Tess

I really enjoyed the characters in this one but the international intrigue plotline has never really interested me.

A sweet, kind-hearted little fantasy romance. It's definitely a little rough compared to some of the author's later work (in style and also in general depiction of gender/sexuality) but the plot twists are clever, the world feels original and overall I enjoyed it.

This was a fun little popcorn movie of a book about a hero and villain with superpowers who meet by chance at a memory loss support group meeting. I noticed a few typos and I think the plot started to unravel a bit towards the end with a lot of revelations all at once (and the way things went down with the cop was kind of wishy-washy) but overall I enjoyed my time with this one. The characters weren't super deep but they were fun to watch and for the most part the action and comedy balanced well.

This was a beautiful little story about grief, change and growth - coming home to a place and people that have changed, ways to handle grief and what you carry with you. I thought the ending was a little too convenient but overall I loved this.

The idea of this book was good - sort of a Titanic meets Event Horizon thing where the main characters find a ghost ship that messes with their perceptions - but the execution did not work for me. The MC's specific non ghost ship related mental health problems were all over the place, but not in a way that was interesting or compelling. The dual timeline thing that only happens for like half the book did not work. The pacing was so slow until about the 70% mark. Most of the actually interesting things happen off screen. The thing that is causing the problem is immediately obvious but no one figures it out. The characters are very vague stereotypes and the romance is deeply stupid. For some reason the same things that were just shown are reiterated over and over like you might not notice (like the character will see a gold faucet and be like “wow! Ostentatious displays of wealth bad!” every single time). I did like the way they solved the problem at the end though.

This horror novel had an interesting concept but I don't think it was very well executed. There were a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes (multiple instances of mixing up Josh and Dale's names, missing words, homophones etc), characters' personalities sometimes felt inconsistent, way too many shopping lists, and I think the epilogue in this version made the story worse by wrapping things up a little too pat. The horror takes a little too long to get started considering that we know what's going on way before any of the victim characters do. I did really like some of the things it was aiming for though, especially around the solidarity between the female characters and some attempted realistic tension and support in Sarah and Josh's marriage.

As with most anthologies, this one's a bit hit or miss. I loved the concept, with each story featuring different holiday traditions from around the world. The best stories were sweet and fun, but some of the others were weirdly violent or felt pointless. One wasn't even a romance, which is kind of a weird choice. 

Favourites: Mask by Sheryn Munir and Grand Market Bliss by Fiona Zedde

Essay collections are always hard to rate for me. Some of the essays were brilliant, searing looks at the meaning of violence, but others had clearly been published elsewhere before and didn't fit in as well with the rest of the content. The parts about COVID felt kind of tacked on and strange.

The history that this book was based on was fascinating, but I think I would have preferred to read a straight-up history book to this work of historical fiction. The characters are all very vaguely drawn and have extremely predictable stories. The reader is always told how the characters feel instead of it being demonstrated in the text, and somehow despite all of the characters' hardships everything seems to always work out neatly for them so the stakes felt weirdly low.

I was really loving this book until about the 70% mark. Feyi was a great character with tons of personality, and even the side characters sparkled. The landscape descriptions were lush and the food descriptions were amazing (I read in the end notes that the author commissioned a menu from a pro chef to fit the characters and it shows). I loved the idea of Feyi getting messy and taking some risks to try and get her life moving again after her husband's sudden death in an accident.

However, the actual romance was bad. Alim just wasn't an interesting character to me. He was so bland despite his history, and he had this self conscious way of talking that made it sound like he was constantly vying for an A in therapy. He's in love with his son's girlfriend in like 3.5 seconds and he doesn't even have the excuse of being star struck.

Also in the second half the writing just gets really Wattpad-ish and bad, which I wasn't expecting from this author. Feyi “let out a breath she didn't realize she had been holding” and I almost screamed.

I preordered this book and then proceeded to not read it for months. “Chainsaw” had what I consider the perfect ending and it was hard to imagine what a sequel could bring to the table. Now that I've finished the book I regret not giving it a chance earlier. 

While Jade is still the star of the show, this book expands to show other characters' POV, and all of these characters just feel so perfectly human. One of the early victims' internal monologue stuck with me for the entire rest of the book. There are a lot of moving parts and things going on in the book, but somehow it all slots together in a way where you couldn't take any of it out.

I really loved this. Fantastic sequel.

Fascinating time travel novel with great characters, use of place and language, and mind bending meta elements. Dark and sad and funny and hopeful all at once, and full of characters I'd love to meet. Some parts were a bit confusing to me (what was up with the cat??) but if you can handle that I highly recommend it.

I was so excited for this book because the memory removal concept holds so much potential, but almost nothing in this book worked for me. The most interesting chapters were Noor's because they explored what working in the clinic was actually like. Most of the characters were disagreeable in uninteresting ways and every time there was suspense it was resolved in the most boring way possible. The ending dragged on way longer than it needed to.

