Bryce

I think I enjoyed this book more than the first. I thought the blind protagonist added an interesting perspective to the story, and I just found myself more into the action than I did in book one.

There's a lingering feeling that this series is just short of being really special, but I can't pinpoint what's missing. Regardless, what's here is well-written and worth reading.

There were a lot of things I enjoyed about this graphic novel, from its art to its storytelling, but the characters kept me from ever fully connecting with the story. David is every self-insert tortured artist I've ever read about, and I just found him unpleasant above all else. Meg is the manic pixie dream girl archetype that exists to “fix” the male lead, which is especially disappointing considering the potential she had to be an interesting character. Some of the supporting cast is interesting, but this story isn't about them. The Sculptor feels like the work of an excellent visual storyteller through and through, and that's the only reason I didn't dislike this book as much as I could have.

This book shares quite a bit with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (including its authors), but I found it much more enjoyable.

Dash, as a character, got on my nerves at times. I wasn't a huge fan, but Lily was warm and funny and very likable. The entire cast was pretty likable, and they added a lot of flavor and character to an already charming novel.

It's a light read, perfect for the holidays, and it made me laugh and smile throughout. And that's really all it tries to do.

(And here I am, changing this book's rating to five stars. It's because, months after I've read it, I've thought of certain parts and they made me laugh out loud all over again. I can't not give this 5 stars.)

The writing is messy (though in a very relatable and charming way) and the essays/anecdotes inside rarely flow.

That's about all the negative things I can say about this book. It's no masterpiece, but it's incredibly funny. It's absurd and awkward, though there's something really human and personal about it as well.

A very short how-to book, it covers most of the same things I've read in many other books on writing. It's repeated so often because it is good information, but this particular book doesn't bring anything new to the table.

Fast, stylish, very nice art, but I lost (or stopped caring about) the plot halfway through. And my tolerance for gore was pushed to the limit here.

The art isn't bad, and a story that has some promise but does little with it. I didn't really get this book. There are little plot points scattered throughout, but they have no resolution or follow-up, and then it ends.

This was a pretty cool book. It ended up being much more original and definitely more engaging than the back cover description led me to believe. Jemisin is a talented writer, only rarely did exposition feel a bit heavy, and some of the more complicated concepts were partially left to the imagination (which I appreciated, even if it was a bit hard to grasp).

Good writing, good characters, and a solidly original concept made this novel consistently engaging and fun to read. I'll be reading the next two as soon as I can.

At the start of this book, I had an uneasy feeling that it wouldn't live up to the first. It took me a while to get back into the world and the characters, but when I did, I felt the exact same way I did when reading A Darker Shade of Magic. This is the kind of fantasy novel I want to read more of.

An enjoyable continuation of a great series.

I got tired of the angsty main character very quickly. The art is nice, the story is solid and the book had its moments. But it felt like it was trying too hard for some deeper symbolic meaning that just did nothing for me.

I usually rate books based on how much I enjoyed them. This book would probably have one star if I did that here.

It was graphic, painful, depressing. I felt drained once I reached the end. (For some reason, I have a habit of reading really emotionally intense books all at once. Maybe it's easier to swallow that way?)

The POV shifts were confusing and didn't give as much room for character depth as I would have liked. A lot of my issues with the book have been covered by other reviewers here, I won't go over them all. The most important thing I have to say is that this book is brutal, and very important. It treats its subject with unflinching realism. It made me, at points, feel dirty myself. I imagine this was intentional, and even if it wasn't, it worked.

For teenagers especially, this is an important read. The saddest thing was that I began to understand why they were lead into prostitution as the story unfolded, and it felt like a path that was all too easy and understandable for these kids (and many kids in real life) to take.

I liked this book a lot more than most people seemed to.

I was really interested in the characters and setting, though the story didn't really captivate me until the guests in question arrived. Then it went in a direction I wasn't expecting, and I loved it.

However, once the major conflict was resolved, the book went on for a while longer. One of the last scenes, with youngest daughter Smudge and a family horse, was completely anticlimactic and uninteresting to me. I really could have done without that scene. The other scenes toward the end worked very well, offering a satisfying conclusion to a few loose ends.

More like a solid 3.5, but it was entertaining and informative. Craig Pittman clearly has a lot of love for Florida, so even the worst stories of Florida's politics and people are undercut with a sense of affection. It goes beyond what I expected (crazy Florida anecdotes) and actually includes a lot of information about the state's history in a way that's still engaging.

I received this book for free as part of a First Reads giveaway. My copy was an advance uncorrected proof.

