Tess

This was a really interesting story of Antarctic adventure and bad decisions. Several people on board the ship kept detailed diaries (and later wrote memoirs of varying accuracy) so many events are illustrated in the participants' own words. This really gives you a feel of the group dynamics on board, which is important in an isolation story about a small group. 

I liked the basic structure of this story a lot; the way the book brought the characters together and the links to the past. It's also nice to read a romance featuring professionals in their late 30s instead of the usual teens and twenty-somethings. The details about rare books and women's work during the second world war were interesting as well.

The primary characters were engaging and enjoyable, but nearly every other character was like a cartoon villain and it kind of sucked the joy out of the book for me. There are two cheating exes in this, as well as three needlessly cruel and domineering siblings and two sets of unpleasant parents (Beryl's parents are indifferent to her doctorate for some reason and then angry with her for getting a better paying job in her own field????). There are also two teachers who on multiple occasions make fun of an outcast student in one of their classes.

Also, for some reason, all of the scenes that take place in the present are written in past tense and all of the scenes that take place in the past are written in present tense. This was really confusing for a bit at the start.

There were interesting aspects to this book but (and it feels strange to say this about a book that features genocide so prominently) the presentation felt extremely twee to me with the “water memory” framing. I also found the book focused too much on the Arthur character when the women's stories were more interesting and interconnected. I will probably check out more of this author's work (the afterword was very thoughtful) but this one didn't work for me unfortunately.

Did not like this book at all. The protagonist never listens to anyone and constantly jumps to conclusions without having all the facts. Despite this, she is somehow always proven right and most of the other characters like her despite the fact that she sexually harasses one of them pretty much immediately after meeting him and almost gets everyone killed on multiple occasions. The one character who doesn't like her is a more competent professional at the conflict zone mediator job who is portrayed as unreasonable and petulant for no reason. For some reason Carrie receives no training for either of her jobs (the call centre or the conflict zone mediator) aside from manuals she doesn't read. The setting is kind of fun and I really liked poor old Gavin, but I wouldn't read another book in this series.

I feel terrible giving this book such a low rating but I didn't like it at all. 

I will say first off that I really liked Sam's relationship with their dad, and the way that emotions are described  being interpreted through facial expressions and the general autistic point of view. 

Every character that wasn't Sam or their dad was pretty one-note, though. I kept forgetting about Sky even though he was part of the core friend group, and it took me like half the book to realize Aidan and Dylan were two different guys. There were two different characters whose entire personality was “mean girl”. The slang is really embarrassing (stop saying emoji!) and the constant brand name and meme references are already dated.

The mystery was also just really bad. The perpetrator is pretty easy to guess because it's the one adult with zero redeeming qualities. The author also seems to want to write a book where true crime sleuths save the day while acknowledging how damaging and ghoulish true crime superfans can be and that did not work for me. The way everything worked out comes across as “digging at old wounds and invading peoples' privacy is bad unless I do it.”

Decent enough family drama slash murder mystery marred by a terrible eleventh hour plot twist. Feels like it wasted my time.

From the blurb I thought this would be a thriller about a woman avenging her son's wrongful death. It isn't. It's a weird romance novel about a deeply unpleasant self-absorbed woman who falls in love with the man who accidentally killed her son. Loved the part where she casually drops that her husband would only live in an all-white neighbourhood like it isn't a big deal.

There are a bunch of typos and the main character almost gets killed by a cucumber.

This is a book of short stories entered in a competition where all stories are 1,000 words and must adhere to a two-word prompt: a character and an object/situation. It was interesting to see what people did with their prompts (especially people who got a bit of an odd one like “TV psychic”) and the array of genres was really wide. 

However, most of the stories felt pretty forgettable and there were a few embarrassing copy errors, including a story that appears to have been printed with the wrong prompt.

Top favourites: And One Hard One by Ezra Fox, A Hook Called Starlight by Bryan Arneson

This was a very dark and strange little novel and I'm still not really sure how I felt about it. The writing is so atmospheric and some of the imagery will probably stick with me forever, but a lot of it didn't really feel like it meant anything. Considering the heavy nature of the real life topic involved I wish the book had had more to say than like “bad things are bad”.

I thought this was an interesting concept, but it wound up being way too pop-history for me. Each chapter features a story about a specific woman (with varying levels of connection to alcohol culture, there were a couple extremely tenuous links that felt like “diversity hires” unfortunately) interspersed with buzzfeed listicle style writing about other things happening globally during that time period. The footnotes are not citations (there's a bibliography at the back, but specific facts aren't cited directly) they're just more unfunny “snark” and some of the chapters (especially the more modern years) feel uncomfortably preachy. Also acting like Hammurabi invented misogyny whole cloth is extremely silly.

The different types of alcohol and how they're made were interesting though.

Did not like this one at all. Unbelievable characters (and a terrible protagonist), and a stupid love triangle.

This book was okay. In an alternate old west with airships, a small-town postmistress is kidnapped by a group of lady bandits who aren't exactly what they seem. 

The book is quite short and written in simple language that felt like a YA novel. There isn't much actual action until the end, the majority of the book is the main character's conflicted thoughts and conversations with the bandits. The characters are interesting but mostly pretty shallow in terms of character traits. There's an attempt made to address some real-world topics like racism and domestic abuse, but the treatment is pretty superficial and fluffy due to the short runtime.

