Jess
Fluffy and saccharine chick lit at it's finest! It was predictable and melodramatic but that was literally what I was here for! Great subway read after a stressful work day.
Solid novelization. Would probably rec this over playing the game to most people tbh. The bit of diy translation at the back is a fun bonus!
About a third of the way through there is a thinly veiled lament about the “Great Replacement”
so i stopped there
A fun main character and glimpses of good dialogue couldn't save this book from 3 of my biggest pet peeves: black and white morality, over simplified sexuality, and a stark lack of female characters.
where the ladies at? honestly disappointed at the lack of female characters. doesn't pass the bechdel test. includes tired (and at one point border transphobic) tropes. a few laugh out loud funny lines can't make up for the lazy plot and flat characters. 2/5 would make a good beach read if you hate women.
Felt real smart when I was comparing the prose to Near to the Wild Heart while reading and then at the end saw Clarice Lispector among the acknowledgements
How do you even talk about works like this? I read it in just over an hour. I want to start it again immediately but also I'm sick to my stomach.
Unreasonably good. Takes true crime from genre to subject in and of itself. This gave me words I've been looking for for a long time to describe how I feel about the true crime zeitgeist and then some
Wildly smart and almost unbearably empathetic.
Evoked a very similar feeling to Red Pill by Hari Kunzru where I was couldn't look too close or linger too long for fear of recognizing myself in the text.
Doesn't quite stick the landing in the way Kunzru does. I also found myself wishing this book was just a little more subtle - I wanted it to let me make my own connections but I found it very prescriptive about it's own interpretation.
The comparisons to Palimpsest are apt. Lovely framing for a short story collection, i wanted it to be twice as long.
finished this while waiting for a concert to start so i was literally crying in the club.
incorrect use of the :eyes: emoji drove me up the wall. I've also read fanfiction that does this concept (both the “stuck in a computer” and the “story told entirely thru internet chat”) better, so there's that.
Too saccharine and sitcom-y for my taste, may have liked it more if i was in a different mood
Overall was a ton of fun, but I disliked the scope creep in the final quarter. imo the stakes didn't need to ratchet up any higher and the finale felt rather melodramatic as a result. Still had a good time tho
stayed up until 4:30 am to finish this ARC. absolutely floored. this series has so much to say about power & history. how does one book feel like a death march and a signal flare and a full-fledged mythos all at once? struggling for words at how haunting and terrible and inevitable it all felt at the end.
my new years resolution is to commit to putting books down quicker. i know when things aren't working for me and this one is not working for me! Language, tone, pacing, and characters are all a miss for me ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Genuinely scared me, had to stop for a bit and turn on all the lights in my room. Really fun!
Voice was way too YA for me, dnf'd within the first chapter. I'm never listening to booktok again
i felt like a lot of the class analysis and critique was missing depth. instead, a disproportionate amount of time was spent in wide-eyed hero worship of CEOs. gross.