Alexa

I might be feeling particularly tender at the moment, but the ending of this story struck me. Everything about it, in fact. People waving the banners of Ravka as they celebrate the destruction of the Fold. Mal and Alina's little life in the epilogue. And their grief - of their losses, but also of who they were up to that point. Of living on while something is gone within them, but still finding meaning in their future.

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that I feel this way, as this is a tender book. Which is quite something for a 420 page final installment in a fantasy adventure trilogy. There's battles and action sequences, of course, but they're largely tedious and uninteresting. There's a lot of travelling from one location to the next that made it difficult for me to stay focused. But the meat of the story is between Alina and Mal, as well as their friends (in some ways I feel like this was a precursor to the motley crew of Six of Crows, not as well developed or established, but a prototype nonetheless). There's also a smidge of something spiritual - Bardugo goes into some really fascinating gray areas with her magic system, which I thought was really impressive and creative.

Bardugo's writing is a lot richer here as well. Far more than Shadow and Bone, and especially Siege and Storm, this is an atmospheric, immersive book that takes time to notice the people in the background - the servants, the soldiers, children and commoners. She does a lot more to build a more intricate tapestry of Ravka - from its religious zealots, to its street peddlers. These asides detailing the places they pass through and people they encounter does a little bit to show Alina's change in priorities, though in some ways I felt like it was just padding out the page count. The conclusion - from the reveal about the amplifiers, to the final confrontation with the Darkling - I think was all very well done and well-earned.

This is a hard book to rate. Past the midpoint, it became too tedious to read for me to rate it more than three stars, but the ending is good. It's too bad this series came to be at the height of YA trilogy madness, because three books seems just really cumbersome for this story, and it makes sense that both follow-up stories in this world are duologies. I'm glad that Alina got her happy ending though - maybe not a fairytale one, and not even the “good for her” ending that I found myself craving at the end of the second book, but one that is real and meaningful. I've been thinking a lot about what it takes to be happy in a painful world, and I think Bardugo nailed it here.

A partner who loves you, work that involves helping and raising people up, and a rich benefactor. I think that pretty much sums it up.

Timothy Wilde is a character in the vein of Rick Yancey's Pellinore Warthrop and Leigh Bardugo's Kaz Brekker - as in the kind of character with a preternatural gift for observation, and for absorbing and analyzing information very quickly. That is to say, these are Sherlock Holmes clones (Wilde and Warthrop being more overt homages, as Faye has written two Sherlock Holmes books, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle actually shows up [b:The Isle of Blood 9955669 The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist, #3) Rick Yancey https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389393836l/9955669.SX50.jpg 14849405]). However, where Wilde differs from these two, and every other iteration of Holmes we've seen, is that instead of pompously confident in his abilities, Wilde is profoundly humble. Like, frustratingly, achingly humble. Like, oh my god, stop beating yourself up for two seconds and actually use that wonderful brain of yours, you doofus.And when Tim is not beating himself up, he's often getting the stuffing kicked out of him by someone else. Give my poor Tim a break, Faye, please.Even though it's been a minute since I read [b:The Gods of Gotham 11890816 The Gods of Gotham (Timothy Wilde, #1) Lyndsay Faye https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1518152198l/11890816.SY75.jpg 16849818], I do remember it as a very striking mystery story, if quite dark. Seven for a Secret feels less like a mystery and more like a puzzle - a stage is set, and Timothy Wilde must figure out how what got where before it's too late. The task of saving and protecting a family targeted by slave catchers because a complex web of political scandal, a barely-there legal system that is deeply ignorant in how to protect free Black people, and a fight for personhood and freedom that the characters are mostly just trying to survive through. Most of the players and pieces are known, Timothy Wilde just has to figure out where they belong in order to save the people important to him. Silkie Marsh, evil brothel madame and the villain of the last book, is back and is looking to be Tim and Valentine's white whale. The barely established NYPD is, of course, already rife with corruption. Politics, optics, and the cultural progress of the times streak through this story, all the while our dear Tim is just trying to be a decent person in world that finds a thousand new ways to be ugly every single day.I liked this very much. Faye is great at creating compelling characters and settings, and it's easy to feel immersed. I love that the relationship between Timothy Wilde and his brother, Valentine, is shaping up to be the core of this series. And while this is a story with a white (and, admittedly, kind of oblivious when it comes to real racial issues) central character navigating an acutely Black story, there is something about the way Faye tells it that gets across the sheer terror and evil of being denied the right to be a whole person, which I don't think I've encountered often. You know what I liked less though? How many times I had to read that Silkie Marsh was incredibly beautiful and also incredibly evil. Like, I get it, a person who traffics and murders children is about as soulless as you can get, but Marsh is starting to become a bit of a cartoon character, which doesn't seem to fit with the complexity of Faye's story.But I appreciated that this book ends on a note (or several, actually) of happiness and promise. That felt needed after the amount of times Wilde got beat up.