This was a strange read for me - sort of a cannibalistic version of The Jungle. I didn't mind the matter of fact descriptions of the brutality of the meat industry (in fact, the words the industry has come up with to mask what they're actually doing is one of the few things I actually liked about the book) but could hardly stand any of the rest of it. So much of this book is about this sort of whiny annoying character who feels superior to other people for no real reason, unappealing sex scenes and mind-boggling world building. The idea that the land didn't change at all when most animals were slaughtered is kind of ridiculous, as is the idea that every government in the world agreed to this plan at the same time when the virus (likely) doesn't exist and it doesn't even solve the stated problem. The Transition is posited to be a solution to “overpopulation” but eating non-agricultural humans is in most cases illegal and the ones in captivity are bred for meat purposes so the population is the same?? I didn't get this book.

This was such a good read for me. The themes are handled really deftly and the characters and situations feel true to life. The characters and their moment in time are integrated into the real historical context in a way that feels organic. I'd wondered how interesting the book would be to read when it's leading up to an event you already know will happen but it really works. 

This book was so good, but also very hard to describe. It's probably 60% character study and 40% balls-to-the-wall gorefest slasher, but every element just builds on what came before in a way that wraps up so perfectly. The main character has a great voice, and her essays about slasher films sprinkled through the book were a highlight. I will be thinking about that ending for the rest of my life. Amazing.

I don't know if “enjoy” is the right word for a book that made me feel this many emotions, but I will be thinking about it for a long time. The story skillfully jumps horror genres, from psychological creeping dread to gothic ghost story to a sort of slasher theme.

The early parts of the book where Lewis is unravelling are fantastic, and the ending had me tearing up because it wrapped things up so perfectly. I'm docking a star because it did drag a bit heading into the final stretch, but I would definitely recommend this to anyone who can handle gore in their fiction.

I picked up this book after seeing another Goodreads reader saying they wanted to put it in the freezer. It's appropriately strange and spooky, and I loved the creepy descriptions of the procedures themselves. However I wasn't really sold on the relationship with Samson and it takes up a huge portion of the book.

This was an interesting book about a historical Chinese doctor. I liked the detail of the medicine (most of which are based on real cases) and daily life during the time period. However I found the voice kind of bland and the tone was preachy in places. I was a bit disappointed that arguably the most interesting parts of her life occur after the book ends.

This is a collection of short stories about incidents in the life of one character on a reservation in Maine throughout his life. Some of the stories were better than others (the stories about the friends messing around kind of blended together for me, but the titular story was incredible) and they're told out of chronological order for a reason I couldn't really grasp aside from putting the best story at the end.

This book is fine. Some of the details of historic painting techniques are interesting, there is a colourful cast of real-life characters, and the ebook version I read had links to all of the artworks described, which was really cool.

However, this is not a thriller. If you are coming in off the blurb on here you will be disappointed. It's a standard list of events historical fiction narrated by the protagonist, and while there is occasionally a vague threat of violence it is at a remove from the story. Secondly, I understand the choice to use that flippant YA style of writing to indicate Raphael's youth but it did not work for me. I understand the sequence of events involved but the character arc for Raphael was boring and I was left feeling kind of unfulfilled.

Two rival multimedia artists, a DJ who can hear the universe, and a dogged news blogger wind up on a path that may alter the way humans perceive reality in Dark Factory. I really enjoyed this book (and the supplementary material on the website) but I know it won't be for everyone. It's got dreamy, stream of consciousness prose, messy characters and an ambiguous ending. The characters felt grounded the whole time, even as things got weird, and the book had a lot of heart. I just really had a lot of fun with this.

I did not like this book at all. 

This is a dual time period story about an American teen attending a summer journalism program at Oxford (though this is barely referenced and comes to nothing) who meets a bunch of extremely stereotypical British people including her scholarship benefactor. The benefactor claims to have some information about the teen's dead father but dies herself before she can reveal it. This leads to the teen somehow becoming trapped in the benefactor's house reading a very shallow and annoying girl's memoir of surviving the sinking of the Titanic, which is full of more ethnic stereotypes, stupid psychic powers and moustache-twirling revolutionaries.

The resolution of the Titanic story is frankly unbelievable and the resolution to the story in the present isn't much better. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.

This novella was definitely bittersweet. The writing is beautiful and evocative and somehow Avi is super relatable despite us having almost nothing in common. I don't know how a story about a character who is suicidal can be so uplifting but it was, uplifting and calm and beautiful. Despite the fact that I liked the way the story ended, I wish it could have been longer.

This was fine - I thought some parts of it were really sweet (for example the scene where Lilly helps Ella do her makeup in the bathroom) but other parts were a bit weird (for example a really long scene about eating sushi at the ball). The romance was kind of boring but I did like the tie in with the roses. I don't really get why the stepmother wanted Ella to wear a dress to the ball in the first place (like she says it's to humiliate her but if she wants to wear dresses and used to do so regularly why would it bother her?) and it probably would have worked better having her sneak out. There were also a few irritating typos. Overall though simple sweet story with a positive message.