sasha
+1 star for: sexy tennis summer (kind of like challengers except if the two love interests were related to each other :/)
+1 star for: not involving black people!!! leave my people out of this nonsense!!!
+1 star for: the writing style! i fear it was used for evil but i read this book in like a day cause i was so sucked in
-1 star for: setting my expectations so fucking high only to burn all of my hopes and dreams. i deadass thought i was gonna get a sex positive raunchy tale about a man discovering the power of submission but instead i got a misogyny laden book with sociology 101 class critique. U WILL PAY FOR UR CRIMES TEDDY WAYNE!!!
this book is like if saltburn met gone girl but the bad guy wins in the end. POOR EMILY!!!
+1 star for: “i wish i knew how to quit you” UGH reading it hurts way more than watching it
(2.5 stars)
+2 stars for: making me LAUGH OUT LOUD at the absurdity of some of the dialogue and writing. like some of these quotes are just so unserious that i just couldn't help but have a good time
+1,000 stars for: DRAGONS!!!
+1 star for: genuinely like actually pulling me in. this book was def a page turner! was it good??? ummmmmm
-1,000 stars for: xaden's pov. if you thought violet was insufferably horny i give you... her boyfriend!!! he's so fucking gross in that last chapter like... UR GIRL NEARLY DIED AND YOUR LOOKING AT HER BOOBS???
-1 star for: FINALLY some small and pale girl rep! we have really been lacking in that department!!!
+1 star for: rhiannon's friendship and andarna (the cutest to ever do it)!
-.5 stars for: black best friend trope PLUS gay best friend trope! AND KILLING LIAM!!!
ok ok ok putting aside the insane amounts of nostalgia for divergent and other 2000s dystopians... i really get why people love this book. easy to read, fun (if not hilariously predictable) twists and an interesting world to enjoy as long as you don't think about it too long.
(3.5 stars)
+1 star for: AVIS OMG (im always a sucker for a rescue dog!!) love how her recovery mirrored the two characters!
+1 star for: a straight couple breaking up to then BOTH have queer relationships next... so fucking fantastic
+1 star for: THE BASEBALL ANGST, ugh i loved the perspective shift between a player whose had to toil at the bottom his whole career and one who's always been a star
+.5 stars for: a nerdy buff sports man (charlie braxton i wish u we're real...)
+2 stars for: BLACK QUEER JOY IKTR (it comes after a BUNCH of trauma but the epilogue made it so WORTH IT)
+1 star for: capturing the truly sinister energy of mostly white private high schools .. been there!
+1 star for: the martha reveal! i was actually shocked about her connection to the other characters. the rest of the mystery seemed pretty straight forward but that twist got me
this book was a refreshing take on what a gossip girl/pretty little liars universe would look like if black people were the targets. i've always been curious about what that would look like and this did not disappoint! the writing and character development weren't really strong to me but the setting, atmosphere and overall themes are what earn this book a 4 star rating for me.
+1 star for: the style of prose! the little sentences between the paragraphs hold so much weight i felt like i was on the edge of a gasp the whole time. i am like beyond speechless. i don't think ill ever read anything like this ever again!
+1 star for: THE BIRD REVEAL (specifically the riverside massacre???) and THE TORTOISE REVEAL!!! god i was mouth AGAPE in SHOCK at these parts. just so so so good.
+1 star for: jun and keema!! not only was the ensemble cast so full and well developed i felt like i was falling in love with this two boys as they fell for each other. absolutely masterful character development and the scene where their minds connect??? i was SCREAMING
+1 star for: the reveal of them entering the inverted theater??? i have never read anything with so much disbelief and shock. the way this story weaves in and out of its self whilst still remaining understandable is just so incredible.
+1 star for: “and so he lay down that night by the dying fire with little thought as to the inner workings of his body—the chemistry of bequeathment and inheritance that began as the acids of his stomach met the gnarled and potent flesh of a god” LIKE???? WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE???
+1 star for: boil rhyming with doyle, made me giggle every time
+1 star for: actually getting me to make faces of horror and disgust every thirty minutes. people must have thought i was WEEEEIRD on the sidewalk, in the grocery store, on the bus, at work...
+1 star for: “so i'll be wed in the church of the holy incestuous mushroom?”
+2 star for: BETH AND ROBBIE EACH UGH MY BABYS! by far my favorite perspectives to read from SO happy they made it to the end! in my opinion they were the most interesting and full fleshed out characters and as much as fran annoyed me (ENDLESSLY) i loved reading their interactions with her. so well done wow.