My goodness, this book is so much fun. I think most people associate Anne Rice with brooding Byronic heroes and overwrought prose, but its a nice reminder that she knew how to write a suspenseful, well-paced, thrilling story. The Mummy has a sentimental place in my family history. My dad introduced me to Anne Rice as a teen, and I started with her independent stuff, Servant of the Bones and Violin, before moving on to the Vampire Chronicles. But for my dad, his first Anne Rice book was The Mummy, found on the bookshelf of a tenant he had after they moved out. I figured it was time to finally experience it myself, and I was not disappointed.

The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned is written a bit like a movie. Not only is it multi-POV, it ricochets back and fourth between perspectives in a way that is similar to how most movies are edited. For some, that might sound infuriating, but I assure you it keeps the pace up. It begins with Lawrence Stratford, the insatiable explorer and archaeologist, who uncovers the tomb of someone claiming to be Ramses the Damned, the true Ramses the Great, who lived for thousands of years and loved Cleopatra. Ignoring the warnings, he brings the mummy out of the tomb, and very shortly after he meets his end. Once in London, the mummy awakens, falls head over heels for Lawrence's daughter, and the two of them embark on a wild journey to avenge Lawrence's death and revisit Ramses' past.

I wrote something in college about how Anne Rice writes the ideal male character as an effervescent, passion-filled lover of life who has a profoundly innocent perspective regardless of whether he does bad things are not. In turn, her female characters are complex, dark, and much more ruthless, fixated on independence and liberation. This book is a star example of that - Ramses is an even more exaggerated version of Lestat, with an insatiable lust for everything life has to offer him, from food, to love, to sex. Likewise, Julie Stratford aches for an independence that she can't really define - however, once she finds Ramses, she spends most of the rest of the book swooning. She's a bit like something from an old Hollywood film, which felt appropriate for the vibe the book was giving off. The more darker aspects of Rice's feminine comes in the form of Cleopatra, a more complex, tragic but powerful character. However, there is a rare middle character on this spectrum at play here - Elliott Savarell, Lawrence's former lover and father to Julie's fiance, Alex. Elliott is clever, diplomatic, romantic but also ambitious. And don't get me started on Henry, the spoiled rich boy cousin of Julie who's descent into gambling and excess have turned him into the perverted version of Rice's ideal man.

This is something I wish people would pay better attention to when story telling - when you get a bunch of characters together that have very distinct roles/perspectives/attitudes, it makes every scene white hot, regardless of what's happening. There is a dinner scene in this book that is one of the best things I have ever read, because every person in it has their own distinct motivations, perspectives, and understanding of the situation. How do you make a story where not a lot is really happening for a while feel so fast-paced and so fun? By creating awesome character dynamics, not to mention smooth-as-butter writing, and an unapologetic love for the characters, regardless of how innocent or wicked they may be.

Things slow down a tad in the last stretch. You know how sometimes at the end of a supernatural horror movie you find yourself asking, "Wait, what did they tell the police?" This book answers that, only it does it before the climax, which is a bit of a drag. However, once it gets rolling again, it dives right into a thrilling ending. I don't know how many times or in how many ways I can say this book is incredibly fun. If you like the idea of reading an old Hollywood monster movie, but with all the sex and queer characters left in, you will probably love this book. It's suspenseful, deeply romantic, and has a great ending.

It is very difficult to define how I feel about this book. At first, I saw the things that I typically like about Chuck Wendig books - good pacing, humor, irreverence, bloody violence. But after a while it started to feel like a lot. The extremely self-aware dialogue felt like a lot, the many different POVs felt like a lot, and honestly, the fact that instead of ignoring that “funny feeling”, as Bo Burnham put it, that we're all feeling these days for the sake of escaping into a fantasy/horror novel, Wendig just leaned right into it, with not only characters bringing it up pretty regularly, but the whole story kind of hinges on it. Because Chuck Wendig is an asshole.

It starts simple enough, the way most horror stories begin. Nate Graves, his wife, Maddie, and son, Oliver, decide to move into Nate's childhood home after Nate's father dies and leaves the home to him in a roundabout way that's likely so he can screw Nate over one last time, as if a childhood of abuse wasn't enough. They decide to take the house for Oliver, who's extremely high empathy is making it difficult for him to even exist, and some woods and a fresh start seem like a good idea. It's not. Because as it turns out something has been going from world to world to get to Oliver, with the intention of ending everything once and for all.

Yes, that's right, this is a multi-verse story. We've got a lot of those lately, don't we? Must have something to do with that funny feeling again. Like Stories of Old on YouTube made an excellent video essay speculating why, which I highly recommend, though fair warning - it will likely make you cry and/or trigger an existential crisis. The Book of Accidents is very much in the vein of all these other multi-verse stories, except it calls out directly why we are so drawn to them right now - the impossibility of choice. The terror of id one thing had been different, we might be different. If we had been spared pain, if we had chosen someone else, if we had stood firm instead of running away. This book is about cycles of abuse, about how much you actually have to sacrifice to put more good in the world than bad, and finding your own power.

