Hannah

I couldn't stop grinning through this whole book, regardless of how it made me look at the bus stop. Emily Henry is a genius at witty dialogue. And Gus... I love Gus. He's like a modern Mr. Darcy with his vibe of “I'm completely in love with you. I will demonstrate this by standing nearby and insulting you”.

“How many times had women who told the truth been muzzled with the label of madness?”

This book was such an interesting combination where the first half of the book is a non-magic but compelling story of a boy, Charlie, helping an old man and his dog while recovering from his father's bout of alcoholism and the death of his mother. The second half of the book feels like a whole new story, with a fantasy world, a kingdom ruled by an evil king, a damsel-in-distress princess, and Charlie transforming into a prince out of a fairy tale. I enjoyed both halves, but the first half with no fantasy elements was my favorite and established all my emotional attachment to the characters. The world that Charlie came from felt so deep and real with fleshed-out characters while many of the supporting characters in the fairytale world felt a bit too cutesy.

I think all worlds are magic. We just get used to it.

Eh. I liked Feyre in the human world, she was strong and fierce and a protector of her family. Very Hunger Games heroine type. But then it all goes downhill once she gets taken to Fae and loses all the strength that made me respect her. We basically watch her paint for half the book.

This was a book where I had very little idea of what was happening for the first 75% and then loved the book after reaching the end and seeing how all the pieces come together. Even when you're not sure what's going on, the writing is so beautiful and visually stimulating that you're happy to stick around for the ride. 

“I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn and every time love's written in all the strands it will be you.”“Hunger - Red - to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace it's edges like teeth - is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out?” 

Full Series Review –

This series made me want to read every other book T. Kingfisher has written, even with all the grit and heartbreak and me falling for the wrong character who was kind of the bad guy and broke my heart by dying in the end, but said “Darlin''” in such a heart-gripping way. The premise? Amazing. Cannabalistic tattoos, wars, demons, criminal underworlds. It has everything. The characters? There is something wonderful about having heroines and romances focus on older women who have lived through some shit.The ending? Heartbreaking, had me crying until I brought on a headache at 1 am. I was so mad at Brenner for being idiotic enough to let a demon in. I was so heartbroken by the way he looked at her and said “Darling” as his last words before he lost his soul for good. I was so uncertain if he'd ever really loved her, if he was capable of love, but in that moment I hoped he was and that he'd redeemed himself. “There were a great many things she had prepared to say - vague explanations, stripped of any facts that could be dangerous, mentions of the Dowager's name, promises of amnesty in the unlikely event any of them survived. She considered them all and rejected them one by one. ‘Would you like to go on a suicide mission?' she asked instead. He smiled. It was the first genuine smile she'd seen all day. ‘I would be honored,' he said.

I read this book in one sitting and it was everything I was looking for after finishing the Truly Devious series. 

Pippa is what I was missing with Stevie from Truly Devious. She's consumed with solving a murder from five years ago, but she also does her homework and keeps her life mostly together. Yes, it's weird that I care so much about this element of my ya characters, but I got so stressed out by Stevie's absolute disregard for the elements of her life that weren't murder and it distracted me from the plot of Truly Devious.Moving past the Pippa v Stevie comparison, Pippa and Ravi were such a lovely pair and the twists of solving Andie Bell's murder and clearing Sal Singh's name were exciting and consuming. One of my top reads of 2023. 

But I was here.
And I did things.

I discovered Amy Rosenthal through The Anthropocene Reviewed, where I learned three things about her: (1) she was friends with John Green, (2) she had died of cancer in 2017, (3) she wrote a book called An Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. This book gives a vivid image of what it was like to live in her brain, both through the “pillow book” format and the beautiful writing that swings between lighthearted absurdity and raw emotion.  This collection is humorous, perceptive, and full of little breadcrumbs of love for her friends and family. 

This book was so beautiful and sentimental. Linus Baker, a social worker, is working for a satirically capitalist company ruled by “Extremely Upper Management.” Linus assesses orphanages for magical children in a world where those with magic are discriminated against. When he's assigned a month-long investigation with a highly classified orphanage, he discovers that life can be so much more than the grey world he's grown comfortable with.