I had no expectations for this book. The premise seemed interesting, to a degree, but I just don't enjoy this kind of story (legal thrillers/political thrillers). So it was a very nice surprise to find myself loving “Saving Sophie”. The story grabbed my attention and held it up until the last page, and my issues with it never got in the way of my enjoyment.

The dialogue feel stilted on occasion, with a lot of the characters sounding alike. There were some minor plot holes I picked up on, there were a few too many stories going on at once, and some of the characters/details that weren't integral to the main plot felt unnecessary. Fortunately, the issues aren't so noticeable as to ruin the book.

I'm very glad I won this, because otherwise I might not have given it a chance.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I just found Yotsuba annoying. These sorts of cutely-naive kids in fiction are best in small doses. Supporting characters, appearing to deliver some comic relief or show some sweet bonding between them and an older family member, maybe. But as main characters, I really find them annoying.

The choose-your-own-adventure format is fun at first, but it gets old pretty quickly. I just read the book like normal, and it made perfect sense to me.

NPH seems like a really genuine, nice guy. He's a surprisingly good writer, funny and engaging. There aren't many shocking revelations (any, now that I think about it) or juicy bits of gossip (a little, not much) in this book, it's just a straightforward and undeniably charming look at a performer that also happens to seem like a pretty cool person.

This book got on my nerves at the beginning, and I assumed I'd stop reading it. But I kept going, and somehow it ended up charming me just enough for me to finish.

My thoughts about the book were very positive as I finished it. But I can't ignore everything I hated along the way. The humor often tried too hard, it reminded me of a weaker version of The Rosie Project, and it just had a lot of little things that grated on my nerves.

It improved, but I can't give it anything higher than 3 stars when I think about everything I disliked about it.

A lot of the bad reviews here are about how the protagonist is unlikable, or that there doesn't really seem to be a “point” to this book, but the way that Jean Kyoung Frazier writes about people feeling complicated, messy emotions and doing things that even they don't really know WHY they're doing is heartfelt and empathetic. There aren't any easy answers or explanations, but I never felt the way that things developed was nonsensical or just completely out-of-nowhere.

To me, this book nails the experience of sabotaging your own life without even really knowing why—as if you're watching your life go off the rails from the sidelines without being able to stop it. This isn't something everyone will enjoy or connect to emotionally, and that's okay. It's a book about complex people behaving in sometimes shitty ways as they try to figure out how to cope with the lives they're living, and I think it's quite a good one.

I received an ARC of this book for free through a First Reads giveaway.

It took about 150 pages for this book to grab me. When it did, it ended up being pretty interesting, but there's a problem when that takes over half the book to happen. The writing itself is very good, good enough to interest me in reading Mark Pryor's other books. The protagonist is a sociopath, and he's not easy to like, but that's the point. By the end I began to understand him, if not actually like him. I can't say it wasn't a bit of a barrier to my enjoyment, but it definitely added something fresh to the story (though I don't think it was necessary to have him constantly mention how he doesn't get people/has no feelings).

The ending was fairly good, but some of the late-game details felt completely out-of-the-blue. The topic of pedophilia became such a big part of the ending, despite absolutely no foreshadowing beforehand. It felt like a last-ditch effort to "redeem" the main character. "Oh, he had his reasons" sort of thing.

It's not the most original crime book, but it's pretty well-written. I just came away unimpressed.

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley.

I'm not going to give this a star rating because I gave up at 53%. Maybe it was my fault, but I just couldn't follow the shifting timelines and I found myself bored, even as I recognized the nice writing and interesting plot elements. I don't think this is a bad book (it might be a good one, I wouldn't know), but it definitely was not for me.

Good stuff. I'm enjoying this series.

The characters annoyed me so much, especially Russell. The book itself was solidly written at times, but at others felt bloated. The story is aimless and I didn't realize what the book was even about until I finished. It started as one thing, changed to another, and changed again.

It was just mediocre and a lot of it outright annoyed me. Some parts entertained me, and I thought that maybe it would get better. But then it just kept... I don't know. It kept being itself.

I received a free copy of this book through Net Galley.

I really enjoyed this one! Melissa Brayden has a great natural writing style that suits a story like this. It feels appropriately big and romantic (not to mention fairly dramatic) when it needs to be, but also low-key and intimate when it suits the story. Bad dialogue is the easiest way to make me hate a book when it's so focused on its characters and their interactions, but the dialogue in First Position is charming and natural. The characters are well-written and the leads have palpable chemistry, so I was invested even throughout some contrived story beats. All in all, a well-done and enjoyable romance with an interesting background in professional ballet.

A back-cover blurb from The Washington Post calls this book “touching, tragic and thrilling,” and those are three words that perfectly describe The Shadow of the Wind. It's a romance, a mystery, a grand adventure and something else that I can't quite pinpoint. I loved it.