I think this book is fascinating with a lot of really cool ideas. I found that I didn't really love the experience of reading it though. It might have been because the dialogue was a little too on the nose. You know when an author is so good at making characters talk and act realistically, that it veers right into uncanny valley territory and your brain just refuses to accept it? That's kind of what this was like. The multiple POVs also felt tiresome, I really wanted to stick with one (if I could claim a preference, I think Maddie would have been good choice for a sole POV character). That said, the story was super cool. The horror aspects were awesome, the fantasy aspects were hella weird, and I love weird. I kind of just wish it were more of just one thing, or even a few things, rather than the explosion of things it is.

I spent a lot of this book with my mind in two places - in the story, and wondering where the story and reality meet. As it turns out, the only thing that's real in the story is the author and his memories of his childhood and his town. Which made me feel like I wasted a bunch of mental energy on a book that was overall fine.

Inspired by events in his hometown, Richard Chizmar weaves an interesting blend of memoir and novel creating a faux true-crime piece of fiction. It's an...interesting experiment. Most writers would take his inspiration (a serial “fondler” that was breaking into women's homes in his hometown) and then turn it into pure fiction - but Chizmar wanted to do something very different. The main character is not someone based off him, it is him. The town isn't based off his hometown, it is his hometown. But the events at the center of the story, and the people they pertain to, are entirely fictional.

I think what mostly didn't click with me is the writing style. I don't read a lot of true crime, but it's my understanding there is still plenty of art and style to writing non-fiction. Chizmar's prose is pretty bland - I'm pretty sure this is intentional, but I don't think he needed to go that far with it. His recollections of his hometown and his life border on hokey with their sentimentality, and while its sweet that something like this is written with so much love, I wasn't really looking for something sweet. The mystery at the center - a serial killer attacking and killing teenage girls - feels fairly generic. A decent but forgettable episode of Criminal Minds, basically.

As such, I don't really have much to say about this. The primary appeal of this book is the novelty of what it is, and that it is a fairly easy read. Otherwise, I didn't really get much out of it.

