Tess

I really liked that this book had chapters from so many characters' points of view. It gave you an idea of the wide variety of people who were affected positively by the game; what they had in common and how they were different, and how having access to a space like SLAY where they could be themselves was important. Both of the main characters are interesting as well, though Kiera occasionally bugged me because she was so complacent about her boyfriend being a jerk to everyone.

It did feel like the author doesn't know a lot about MMOs though - a high schooler and a college student programming a VR MMO completely in secret is a bit far-fetched, and any MMO with 500,000 subs and 2 mods is bound for trouble eventually. The reveal of the identity of the troll is also not exactly surprising but still kind of disappointing.

This was a short book, but I found the writing style fairly dense and challenging. Somehow it seemed to have a lot of extraneous detail and repetition, especially in the middle. However, I really liked the messages about the pain and power of shared history and generational trauma, and the ending was good enough to make me want to rate it higher than I had initially.

I liked this one so much! Beautiful, poetic, tragic and hilarious. It's probably not for everyone but this was the perfect book for me.

This book was just okay. The style fit the time period and diary concept, but the characters were pretty two-dimensional, especially the main character's parents. You have to suspend disbelief a bit not over the ghosts but over the idea that while running for his life this guy actually grabbed his diary first. Not much happens for the first two-thirds or so and then in the final third literally everything happens, so there are a lot of things that are mentioned once and immediately dropped again.

This is a set of interconnected short stories about different members of a roller derby team falling in love. Some of the stories were kind of cute but some of them were very weird (I loved the main character in the billionaire story but the plot was, uh...) and I didn't feel like very much happened.

Well. I think I can safely say that I've never read a book quite like this before. An unlikely band of adventurers (including two cult members who have been eviscerating unsuspecting passers by in exchange for drugs, the immortal woman they'd eviscerated, a witch with a reanimated bear for a butler and a horrible doll filled with guts) travel to a troubled city that sits on the calcified organs of long-dead gods, each trying to fulfill their own desires.

The world is the definite stand-out here. Crazy things are happening at every second, but the characters think of them as normal and they're described well enough to fit into a coherent world.

Unfortunately I do feel like this book was too long. A lot of things happened that, while interesting, didn't feel like they really mattered all that much. A great many characters are introduced only to die within pages (even someone who looks like they're going to be a major character at first dies without much development) so the deaths sort of start to get a bit boring.

I did like a few of the things that happened with the city at the end, though. It's a pretty quick read so I would recommend if you don't mind buckets of guts in your books and are looking for something unique.

Kind of an unfortunate anthology, most of the stories were just not that good: either kind of aimless, felt unfinished, or tone deaf in the way the “otherness” was handled. 

Favourites: Where The Lovelight Gleams by Michael Thomas Ford, Miss Infection USA by Shanna Heath and Mud Flappers by Usman T. Malik.

I had high hopes for this book but it just did not come together at all. None of the characters are fleshed out at all, which makes their drama (yes this book has a love triangle) very boring and many of them come off as ethnic stereotypes. In theory Nix's mother is a driving factor of the story but she's such a non-character they could have been looking for buried treasure with essentially the same effect. Nix is so reactive and never really seems to make choices; she's always being buffeted around by the narrative.

The author also makes the baffling decision to include no major Native characters, have her POV characters participate (with a small amount of reluctance) in what is essentially cultural genocide, and make the voice of Hawaii a white boy whose father is in the Hawaiian League. The way the Hawaiian culture is written about in this book as this thing that will inevitably die was disappointing.

Did not like this. Every character was annoying and their family arguments were excruciating to read. The sisters constantly make absolutely baffling romantic decisions and then throw tantrums feeling sorry for themselves.

I really enjoyed this odd little coming of age (transition into your 30s) book once I let go of my expectations of it and met it on its own terms. I do think some of the surreal plot lines were a little much for what the actual plot was but I really enjoyed the book within a book and Meadow's relationships with his friends.

Yes, it's sappy but I really enjoyed this book. It keeps the same formula as the first one, with all of the rules of time travel, and asks what it means to choose to be happy.

I thought this book was beautiful and really thought-provoking - if you could travel through time despite all the rules and constraints and never being able to change anything, would it be worth it? The stories are sad but not too maudlin, and while I would have preferred the outcomes to be a little less conservative I can see how the characters came to those conclusions and really liked how even though they hadn't changed the past, the change in perspective changed their future.

This novel is an adaptation of a play of the same name, which explains why it's so dialogue-driven and all takes place in a single room.

There were some things here that had the potential to be interesting - the “guess who's coming to dinner” scenario with the white people who desperately want to believe they're not racist (or that they don't SEEM racist, these characters are preoccupied with seeming) but resent the class/race divisions not going the way they would expect, the mundane weirdness of living through a disaster, some of the things with the animals. However, the prose is extremely dense, full of short sentences, weird metaphors and unpleasant sexuality, and in the end it just kind of felt like a chore to read it. It also drove me insane that they spent all that time complaining about not knowing anything but refused to listen to the radio.

This comic anthology was fine, but a lot of the stories felt incomplete and weren't that memorable.

Top stories: The Lichtenberg Lady by Cait Zellers, Slow Orbit by Arlo Everett, The Crowned Ones by Matt McGrath.

I didn't like this one at all. The Greek chorus conceit with the moms really felt fake deep and everything seemed to build up to nothing. By the time something really dark and cult like was happening the book ended.

The concept of an adventure from the point of view of a sort of cannon fodder enemy creature was interesting and I liked both the little tidbits about their culture and the main character trying to contend with an unfamiliar world.

