Earwen

I read this because I saw some cute panels on tumblr, I'm not familiar or interested in reading the main story. It was cute for what it was and the art is great and very expressive. It's short and sweet but doesn't really have a full conclusion. It felt more like a snippet of their lives than a full story (which makes sense! it's a side story).

Unfortunately I think this was the weakest book so far. Despite liking the world and concept of the story a lot I didn't like what the novel chose to focus on content or style wise. I pushed through to finish this one (mostly because as said I enjoy the world and some characters which is also why I still rolled this up to a 3 despite not enjoying it much) but I don't think I will be continuing the series.

(to elaborate a bit on the above: even though the stakes are higher than ever we get multiple chapters concerned with Harry dating a completely normie human girl, like a full chapter of awkward date banter, later just them hanging out and I think two sex scenes which I skipped because I was so annoyed at that point, this is not a very long book and focusing on this just seems like the wrong priority to me. Also the love interest of the previous book Lilith simply is more interesting on grounds of being already established and not just. a non-magical human. I think this series has a weakness in introducing a new cast of characters in every book so far and by this point it should already have a well established cast (Lilith and Bautista who both make an appearance in this are excellent characters for example). Likely her new love interest in this book is going to become more interesting later but this book suffers for it.)

Better than the 2nd book! I appreciate that the book highlighted police violence against black and brown violence for such a cop-heavy book that always felt awkwardly ignored to me. However

Tom basically defends the guy who shot a brown boy for no reason , and Roxanne is pissed at the moment but by the end they still end up together? Huh?

Other than that I still love Roxanne, the mysteries are nice and all but she carries these books. I like that her sexuality (she is bisexual) matters beyond just her love interests (BOTH OF WHICH SUCK but never mind that), it is something that is part of her character regardless of her love life.

Creepy dark stories as usual. Kiernan got me into short fiction in the first place, so of course I enjoyed them. Few true standouts for me probably because I'm not a fan of the fairy tale vibes, even if it's fucked up creepy fairy tales

Standouts:
For One Who has Lost Herself
The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4)

I'm not a big Christie fan I mostly picked this up because I want to read more in German and my father had a German copy lying around. I rarely get to read physical books these days and reading this in physical form felt good, I probably enjoyed this more because of this. If this was digital I might not have finished it. Either way it didn't feel like a waste of time because I was mainly reading to reactivate my German vocab - so, rolling the score up.

Even considering the release date this is absurdly sexist. It's not regular period-standard sexism , discussions on women and women's place in society and relationship with power has an overwhelming presence in the first half, and continues to be relevant in the second. I don't know much about Agatha Christie's life or politics to contextualize this, but it definitely felt like she had an agenda here and made the first half of this book an exercise in patience.

The second half is when Poirot makes a real appearance, the aforementioned issue isn't gone completely but much less on the foreground. The solution to the mystery itself wasn't very interesting, but the twist of basically everyone in the family thinking another did it and trying to cover for them was a really fun one. I wish it meandered less in the first half.

Also a random note about my German copy some things seem to have been changed rather arbitrarily, stuff I noticed.
Sarah's name was changed to Sylvia
Carol's name was changed to Carola
A few paragraphs about religion were removed

(I love the cover of this It fits the book perfectly. Honestly I think all the other cover illustrations are cartoony and/or unfitting. This is perfect and captures the character of Merricat beautifully. )

love the concept of metal + horror but “ooooh spooky sexy demon lady will fuck your friends and split your band” doesn't do anything for me. Also, at some point the spooky sexy demon lady accuses someone falsely of assaulting her. Better not think about all this too hard. Some nice imagery though.

e: after writing this review I decided to lower my rating to 1 star.

UH objectively this doesn't deserve this high a rating probably but the art man the art it's my favorite art style in manga

Some quotes I liked, for varying reasons

I shoot Mr. Allomby a conspiratorial glance. We're not actually conspiring, but it's important to look at people like that every now and then because that's how real relationships are forged.

I think, in parentheses, about Menéndez. The two curved lines bend toward each other, trapping Menéndez inside my head and my head inside the parentheses . . .

I tell him that monogamy, like all artificial things, is absolutely necessary because man invents only what he needs. My aphorism leaves him speechless.

NOT a good first japanese novel unless you are in a hurry to learn how to describe various gross smells

My opinion on the actual work is kind of mixed but I also feel like my jp level was below ideal for this, and any review would be unfair.
Not to mention, it took me about 2 years to read, which also isn't ideal for a decent review.

This was, unfortunately, bad on a technical level, the prose is choppy, the tense keeps switching mid paragraph. Half the page count is dedicated to describing food and dress, which drove me insane. I'm still not sure if they were intentionally trying to emulate american psychos brand name dropping in a way, or just juvenile writing, as this problem of over describing needless details is something I see most often in debut ya fiction. A lot of details are given haphazardly with no rhyme or reason, Melanie's backstory is seemingly randomly inserted throughout. While the information in it is relevant (certainly more so than what flavor of milkshake she is drinking that chapter), often it disrupts the flow.

