Izzy

I see a lotta reviews that are like how is it possible that a thirty year old married woman is this attached to her husband or that say something like Katy's love for her mother is so selfish and weird—which I think isn't as anomalous as one might think. I don't know, I found the floundering between cheating and not cheating more disheartening than anything else in the novel, and I think daughters can love their mothers to the point of codependency, and it can be a selfish and short-sighted kind of love. Katy isn't likable, sure, but this isn't a romance novel. I think it's more of a meditation on grief, and even if it felt clumsy at points, I think it was written well enough that I could empathize with that raw and terrible feeling of losing a parent you love. To each their own :P

This book is meant for a target audience, and that target audience is decidedly not me.

I will give credit where credit where credit is due—this book makes no qualms about what it is. Cheesy, sappy, silly romance between two gay dudes that could honestly work as a fanfiction if you tried hard enough. Just replace the names with your characters of choice. It has that over red white and royal blue, I'll tell you that much. I think what just irritated me and annoyed me to hell and beyond was the writing style. Every other page and every other conversation was some fucking GSA spiel about labels and their importance or mental health and so much of the cast of the book was clearly diverse for the sake of diversity. Dev being Indian doesn't impact him or his character in any way, and is about as relevant as the color of his underwear.

I do not understand how so many people love this book, and okay, sure, some books aren't meant for me, but the writing style for this book just infuriated me. If it wasn't some conversation about asexuality and neurodivergence, it was the attempts at being witty and funny that just felt flat. If it wasn't that, it was the random ass fucking metaphors (“his violin eyes” “hands spaced apart like she was building a small IKEA shelf”), and if it wasn't that, it was the way the characters just interacted with each other like every conversation was a Reddit thread or a twitter debate. Maybe people like that! I certainly didn't! Who even the fuck gives a shit! Dev could be a white gay dude and it wouldn't make a difference! You could cut out 30% of this book and nothing would change!

Still better than red white and royal blue tho so

that was a book, sure

Ending a book with a sex scene gotta be top 10 funniest things ever

this is one of those books that's really just full of fluff and a well intentioned message, and there is honestly so much it could improve upon—especially its handling of its only relevant black character—but overall i guess it really just wasn't for me.

the invisible life of Addie laRue? More like the (giggle snort) BORING life of Addie LaRue

You'd think a book with a premise like a woman from 18th century France makes a deal with a devil who is literally her customizable male love interest, like some sort of Sim, and she lives through historical moments would have more excitement in it, but it unfortunately does not. I don't know why all the unfavorable reviews of this book are whining and saying stuff like “THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A ROMANCE BETWEEN ADDIE AND LUCCCC” but frankly speaking Luc is about as interesting as drying paint, and his only saving grace is that he's behind the accomplishments of most historical figures somehow, which just makes him more akin to a comedic figure than anything else.

Addie is boring. She is bland white bread. Not sure how that's even possible when you're a bisexual immortal from the eighteenth century, but this girl has had three hundred years of living and the book shows us her life only in France and America. There is constant allusion made to her escapades in other parts of the world—Turkey, Argentina, Portugal—and the fact that she's gone mad multiple times, and maybe this is the SJW in me speaking but I would like to see how and when a 300 year old woman discovered she was bisexual, but alas. All of that, the potential storytelling anyway, is thrown away in favor of hopping between Luc's tortured, emo, broken

ENOUGH!!! POVS!!! STOP IT!!!

3.5 stars, rounded up. I think the prose can be a bit much, but i found it fitting in the latter half of the book, where everything is slowly starting to unravel. yoga penis line is eternal, though

I'm starting to think the romance genre isn't for me, because my eyes were just glazing over the entirety of this book, except for the existence of the best character in the book—Alex, of course—who I honestly thought would have been the romantic lead, and I'm gonna be honest, would have been way funnier and interesting to me. Then again, I have no idea what people typically like when it comes to romance, and I can see why people would liken this to RWRB. There's that style of writing that some people think is funny and charming but I find vaguely irritating in the way I find white people trying to be funny irritating most of the time, there's the vaguely diverse group of friends that's there, being vaguely diverse (this just being Priya who is Muslim, which is crazy because Priya is as Hindu a name as I can conceive of, but who cares, there've been worse things in life), there's the snarky main character who's biracial (like, French and English, which as I understand might as well be vaguely ethnic to British people) and the uptight blonde dude that's there being sexy and constipated. Interestingly, it also shares a commonality with RWRB in that they both make an off color reference to American imperialism and violence that just jars you, because it reminds you that these books are written for an audience that decidedly excludes people like me and my friends, while also trying to pretend that it isn't. People of color are largely ornamental here, which I'm not disappointed about and I've just sort of expected from books like these written by white queer people—but it feels like there's a difference between knowing this, and seeing it in action. I'm sure this isn't the kind of book where I'm even supposed to care about, because who cares about the optics of representation when two white gay dudes are having a go at each other through fake dating tropes or whatever, and I know these books are largely meant to be escapist fantasies. But what kinds of romance books are people escaping into? Books where (ex?)Muslim South Asians lesbians are just inexplicably hanging out with nobody but white people? Books that make a one-liner out of a war? Again, I'm sure I'm hand wringing over things that nobody cares about but me. But I'm starting to think that books written by white queers and touted as feel-good romance books and escapist fantasies are books that are catered to the kind of person that doesn't want to think about these things, which is a luxury that quite a few people want to enjoy. I won't begrudge them that. But I will wonder.

