Eric

I thoroughly enjoyed this read, though it did read more slowly than I would have liked. It's a detail-rich story with Russian history in footnotes thrown in and a LOT of Slavic names, so I had to constantly turn back to previous chapters to remember characters. BUT - it was a lovely chronicle of one man's house arrest in a luxury Moscow hotel, from the Revolution up through the Cold War. It seemed that the smaller his world got, the more it opened up, as he discovered more and more about himself, his friends - both old and new - and Russia as it changed.

This started as a Halloween read that took too long to get off the ground. The prose is at times unintelligible as it takes up to an entire page to describe a carousel and using metaphors that are quite odd on the regular. It didn't really get exciting until I was 60% of the way through the book, but it did hit a good clip until about 90% when it slowed down again. All in all, it was not worth the read and I'm not sure what the hype is about. Perhaps people found different things scary in the 40s? But the scariest part of this book was that one of the men had tattoos, which was mentioned approximately 400 times.

A woman who no longer wants to live finds herself in a purgatory of sorts, where she gets to try on every life she could have lived, trying to find the right one for her. This was a quick read, maybe took a week or so. It was fine enough, but I knew how it would end after the first like 20% of the book. Filled to the brim with platitudes and just sloppy writing. And because she kept hopping through lives, the characters never stuck around to be fully fleshed out. A neat premise but a missed opportunity.

I was looking for a similar quick queer romance after reading "Red, White, & Royal Blue" and I guess this sort of gave me that? But it was much more YA than anticipated, so the characters read extremely juvenile and underdeveloped. I almost canned it several times because of the inner monologues of the characters that just sound like 16-year-olds, because they ARE. But I pushed forward because it was so short. I think if I were twenty years younger, I'd like it, but it was just too immature for me, in the end.

This was only 225 pages and the chapters were all only 4 to 5 pages long, so it went quickly. The digestible nature of the chapters made the pace much quicker than most books and added to the overall urgency of the story. It was a flourish of activity, mostly related to the title ... but at its core, I thought it was about jealousy, the burden we place on the oldest child, and the societal/spillover effects of psychopathy if it is left unchallenged.