Teija

This was a very quick read. It takes the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff sinking and brings it new perspective, showing the event through the eyes of a few young protagonists. I thought it was very well done, but something kept me from fully connecting with the characters.

Tamsyn Muir is a bloody genius.

This book took some time to get going and it is TRIPPY until you figure out what's happening, but it is so worth it. All the characters are so good. This universe is so unique and so interesting. One in particular might be climbing my favorite fictional characters of all time list real fast. I'll wait for the next installment just to be sure. And I CAN'T WAIT.

Also, if you're into audiobooks at all, Moira Quirk does a phenomenal job with these. Highly recommend.

This is a fantastic exploration of the Americas pre-European intervention, but it is extremely dry. I'm used to historical texts and academic readings but even with interest in the topic and a willingness to power through, I found myself spacing out and having to backtrack a bit. Persevering did reap reward, though, as the ideas explored in this book are worth examining. Well worth the effort, but it does take effort.

I'm hooked and want to know wtf Russ was up to!! This book had just the right blend of Caribbean vistas, mystery, and romance. Can't wait to snatch up the sequel.

This is a lovely little short story with magic and books and a couple of library fines.

I was surprised at the age of this book, as it's lasted this long and still remains wildly relevant to what's going on in the world today. The issue of women's rights is still a very big debate, and it was more than a little chilling to read this book, knowing that if things really do go south, this isn't an entirely unbelievable situation.

I thought that perhaps the epilogue was too much – I liked the way it ended without it – but it doesn't diminish the book by any means. Definitely worth a re-read!

I think the concept of this one was really interesting and I really enjoyed the fantasy worldbuilding in it, but the characters weren't necessarily the most interesting to me, especially following two installments featuring such compelling kids. This was still a good story, absolutely, but Moon and Lundy just didn't strike me in that same captivating way.

This book is an extremely thoroughly sourced and researched exposé on the entire unholy cluster that was Theranos. While it goes into the things you would expect of such a book - the way Theranos mistreated and terrorized its employees, the lack of standards in Theranos labs, the irresponsibility on the part of everyone involved in allowing Theranos to conduct testing on real people and give them totally fake and misleading test results, the constant goalpost moving and number-inflating on the part of Elizabeth Holmes and her co-conspirators... what really struck me about this was just how hard Holmes and her lawyers worked to keep the story from getting out. Spending millions on legal protection, threatening people's careers and families, attempting to smear Carreyrou... every action made was a poor one driven entirely by self-serving interest not in the company or its product but in the reputation of Elizabeth Holmes. Every single thing about this was in service to her and her ego. It's astonishing.

Equally astonishing is just how much trust and money people are willing to put in when they are approached by a young, attractive, wealthy, white woman with a dream. Theranos fleeced very powerful, very wealthy people, even after clear concerns were being raised about the business, its products, and its methods. And even yet people chose Holmes over reason. Repeatedly. It's really something else.

Woah okay Seanan McGuire, way to dig deep and grab all my heartstrings and then yank brutally on them. There are so many feels in this book and for so many characters. I have felt a lot of things during the course of this series but I've only cried twice, and both times involved the same somewhat surprising catalyst character. Oof. What a good one. At this point I'm wishlisting every McGuire I don't already own.

This was a perfectly charming book with a gorgeous setting and some interesting characters, but I found that the family “mystery” wasn't all that mysterious and that some of the characters were far more interesting than others.

I also found some of the things introduced early on were not really addressed realistically- namely the twin sources for the protagonist's grief were kind of abandoned narratively and never fully “resolved,” not that grief can truly resolve, but the author didn't come to a satisfying fulfillment of that particular thread of character development.

Finally, I found that some of the secondary characters got far more fleshing out than others - Fabrisse was a fully developed person, but Jean-Paul was less so, and the hints we got about him were interesting so it was disappointing that we never got the whole story.

Ultimately this story was charming, and the historical flashbacks were really great. But overall I found that there were things left unfinished in the contemporary storyline.

The saga continues with further expansion of the backstory of the queens, the history of the island, and some excellent interactions between people you wouldn't expect. And my god, the things done near the end of this one! I'm glad I had the next one ready to go because waiting to find out exactly what the heck the queens were up to would have been excruciating.

It's emotionally manipulative bathtub reading. I enjoyed it as I read, but I didn't take anything away from it when I was finished, except that I didn't think I'd be buying another Ahern book. Even the movie adaptation was so-so, but at least it had Gerard Butler. The book didn't even have that.

I get that Holly was grieving, and that she was upset – but a book this thick with this many self-pitying crying jags and this much selfish behavior out of the main character just doesn't do it for me. I didn't like Holly at all; nor did I like many of the supporting characters.

This book is such an adventure. I love the characters, I think the concept is super creative and unique, the writing is the high quality I have come to expect of McGuire. This is probably her greatest book so far. Thoroughly satisfying and unlike anything else I've read.

I'm not sure I'm on board with the ultimate lesson this book is attempting to make about the difference between secrets and lies. Or where its main characters land on that spectrum.

The characters (particularly Thor and Deac) were varying levels of lovable. But I'm baffled why the author made Roland a monk at all if he performed exactly one (1) monklike thing the entire book. It just felt like a strange and pointless plot obstacle that didn't even stand up to a slight wind in the face of Allison's super sexy super sexiness.

I kept reading wondering if it would land closer to Umbrella Academy or CSI and it sort of never decided what it wanted to be. But it was a perfectly good way to fill a flight home from vacation.

That was an intense and satisfying finale to a very interesting, creative series.

[update later] It turns out the longer I think about the ending, the more holes I can poke in things, and once I had time to process... it's fine, but it's sloppy.