What a bunch of nonsense.To be fair, when this book began, I was on board. From the very first line, The Atlas Six announces itself as absolutely up its own ass. And that's fine, that's great even, I love pretentious books about magic and libraries and borderline sociopaths. But by the time I found myself somewhere in the middle, I realized the overwritten dialogue and soulless characters had long overstayed their welcome. Six young magicians are chosen by the mysterious Alexandrian Society, the holders of the lost library of Alexandria, to spend a year proving that they are worthy of the library's secrets. At the end of the year, they must choose one of them to eliminate, and drunk with the possibility of learning the long lost secrets of magic and history, they agree, not thinking about what “elimination” might actually mean. Each of them are exceptional magicians in their particular skill sets, but four of them - Nico and Libby, the physical magicians, Reina, the naturalist, and Tristan, who has the least defined abilities but can see through illusions - find themselves caught in a game between the two psychics - Parisa, the telepath, and Callum, the empath. When it becomes clear what the stakes are, they have to choose who they are going to align themselves with - and who is going to die. Granted, it's not quite balanced as that. The group takes an immediate disliking to Callum over Parisa, probably because he can manipulate their emotions, whereas as far as they know, Parisa can only read their minds, not change them. But even if she doesn't have a magical ability to do so, that doesn't stop her from doing exactly that. She's also the certified Sexy Girl, and I would like to implore writers going forward - if you are thinking of writing a female character defined by her sex appeal, please for the love of god, reconsider. It's so, so, so boring.Probably the character I enjoyed the most was Callum. Even though his chapters probably had the most florid ruminating, at least it was fucking fun. He was doubtful that Tristan would be capable of understanding that, but the sensation of being liked was extraordinarily dull. It was the closest thing to vanilla that Callum could think of, though nothing was truly comparable. Being feared was a bit like anise, like absinthe. A strange and arousing flavor. Being admired was golden, maple-sweet. Being despised was a woodsy sulfuric aroma, smoke in his nostrils; something to choke on, when done properly. Being envied was tart, a citrusy tang, like green apple. Being desired was Callum's favorite. That was smoky, too, in a sense, but more sultry, cloaked and perfumed in precisely what it was. It smelled like tangled bedsheets. It tasted like the flicker of a candle flame. It felt like a sigh, a quiet one; concessionary and pleading. He could always feel it on his skin, sharp as a blade. Piercing, like the groan of a lover in his ear.Callum is the character that is the most in tune with himself and the most in touch with his magic. In his twisted way, he's the one that actually gives you a sense of thrill and excitement about it. In every other sense, magic is mostly seen as mundane, confusing or a nuisance. (There's something in here about attaching virtue to suffering, and how only villains are allowed to appreciate their power and enjoy themselves.) Reina resents her abilities because she is essentially a battery for plants, Libby can barely control her abilities, Nico pushes himself to the point of masochism (Nico's backstory/side plot in general is extremely overwritten, like Blake was desperately trying to make him sympathetic and interesting, and it's just really hard to keep him connected to the rest of the story), and Tristan doesn't even understand what he can do. The only exception to this is Parisa, who uses her ability well and consistently, but that gets kind of ruined because of this fucking Hot Girl Who Bones Everything In Sight absurdity. Each character though feels like they have a similar voice, a similar perspective, and that turns the rhythm of the story into a dull drone. I thought Reina might be an exception to the ethical vaccum that the rest of the characters represent, if only because she's so underutilized and the few chapters she had could have provided a reprieve. But no, she's just as callous and self-centered as the rest of them, and so when little nervous Libby suddenly tries to say, “Hey, isn't this wrong?” it feels completely meaningless.I realized something when I was thinking about the books that this reminds me of. The obvious seminal piece for this is, of course, [b:The Secret History 29044 The Secret History Donna Tartt https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451554846l/29044.SY75.jpg 221359], but the books it reminded me of more were Taherah Mafi's [b:Shatter Me 10429045 Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1) Tahereh Mafi https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1310649047l/10429045.SY75.jpg 15333458] series. Aside from it also having a blond socipathic empath (not as novel as you might think, as The Bright Sessions does a similar thing with Damien), the Shatter Me books are characterized by over-the-top characters with over-the-top feelings and a lot of long chunks of dialogue of said characters talking about themselves, each other, and those feelings, with very little actual plot. This has a catnip-like effect on certain kinds of readers -evidenced by the extremely high ratings these books have-, who are really just looking for characters to ship in a coffee shop AU, rather than a tightly-wound story. Because what separates The Atlas Six and Shatter Me from The Secret History, a book that also has hyper-stylized hyper-real characters with rich dynamics and big feelings but is not only extremely popular but is arguably considered a modern classic, is that Donna Tartt's characters don't exist for you. They exist for the story. Henry Winter may sound like someone drawn up from a teenager's notebook, but he exists in his world, with his own secrets and motivations. He's not fan service.When Callum tells Tristan that Tristan is drawn to him because Callum reminds him of his father, yes, that's technically good character work, but you're not supposed to just say it! It's supposed to be illustrated through the story and the characters' actions. There is so much telling and so much talking in this book, that by the time it gets to the last couple of chapters, it's basically just word salad. Not to mention, the climactic reveal is mostly just confusing and overwritten in a way that makes me think that Blake didn't really figure that aspect of the plot out until the very last second, if at all.I am giving this two stars because, as stated, I like the premise and the world, but also...I got a whiff the catnip too. The meat of the relationship between Callum and Tristan is not really there - but that's not what Blake was really going for, was it? Again, it's about giving Big Feelings with Vague Circumstances, so that you can take that and run with it in your own head. Normally I would look at something like this and think - who greenlit this? But this strategy gets attention and makes money. Not a bad plan.

This book is an absolute blast. I'm not sure I want to get much more in depth than that. I was looking for some fun, punchy horror and I got it.

The set-up is a simple one, and fairly recognizable to anyone who has watched a horror movie, or really any movie centered around teens. Quinn Maybrook and her widowed father move from Philadelphia to a small town in the Midwest called Kettle Springs. They're looking for a fresh start, and the town needed a new doctor. Despite wanting to keep her head down, she finds herself falling in with an unusual band of rebels - as though the popular kids had gone a little rotten. When she's invited to a party out in the cornfield, Kettle Springs starts to feel pretty cool. And then a clown with a cross bow shows up.

Clown in a Cornfield is not remotely subtle. It takes a look at our country and the current zeitgeist, and puts it in microcosm. With lots of blood, whirring chainsaws, wayward teens and angry Boomers. This book is about how much we hate young people, and why we keep killing them in the kinds of movies this book was inspired by. And despite taking on all this so unapologetically, it is still so much fun. It does take its time to set up the character dynamics, and honestly I didn't mind that much, because once it gets going, it does not stop.

For horror, it's not that scary. It has gore and it has violence, but not really the kind of suspense that gets you spooked, though there is plenty of tension and some great classic horror beats. I actually found the unraveling and the revealing of the villains a bit more interesting than the perseverance of the central characters, but that's a subtle distinction. I kept turning the page, and I had a damn good time doing it.

I am so glad I decided to read this out of spite.

That's very glib, I'm sorry. I don't want to give you the impression that I haven't thought about this extensively, because I am not the type of person who makes any decision or judgment without overthinking it into oblivion. And I have thought about Lauren Hough and all that surrounds her a lot. Like, an embarrassing amount of a lot. But I don't want to use a review to get on a soap box or make rationalizations or justifications. I really just want to tell you that this book is incredible. I will tell you that after all my overthinking, what I kept coming back to was this - I don't think Lauren Hough is a person who acts out of hate, merely someone who is complicated, who has made mistakes, and is still learning, and still changing. And most importantly, that she is still a person worth listening to.

