tori
oh my god....
i have never read an author who understands teenagers like alice oseman
this book is absolutely gorgeously written but it is also definitely a product of it's time lol, there was some serious early/mid-2010 lingo in here but the characters and stories made up for it 10000%
frances and aled are some of the most relatable characters and one of the most beautiful friendships i've seen written in a while. i saw so. much. of my best friend and i in the two of them and it was just incredible.
wow.
It was alright, I guess. It was really repetitive and was pretty straight forward. There weren't really any beautiful metaphors that punched me in the gut or anything like that. I really liked the last chapter, about femininity and how women are powerful and should life each other up, and that last chapter is really all thats saving this from being a one star book.
Also, I'm personally just not a fan of this style of poetry.
LAHSOSJDOJSKAKD OH MY GOODNESS
I honestly don't even know if I can put it into words the feelings this book gave me. If I had the ability to, I don't doubt that I would've finished this within a few days. Sadly, though, schooling got in the way of that :(
This was the first book in so long that made we want to stay up until the early hours of the morning reading. I haven't been so enraptured in a story in a while and this was so much fun!! I got so attached to these characters in ways I really wasn't expecting and the amount of times my jaw dropped, I made inhuman noises, or I simply clutched at my chest because of the PAIN this book inflicted is INSANE.
I have so many other books left on my TBR but there's a very high possibility I might force my mom to drive me to Barnes and Noble tomorrow to go pick up “Crooked Kingdom” and the entire “Shadow and Bone” trilogy.
Can't wait for the show to come out but definitely need to read all the others before I watch it!
THIS BOOK IS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING I CANNOT RECOMMEND THIS ENOUGH!!!!!❤️❤️❤️
The writing immediately grabs you and hooks you right into the story. It's beautifully written and the settings are all amazingly vivid while still not being too flowery and too long-winded. The characters are all so real and fleshed out. Their emotions and actions all make sense, no one does anything for no reason, and the pacing is absolutely perfect. There are twists around every turn, you think you know something, then it gets flipped completely on its head.
All I can say without spoiling anything is:
Anyone can betray anyone.
I would 100% recommend this to anyone, no matter what genre you usually prefer. This is the first fantasy I've read in a long time and what a way to jump back in. I'm going to start the second tomorrow and I am beyond excited!! I've definitely found a new favorite author!
I really really enjoyed this!! This has been on my list since I read “The Strange Fascinations Of Noah Hypnotik” a little less than a year ago. One of my favorite things about David Arnold's books is that the characters are always crazy and wild and insanely memorable. I also love how there's always a bit a fantastical element to his stories. Not in the sense of magical realism but more to the effect of “That wouldn't really happen in real life, but I'm going to suspend my disbelief for the sake of the fact that I WISH it would happen in real life”, ya know?? I absolutely adore Arnold's writing style and the way he crafts his characters.
This 100% would've gotten 5-stars if it weren't for a few key things:
1) There were a few pretty fatphobic remarks from our main character. They weren't necessarily direct but more internalized. Mim also didn't learn or grow out of that behavior. It just didn't sit right with me.
2) There was a scene that was straight out of r/thathappened. I genuinely had to set the book down and take a break for a little while after I read it. It was something to the effect of:
Bad person: being bad
Mim: says something to that person
Everyone: CLAPS
I understand that this book was written in 2014 but it definitely shows. (Also the same thing happened in “The Fault In Our Stars” and that's not forgivable either. Just ugh)
3) I wasn't a huge fan of the last line. The ending as a whole was pretty great. It had just the right mix of ambiguity and closure, something I'm realizing David Arnold does really well. However, the very last two lines just didn't fit for me. This alone wouldn't have docked it a star, but combined with my other two points, it really just solidified its place at 4 stars.
Overall, it's a really great book and I feel it definitely deserves a read.
there was a foreword that sort of let me know the ending from the beginning but honestly i didn't mind. this was incredible.
I loved this so much!! Wren was SUCH a relatable character and I really enjoyed reading about her!
In the beginning, the book was really great! I loved the perspective switched and the writing style was amazing. I loved the way that the author hinted at things and slowly revealed more and more about the characters. I also thought the humor was really well-written. I thought for sure it was going to be a five star read.
At about 15-20% I realized that the story and characters had a couple flaws, but it was still overall a pretty good story and the writing style was really saving it. I thought maybe it would be a four star.
Then, about half way through, the novelty of the writing style wore off and I was really starting to see through and flaws of the characters, especially Eleanor. Not to mention the fact that there were some side characters who were almost nothing but caricatures of stereotypes. So, maybe just a three star book.
When I got to about 60-70% of the way through the book, I just simply found Eleanor annoying. She was picking fights with Park and getting mad at him over pretty much nothing!! He would try to compliment her and she would twist his words around just to be mad at him. Also, some of the things she would say were just plain odd and borderline creepy. She would talk about how she wanted to bite Park's cheeks and “eat his face whole”. Weird. Two star.
Then, the ending. The ending actually wasn't that horrible. It was really sweet and gave the both of them sort of happy endings?? But when you really think about it, Eleanor is still being a bit of a jerk to a guy who did nothing but love her. He wrote her letters every single day and she read none of them. Nearly a year went by before she sent anything to him. It took a year of her not reading his letters and him not hearing anything in response (so, basically, no communication at all) for her to finally say “I love you.”
