Earwen

e: when i wrote this review i had rated it 3 stars it's been 2 years and I still think about this book a lot and barely remember the parts that have dragged. at some point i changed the rating to 4 stars which reflects my views now better.

At one point of the book I was sure I would drop it. The main character would not stop complaining. About “picky eaters” (which definition includes people with allergies and vegetarians), her teenager not wanting to waste plastic and buying clothes secondhand, modern medicine, vaccines, anything. The book was also very repetitive, it's used to for effect but for the most part the effect was exasperation on my part. It had a strong start, and a strong end, but the middle is way way too long. Overall it's still a shorter book, so I'm glad I stuck with it. The ending was satisfying, and made interesting points about adoption and motherhood.

DNF at ~50%

i don't know why people keep talking about how weird this book is. For a book supposedly about the end of the world it is exceptionally boring. and it reads more like a self discovery novel of the bi main character. which in itself is not a bad thing but a) not why i picked this up and b) he does so by cheating on her girlfriend so way to reinforce stereotypes about bi people i guess. Also i know the narrator is a horny teenage boy but all this talk about balls and sperm and masturbation and how horny he is got kind of old, I get it. He is a horny teenager. But I don't need a reminder every paragraph geez

This is the second book in the Lady Trent series. I rated the first one, like this one, 3 stars. If you haven't heard of them this is historical fantasy about a woman who really wants to study dragons even when society tells her no. She is a great character, and the book excells when it focuses either on her ordeals trying to pursue her passion or discussion of the actual dragons. When it goes more into the adventures she has in foreign lands I find it much less impressive. The author puts a lot of thought into developing a wast world that feels real beyond the scope of lady trents memoir but I find it hard to care about beyond the dragons (much like lady trent herself). These thoughts apply to both books though I think I liked this one a little better.

I was really uncomfortable with the way this book used a characters weight as a shorthand to make her seem gross and dislikeable, but otherwise solid mystery/family drama.

Also the lead characters girlfriend was one of the most insufferable love interests I experienced. That was at least somewhat intentional considering the lead thinks that too at times but ultimately I found it hard to cheer for the two to get a happy ending together.

God this book was so annoying!! Parts of it were really good but other parts just pissed me off.

First of all, Mor is an asshole. She has a bad case of I'm-not-like-the-other-girls. She ‘s so condescending toward the girls in her school. Sure most of them do treat her badly but even the ones that are supposedly her friends she treats like shit. She calls the girl who is her only constant friend through the book repeatedly stupid. There is another girl who is friendly to her and they have relatively similar interests. Mor finds her creepy. Of course this has nothing to do with the fact that she's a lesbian, oh no Mor unlike the other girls isn't homophobic. Therefore her stopping talking to her completely after telling her she's not interested is a coincidence too. Another girl is jewish and Mor is constantly jealous of her because she gets special food. She considers faking being jewish to get the same food. Seriously? This girl is 15!!

The whole book is incredibly weird about sex and sexuality. Mor out of the blue claims most people must like both men and women but not her, she only likes men. Because she is “peculiar”. Towards the end she meets a “beautiful boy” and the book more or less becomes about the shitty romance. The boy, Wim has a bad reputation, because his ex-girlfriend got pregnant and had to get an abortion, or that's what the rumors say. No one knows for sure. People still warn her away from him. Mor tells him that they were both stupid but the girl was even more so for making a big deal out of it. Wim repeatedly calls his exes morons, unlike Mor who is smart and reads science fiction. Mor is generally happy to hear this. It's infuriating. Oh and while I'm at the topic. God she keeps going on about how she doesn't want love or marriage, ever. She only wants a friendship where they sometimes have sex. And yet she's jealous over Wim, and there is stuff obviously indicating she's in love with him. I think Jo Walton really tried to have her this super special ahead of her times girl but couldn't let go of the dumb romance either.

However the worst bit -(tw csa) at some point in the story Mor's father while drunk attempts to sleep with her, she tells him off. Later thinks maybe she shouldn't have, because she doesn't really consider him her father. Which in itself, fair enough she hadn't met the man before a few months ago. But surely a 15 year old girl would have a stronger reaction to this? It's never brought up again it serves no purpose. Besides perhaps Jo Walkton trying to tell me that incest isn't that bad?