However, the book itself just wasn't that good. The main character's change of heart seems to come out of nowhere. There are a lot of simple usage errors in the text that should have been caught in editing, and the plot in the middle was very boring and repetitive with Ren trying to make friends and Khavi killing them over and over.

This book was just completely awful. The pacing is SO bad - it will go hundreds of pages with nothing happening except awful people bickering for no reason and then suddenly everything happens for maybe 20 pages, then we are back to bickering again.

All of the characters are annoying and act like teenagers despite ostensibly being professionals (one of whom is 400 years old). Marnie hates Mark because she thinks he was lying to her about being engaged when they had an affair, but acts no differently toward him once she finds out he's telling the truth. The vampire is gross and condescending at all times. Narration compares “vampire” to the N-word. Every single female character aside from the protagonist is evil and described in the most misogynist way possible while the characters make weird generalizations about what men and women do.

Apparently this is a series but I genuinely couldn't bear to try another one of these.

Wow. I don't even know what to say about this novel that won't spoil the experience for anyone thinking of reading it, but I really enjoyed this. The descriptions of the world are fascinating, the main character is charming and his ways of thinking are described in a way that makes them make sense, and the plot took plenty of turns.

This book was fantastic, it really surprised me. I loved the writing, and the plot deftly handled subject matter like loss of a family member, personal identity and intergenerational trauma. The characters were super charming, and the way mythology tied into the story was well done.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did. However, there was no over-arching plot to this book at all (like Lizzie meets Kerra, bam insta-love, they're happy, a bad thing happens, they're happy, a bad thing happens, &c) and at the end nothing really feels resolved. Most of the characters are pretty interesting and vibrant but Lizzie herself is a bit of a doormat and like I know she was supposed to be from a small town but a lot of the time she felt like an alien instead.

The premise of this book was really interesting to me, but it didn't really manage to follow through. Each suspect gets POV chapters, but their voices all sound really similar and it becomes clear really early that none of them did it. The real culprit is somehow both obvious and unbelievable, and since that person isn't around to speak for themselves anymore it sort of falls flat. The way everything kind of ties up neatly with a million tidy romances at the end is really goofy.

I did appreciate the resource list at the end though, especially since the book is targeted at teens.

I liked this novel a lot. It was full of interesting historical and cultural details of a location and period that I didn't know much about beforehand but in an easily understandable way. It definitely felt like it was written with respect and love for the real people of Jeju.

The overarching story about forgiveness and seeing other people's perspectives was good but it was also very similar to Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by the same author, which was kind of weird for me.

I feel bad for rating this so low since I usually really like Alyssa Cole's work, but I couldn't stand this book.

The two main characters are incredibly stupid spies (we are told in narration how good at their jobs they are but they spend the whole book overreacting to things, making amateurish mistakes, and doing things they know will threaten the mission) during the American Civil War. The book acknowledges the power differential between the two characters due to race and gender, but then repeatedly shows the hero trying to push the heroine's boundaries, which I guess is okay because she secretly wants him so badly that they have a bunch of embarrassingly written sex (including a notable scene after Elle was shot in the head!!!!) and get married after knowing one another for a week. The final act relies on a false rape accusation against the hero by a spurned lover to propel it forward.

Honestly, the story of the war and the spy network was interesting and I liked some of the side characters a lot, but even outside of the romance the hero felt unnecessary (he didn't actually help with the spying very much). While the whole conceit of Elle pretending to be mute felt contrived, I might have liked the book better as a solo adventure for her as a spy.

This is a quick read about a sex worker in Morocco and how her life changes after she agrees to star in an independent film. The main character is kind of a jerk but she's got a lively voice - it really does feel like someone is telling you a story. Sometimes she interrupts gossiping about one person to gossip about another person!

The downside to the telling a story format is that a lot of the time nothing is happening and things that seem like they should be important plot points kind of get pushed aside. At one point the main character is hit by a motorcycle, which hardly ends up mattering and the reader only finds out about it after the fact. It seems like a weird choice.

The parts once they start filming are great, though, and even though the ending is kind of silly and unrealistic I liked it.

I can see why other people like this book and I do think some of the commentary on race and perfectionism is worthwhile, but I just did not like this book at all. 

The writing style is very florid and full of repetition (yes she smells like sea salt I KNOW) and annoying fanfic tropes (they keep calling each other by their full names??). The main character is an astronomer but does no astronomy in the book, barely thinks about it despite apparently loving it, and doesn't seem to know why she liked it in the first place. The one piece of “astronomy” in the book (aside from some poetic “you are made of star stuff” nonsense) is a paraphrase of an annoying Tumblr post about a mars rover. I think this felt so glaring to me because I read “The Disordered Cosmos” so recently and it's by an author who is theoretically so similar to this character - a Black lgbtq+ astrophysicist - but had such a strong enthusiasm for the subject matter.

The characters are mostly meant to be pushing thirty but all read very young and immature. There's a character who is a candy striper or something who reveals someone's private medical details without their consent and no one cares. The love interest is essentially a manic pixie dream girl (also she's Japanese and this is handled very weirdly) and loves the main character even though she treats her badly. The whole thing kind of feels like a fantasy where everyone else puts aside their problems to hold your hand - no other characters' issues that are brought up are resolved. It also feels like every character just sort of parrots the author's political opinions despite their actual situation - the main character living off her parents' money (she's 29 and her dad is paying her rent!) is required to make the plot work but she's joking around about how she's a broke millennial who will never be able to retire and ragging on people with “generational wealth”.