However, I actually really liked Park. He was one of my more favorite characters I've read about in a while. When he loved, he loved with his whole heart and he put others before himself in every situation he could. While a couple of the things he did were odd, I think that he was still a pretty great character. The fact that he was happy at the end sort of almost made up for everything Eleanor had done throughout pretty much the entire book. So. Three stars.
I think I went into this book with high hopes because I had previously read “Fangirl” by the same author and that is probably one of my all-time favorite books. Not to mention, I just finished reading “Red Queen” right before I read this one and not many books deserved to be compared to that one.
Overall... meh.
Ps. I really don't understand the whole subplot about Park needing to learn to drive shift. It just seems unnecessary and doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'm sure it's symbolic of something, but I genuinely cannot tell what.
This book was amazing. It pulled me in straight from the start. Be warned, there's not really a plot, it's more just following Francie as she grows up in Brooklyn. However, the story of her growing up and exploring and learning about the world around her is so captivating and intriguing that you'll barely notice the lack of plot. The characters have such interesting stories and lives and you get so invested into. And the characters are far from cookie cutter! They each have their own rises and pitfalls, their roses and their thorns. Also be warned if you're a cryer; the latter half of the book made me cry about three times. The last 20% of this book gave me such feelings of hiraeth, the way everything is so beautiful worded and lovingly described. This book is absolutely one of my favorites ever.
Oh. My. Goodness.
That's literally all I can say.
I just finished this and I cannot put into words how much I love this book oh my goodness.
I'll come back in the morning I need to sit with this wow
Edit: okay hello it's the next morning, here are my thoughts.
This book is PHENOMENAL. I'd heard a lot about it and thought about picking it up for a while, but when I heard someone compare it to “I'll Give You The Sun” by Jandy Nelson (my all-time favorite book) that was when I knew I needed to read this immediately. And honestly?? I really see the comparisons! Noah and Ari are super similar characters and the writing style is very similar. While Alire-Sáenz doesn't exactly match Nelson's constant flowering metaphors, this book isn't any less gorgeously written. From the very first line, before the book really even started, this book just slapped me in the face while hugging me tightly.
It was wild.
I don't want to spoil the first line but it was so painstakingly relatable and I felt understood from the first moment I opened the book.
One of my favorite quotes (aside from the first line) is:
“I knew that there was something about me that Mrs. Quintana saw and loved. And even though I felt it was a beautiful thing, I also felt it was a weight. Not that she meant it to be a weight. But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.” UGH... LOVE THAT SO MUCH!!! FELT THAT IN MY SOUL
Towards the end, I had a few ideas of where I thought it was going to go and I did end up calling one of the final conflicts, I still greatly enjoyed this.
I think this is gonna be closer to a 4.5. I'm not sure why, just kind of a gut feeling, but I'll still round up bc this book def deserves it!!!❤️❤️
DNFed at 17%. Just couldn't get into it. It was written super strangely and the characters made no sense. The kindergartener talked like a thirty-year-old which was just super off-putting (and I know that he was probably some supernatural being or something and that was supposed to be a twist later on?? But it didn't feel right)
Pretty good!! If you really like history, this'll be great for you!! I do sort of wish it went a little bit more into the conspiracy side of the mystery because throughout the entire book, they were posing many interesting questions but never answering them until the final couple pages of the book in the Postscript. But as for the rest of the book, it tells the story with just enough detail for you to really understand what happened, even if you're—like me—going into this book knowing next to nothing about the topic.
this was really fun!! i love modernizing shakespeare and i think this handled it really well
i enjoyed this a lot! i think there were parts of it that definitely dated the book and possibly didn't age well but there were also some that aged incredibly, such as fey making a joke about a writers/actors strike coming in the future due to not getting internet residuals. i would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to someday head into the entertainment industry.
I read it for school, but I had the ending spoiled for me. Meh, it was alright. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it. The imagery was really nice
i do not understand how i can feel so utterly neutral about a character then oda writes their backstory and they instantly become my FAVORITE character
PHENOMENAL!!!!!
I seriously love Jandy Nelson's writing style, it's so beautiful and I don't understand how her books aren't more popular!
Personally, I did enjoy “I'll Give You The Sun” a bit more but then again thats probably because this was her debut and I also relate to Noah more than I care to admit.
i enjoyed this!! super atmospheric and surreal. loved the author's writing style, i definitely want to check out her other works after this. the shakespeare tie-ins were super interesting, but i did get a little lost in them, trying to figure out which book character was meant to represent which shakespeare character. it's worth saying that this is NOT a retelling (like i starting thinking it was), simple a book with some parallels to a few shakepeare plays.
i honestly didn't know what to expect going into this but I really enjoyed it! there's definitely a couple problems with a couple lines, being as this book was written in 1989 but honestly nothing egregious. i loved pretty much all the characters and, honestly, for a murder mystery, there was something strangely comforting about the way it was written. it felt very cozy, in a way.
i loved all the details about the fashion and the way clothing played such a huge role in the story, it worked so well!! also the way it was written was so interesting and definitely kept me hooked and reading. the way it followed so many different, seemingly unrelated characters at the same time that then all came together so nicely at the end was incredible. the ending did wrap up a bit quick for my taste but other than that, a really great read!