+1 star for: the writing??? god so gory and so visceral i just couldn't put it down!!! the type of story that just infects your everyday thoughts. so so so good
+1 star for: teach and beth's final SCENE UGH. it coming full circle from the beginning was so unbelievable satisfying i read the whole thing with a morbid grin on my face. beth is one bad ass mother fucker!!!
+1 star for: “it's just a way to keep from being drawn and quartered by the Knights of J. K. Rowling” I SCREAMED
-1 star for: the amount of side characters!! rarely have i come across a book where i feel there were too many extras. i even liked a lot of them but wow i was just astonished by how many new people were introduced each chapter. by the end i felt i couldn't really care about anyone other than the main six (beth, robbie, fran, indi, ramona and teach) and it's the one thing keeping me from giving this a five star. too often i had to search up people because i had no idea if they had shown up before. reading this book as a physical copy would have made this even more insufferable.
(3.5 stars)
+1 star for: THE ENDING??? wow the last 20% of this book felt like a blur, i couldn't put it down!
+1 star for: a happy ending! i was so hype when the fake out with anastasia was revealed. and HELLO??? 1,500 years alone for Astrid.... wow that reveal was so so so intense
+3 stars for: the Thunderheads contingencies for the animals!! loved it!!!
-1 star for: the overall format of the book. generally i like when books are either told out of order or have unique formatting in them but having BOTH was honestly a bit too much for me. i found it a little too confusing that at some points i just didn't care lol
-.5 stars for: MAKING MY KING ROMAN DAMISCH WAIT 117 YEARS TO BE WITH HIS ONE TRUE LOVE UGH HASNT HE SUFFERED ENOUGHHHHHH
+2 stars for: MY BABY GINO I LOVE HIM UGH, favorite character by FAR. always made me giggle and smile when he had a speaking line and his loyalty and support??? unmatched! the reveal of his backstory made him just that much more enjoyable. love love loved him!
+ 2 stars for: being able to viscerally feel, taste and HEAR this book. i've was so enraptured by the language used to describe sasha's feelings and environments and the way she experiences honey. WHEW it was just so great.
+1 star for: being a love letter to our pollinators. everytime farming was described in this book i wanted to pack myself up and flee to the countryside to be a beekeeper.
-1 star for: “don't blame the bees, blame the machine” being SO on the nose! everything that happens in this book is explained and foreshadowed ad nauseam. it ended up becoming repetitive and so so so predictable. at around the halfway mark when the action started to ramp up this book was sitting at a 4 star but then it slowly teetered into 3 star territory because of how stale it got. the mystery and flowery (ha) language couldn't lift the weight of the overall plot so i was a bit disappointed by the end.
-1 star for: making a character with my name be annoying and gullible LMFAO. sasha was such a blank protagonist that on multiple occasions i wish we could have gotten to live in someone else's head.
at about the halfway point i knew i was going to rate this book 1 star. it took a while to get how I feel now and felt reading this straightened out into words. so for now these are my immediate thoughts:
it is incredibly ironic that this book purports to be a looking glass into the worst of human nature when the author has made up these characters and experiences basically from scratch with no research into real victims and how trauma recovery actually works. the fact that it follows four men, three of which are queer and two of which are black, just feels so icky. like at no point does it feel that these stories and characters exist in the real world. besides the fact that their environments feel hollow, we get almost no depth from these men after they enter their thirties. i was actually astounded by the fact that once i started reading about them in their 50s i realized that at no point had the characters actually matured. i went back to read bits from when they were in their early 20s and their voices are the same, their thought processes are the same and their problems are the same. willem is beautiful and naive, malcolm becomes an almost ghostlike character with no agency other than ‘build beautiful house', JB stays a tortured artist and jude. god poor jude.
i can't say enough about how painful it was to exist inside his head. an unbelievably smart and kind person who at no point in this entire book think he is ever worthy of being treated other than a piece of garbage to be used and abused by everyone around him. it is sickening to be rendered a helpless bystander as jude is failed again and again and again by those closest to him. the people we are supposed to believe know and love him the best. i don't believe for a second that a DOCTOR and a PARENT and a SPOUSE and the alleged litany of friends we meet through the novel wouldn't have this man forcibly committed after decades of self harm and suicide attempts. besides the fact that they do stage an intervention nearly thirty years too late, i find it so hard to believe that we are expected to believe these people love jude.