It was a fun little diversion, but ultimately forgettable.

I did not like any of the stories about romance or texting (oh you didn't text me for 10 minutes I'm going to have a breakdown... Ugh) but almost every other story was great. 

This is a contemporary novel about a young rapper on a cross-country tour. I thought Deza was a great character - she makes some silly decisions because she's young and she puts a lot of pressure on herself but she's smart and funny and passionate. The other characters are a bit more thinly drawn but they mostly do the job. Unfortunately I found the love interest kind of wishy-washy and boring, so the romance aspect didn't really do anything for me.

This book has a fascinating structure, some really beautiful imagery and some striking set pieces, but it's also an overlong slog and a lot of it felt off putting. It somehow both feels timeless and extremely dated. I can definitely see the influence on other books that I've enjoyed. I'm glad I read it but I don't think I'd ever read it again.

This was a wild ride of a high school thriller about two students who are targeted by a mysterious figure who seems to know everything about them. The first half was a little too slow for me, but the second half knocked my socks off. The twists were great, the character voices were fun, and I liked the ending.

I thought the last 20% or so of this was pretty good, space action, catharsis without being too pat, but the rest of this was a slog. I'm assuming from how graphic it gets with sexual violence that the intended audience is adults but the main character is a child so it feels very YA in parts. The cyberpunk stuff feels goofy and pointless. The aliens are basically just cobbled together Japanese stereotypes which is kind of weird when there are theoretically Japanese people in this universe (the main character's home ship has a Japanese name!). Zero plot important female characters. Weird time skips. A whole chapter in second person for some reason.

This is a very sweet (but also pretty scary in places!) novel about a young girl and her ghost friend. It's set in Malaysia and covers topics such as family secrets, loss of a loved one and what happens when your best friend suddenly makes a new friend. It's written in a really charming almost fairy tale style.

This book was a bit of a different format than the first two because Harry doesn't really have a “case” and the stakes are mostly personal. Because of this I found it got a bit unfocused in places since she's both the detective and the client. I'm really enjoying a few of the recurring characters and I love the way the problem was finally solved. Overall great book.

The format of the book, with each chapter narrated by a different character describing their reaction to the same events, was really interesting and used well.

I flew through this book and every twist and turn surprised me, but it felt kind of like it ran out of steam at the end.

I feel bad saying it, but I didn't like this book at all. Meandering sentences full of ridiculous pop culture references and unlikable characters (and weird implications about electricity being required for a culture to be considered sentient, yikes). The one major female character is dead for most of the book.

I really liked the idea of this book, but the execution was a big miss.

This book was way too slow and boring for me - the first really exciting to occur in the book happened around the 76% mark. Most of the book was just the teen characters arguing and complaining about everything. It doesn't make sense to me that any of these people were cleared to fly. They all have extremely obvious issues, their personalities clash constantly (they will have to live together in a confined space for 23 years!) and they always seem to take the opportunity to make a bad decision. The religious aspects were also really off-putting to me, and it's weird how the writing leans so hard into psychological issues but always seems to shy away from racism and colonialism when they come up.

There were a few quotes I liked (plus the one exciting thing and a couple of the adult characters) but it's not enough to ever recommend this to anyone.

I didn't like this book as much as the first one. It was still fast-paced and the mystery still had a few twists and turns, but the perpetrator was revealed too quickly and the magic setup felt kind of superfluous. Also the whole evil Soviet organization thing was kind of over the top.

This was a strange little novella and I'm not sure how I feel about it. 

It's 1900 and Louise's husband is dying of a syphilis-like illness. He was a surgeon and she had worked in the same hospital so they approach his dissolution with a sort of clinical detachment that can sometimes be more horrifying than if they were shocked about it. They (especially Louise) are also dealing with the judgement from others based on the nature of the (both assumed and actual) illness, which I thought was well done.

I liked the end point and what came from that, but I could not understand why Louise made the decisions that she did. She came across as a bit of a cypher in a way that made her ultimate decision seem a bit far fetched. I also wish we had gotten a bit more from the instigator, because I wasn't really clear on what her goal was.

The story of someone falling for a friend during a road trip had potential, but the writing is really sloppy and the characters are terrible. Every single sentence is, “I did this. Then I did that,” for the entire book, which was excruciating to read. The writing and emotions feel very YA but there is a really graphic sex scene, so I'm not sure who the target audience is, here. It all seems very fanficcy to me, not just because of the one bed situations that kept coming up and the constant overreactions to everything but because the characters really didn't have much differentiating them one from the other. There is a bizarre scene where the characters just straight up list their sexualities (including that of a friend who isn't present).

I had assumed from the summary that the friends would fall in love on the road trip, but instead the main character falls immediately before the trip and then treats the love interest horribly for the entire rest of the book. The constant push and pull of the two characters having sex and then April being like “oh that didn't matter” more than once made her read like a chaser (the love interest is trans) even though I don't think that was the intention. We're never really shown what the love interest sees in her.

There is a sort of bucket list element which could have been fun, but most of the list was checked off before the book started so nothing really comes of it.