it been shorter, with deeper characters, and a well thought out conclusion.

Actual rating 3.5 stars. So this book is really lovely in so many ways, first and foremost I liked that it had an easy relaxed feel to it, the flow wasn't too rushed but I was drawn in all the same and the premise is just beautiful there were chapters that gave you backstory and mythology and those were my favorites. The romance is cute and very normal, it's just two boys who have found something special and they kiss sometimes. These are great things.

Here are the things I didn't like about it.

It's lacking.

The pace while relaxed and flowy does just that and about 3/4 of the way through the book it gets boring.

Climax? What climax?

The central plot of this book is that Danny's dad is stuck in a town that has “stopped” and he wants to get him back. But where's my conflict? Everything is more or less smooth sailing until the you reach the “plot twist” and even then because of how easy going the rest of the book is you don't feel the punch.

Character development was a little... bland? That's too harsh, they weren't boring, but I felt like they really didn't face any hard choices, nothing REALLY difficult was thrown their way, to make them evolve. They were too likable and their lives too easy.

Yes there is character death but it didn't impact me emotionally in any way, Danny never really has to choose between anything which makes the resolution at the end so flat, no heart flutters or grand cheers because the end was predictable.


So for a nice relaxing read in between more emotionally taxing books this is a good one.

I think we all need characters like Henry Montague more often. He's spoiled, he's an ass and he lets his privilege cover up all his wrong doings, all the while he thinks he's just having fun and doesn't care about the consequences of his actions.

So when he goes in his grand tour through Europe with his best friend and his sister he thinks it's all just going to careless fun. But he quickly learns that a mindless choice can throw your whole world off balance. This story is cute and funny and touching. Henry learns slowly that maybe he's not always in the right and maybe he's fucked up too many times in the past. It's about how he comes to terms with an abusive past and how that's effected him. He's not perfect he's cowardly, and selfish but he wants to be better and I thinks it's something we can all relate to.

This books covers racism and sexism and ableism I thought in a way that felt realistic. Because Monty doesn't understand why someone would be offended when you're “defending them” or grief to fox then he feels like he's being a hero and therefore a good person, which is a hurdle that is jumped through patience and kindness, and it helps him become more aware of how he handles these situations.
All the dialogue is extremely realistic, they stuffier and say the wrong things and don't say what they mean for fear it will be the wrong thing, and it felt so much like conversations I've had or have heard and that's not always easy to do when you're writing.

Then there's the romance which is just too cute and fiery and shy at the same time and mutual pining is my life.

But then there felicity montys sister and I just really want her to have her own book about all the badass stuff she's capable of and really show off all of her strong points because she's by far my favorite character in this whole book.

All in all the book was absolutely gorgeous and lovely summer read! Everyone should read because you need this story in your life.


Note: this cover is sooooo ugly I can't stand it. I hope they do a new cover at some point.

DNF. The characters are soooo predictable and cookie cutter “ rich cocky spy” because they're the top of their game, but they get too caught up in their own dark lasts and it makes them shallow and boring. This story is so tropy it's impossible to finish.

Review to come

DNF. I pushed 2/3 of the way through this book and couldn't finish it. I don't know what it was exactly, the plot was interesting enough, and the world was amazing! The characters weren't even bad really, I just couldn't connect with them they seemed too shallow, and everything moved too quickly for me. Overall it was a book that had everything I should have loved and wanted to love but couldn't deliver in the areas I wanted it to.

I can't right now. Holy hell. This book was everything. Everything. Above the way it's written, it made me laugh and cry and fear and cheer and all the things a good book should. But it told an amazing tale of how the bad don't always turn good and the ones who save us aren't always heros. It tackled things like PTSD and addiction with grace and drew attention to them and showed how serious they are, but didn't take away from the story to do so, the problems of the characters was woven into the story with such perfection. I can't handle it. I will be rereading this book over and over and over again

I would like to start by saying I don't hate this book. It was an enjoyable enough read, but it was riddled with trope after cheesy trope, and everything was over explained it felt like. The rule “show don't tell” I realize doesn't always apply, and there are times when it's okay to tell what's happening, but this books was different. It told me everything, there was zero room for me to interpret anything because it was spelled out in front of me. And the language was so weird, some sentences were so bright and colorful and other were drab and boring, the style felt clunky and it didn't fit well together, some whole chapter you tell were the ones the author really really wanted to write, the others were well half hearted it felt like. And world building was lackluster, and the characters needed a hell of a lot more fleshing out, I feel like I didn't really even know them until I was 3/4 of the way through the book. However I an giving it a 3/5 because the 1/4 of the book was interesting enough story itself was interesting enough that I finished the book and will even read the second one. It just won't go on my list of “best books ever”

So I actually finished this book forever ago. It really just... fine I'll say it. It was boring. And predictable. And the first few chapters were awesome, and then after the whole lab destruction scene, it just felt like an episode of TWD.

This book. This damn book sticks with me, every time I want to read something just to remind myself how much I love to read I go to this book. This book is a love story for sure, but it doesn't just tell the love story of two people falling in love. It's about a group of people falling in love with a circus, with a circus full of mystery and magic. A circus full of more questions than there will ever be answers. You'll find yourself forgetting that it's an arena for a very dangerous game.

I read it so you don't have to. Seriously don't waste your time .

Okay so here's the thing. I read this because of a few reasons. 1. It is considered be a national treasure of France 2. It is constantly listed as one of the most horrifying books people have ever read

Yes this book is disgusting and made my skin crawl and made me hate humanity. Yes I understand this book is a rough draft and was written while the author was imprisoned at the Bastille. Yes it supposed to shed light on the darkest parts of the human mind.

Considering all of this, the book is still BAD. The writing doesn't make sense in most places and where is does make sense it is equally boring as it is disgusting.

C'mon France you can do better about picking your national treasures. Page after page of people eating shit and a terrible writing doesn't deserve all this attention. Be better.

DNF