i am no stranger to dark themes and topics being the focus of literature and media (hell one of my favorite shows is SVU) but to me the key element missing here (besides the fact that it very obviously entirely made up) is that there's no resolution. suffering and pain and disability and mental illness all happen without reason in the real world but that's just it. this book ISN'T real life. it pretends to be sure but it doesn't for a second feel like anything happening is real. horrible things do happen in real life but the extent to which we have to witness them in this book is almost laughable. at no point does anything in this book mean anything. showing suffering for the sake of the suffering CAN and HAS been done well in other media, however it has always meant something. whether to show the cruelty and darkest parts of humanity or to show the resilience of the human spirit. at every twist and turn i was just screaming WHY WHY WHY.
if i could give this book less that one star i would. it's only and i mean ONLY saving grace is the formatting. i like the non linear story telling, the structure of the parts and chapters and how we follow the characters throughout their entire adult lives. the writing at times is so beautiful that it hurts and other times it's so self absorbed that i giggled in disbelief. it is too long tho, this could have been 200 pages shorter at least. in fact this book should be 0 pages lmfao.
+3 stars for: “his eyes are shut too tightly to know anything beyond his own anguish” PEOPLE DIED! I DIED!
+2 stars for: the pure SHOCK of finding out what Tyger was meant for, the FEEDING FRENZY, the great fucking resonance and the cliffhanger UGH
+1 star for: anastasia and maries relationship ugh im so soft for those two
-1 star for: THE DEATH OF THE GRANDDAME UGH MARIE YOU WILL ALWAYS BE FAMOUS “she was good. very, very good.”
-1 star for: such a slow start, this book deadass took me NINE months to finish cause it was such a slog at first
wow. wow. wow. isaac i was SO unfamiliar with your game. published nearly 75(!) years ago, foundation manages to deliver a science-forward speculative look at what a interplanetary future holds for the human race in a way that's still accessible AND bitingly funny. this book truly is the father of science fiction and i'm so happy i picked it up.
+1 star for: the prose! i was at all times giggling to myself while reading this. though we follow a multitude of characters through hundreds of years, there is still an underlying current of sarcasm that runs through them all that is portrayed in SUCH a funny way.
+1 star for: the trial of hari seldon! i was at the edge of my chair the entire time. with all of seldons crises we know from the encyclopedic foreshadowing that the main man will somehow masterfully outsmart the impending problem, THIS ONE IN PARTICULAR was the best (perhaps because it was the first)
+1 star for: the fuck ass names and lord dorwins lisp. i was SUFFERING through some of the spellings but the absolute satisfaction i got after deciphering what he was saying was just so top tier
+1 star for: space opera perfection
+1 star for: “The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receiving initiative, a freezing of caste, a damning of curiosity—a hundred other factors”.
and
“Since when does prejudice follow any law but its own”.
two of some frighteningly insightful quotes from this gem
-1 star for: white man nonsense. not a SINGLE important female character on screen other than the hateful wife and passing mentions of a mistress here or there. also every main character is just a super smart scrappy young white guy who gets his way in the end. after 5 times it gets really boring and repetitive. i know it's reflective of its time but once you notice you can't UNnotice. pretty disappointing representation from an otherwise astute look at the human condition. if this book had more variety in its protagonists and/or one less section it would have been a five star.
+1 star for: THE SAXON BANKS REVEAL!!! i gasped so loud i scared my poor roomate... sorry emily!
+1 star for: the three leading ladies! love my girls and their relationships with one another. lowkey love how they made me want to be a mom just for the gossip LMFAO
+1 star for: some laugh out loud moments like this book was so randomly funny
+1 star for: “what are you babbling on about woman”
(3.5 stars)
+1 star for: working thru trauma and falling in love!
+1 star for: brad the ugly dog, i don't think human brad got enough smoke for abandoning justin like that id be PISSED if my roomate left me like that
+1 star for: the GIGANTIC amber 23andme plot twist i was SAT, could NOT stop listening!!
+1 star for: protective best friends, maddie was my absolute favorite character
-0.5 stars for: kind of insta love... i was so thrown off by the timeline of this book because what do u mean you've known this girl for 6 weeks and you're already saying i love you and having ur whole life ruined because of her
+2 stars for: grumpy sunshine
+1 star for: healthy sisterly relationships
-1 star for: the most immature and ridiculous writing i've experienced in a while. this book feels like it had ZERO content editing. when you look up “tell don't show” in a dictionary this book would show up. it was so unbelievably frustrating to have to read about potentially exciting moments EXPLAINED to you instead of experiencing them. instead we got 60% office busy work, 20% omg look at me im so useless and clumsy bt also stunning, and 10% randomly intense character trauma. sighhhh, for me this felt like a complete waste of potential. the set up and premise seemed so full of whimsical silliness that was just completely unfulfilled. i found myself willing the pages to move faster cause i just couldn't. post reading mood: exhausted and not in a good way.