Tess

I've been wanting to read this one for a while and it did not disappoint: nasty characters in nasty situations as everything spins out of control. It got a little repetitive for me near the end and the kindle edition had some annoying OCR errors but overall highly recommended to anyone who likes weird horror.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this one. It's a gritty noir story about an eternal war of assassins and the people who get caught in the middle. Somehow it managed to merge brutal violence, off-beat whimsical humour and genuine emotion into a package that was more than the sum of its parts.

Very weird book overall. It is a prequel but references a lot of current events that happened after publication of the previous book. Boring, flat characters bordering on stereotypes. Very preachy unpleasant tone. I don't think I'll bother with the third book.

This is a super fun collection of short stories that take Japanese mythology and reimagine the ghost/monster characters in a modern context. All the stories are set in the same world, so various characters are shared between them. There is a short summary of the story each piece in the book is based on at the end, which was interesting for me.

This book was an interesting character study of an utterly boring middle management type who becomes obsessed with the circumstances of his wife's sudden death that occurred while he was away on a business trip.

The first half has the man spiralling into an obsession with the minutiae of events involved and coming up with this convoluted explanation for her death. This look into his psyche was fascinating but then it turned out that he was 100% correct, which was kind of silly.

The second half kicks off when the man uses this info and makes an impulsive mistake. This part was fun, kind of read like the aftermath in Strangers on a Train, and the actual ending was great.

This was an extremely strange and disorienting book. I liked the writing style and catching the recursive references but in the end I'm not really one hundred percent sure what happened.

This was a fast paced read with decent tension but it could have been a lot better. All of the POVs felt the same to me (even the dog!) and nothing really surprising happens. The writing style is pretty simple and uninteresting and there were a few obvious errors (misspelled or missing words).

Very boring book with a ridiculously stupid main character and mostly bland side characters. Very early on you can guess the entire plot including how reveals are going to be handled and you're exactly correct - no surprises. Strange social media themed interludes between chapters that basically just list the book's themes (this is so common and I don't get it - authors of the world I PROMISE that women are capable of understanding themes without interludes or footnotes or characters just listing them). There's also a secret that hangs over the main character for a lot of the book that turns out to be boring and revealed in a really anti climactic way.

Yes, this story about a down on his luck man who turns his life around after a chance meeting with a quirky old lady with a tragic backstory is kind of cheesy and predictable, but I really liked it. The author's outlook on life is what I needed to read right now.

I had fun with this one - a dark story of a future Toronto crumbling under the costs of doing business. I thought it was just a little bit too long (some parts were repetitive) but overall I enjoyed it.

This was a really interesting read for me. It was a little simply written, which made it a fast read, but it really does well at describing the way of life that the disaster leads them back to, and the relationships between Evan and the various other characters. Despite kind of knowing how things are going to end, the dread of it was really well handled.

This was a really hard book for me to rate. There were parts of it I loved, but other parts I sort of hated in equal measure.

The Arctic expedition chapters were interesting and while some actions the characters took were ridiculous they were at least understandable. The characters were mostly great though I wish they were developed more. Some of the diversity elements were handled well and some were not - I thought the Black characters were competently written and did the best they could with what they were handed but the gay character was written in a really weird way and while the trans character herself was fine, the way she was written required another character to “become” a trans man against her will which is certainly A Choice in today's political climate.

I loved the last courtroom chapter but every single other courtroom chapter was boring and repetitive and could have been replaced with a short “court transcript” without losing anything of value.

The author clearly did a lot of research and feels fondly toward the people the characters are based on. There is one connection that the main character has with a separate historical event (I won't spoil it) which felt kind of sensational and unnecessary, and the ultimate scheme behind everything that was happening was way too convoluted.

On the whole I'm happy I read it but it's kind of hard to recommend.

This book had a lot of potential and I think a lot of the things the author was aiming to do were admirable, but overall it did not work for me.

The game and the characters who disappear playing it are surprisingly unimportant to the plot - the rules are broken all the time and it never really seems to matter that much. Sometimes they didn't even seem to notice: Raquel never managed to follow the flip a coin three times rule and that never even comes up. Some tricks don't work until they do, or only work when it's convenient for the plot, and some solutions felt pretty far fetched. The romance felt a bit rushed and silly (Raquel can't even explain what she likes about her) considering everything else going on, and the love triangle plotlines all felt pointless. Most of the characters didn't really have much personality in that they were all very similar to each other, so it was hard to get that invested in them.

The basic storyline idea and what the author is trying to communicate about the importance of community organizing are good, unfortunately I just didn't feel that they were very well executed.