Anyways, two stars because I really liked Alex♥️

I was eager to get into this book—a magical realism book about an Asian lesbian? Don't mind if I do! But i felt quickly drained as I read on. I'm sure there was a purpose to all of the mentions of all the references to shit, cum, piss, farts, spit, mucus, but I genuinely can't think of any reason for it. The worst part is that I think there are real glimmers of something good and beautiful in this book, but it is so bogged down by graphic detail that it's hard to pick up on it.

Look at me. Forget Hannigram and Sasuke/Naruto or whatever the hell you think is the prototype for toxic homoeroticism. I am going to tell you this once, and I want you to engrave this into your memory: Wolf Larsen and Humphrey Van Weyden are the ancestor of all gay and violent erotic tension.

Wolf Larsen is perhaps one of the best male characters ever conceived of, and were this novel published in the 21st century, I am convinced that young men everywhere would have modeled his behavior after him. His name is WOLF. He's self-educated. He regularly shanghaies people into working for him. He beats the shit out of like five men at once. He beats the shit out of a shark. He engages in philosophical debates, and is described by our narrator as handsome and good-looking, and his physique has our narrator literally speechless. His eyes are beautiful. He makes his own navigational tools. At some point in the book I was expecting Hump to describe the perfect shape of his dick, such was the insanity of the descriptions that Humphrey kept laying down on him.

Humphrey is fine. He's very much an ideological vessel, going up against Larsen's individualistic and violent beliefs, but the great joy in Humphrey's character lays in how utterly besotted he seems with Wolf Larsen, and how utterly he loathes him in equal measure. Larsen favors Van Weyden in a weird sadistic way, and Van Weyden hates him for it, but also takes great pride in his new duties. It's bonkers. The first half of 60% of the book is just them being violent and tense around each other, in between discussions about mortality underpinned by intellectual sexual tension so thick you could cut a knife with it. If the entire book was just this I would've loved it, but unfortunately Maud Brewster arrives, and Humphrey remembers that he's a heterosexual and that women are important, and the rest of the book is spent as Humphrey whines and tries to act masculine for Maud and Wolf Larsen is relegated to the sidelines as a boring and bland romance just...occurs in between Maud and Humphrey.

Now. Do you think this book had women in the early 1900s acting like fujoshis and saying shit like “UGH why did Maud even arrive things were sooo good between Wolf and Hump

Lowering my rating from a four star to a three star because where the book excels, it doesn't make up for the confusing pacing, for how points of conflict are brought up only to be quickly resolved, and the frankly confusing romance between Ead and Sabran that felt like it came from out of nowhere. For seven years Ead didn't give a shit about Sabran, and then just...started liking her? Okay, whatever. I liked the world-building, even though Seiki and some of the Eastern and Southern countries were just vague Orientalist fantasies, while Inys felt like the only nation to be fully fleshed out. A good book in the first half, dragged down by the weight of its own plot lines and mistakes by the middle, only to have what felt a bit like a rushed ending (weird, for a book this size to have one.)

i think the pacing of this book started out brilliantly—slow moving, beautifully described, and a decent enough cast of characters to keep me invested. and then the latter part of the book moves in, where every character that isn't a part of the main trio is sidelined and forgotten and the plot just kind of...falls apart? i'm not entirely sure how to describe it, but i wouldn't have a problem if other characters were sidelined for the sake of main characters, if the main characters had more substance to them. beautifully written though, i'll give it that much.

so I came to the reviews and I was shocked by the amount of people that were like ooooooh the grape scene is soooo visceral and ooooh the cannibalism meanwhile I was just like oh... that was important? i think the book just, from the get-go, desensitized me to like poopenfarten stuff so when those things do happen I had no real reaction. so sick of coming to novels reading 5-star reviews like “this was deeply dark and disturbing” and actually reading the book and finding it boring in its banality

Now, I don't ever write reviews. Usually, I'm more than content to sit back in my chair and reduce a book to the number of stars I give it. Whatever my opinions on any particular book may be, someone's already probably written about it much more articulately than I could have ever hoped, and to a much larger audience, besides.

Sometimes, though, a book will incite such strong feelings in me that I don't feel like a one star rating would suffice. No, I have to sit down on my ass and ramble at the uncaring void of the internet, why, exactly it is that I absolutely, passionately, ardently despise a book.

Oh, man. This book. It's not that I wasn't emotionally invested in any of the characters or that the writing was absolutely horrendous–quite the contrary! The writing was gorgeous, and the characters–though they felt insufferable, at times–I grew to like. But, Jesus Christ, can anyone in this goddamn book catch a break? The first few times anything bad ever happened, I felt sad. And then bad things just kept happening. And happening. And happening. And happening.

Listen, I get tragedy. I get sad endings and bad things happening. However, when an entire book is literally just one gigantic sobfest piled on top of another sobfest, like it doesn't know how to evoke any other emotion in a reader other than absolute soul-crushing sadness, you really have to stop and think. What frustrates me most is that every now and then, I caught glimpses of something this book could have been. Something well and truly beautiful. But all of it was overshadowed by the ‘hey, let's make something bad happen to this character, again, for the sixtieth time, and make you feel bad.' Also, there's something to be said about how badly all of the gay characters here are treated but if I start on that I'm going to burst a vein or something, and I am not going to die over a book this bad.

Anyways, if tragedy porn is your thing, go ahead!

Nice world-building but I feel like this was a pretty aimless kind of high fantasy story. Maybe that's the point, I'm not sure—but I feel like after reading how clever and smart Kvothe is and how his only flaw is that he's reckless I kind of just stopped being interested and powered through sheer force of will. Kvothe should have sucked Bast's dick at some point. Feel like that would've spice things up maybe