“He dreams. Is that understood, I wonder? He dreams of a future that he may never have. And while his dreams may seem small, they are still his and his alone.”

I picked this up at random without knowing much about it and ended up loving this story so much. The romance is funny and sweet and a bit over the top at times. The characters are flawed and lovable.The fact that they fell in love both in person and over margin notes made for book edits was a unique style that I was very into.“What would somebody think about a person like me? Who, out there the world, would think I was special enough to make the heroine in their story?”“...and anyway, romance isn't just about attraction. It's about companionship. You don't see old married couples who've been through two world wars and five babies together making out on a bench when they're ninety and think to yourself, now that's what it's all about. You see the way they hold hands, the way they serve each other scrambled eggs on plates they got for their wedding day, the way they shuffle through the paper in the mornings together without needing to fill the space with empty conversation. Because they are happy. Just happy. Together.”

We first meet Addie LaRue as a desperate young woman trying to avoid a life where she lives and dies in the same small village as the wife of a man she does not love who'd consign her to a fate of likely dying in childbirth. She makes a deal with the darkness to live freely until she's ready to stop. He takes this deal and makes it so that anyone who meets Addie will forget her. She exists - somehow thrives alongside suffering - this way for 300 years before meeting Henry, a man who remembers her.

Addie is my role model. Her will to survive, her ability to enjoy temporary moments of happiness, and her stoicism in the face of suffering show us a specific philosophy for how we can approach our lives. There are so many characters across so many books who've frustrated me with their reaction to hardship, but I never once stopped admiring Addie. I understood and respected her decisions, even the bad ones. I loved her reaction to good things. People who endure trauma often struggle to accept happiness and love into their lives for fear of risking more pain when it leaves. Addie frequently states, “She knew that it would end, it always ends eventually, but she would enjoy it while it was here.” She matches the gods with her determination and her vigor for life.

“But isn't it wonderful... to be an idea?”“And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it. Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain? And she turns her head and looks at him, and says ‘Always.'“

Maia is the youngest son of the Emperor and was never meant to lead, let alone see the Imperial Court again. He's been long exiled due to his heritage. His mother, the third and regretted Empress, was a goblin.  When a crash kills the Emperor and three older sons, Maia finds himself the unexpected (and unwanted) Emperor.

I thought this story was beautiful. I felt so much for Maia due to his childhood abuse and the gentle manner in which he took on each challenge before him. I loved him for not becoming the monsters who raised him once he had the power to do so. 

“Old boy, in this life there will always be a certain amount of shit to be shoveled. I really would urge you to buy a long-handled spade and simply get on with it.”

A perfect heartwarming comfort novel.

The concept of The Seven Year Slip is a strong sell - a woman grieving the loss of her aunt moves into her aunt's apartment and finds that this apartment sometimes sends you back 7 years in the past. There, Clementine meets Iwan, a man who stayed a summer at her aunt's house with dreams of making it as a chef. 

The plot centers around her falling in love with the idealistic Iwan of the past while getting to know the more cynical and refined Iwan of the present. I had a hard time connecting to the romance between Clementine and young Iwan. The conversations felt like they skipped straight into the deep end without any getting-to-know-you phase, and I didn't find them believable. I felt much more connected to the more mature romance with present-day Iwan. That's not to say past Iwan wasn't likable, he had a lovely way with words.“Universal truths in butter. Secrets folded into the dough. Poetry in the spices. Romance in a chocolate. Love in a lemon pie.”The main point of this story which I deeply connected to was the concept of falling in love with multiple versions of your partner and accepting that people change. The person you loved seven years ago will be vastly different from the person you love today, even if they are the same person. No one ever goes back to being the old version of themselves, and you cannot force them to. Long-lasting love means choosing to fall in love over and over again with every new version. As someone who has been married for almost a decade now, that clicked with me.“That was love, wasn't it? It wasn't just a quick drop – it was falling, over and over again, for your person. It was falling as they became new people. It was learning how to exist with every new breath. It was uncertain and it was undeniably hard, and it wasn't something you could plan for.”

