Sarah

Felt quite slow for a thriller but it did have me completely guessing and the ending was wild

A bit slow but man I just love Silvia Moreno Garcia's writing style it's just beautiful

So cute and heartfelt and had me super emotional at points. Loved Justin's family dynamics. Also the plot twist!! Spent half the booking thinking these protagonists were barely connected to the Part of your world universe and then BANG

I mean it was complete FMcF bullshit and it was the exact same plot line as every single other one of her books but it entertained me and kept me going during two really hard work days so I can't hate on it too much

Just could not buy into the idea that the FMC met this dude for one day, he dicked her over and abandoned her and she was still caught up about him 10 years later. Girl get over him he doesn't deserve you. And then to do it again??!!! What a dick

I need to remind myself not to get tricked by these pretty covers Carley Fortune has yet to get over 2 stars from me

This never particularly gripped me and I don't know why. I enjoyed it I just never felt that urge to pick it up. Might just be me being not in the mood for fantasy because it was overall a really satisfying conclusion to the series.

You're telling me the plot of this book is the MCs best friend telling her to sleep with her ex and then getting jealous of them?? Absolutely deranged I love it

Can't believe I'd never read this til now. What a classic. Ray Bradburys writing is just beautiful as well, so much metaphor. Not super keen on the portrayal of women (the bit where they were choosing who to vote for and saying they'd only vote for a tall attractive man is a genuinely awful stereotype to put across) but I suppose it was written in the 70s so it is a product of its time

This was trying way too hard to be whimsical and in doing so missed having any actual substance. I'm sorry but I could not care less about the star crossed romance between two characters that only met yesterday and talk to each other exclusively in phrases taken from r/im14andthisisdeep

This was fun and I really liked that the romance had actual stakes, it did feel like there was a genuine reason they couldn't be together. But I can't help thinking their relationship was much more based on lust than actual love lol, I mean they didn't exactly spend much time chatting

The plot was quite fun and I did like the mystery and solution but man Lo is the most annoying protagonist

Ok while this is 90% filler and clearly just written to bulk out the series (I mean theophanie appeared out of nowhere and got defeated by the end anyway so was clearly never meant to be a big series villain) I still had a really good time. I genuinely do just love this world and would happily spend as much time in it as possible. What can I say I'm a shameless fourth wing girly

Read for book club

Here's a big old thought dump of things I hated lol. Might clean it up if I ever get a mo

-the writing was awful. You can tell it's a first novel. Everything was told not shown. Everything was simple sentences, this happened then this happened, with little to no emotion. I think the author was just a bit too ambitious with scope and had to really cram so much plot into it that she didn't have time to focus on actually narrating events properly
-none of the characters were particularly well developed. Even Lavinia was not very well developed but jeez all the others were cardboard cutouts. For Lavinia you get weird throw away lines like ‘that was where my birds nest collection began' and it's never talked about again, and its clearly the author trying to give her character more character, and just failing. You cant just tell us a thing, then never develop it ever again. (And the book club questions at the back of the book had the gall to ask about the birds nest motif and what it meant ARGH). The rest of the characters just exist for plot reasons.
-The plot was just tragedy porn. It was just like ‘lets throw every awful thing possible at these characters' to the point of absolute ridiculousness. Nothing was ever explored or given weight eg Marshall, it just happened for the sake of happening. It also kept using miscommunication to make bad things happen which is just cheap and bad plotting
-I also think there are quite a lot of racial issues with this book that as a white person I'm probably not in the best place to point out but still I just cant ignore. the portrayal of the Captain and Will Stephens as ‘good' slave owners is just incredibly fucked up. The narrative is split between Lavinia and Belle, clearly trying to contrast a black vs white viewpoint. Except Lavinia's narrative goes on and on and Belle then just gets 2 pages repeating the same events Lavinia described and basically being a stand in for events that Lavinia hasn't seen, giving the story a real white bias. Lavinia's “mind of a child” really does not help things here because instead of getting a nuanced portrait of her class switch and her relative privilege we instead see her whine and moan about how shes not able to act however she wants and thus cause more issues for the enslaved characters. UGHH

Look I'm a huge sucker for a big long character driven novel, especially when the whole cast is interlinked in a huge spiderweb of connections, so while I do agree it was a bit hamfisted and the writing was really not great at times (went through 600 pages without a single highlighted section

Ok I'm sorry I did not enjoy this. Maybe I didn't get it. Or maybe I should “trust myself as a reader” and just accept that I really did not have a good time. Too much NLOG energy. And while I did kind of love the climax the middle dragged a bit. Also I cannot believe at the end of all this Samantha really just snubbed the girls at graduation like where is the growth?? Oh sorry I forgot she's not like other girls

Beautifully written, very raw. I didn't really know Japanese Breakfast before reading this (just picked it up because it's popular lol) but wow listening to her first album after reading this was impactful

A lot of people on here hated Richard which honestly fair enough but somehow I didn't? Plus having a mystery (somewhat obvious though the secret may be) was a fun driver

Doesn't feel like a book I'd normally choose to read but I think it did well at what it did. I'm not a huge fan of a thriller without a driving mystery and though it was pacy and there was always something happening it did feel a bit like it lacked drive because let's be honest you know the hero's always going to win right?

A good idea but suffered from too many characters. I get it's meant to show the whole community but because every character had their own chapter with a full backstory you'd just get interested in one character and then the viewpoint would switch and you'd never really hear from them again.

Not as much fun as the first one but then the first one had the joy of meeting the protagonists. I actually think the murder in this was more interesting but it definitely lost some momentum in the middle

Enjoyed this book but it really was just a copy of the hunger games but slightly worse. Nothing new was said.

I know it's not a plot driven book but it really did annoy me how the plot was so utterly predictable, yknow obviously the wedding doesn't actually go ahead leaving the MC to probably get together with the groom she'd been crushing on, but it's okay because the brides probably going to fall in love with the BIL, oh and of course we get the moment when the ex husband begs for her back and she gets to turn him down. The writing is so beautiful and the first half is so poignant I really hoped we'd get some more depth than the easy answers that the ending provides. I did really enjoy it though.

Very clever and witty

Might have burnt out on area x a little because I do agree with people saying this was a better book than book 2 but somehow I struggled with it more. While it's kind of funny how much Control is just some dude reluctantly dragged into all this, it doesn't make me want to read about him, so I really struggled with his chapters despite being the only ones in the present. Very interesting to see Saul and the creation of area X but ultimately none of the reveals of that felt particularly wowing

A bit slow in the middle but I do see that's kind of the point. The ending was worth it though. Very keen to see where this goes