Also - she had a right to be mad. That's something that, with over a year out from that whole thing where a certain highly-motivated portion of you decided to one-star this book, I feel very unambiguously about. She had a right to be mad, and she had a right to be as ugly about it as she wanted to be. One day, you will all figure that out.

Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing might be one of the best things I've ever read. A memoir in essays, written in a grounded but lyrical prose that worms itself into your head, it is hilarious, irreverent, gut-wrenching and inspiring. I feel a little self-conscious about saying it's inspiring, that it's relatable, that it's validating, when my life was so drastically different from Hough's. I don't typically read literary non-fiction. I meant it when I said I read this out of spite, I am for the most part a genre fiction person. I don't like the idea of wading into someone's trauma for the sake of entertainment. But this isn't trauma porn - this is about class, this is about gender, this is about sex and community and learning to become the person you are when no one taught you how.

“Solitaire,” the first essay is an easy favorite, covering her history in the Children of God, her unreliable hippie parents, her military service and the discrimination she suffered due to her sexuality. I read the majority of it by the pool and found myself wanting to get up and pace like a mad woman. Much like the “Cable Guy” piece that went viral and got her the opportunity to write this book, it is a fantastic and infuriating piece of writing. The book doesn't lose any steam after that. “Slide” and “Badlands” will make you far more aware of the money you make and waste, the food you throw away, the homes and support you take for granted. “Boys on the Side” is incredible for how hilarious it is, despite talking about Hough's rape in the military and the deep fear that came with being young and gay in the 90s. Knowing that this woman had to give herself a pep talk in the bathroom mirror when she had sex with a woman for the first time was so validating for a late-blooming baby gay like me. “How to Make an Enemy” is a brutal disassembly of Hough's own bad habits and coping mechanisms, created by an insecure and abusive childhood that led to an adulthood of hypervigilance and passivity. It is all, like everything, about finding a way to be safe and to be loved.

The book gets harder to read from that point, even when it was already hard, but it is very worth it. I realized that I had to stop reading it before bed because I wouldn't sleep well afterward, as my mind and body would be buzzing. It sneaks up on you. Hough doesn't write like she's trying to make you feel bad for her, or to even make you understand what any of this felt like. The most descriptive she gets is in “Cell Block,” a justifiably brutal portrayal of her experience in jail, after getting into a fight with and making an enemy of a well-connected person in her community. But even through all that, even as she talks about her slide into depression in adulthood, her anger and defiance coupled toxically with a crippling inability to advocate for herself, there is still this desire in her to push through. She says in the final essay, “Everything That's Beautiful Breaks My Heart,” a manifesto-esque examination of our modern world through the eyes of someone who tried her best to be a part of it and found it hollow, “But the thing I know about depression is if you want to survive it, you have to train yourself to hold on; when you can see no reason to keep going, you cannot imagine a future worth seeing, you keep moving anyway. That's not delusion. That's hope. It's a muscle you exercise so it's strong when you need it.”

It's honestly incredible that anyone could come within ten feet of this book and not recognize its brilliance. It is a valuable piece of queer history, a striking portrayal of poverty and working class life, layered with the knowledge and acute perspective of someone who understands cult thinking and cult behavior inside and out. All things that are incredibly important to understand always but especially now. A writer doesn't have to be a perfect person to create valuable work. Most are far from it, in fact. And insisting that everything you read and consume be created by someone as pure as the driven snow is not going to create a world of valuable art. Not to mention, you will also drive yourself insane in the process. Look, I'm not going to try to tell anyone how to live their life, and if it wasn't clear by now, I would probably ride to hell and back for this woman at this point. But let me make a suggestion - you don't actually have to put yourself in contortions over every perceived misdeed. You can just let things be. Understand the “isness,” as Aldous Huxley called it, of something or someone and move forward. Or don't. This advice goes for everyone, by the way.

As for Hough, It doesn't take much to see the very clear throughline between what she describes going on in her own head and what we see her do. She responded to trauma by erasing herself, and letting herself and her identity belong to other people. It was only when she was fighting for someone else that she was finally able to stand her ground. She literally lays this all out in “Badlands,” when she talks about her experiences as a bouncer. It's also not hard to see how once someone like this has the slightest bit of control and power - and the detachment of the internet certainly provides some of that - a similar effect happens. It wasn't until barely a decade ago, according to her, that Hough really began to become herself, to set boundaries, to define herself and take pride in all the ways she is different, as opposed to assimilating.

It's possible she over-corrected.

Or maybe she didn't. Maybe she did what she's always done. Maybe she became exactly what you wanted her to be.

Man, I seem consistently drawn to stories about moonshiners, but somehow they all end up being rather humdrum.