A book that mixes magic and fairytales with Judaism. A Jewish girl, Miryem, loves her father but is watching him let the family starve because he won't fulfill his role as a money lender. Her grandfather is a wealthy man of the same profession, and she wants that wealth and comfort for her own family. This desire is spurred into action when her mother becomes sick. Miryem starts collecting the money herself. Little does she know what can happen to a girl who turns silver into gold.

“But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones”

This was an interesting read that approaches time management from a philosophical perspective rather than from a self-help perspective. It asks several questions: What is our experience of time? What qualifies as a good or bad use of it? The premise asks us to set aside the goal of attempting to stuff our days with slots of value for a future payoff and instead consider how we want to allocate our four thousand weeks to enjoy the present. 

Some parts of this were rather repetitive, but I came away with good insights. I do wish the book would have focused less on what is wrong with our approach to time and more on building a vision of what could be better.

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (‘This shouldn't be happening'), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process.”

This book was an apocalyptic hug. Favorite read of 2023. I love everything about it. Ryland Grace is a joy to tag along with, even as he's facing certain death in a separate solar system from Earth. His inner dialogue is so entertaining. Rock stole my heart even though I'm terrified of spiders.It was so heartwarming to watch these two work together across culture and language to communicate and solve the mystery of astrophages to solve both of their planets. The solid and steady growth of their friendship was lovely and the world-building was so well done. I appreciated how flashbacks were introduced as a form of Grace slowly getting his memory back, so it didn't feel forced in the overall plot.

Grumpy. Angry. Stupid. How long since last sleep, question?

This series is so, so good. It is an emotional rollercoaster that is at times hard to read because the characters' pain is your pain. You grow to care so much about these well-fleshed-out characters, and the author does an amazing job at making both the reds and golds and all the colors between complex. There is no clear good and evil. The reds are not wholly good and the golds are not wholly bad. I love how he shows this yet still makes you understand that the societal structure that stands on the backs of the suffering lower castes must be destroyed. He shows the struggle in a rebellion - the balance that must be struck between tearing down and rebuilding and how easily the good side may become bad if they don't hold onto the future they're fighting for.The audiobooks for this series are a masterpiece.Darrow is a Red and a HellDiver. He lives in the deep mines of Mars, loving his wife Eo and taking pride in his work even as his people starve and his death threatens to arrive every day via a pit viper or a lost limb. Then, Eo shows him a secret section of the mine they were never supposed to see - a garden. He's never seen the sky, never felt grass beneath his feet. Eo tries to convince him to rebel, but he won't risk dying like his father did. He has Eo to live for. That's before they're caught exiting the garden. Eo is whipped and then executed when she sings a forbidden song that still lives in my head to this day.

My love, my love
remember the cries
When winter died for spring skies
They roared and roared
But we grabbed our seed
And sowed a song
Against their greed
And
Down in the vale
Hear the reaper swing, the reaper swing
the reaper swing
Down in the vale
Hear the reaper sing
A tale of winter done
My son, my son
Remember the chains
when gold ruled with iron reins
we roared and roared
and twisted and screamed
For ours, a vale
of better dreams

 Darrow is saved by the Sons of Aires. They ask him to sacrifice everything to save his people by undergoing the carving to become a Gold and infiltrate the institute.

I've been fitting a little of John Green's writing into my brain every day for the past couple of months with this essay collection. It never failed to leave me inspired, laughing, and a little in awe at this planet and the silly humans who inhabit it. I ended my reading with a book covered in highlights and sticky tabs. Green will never fail to impress me with the beautiful way he strings words together.

To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June... We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.

The Bachelor is mashed with classic fairy tales through the setting of a support group for modern women dealing with their trauma. Each chapter is a different woman's story. Each one is captivating and disturbing. 

