Mercer
This book. Wow. Slow and beautiful and lovely. In Part 4 I thought for sure my rating was going to be tanked, but it all turned around at the end.
I wanted to like this book. I wanted to like this series. As someone who loves Fantasy, the Discworld books are often recommended to me. While I love the idea of the world, the execution of character development and lore feels underdeveloped for me, at least in this novel. It's possible that I will read another Discworld book in the future, but I'm not hurrying off to do so.
This was very good. I couldn't put it down, honestly. It was definitely more murder mystery and very minimal fantasy/magic, which I enjoyed! I'd recommend this to probably most people, except for my dad, haha, so I'll give it a 5.
This was a good book. I wonder if I would have rated it higher had I known or watched iCarly. For me, this mostly just felt like trauma porn. There was a lot of exposition of pain, and I am so happy that McCurdy seems to be on the other side of it—however there was little exploration of coming around on the other side. I guess there's some message that there is no “coming around the other side” with eating disorders, but that doesn't feel intentionally done.
This is tricky. Some of the chapters I would rate a 5, some of them a 1. Like the New Yorker articles that this collects, if the topic is something that I'm not already innately interested in, the writing needs to do some work to get me there. These ones didn't do it.
I feel like if the subject themselves aren't complex or interesting on their own, this author wasn't able to craft something of worth.
That said, at least half of the chapters were great. For those, I would recommend this book.
I wish I could wipe my brain and reread this book again. Truly so beautiful and sad and lovely. Loved the pop culture references. Loved the descriptions of Boston, New York, LA. Loved the fragile, flawed characters. This book was perfect. Even the things that weren't perfect felt like they were intentionally so.
Also, I wish the games that were in this book were real.
There were parts of this book I would give a 1 and parts I would give a 5, so I am giving it a 3 to run the middle.
I honestly do not know why there was so much memoir in this. I appreciated the research that went into this book so much, and I felt really thrown out of it when the author popped in her personal anecdotes. The tones were totally different and just didn't match up. I wanted more cohesion, and I think the best way to do that would be to cut the anecdotes and keep this to the research that the title suggests it is.
I wanted to love this book. Unfortunately, all of these stories are traumatic. As a doula, I get it—many pregnancies are really traumatic. I still feel that there should have been warnings, or the stories should be grouped by topic, maybe. Beyond that, a few other things: so many of these people had night nurses, and women are not the only bodies that can gestate.
If you want stories about birth and labor, as the women around you instead.
This book was good. That said, my interest waxed and waned. There were some moments that I really loved, and others that felt torturous.
Similarly, to read a 700 page book to only have the conclusion be a set up for a sequel angers me. It feels like going out for a meal, being filled to satisfaction and then the waiter telling me that I HAVE TO get dessert. Let me choose to eat dessert! I just spent a ton of money on my meal.
Same with this book: 700 pages is a lot of time to spend with a story and have very little conclusion and most of the action happen in the last 20 pages.
Well-written. However, because I already knew what happened this wasn't really a “page turner” per se. Take it or leave it, I suppose.
This could have been a 5 star book, but it was missing...something.
The universe in this book was unique. I loved the world building and the idea that these folks live among us just undetected.
That said, it felt like there was space for depth and allegory that just got missed. I wanted more emotional investiture. There were moments that made me feel deeply moved, but those were because of my own life experiences rather than the writing.
A good book, but definitely a snack when it could have been a nutritious meal.
This resolved too cleanly for me. It felt as though the whole book was conflict, and then it got to the very peak of conflict 30 pages before the end of the text. Then, everything wrapped up neatly and cleanly and quickly. It felt very unsatisfying.
I was expecting this book to be hot garbage based on the title. I was pleasantly surprised. Despite some real cheesy bits, I found myself really engaged with the imagination of the author. The tech was cool! The world was cool! The plot was cool. I enjoyed this basically all the way through, including enjoying rolling my eyes at the cheesy bits as they came up.
Perhaps the most helpful parenting book I've read in that it addresses the abundant concerns and anxieties that we have as parents, rather than all the things we need to be doing better to soothe them in our children. I felt seen, gently guided, and appropriately delighted by some of the anecdotes. Example: comparing children to followers of Dionysus and adults to those of Apollo.
This was the best parenting book I have ever read. So relatable. So funny. So sad. Just excellent.
I loved this book. I got it for free from audible and was not expecting to enjoy it, as thrillers aren't my typical genre, and was pleasantly surprised that I didn't ever really want to put it down.
A Handmaid's Tale-esque story set in a near-future post-COVID Britain, told from the perspective of a mother and daughter duo, this book was touching, scary and very close to home at times. It was terrifying to me how very real the policies in this book felt—almost like something that could already be being enforced. Perhaps that was what I enjoyed most: the fact that it was dystopian but still very very real.
A few nits: the ending felt rushed compared to the development throughout and I found myself a little disappointed by the ease of resolution. However the ending was satisfying enough if you aren't someone who wants heavy reality.
DNF at about 50%. Super weird tone, strong undertone of vaguely creepy sexuality. Poorly written.
Tender. Sweet. The periods about parenting in the pandemic were triggering and hard for me.
This was very sweet and dealt with, surprisingly, a lot of heavy topics. I appreciated the amount of research that the hearing author put into writing a book partially from the perspective of a deafblind person.
This was extremely good. But also extremely pretentious. I feel like you'd need to be in a certain mood to enjoy this book. However it reminds me of some of my favorites: Rings of Saturn and Winesburg, Ohio if they had been combined.
This was excellent. I love the magic, I love the characters, and there were twists that actually took my breath away. I don't know that I will read a second, which the author left room for, but I certainly enjoyed this one.