Albright writes clearly and saliently on a topic she has seen grown and change through her lifetime in politics and political thought. She walks us through her definition of fascism and then takes us on a trip around the world to see it in action, from Duterte to Kim Jong Un, and then spends a lot of time discussing the developing political atmosphere in the United States. She laments the fall of the US as a world leader, the loss of trust in our government from other leaders around the world, the dubious position our democracy is currently occupying, and what it would take, in her eyes, to bring it back from the edge. She does not hold back on her opinions, but she is also very diplomatic. And she highlights exactly why she thinks America is in such a dubious position not based in our political leadership, but based in the way we interact with one another when it comes to politics. Contempt, she argues, is one of America's defining political attitudes, and that is largely what allows us to be so strongly divided by bad actors in our current political landscape. Well worth the read.

This is a thought-provoking book that can be at times inspiring, heartbreaking, and absolutely enraging. It's a page-turner, for sure, which had me reaching back for the audiobook every time I had a spare minute to see what happens next. The story of the Westover family is one that is fraught with abuse and ignorance, but also tied irrevocably with the bonds of family. This is a fascinating read, and really sheds light on just how hard it is for abused people to really untangle themselves from their abusers, particularly when those people are family, especially when the abusive member of the family is protected by others within the family unit for the sake of ‘keeping the peace.'

While Tara Westover may very well be an unreliable narrator–she speaks a lot about questioning her own judgment and memories, and acknowledges her trouble with recalling facts, particularly when she has paved over her traumas with justifications–it's valuable still to recognize how much work she has done in her life to try and get to the roots of her own life and release herself from the grasp of her own past. The work she has done to make a life for herself while preserving what she values is impressive, and ultimately I think the book is worth reading. It is a testament to just how hard someone has to work to untangle themselves from an unorthodox and harmful upbringing such as this one.

This is an invaluable resource for people who want to be more thoughtful about the way they approach conversations about race in the United States. Honestly, it would do everyone a bit of good to read this, even if they feel like they are already well-educated in social and racial justice matters.

Oluo addresses all manner of commonly-discussed-but-often-misunderstood things like affirmative action, the school-to-prison pipeline, the Black Lives Matter movement, tone policing, and more in this book, all while being simultaneously extremely accessible and at times humorous and soberly serious. She speaks of her own lived experiences and attempts to speak to an audience that may come to this book defensive and uncomfortable. The end goal of course is to cause folks to stop and reflect on their own behaviors and adjust where they can to be better allies to people of color and oppressed minorities in their own lives, even if the road to self discovery can be upsetting and difficult. This book is well worth it and I encourage people to pick it up. It is absolutely eye-opening and educational.

This book is such a blend of great things. It's a phenomenal fantasy in an Asian style. It's a brutal war story. It's a self-discovery. It's found family. And it is utterly enthralling. I found myself sitting and staring at walls just listening to the audio. I shirked other things I needed to do so that I could spend more time with this story. I cannot wait to read the next one.

Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire) did such a phenomenal job with this book. I don't think I've read a book in YEARS that I have wanted this badly to be adapted into a high-quality movie. Everything about this was great. The creativity in the way she imagined the cryptids, the characters, the tech involved... I just loved every minute of this. Really glad I picked it up.

Honestly, I would give it a 3.5, but you know how GoodReads is about half stars.

This book is a well-crafted novel in terms of characters and story; even knowing how things went in WWII, you still felt the suspense of the sorties and the life-and-death stakes that these characters dealt with. However, the author allowed these characters - Katya particularly - a little too much freedom to say and do things that would definitely have gotten them booted from the army or shot for insubordination. Once, MAYBE twice, might have worked in the right context, but this protagonist's sharp tongue became a little unbelievable over the course of the novel.

I also felt that the story would have been just as powerful entirely without the romantic subplot with Vanya. While he was an interesting character, their pairing felt very rushed and unnecessary, and it would have been fine enough for Katya to spend all of her worries about her loved ones on her mother, who was a far more powerful character connection for her from the beginning.

Overall, I did enjoy this novel, and I really am glad to see someone has taken the time to write about the Night Witches, because they are a fascinating part of WWII history.

This was a totally charming tale! I loved how Goss wove together so many of the old familiar monster tales - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Frankenstein, and more - and wrapped it all up in a Sherlock Holmes story, but all the while centering the women of the story. I'm looking forward to the next installment!

I'm going to have a hard time explaining exactly why I didn't like this without filling my review with spoilers, but I'm going to try my hardest.

There is a part of this book that is great. It's the part where Anna, the protagonist, is trying to break into a man's world as a woman and become a diver. That's the good part of the book: Anna's professional life. It's compelling enough that I wound up finishing this book instead of putting it the DNF pile.

The part I disliked was literally everything else. Everything about Anna's personal life is a mess, and not in a good way. The most egregious part of the story is chock-full of spoilers but I will just say this: if you care one whit about disabled people, you want to skip this book. It's callous in the way it handles its disabled character, and at one point even uses the memory of a hope of what the disabled character could have been had she only been able-bodied to motivate Anna to make a major choice in her own life.

Overall, the book was a massive disappointment, as there was an interesting story buried in it, surrounded by things that ranged from bad to worse to offensive. I would not recommend this to anyone.

Still hooked. Loving the tension between Mac and Barrons, loving the worldbuilding, loving the lore... definitely plowing through these.

Rachel Caine managed to wrap this whole series up in such a satisfying way. I have genuinely enjoyed every last installment, and the world within is just so intriguing. These characters are all so strong and so well crafted. Truly a phenomenal series.