Through all the stories is an underlying plot where the “therapist”, a man wearing a human suit to play the role of a young and attractive male, has something nefarious planned. The ending reveal of who he is was quite a twist, I'd grown convinced that he was Raina's former lover Rumpelstiltskin when he was really her current husband - host of The One (aka torture chamber/traumatic version of The Bachelor). Outside of that mystery, I loved watching the women grow to support each other and pull out what it means to be a woman in this world.“Maybe don't even be out there, on the street, not if it's dark, not if you're a kid, not if you're a woman, not without a rape whistle around your neck, not without pepper spray clutched in your hand, not, anyway, if you're wearing that outfit”“Morals create a labyrinth of rule geared toward blaming the victim...““Brandon chose you. But what if it were the other way around? What if it were your choice? What would you choose?”“Come on, I gave the fucker the address.” “I practically moved in with the fucker,” said Bernice. “Great, so we're both idiots,” said Ruby.

Series review –

I stayed up two nights in a row until 3 am to finish the first two books in this series, there were so many fun twists and I could not stop reading!

The Truly Devious series splits between the present day and the 1930s at Ellingham Academy, a famous private school in Vermont founded by Albert Ellingham as “a place where learning is a game.” The year that the school opened, the founder's wife and daughter were kidnapped. Though Albert gave everything the kidnappers asked for, they're never found. A few years later, Albert goes sailing with his FBI friend George Marsh and their boat blows up.In the present day, Stevie Bell is accepted to Ellingham Academy with the ambition of solving the case. While the cold case is her original interest, she soon becomes embroiled in an active murder as death visits Ellingham Academy once more.The Ellingham case is solved by book 3. The next two books are irrelevant to the series and simply served to strengthen my wish that Nate could've been the love interest instead of David, though I love Nate and Stevie's friendship regardless. I would do rereads of this with just books 1-3. 

It took me awhile to get hooked into this story. The writing is slow, lyrical, and purely vibes at the beginning. We're wandering endless halls full of oceans and statues with very little idea of what is going on. Once the plot is added into this visually stimulating setting, I was completely hooked and finished the book during one flight. 

The world and characters are vivid with a dash of mystery. The culty subplot slowly leaked through journal entries was so well written. Clark is skillful at inspiring both horror and beauty and making you feel like your floating through all her worlds.

The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of itself. It is not a means to an end.

This is like Mindhunter for young adults. Two college kids are recruited to interview Juvenile serial killers based on the experience of their personal trauma. Emma is the sole survivor of a serial killer and Travis is a US Marshall candidate whose father was killed by a young serial killer, Simon.The premise is a bit shaky and I struggled with the overconfidence of teenage plans, but that's what I get for reading this as an almost 30-year-old. All in all, I ate this book series up and had a fun time reading it. 

I came for the mystery and stayed for the characters. This is about a group of 80-something-year-olds living in a retirement village who meet every Thursday to solve cold cases. Their club gets much more exciting when a man connected to the village is murdered.

This group of retirees is quirky and heartwarming. Their ring leader, Elizabeth, is a force of nature who always manages to stay one step ahead of the detectives using the connection of her past mysterious career (spy? international agent? who knows) all while dealing with the heart-wrenching and slow loss of her best friend and husband due to dementia.“Her arm is around her Stephen in the darkness. Can he feel it? Does Penny hear her? Have they both already disappeared? Or are they only real for as long as she chooses to believe they're real? Elizabeth clings on a little tighter and holds onto the day for as long as she is able.”While the rest of the cast initially claim to not be friends, we get to watch as those friendships secretly grow anyway and enjoy all the lovely interactions that emerge as a result.“‘Where is your place, Ron?' asks Ibraham. ‘Honestly? I'm flicking through it all in my head, all the things you're supposed to say. But, listen. It might just be here in this chair, with my mate, drinking his whisky, dark outside, with something to talk about.'“In the end, I didn't care much about the murders and the organization of the case could've been better. But you could've given me this group of retirees doing just about anything and I would've read it.

This was an enjoyable read with characters you want to spend time with. I particularly loved the grave witch with her demon rooster and the godmother who was meant to be evil, but instead lived a mediocre and kind life with her chickens.

Why did I think she must have slighted me? Why didn't it occur to me that she might just be doing the best she could?

‘Go,' she whispered... ‘Run and be free. They cannot use what they cannot find.'