However this stupid annoying bullshit book was still fucking FUN I was going to give it 3 stars but typing up all that made me realize it doesn't really deserve it at all. I enjoyed Mor's voice in the first half I generally like young narrators. But honestly, I hadn't realized she was supposed to be 15!! She simultaneously manages to sound both like a 10 year old and a 80 year old. I also liked the parts she talked about books, though I can see it might be annoying to a lot of people. She just kept dumping book title after book title saying a few words if anything about them. The ones I did read I generally had a vastly different opinion on than her. But it was still fun. But you know what? I would have gotten the same experience going through someones goodreads list. It felt like and attempt to appeal to nostalgia. Oh she liked lord of the rings? Oh why, I love lord of the rings! This book is amazing! (This is hypothetical I in fact can't stand Lotr). The magic stuff was interesting too but in the end it ended in an unsatisfying stupid place when Wim got involved god forbid the love interest wont put his nose everywhere. I liked it much better when it was vague.
ANYWAY the longer I go on the lower I want to rate it, it was enjoyable so I guess I'll give it 2 stars and feel angry some more.

im giving up the reread ..

This is my third attempt of reading this book and while everything is interesting is in theory i just cant keep attention on it. Maybe it's bad timing or maybe it's just not for me. Oh well...

I feel that I was too young to appreciate this book, which isn't something I thought I would say about any book before reading this. I think a lot of what the book was doing flew over my head. I found it difficult to relate to themes and characters as I am now but it was beautifully written, and I really wish I could have gotten more out of it. I didn't think I cared much about the characters until the last chapter, which I found very hard hitting despite it all. I didn't exactly enjoy this book - sometimes it felt a chore to be honest, but I'm still glad I tried it. Maybe someday I can reread and understand it better - though when I think about it, I hope I will never experience such loss that will make me relate to it.

Oh the main character happens to be a lesbian which is probably how this ended up on my to be read list. (It's not a romance, or an Issue Book - or at least not a Lesbian Issue book but you know, it's there even if you might miss it if you blink too hard)

This is a puzzle book. If you read it as a regular novel you will be disappointed. Instead see it as the equivalent of the puzzle page of a newspaper. You're not here for the characters or story. You're here to solve a riddle. This is a book that expects your participation. You can just sit back and let the events unfold but you will enjoy it much more if you try to solve it on your own. And it is solveable.

As a puzzle I would give this 5/5

as a novel... the writing and characters were mediocre. There were some instances of classic menwritingwomen.txt too. For all of this I would give it a 2/5. All flaws that would ruin another book. But here it isn't all that relevant. At the end of the day I will mainly judge the book by what it set out to do - be a puzzle. As a puzzle I would give this 5/5. The flaws did bother me to a certain extent but not enough to bog down the rating to more than a 4.

fun, but no substance. Also the sexualization of characters was annoying (because why wouldn't a genetically engineered super-soldier NOT have huge tits right..). I enjoyed the first few chapters where the girls were still kids a lot, but I lost interest soon after.

3.5

This was incredibly boring. The action was terribly written and frequently interrupted with how much Val and Alexa wanted to fuck. I swear to god they're extra horny this book, there's at least one line about how much one wants to fuck the other every page, despite werewolf hitler running about trying to destroy the entire vampire species. They constantly whined about how little time they had the fuck and yet there were more sex scenes in this book than all of the others combined (and don't get me started on the sex scenes themselves. They're all the same to the point if I cared enough to check I'm pretty sure there would be near copy-paste identical paragraphs). The book never manages to convey the supposed danger everyone is in. It's hard to care about characters dying when they had like 3 lines in total for 4 books (not to mention one of them is literally introduced in this book?? am I SUPPOSED TO CARE THAT SHE'S IN DANGER). The whole book I felt like the author(s) just wanted the action to be over with so they could write erotica. In which case they should have just done that. The plot is also resolved in a stupid way, in like one page.

So, the first two books in the series are good. Especially the second. But as a whole it's not worth it.

Stand outs:
The Color Out of Space
Herber West Reanimator (Had read this one before and I love the very loosely adapted movies)

Also enjoyed:
The Whisperer in The Darkness (even though the main character is the naivest idiot alive apparently)
The Call of Cthulhu
The Picture in the House (Didn't think much of it at the time but looking back this is the only story that successfully creeped me out so it deserves a mention)
The Shadow Over Innsmout (This probably would have been a standout for me too if it weren't for the middle bulk where an old man tells the backstory of the place....I can't read accents lovecraft pls)

Generally the shorter stories were forgettable while the stories bordering on novellas were much more enjoyable.

All in all not bad for a dead racist/5

And specifically about this edition: While a lot of the notes at the end were interesting most of them were tangentially related and looking them up while reading took me out of the story. Like there would be a note to tell me a date in the story is close to the death date of Lovecrafts father.