Characters acted over the top, talking normally one second and yelling the next. It made sense for the main character, but everyone talked like that. I'm once again unsure if this was done intentionally or not. I suppose not every book benefits from realistic characters. Though I think it would nice if other characters were more down to earth to contrast with Melanie here.

A lot of the passages about Melanie's clients were unnecessary, and more a bit confusing on how she has this much detail. For example why is a wifebeater giving the details of his lifelong abuse of his wife randomly out? Although the narration is omniscient, it is also often outright stated Melanie has similar information as the reader does. The details on the child victim were wholly unnecessary. I don't think the story benefited from it in any way.

Despite all my complaining at some point, something clicked and I decided to enjoy it like a b-movie. I didn't mind the characters anymore at that point. I genuinely started enjoying it a lot. This is the closest we have to Lesbian American Psycho. It's not the most polished work in the world but I can't deny it was fun.

I feel bad ragging on an indie title, especially one I ultimately recommend, but I can't not point out my problems. Maybe that I liked the book despite all my complaints could serve as a recommendation in itself.

Here are some cws because there is a lot and not all is obvious Obvious ones, death, a lot of descriptions of dead bodies, a lot of gross medical stuffAbleism, directed at the main character. The main character is autistic and she is obviously, kind of not a great person to put it mildly, you could consider it ableist on a meta level depending on how you read this. Racism, bullyingcheating & domestic violenceNecrophilia, graphic, kind of...arguably consensual? I don't even know man rape, child abuse including sexual abuse not descriptive but on page, not really relevant to the actual story. Oh and kidnapping. literally. see above my comment on it being unnecessary.

I don't really add manga to my list but I wanted to write down my thoughts on this somewhere, and this is as good a place as any. This is a stand in for all 27 volumes I read and the review is for the series as a whole.

Claymore is a good manga that could have been downright amazing but manages to sabotage itself at every turn.
It helps that the problems I have with Claymore are for the most part, not outright faults but things that I see great potential in that never fully utilized. This applies to both plot points and characters.

The biggest culprit I see in this is that Yagi is using in GGRM's words the “gardener” method of writing, not planning ahead but just thinking “let's see where this takes us”. Nothing wrong with that in itself but if you want your writing to be consistent in this style you need to have some ground rules about how your setting works. Claymore doesn't. It's bafflingly obvious that Yagi keeps coming up with things on the spot, especially in the final arcs. This is very easy if you take a look at the earlier chapters.

Claymore has a large cast and few of them really get to shine, generally they will get a moment to shine, a backstory, generally involving how they ended up a claymore. It's not much however I still love every one of the claymores introduced. It's hard not to feel sympathetic of even the most cruel of them when you know the circumstances they've lived in. The manga is at it's best when it focuses on claymores as a group and the bond between the warriors.

I would say the manga has two main plots, one is Clare's quest and the other the fate of Claymores in general. The first becomes a bit of a mess with shounen tropes creeping in, the “power levels” getting higher every chapter to the point bordering on self parody. It's also where the most underutilized character and plot points come in, especially in regards to Raki (without giving spoilers his plotline could have allowed him to give a lot of insight to a certain important villain(s) but instead he is just here parroting things he said the first chapter). It's not bad, there are definitely parts that I enjoyed about this storyline too, I didn't close the book angry at the ending, just kind of disappointed that it didn't hold up to what it could have been.

The other major storyline is, despite coming into play halfway through much better handled. It's a much less typical storyline than “defeat this monster” which the first storyline can be roughly summed up as. It also is a much more satisfying conclusion, after this Clare's story feels a bit like an extra.

The art while gorgeous, one initial problem with it is that characters start off looking very similar. As claymores the have the same hair, same eyes, rougly the same uniform. You basically have to recognize them purely by hair style. Later on Yagi learns to work around these and have more unique looking claymore. Althought the art is beautiful in general where it really shines is the monster design, they all manage to be creepy, unique and most of the time also absolultely gorgeous in a way. The panel work on the other hand is pretty standard. There are times where it's hard to know what is going on because of how every new enemy has a completely unique anatomy.

Claymore at the end of the day is a very flawed manga I don't have purely positive things to say about any aspect of it. And yet for all the flaws that it has none of them kept me from loving it to bits. Objectively I would say this is a 8 out of 10, maybe even a 7. But in my heart it remains a 10.

Pretty generic YA contemporary. When it actually focused on the two leads it was very good but more than that it was focusing on the various men in their lives, and I get that it's important but surely not more so than the main relationship. Also, there was a lot of (het) sex which I find very weird in YA stuff but that's what I get from going to HS in a small turkish town I guess.