I liked parts of this book, but overall it disappointed me. The little flairs to remind you the book is set in the 90s are pretty cute. Some of the scares really worked for me (there is a scene where the main character is trying to escape a location without being seen that is both so tense and SO gross, and I'm not usually squeamish), and the idea of a vampire that is hunger personified (he just always wants more no matter what) was interesting. When the book club finally gets together for the plan I had been waiting for the entire book, it's great. The intro mentioned that the book is kind of a tribute to the author's mom and I could really feel it in those moments.

I appreciate what the author was trying to do with the Mrs. Greene character and the vampire going after children he thinks won't be missed but the execution didn't really work for me. Mrs. Greene had to take charge of everything all the time and it basically circled around from her being part of the team to her having to coddle and take care of all the white characters. The women in the book club were thinly drawn and not very interesting. I only finished the book a couple of hours ago and I can only remember that Slick is religious, one is named Kitty, one wears whimsical sweaters and Grace is the biggest jerk. Patricia is a huge doormat and the husbands are universally terrible. It was weird to me that the parents weren't more concerned with their son's nazi obsession, aside from it being mildly embarrassing in public.

My biggest negative though is the use of rape in this book. It really feels like it's just there for the shock scenes, and the way the women's (and girls') bodies are described during those scenes is really voyeuristic and weird. The worst of the rape scenes takes place off-screen and the author STILL manages to describe the victim's breasts and the state of her pubic hair. What happens to the character afterward is also weird and felt pointless.

This was kind of hit or miss for me. I think this author has a really charming writing style, and I loved the Thai cultural references and family dynamics. However, the romantic plot relied way too much on ridiculous misunderstandings and overreactions and neither boy's motivation really made sense to me. 

This started out kind of standard YA mystery for me, fun enough, but as things escalated the character conflicts didn't feel realistic and the plot got extremely silly. The final confrontation was ridiculous.

This is a collection of short vignettes in the life of a trans Chilean sex worker in New York from the 90s to the present day. The tone of these stories was great, even when they dealt with heavier subject matter there's a thread of resilience and dark humour throughout. The book felt like sitting down to listen to someone gossip about their friends.

I thought the concept was kind of neat but the story was just not good. If the ships are limited to imprinting on one person based on DNA then why are animals permitted on board in the first place? The ships were kind of cool but I think there were too many characters for a short story to sustain. There was one character who just announces that she's trans and then doesn't do anything else, there's a character the pov character is really judgmental of because she has allergies (??), a guy whose only character trait is old, a guy who had pet crabs, a guy I forgot about until he committed suicide, a guy who ATE SOMEONE'S PET and has tattoos or whatever and the main character, who has a comically stupid backstory and makes the worst decisions imaginable. What was the point of this?

This was a super fun popcorn movie of a thriller about several assassins and other shady types all trying to complete their missions on one crazy train ride. The characters are all larger than life and feel bold and unique. The tension never lets up and every tiny detail that ever comes up is tied up perfectly by the end.

I would have given this 5 stars but there's a minor side character who, while I enjoyed her, was constantly assailed by transmisogynist jokes and that bugged me. I'm hoping that gets fixed in the upcoming film version.

It took me a while at the beginning to figure out how to read this book, but once I got into it, I couldn't stop reading. At first it feels like a lot of vignettes only connected in that they're about the same person, but gradually it all comes together. The author's “kid” voice is really well-done.

Very sweet story about a group of teens who are struggling in some aspect of their lives and get drawn into a strange magical world. It moves a little slowly but the way it all comes together at the end is worth it for me.

I really did not like this book at all. The prose was ridiculously overwritten, the characters were boring (and it was kind of interesting that the only non-villains who were jerks in a way that Sideways took issue with were trans people, hmm) and constantly made really stupid decisions. It seemed a bit goofy to me that the girls become friends so quickly, like one night this girl is paying Sideways $40 to be a freak show at her party and the next day she is ready to die for her?? A lot of dialogue felt very “author voice”, like when a character who was generally very fussy and worried said that their town needed more gangs.

For huge stretches of the book nothing happened. I liked the concept of the book devil when it came up but it was way too near the end.

This book was okay. The history and culture dealt with are tragic and interesting, but I didn't think the story was that well executed. The dual timelines felt unnecessary since we know from the beginning that Junja will survive the war, and because she dies in the prologue we don't get her perspective on her postwar life. The romances, especially with her first love, felt very superficial considering all that comes later - lots of love at first sight but not really that many interesting character interactions. The entire final third of the book is about men for some reason, which isn't really what I'm looking for in a book ostensibly about haenyeo.

Quirky little collection of short stories about an old lady who kills anyone who crosses her and then uses her sweet old lady persona to get away with it. Nothing groundbreaking but the stories were pretty fun.

I really enjoyed this one: clever critique of the tourism industry that's sprung up around death (natural disasters, genocide, serial killers, “voluntourism” etc). The way that complicity in terrible things is written off by multiple characters because they're only playing their little part feels real and I loved the ending. I did think the romance was a little silly though.