Vera

Just like Garden Spells, this book takes you to a magical place and fills you up with warmth. It just made me feel cozy and at home and I was so happy to see the great great characters of Garden Spells again - also in this book, they felt so real, so honest and so familiar. Great read!

Boy, do I enjoy 200 year old gossip and drama!

While the story is interesting, the portrayal of female characters and constant sexualizing of everything kept drawing me out of it. The fact that it reads like an ongoing D&D campaign is fun but also doesn't help the story move along as we go from encounter to encounter (eg what was really the point of the cannibals). Towards the last ~50 pages the pacing picks up and I liked the idea of how the battle is faced in the end.

Yet, sadly, there's just too many dick jokes for my taste.

3.5✨
Loved the setting and it's unapologetic killing off of characters but I got the feeling that the story didn't really know where it wanted to go or at least it felt very chaotic and unimportant most of the time. I also think that Cardan was too unlikeable in the first half to consider him a love interest which doesn't really make me root for them. In the end everyone was just a bad person one way or another and it makes it a bit hard to care for the characters. However it definitely made me interested in continuing so it deserves being rounded up!

1,5 stars.

Although this book sometimes does a good job at portraying the ugly sides of mental illness and has a great concept, the plot and characters were terrible. Found myself dreading to read this and could not in the slightest understand why most of the reviews printed on the book itself describe it with„funny“ „makes you laugh out loud“ or call Moshfegh a „merciless comedian“. I could not find a single funny line in the book. And if issueing mean comments about people with eating disorders is „funny“ I fail to see the humor in that. Terrible read.