Also I loved the subplot of the mc gradually warming up to her step-family, kind of wish there was more focus on that also.

The end was super abrupt but not terrible I suppose.

(the stuff about blue is the warmest color is really gross if you know some background about the movie but I assume the author didn't so whatever)

Maybe if you aren't familiar with any non-cis people this book might be interesting as a sort of informative entry point. While this is perhaps rude to say about someones memoirs, I just didn't feel like it had anything interesting to say. Just a recounting of the authors life, particularly experiences regarding eir gender identity. It wasn't particularly insightful, or thought provoking, or failing that even funny. The events are often randomly put together non-chronologically, as if they're not meant to be a full narrative but random comics the author wrote one at a time (I am unsure if this is the case or not). Things were often brought up and then not followed up on, which is the authors right but in a memoir, why bring them up in the first place if you have no interest in following up? The most interesting portions of eir life was probably childhood, but these parts were mostly glossed over. It ended abruptly, I was reading it digitally and thought I had an issue with my copy. Maybe if the author had written this a few years later, they would have matured more in their storytelling, and put their insights into gender identity in a more succinct, insightful way.

(On a more personal and more unfair note: there is far too much about fanfiction in this? Particularly one direction fanfiction, honestly it just made me feel embarrassed for everyone involved. One direction fanfiction of all things.)

Beautiful art, interesting setting. Only problem is it's too fast paced to care about what's going on for me, who are these people and why should I give a shit? This seems to be my general problem with western comics however... Probably won't pick up the second volume.

I want to write a proper review eventually but for now I just want to say this series is the best “casual inclusion” of lgbt characters and women in a fantasy I've seen in any sort of media and might have skewed my standards now

The whole book is the author traveling with his son and having dialogues about philosophical questions. It made me think of Sophie's World a little but unlike that it feels genuine and not like a textbook with an awkward framing device. It's also not about philosophers, barely any are mentioned.

Though this didn't really teach me anything significant - it is aimed at children after all - it was still super enjoyable. The audiobook has the kids lines read by the actual kid which was cute. And seeing a parent talk seriously about “stupid” kid questions made me happy. I think it'd be a great book for a child but an even greater book for a parent to see how to talk to your children thoughtfully.

I was happily listening to the audiobook and enjoying it reasonably until I made the horrible mistake of reading the goodreads description and noticing the ugly jumble of letters that is “Myfanwy”. You might think I could just select to ignore this and continue on listening to the audiobook, never again needing to see this abominable combination of letters again but I can not lie to myself. Never again will I return to my blissful ignorant days of thinking the main character was called Miffany.

(also it was kinda boring I should mention that too)

Really dropped the ball towards the end and I didn't need the transphobia in the final third either.

My final opinion is that this is a very readable thriller despite being 800 pages (I read it in 4 days), and I loved the two leads. But it's awkwardly plotted, and I thought at times it just was shocking and depressing just for the sake of being shocking and depressing. Considering the subject matter is already horrifying enough I don't think they needed to go the extra mile.

Settling on 2 because 3 is the most insulting rating you can give to a book like this

e: I cant believe I called daisy insufferable I adore her now - but yes she is insufferable too
–
Daisy is insufferable. I mean, on paper the concept of a narcissistic arrogant little detective girl sounds great but she has no likable qualities at all. I felt sorry for poor Hazel throughout the book!

It's a minor part but I liked how casually there were lesbian relationships in the book. One of the reasons I picked it up in the first place is because I saw reviews complaining about that - Anyone who is so bothered by the inclusion of minor lesbian/bi women in a book for children should take a good hard look at themselves.

i really tried with this book but I couldn't stand interested and it ultimately just put me in a reading slump. putting it down for now.

I read this after [b:Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 27192545 Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 Kathe Koja https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1444887178s/27192545.jpg 47234707] which although doesn't advertise itself as female weird fiction it more or less is (one or two stories by men I believe). If you are interested in the subject I'd suggest that book over this. I found the stories in this book much more of a mixed bag. Although there are some standout stories: 5 starsOur Lady of Arsia Mons by Caitlín R. Kiernan The Body Electric by Lucy BradyEvery Hole in the Earth We Will Claim As Our Home by Gemma Files4 starsFrom the Cold Dark Sea by Storm ConstantineThe Woman in the Hill by Tamsyn MuirThe Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah MonetteSadly the other stories bored me, besides the few I outright hated. I think I would have enjoyed some more if I was familiar to the Lovecraft stories they were based on, so it might be on me.

The art is gorgeous. Emanon is cool...however I read so many versions of the “unremarkable man meets mysterious/supernatural girl and that changes his life in some way” stories that I...find it hard to say it's anything more than “alright, I guess”.

Like a 4.5? I had some issues with it but I'm excited to continue. I might roll it up depending how I feel in a week...