Revelator is the story of Stella Birch, of her adolescence in the cove raised by her strict and strange grandmother, and her role as the revelator of a small cult; and ten years later, having left the cove behind, making money as a moonshiner, and then called back after her grandmother dies and she has to finally face the choices she made back then. Do you ever get the feeling when you're reading something that the author made an outline and just never deviated from it? Or just never found the seeds in the middle that would make it grow into something special? This was one of those books for me.

Revelator is unique, but also pretty straight forward. As such, I don't have much to say about it. It's fine? I loved the dialogue, and the prose flowed well enough that when I sat down to read it it was relatively easy to get sucked in. Though that was mostly when I was reading adult Stella's chapters, young Stella was very frustrating and kind of annoying. I wanted to dig more into who Stella had become, but most of plot I found uninteresting, which came through in the climax and finale which I really had to push myself through and largely skim to finish.

I like this book for its atmosphere, and it is delightfully weird in many ways. However, the characters and plot just didn't have a whole lot of pull.

When I decided to pick up A Certain Hunger, it was because I was craving something unapologetically wrong. There is so much discourse right now about the meanings of the actions of a character, about what stories one should or should not enjoy based on their moral standing, and whether the portrayal of a bad thing (ambiguously, floridly, or with condemnation) renders a work worthless. And it's starting to weigh on me. It seemed that the most dangerous stuff I read in my life I got my hands on as a teenager, and now that I have all the freedom of an adult, I am absorbing media that, in so many different ways, is walking on eggshells. So I wanted something bad, I wanted something violent, I wanted something unforgivable. I wanted something about women doing bad things because they can. And that's exactly what I got.

“Gleeful, we banquet on flesh.”

A Certain Hunger feels like a throwback to how stories used to be told - a person with a story, telling it to someone who wants to know. Except it's the 21st century now, and instead the vampire Lestat or Jonathan Harker, its Dorothy Daniels, a middle-aged self-professed psychopath, murderer of men, and cannibal. A Certain Hunger is her life story, her confession, told trimly and indulgently, with pretension, with dignity and an unbridled love for flesh. All kinds, and in all ways. The grown-ups are talking now, thank you. You will learn more about meat, more about food, and more about bodies than you thought you could in 250 pages.

A book hasn't sung to me like this since the Vampire Chronicles. Summers writes so beautifully, you feel like you could lick the blood off the page. I miss writing like that. A lot of it comes from sheer knowledge - of words, of culture, of food. I simply do not have the vocabulary to replicate a lot of what Summers does here (but I was definitely taking notes). But a lot of it comes from a willingness to play. At one point, Summers used the phrase “festive estival” and I about threw the book across the room. This woman is a menace of a writer and I love her.

I do wish that I had read this when I still thought I was attracted to men. And I will admit, the stories of Dorothy's early life were not that stirring. However, there was still a deep attraction there. It reminded me of myself when I was young - more importantly, who I wanted to be. Who I thought I would be. As it turns out, being a writer in a big city is actually really expensive and lonely, and chewing through men is a cool aesthetic but the reality is men are generally pretty uninteresting. The bit goes cold quickly. But Dorothy is a wish-fulfillment fantasy as much as Cinderella is. A power fantasy - a dream of being both detached enough to not be bothered, but still being able to enjoy the glimmering taste of it all.

I wonder though if I did really get what I wanted. There are several moments where Dorothy chastises and judges the eating habits and bodies of others. Something that I immediately picked up on as “problematic,” and then remembered what book I was reading. So did Dorothy, who promptly pointed out the obvious - she's a fucking cannibal. You're not supposed to think she's right. But you do enjoy it - both her violence and her judgment. “You slip in to the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy, moral business, and feel like you are a better person,” she says. She's giving you permission. But I wouldn't have minded if we didn't have that permission. I think I would have liked a little bit more mess, a little bit more rot. But maybe even cannibals have their limits.

This is one of those reads that I spent a considerable amount of time getting through, but have little to say about it by the end. I felt like the bones, structure, everything about this story should have been good, great even, but it just wasn't.

Touraine is a lieutenant in the Balladairan army - a powerful colonial empire that took Touraine from her home country, Qazal, as a child, and made her into a loyal soldier. Which she is. She wants nothing more than to rise in the ranks and prove herself worthy. As you can imagine, that's not what happens. In fact, almost as soon Touraine sets foot in Qazal, as part of a battalion of other conscripts like her, things start to go wrong. Sure, she saves the life of the princess, or at least helps a bit. But within a week, she's on trial and facing execution. Instead, Princess Luca plucks her from the military's clutches and makes her her personal assistant, in the hopes that Touraine's inherent ties to her country will help Luca quell a growing rebellion. This will prove to not be a great plan.

There was something I found myself craving while reading this book. Something about it just needed to be...meaner. Maybe. There's grit and death and war, yes, but none of it really seems to land. One of my biggest points of frustration was that whenever a major event or action sequence happened I often came away from it confused rather than excited. It's not like the plot is particularly complex or anything, but whenever some twist happened I would spend several pages going, “Wait, what?”

