Ceraphina
Contains spoilers
3 to 4 stars. The writing is great and Henderson added beautiful atmosphere. But I so badly wanted her to go “bad” at the end instead of saving a bunch of old christian men. Why is there next to no novels where a woman finds out about the evil witches and joins them instead of working on stopping them?
Oral history of a not your typical Alien invasion. I liked this well enough - it was nice to learn the aftermath of the “end of humanity” for once, to learn of this instead of being in the middle of the action.
The characters however were quite flat in my opinion but I didn't really care too much about that in this instance as I was just enjoying learning what happened with the “Pulse”
I really enjoyed this book but I lost all interest at the court and trial nonsense. Just felt like Kristin Hannah wanted to toot her own horn but nothing is more annoying than a character in a book admitting all their wrong doings to a cop and then being like “oh no, I needed a lawyer didn't I?!” like I know people are that goddamn stupid but it really irks me to have to read about it especially when this book was going in such a strong direction prior to the last quarter.
Andy Weir is a one trick pony for the Adam Sandler main characters (not rly sure why he's in the position he's in (as in, how tf did he get this job), memory loss, slightly or mostly misogynistic, uses humor to a nauseating degree) in his book the Martian and based off of reviews is exactly the same as PHM. I think he's trying to get out of it with a couple of these other books like Artemis and Randomize but he just unfortunately fails. This just wasn't great.
This book really didn't work for me. The first quarter dragged on. The middle was definitely the best and the ending felt flat. Honestly at times I felt like I was reading a Middle Grade book (which, is it??? Am I missing something here????) - every conversation between Linus and the Magical Youth constantly was hard driving “lessons” into my brain about how to treat others different from us. It was beyond repetitive, and so much so that with every conflict you knew exactly how it would be resolved, nothing was surprising and it left me with distaste.
Contains spoilers
I've been sitting on this for the day and the more I think about this series, the angrier I'm getting and knocking this down to 2 stars from my original 4.
First things first, the smut is bad. I'm sorry but two to three sentences of being eaten out isn't satisfying, and like, writing sex scenes shouldn't be as difficult as this book made it seem. It was clunky, and just not it for me. But I'm willing to overlook this because it's not the whole story. But I'd like to quickly add, that the rape between her and the demon (she agreed to this sex act however the disassociation, wanting it to be over, feeling “empty” general depression after the fact, and acknowledging this was only as a transaction is rape to me) was so poorly written? I can't get over it honestly. The writing style is very stream of conscious at times, and it was noticeable at this very pivotal time in the plot. It just didn't sit well with me.
Also the way Colliths death was handled? Again, stream of concious style writing had a huge disservice to his death. It's like our writer has so many ideas and plot points they want to make, it just sentence after sentence with no feeling. I'd expected to feel something for Colliths death and it was just bland.
Speaking of this, books are allowed I acknowledge to end on cliff hangers. But to start so many open ended questions of various characters or plots is hard to want to deal with. Like Laurie admitting he put the scar on Collith. Or Oliver leaving things in the real world. I don't want plots to feel like a huge effort to keep track of.
A lot of shit happens out of convienance too. I feel there has been zero repercussions for Fortunas actions. Colliths death would of been nice as a moment for her to really reflect on what's happening to her life, but instead she found a way to have advantage on death, regardless of what that cost was. Its whatever she wants, when she wants it, and if that's the entire series will we ever experience emotions during reading them? Another thing of convenience that bothers me the most is her “powers”, or “bond” she has with all the faeries in unseelie court. This bond is difficult on her when we want to add tension, but always seem easy to overcome and bring more power to her when she needs it, like during fighting?
Fuck I really could keep going on and on. This review is mainly for me to remind myself when the third book comes out, to not have high hopes.
Absolutely riveting. First book in a long time that made me stay up until 530 in the morning just to finish it. I wish I had more words to say to describe how impactful this book is for me, but without getting into my own story - this is all I can conjure up. This was a beautiful and hard to read book, many times leaving me breathless as I could see myself as Vanessa. I will treasure this read for many years to come.