I also never found Touraine particularly compelling. She's not really impressive at, like, anything. Most of the book she spends forced around by events, changing sides and allegiances, and dying and getting saved repeatedly. Luca I wanted to like more, I liked the promise of a princess that is sharp and weary, rather than, well, princess-y. But she's still pretty naive, and it undermines anything that would be intellectually interesting about her. Also, I never really felt any chemistry between them.

This is a political thriller with pretty thin politics, a military-fantasy with not a whole lot strategy and confusing action sequences (though Touraine's one-on-one fights with Jaghotai and Cantic were definite highlights). For all the effort put into the world, the meat of the story felt pretty anemic to me. It premise and setting had a ton of potential, but I felt like it just never went anywhere.

Now this is how you do a gothic romance! Because even though it doesn't spend that much time on describing the dust and the dark hallways, it is committed to its characters, to its love story and to its horror.Jane Shoringfield has everything figured out. Not wanting to be a burden to her adoptive parents when they decide to move to a new city, Jane decides that the best decision is to get married to someone who respects her need for independence. A marriage of convenience in the truest sense. She makes a list of thirteen men and at the top is Augustine Lawrence, the reclusive surgeon, who after some resistance, agrees. What she doesn't expect is their almost immediate connection, the satisfaction that working in her new husband's surgery would bring her, and the desire they would have for each other. She also doesn't expect that hidden inside his crumbling manor is a collection of phantoms and a madness created from dark magic and an even darker guilt.I really love this. The relationship between Jane and Augustine is tender, awkward and incredibly...nerdy? This is what happens when two very introverted, dedicated, logical people meet and fall in love. Jane is deeply relatable in all her awkwardness, but without being embarrassing to read about (I'm thinking of the protagonist of [b:Rebecca 17899948 Rebecca Daphne du Maurier https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386605169l/17899948.SX50.jpg 46663] - there is a long tradition of humiliating the heroines of gothic romance novels). Augustine is charming and complex enough that you can see why he is so attractive to Jane, but also recognize the flaws that will become more significant as the story goes on. Because for all this book's sweetness, it's also very dark, gory and spooky. For what it's worth, Jane and Augustine are adorably into it - their wedding rings are made from human bone, after all. I love that Caitlin Starling establishes a world that is not our world, but just adjacent to it - carefully side-stepping the possible religious implications of the magic involved. And I love the magic. I love that it has consequences, I love that it clearly has rules but those rules are not always knowable. And I love the fact that what gives Jane a knack for it is her love of math.This book is also not quiet about what it wants to say. The old, neglected mansion has always been a perfect metaphor for depression, for mistakes that can't be fixed, for the pieces of us that we're most ashamed of and want to hide. This book pulls all that subtlety out into the light, and in Jane it gives us a character that asks “Why hide?” Why be ashamed of the things you can't control? Why hide in the dark when you can choose to act? Augustine is fascinating because he is kind and thoughtful, but also carries a slippery kind of narcissism - the kind that pulls darkness towards him because he believes himself responsible and deserving of that darkness. Jane has to face the question, like a lot of us do throughout our lives - what do you do when you love that person? What are you willing to do for them? And how long can you wait for them to do it for themselves?A lot of reviews for books I've been reading have been talking about “beautiful prose,” and I found that I haven't agreed in many of those cases. Great prose should evoke and every once in a while stand out enough and let you know it's there, but it's primary purpose is to tell you the story in the best way possible. This book does that. Starling's writing is incredible. Which is good because the final act is not for everyone. It's a lot of Jane inside her own head, barely holding on to sanity and reality. And it's not a small section of the book. The climax and finale are also pretty bonkers, and it's only because of the goodwill that the rest of the book established that I trusted that it made any sense at all. Overall, it's satisfying, even if it makes you feel like your head is spinning a bit.The Death of Jane Lawrence is an incredibly successful gothic romance and piece of horror. It doesn't have the full five stars for me because of the deep weirdness of the ending and final act. Even though I enjoyed it, I wanted it to be more refined. But overall, beautiful prose, great story and wonderful characters.

DNFThis book...was not ready to be published. It still reeks of a young, inexperienced author trying to figure out how to tell a story, create a world and inspire with evocative prose, all of which Mikuta tries so hard at you can feel how hard she's trying.The world is incredibly flimsy, the different sides only vaguely established. Militaries that don't really behave like military, rebel factions that don't really seem like rebel factions. It all just seems like high school. Gearbreakers reminded me a lot of [b:Honey Girl 49362138 Honey Girl Morgan Rogers https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1591632931l/49362138.SY75.jpg 74797148], in the way it uses a lot of lyrical and flowery prose - or an attempt at it, anyway - and tries really really hard to make the characters sound like they have a youthful camaraderie, but mostly sounds forced. It sounds like a college student trying to replicate the spontaneity of their friend group on paper, but in this case its even more out of place because these are supposed to be trained killers. And honestly, the prose was better in Honey Girl.Here's the thing - it's not enough to make a sentence sound pretty. It has to serve your story, and you have to use words and structure that speaks to what is happening within the story. Mikuta uses a lot of passive voice because it sounds elegant and different, but it undercuts the action at every turn.The moment the Pilot recoils, her palm presses flat beneath his chin, and his enraged shout winds down to a single note before disappearing altogether. Even from here, I can see the point where his eye flickers out, and an almost sweet tone takes the girl's growl as she reaches the same conclusion. But before she can shove him away and leap to her feet, the butt of a guard's rifle falls against her temple, sending the dark eyes spinning back as she crumples.That is way too many words for an action sequence. I honestly could barely figure out what was going on most of the time, it gave me a headache trying to parse things out. I'd say this was a good start for someone working on their first manuscript, but not a published work. Mikuta has some interesting ideas, but not the skill those ideas called for.

What an absolutely evil little piece of fiction. Like spending the day with the worst person you've ever met, but hey, he knows how to land punchline.

Emily Tesh writes the best novellas. Like in Silver in the Wood, the pacing here is perfect. A tightly-wound yet dreamy story, with characters that are pointedly and evocatively written. Creepy, mysterious and oh-so-sweet.

Not for me! Very cringy teen urban fantasy stuff, a la CW shows or that terrible 00s witch boy movie, The Covenant. Also just way to heterosexual for my tastes.

It took me a minute - and when I say a minute, I mean about 200 pages or so - to realize that The Fifth Season didn't really feel like a story in of itself, but an opening chapter to a very large book. Also, that I wasn't enjoying it very much.

The world of The Fifth Season is one of regular calamity. Apocalyptic earthquakes and seismic events happening every hundred years or less, never allowing civilization to advance. What's viewed as both the protectors and the banes of this world are the orogenes - people born with the ability to affect the movements of the earth. If they're not killed at childhood when their abilities are discovered, they are taken to the Fulcrum, where they are trained to use their powers for the greater good. Make no mistake though, the Fulcrum is not Hogwarts. Grits are brought up with the knowledge that they literally don't count as people, and they have little right to their own bodies or their own lives. The Fifth Season gives us three perspectives into this world at three different times - a girl just brought to the Fulcrum to begin her training, an accomplished four-ringer assigned to a mission and to make a baby with another far more powerful orogene, and an orogene woman who had been in hiding, longing for revenge during the end of the world.

It's going to be hard to put my finger on it exactly, but I think what it was was that I never really felt invested in any of the characters. It certainly wasn't the world building, which as you could probably tell is absolutely fascinating. It's dense, for sure, but Jemisin has never been the type of writer to hold your hand. But what becomes clear within a few chapters is that this is a world built on horrible oppression and, most notably, the abuse of children. That left me with this tension throughout the whole book, like I was always anticipating a blow. When it came to the central characters, there wasn't enough that I felt like I could celebrate with them or about them, the only thing I felt with much acuteness was their pain. A book with mostly pain and little enjoyment feels kind of like a raw deal, doesn't it?

This is certainly a well-written book, with lots of fascinating plot devices, mysterious allies, and super creepy villains. There's some pretty exciting sequences, and Jemisin manages to make the orogenes' use of their powers not seem too abstract (there are some moments though when that stuff just kind of goes by in a blur). I just.... I don't know, I wasn't feeling it. It might have been the voice. Jemisin has always balanced her lofty fantasy worlds with relatable dialogue and sarcasm, but I think in this case the reliance on ironic humor made me feel more detached and even annoyed than invested. I think there's also some issues with the pacing. The way it bounces back and forth between perspectives, and the amount of time character spends traveling and observing things rather than doing things often ground things to halt. Jemisin has gotten away with this in the past, but that's mostly because I adored the characters and didn't mind wandering around for 300 pages with them. This was definitely not the case here.

This is one of those books that is really difficult to rate. Somewhere a little above a 3, because it feels more substantial than most middling 3-star books, but definitely not a 4 for me. A fascinating world, but not a very enjoyable story.

throws hands in the airI mean, I'm pretty sure I get why people like this. Or rather, I can imagine the mentality. You've dreamed about sweet, overly sensitive bookish men and being the otherworldly woman who changes his life? I'm not saying that Addie LaRue is an MPDG or anything - that phrase is so dead - I'm saying that this book relies heavily on you soaring on the emotional wave that is created by a pretty boy and an immortal girl's relationship (and I guess the magic of New York City, or whatever), because this certainly isn't relying on plot twists or tense rising action. But in order for that to work, you have to actually feel that emotional wave. And I did not. I spent his entire book standing on a dry beach, wondering where all the waves were.Adeline LaRue was born in the wrong century. It's not that she wants to be anything in particular, she just wants something more than 17th century provincial French life. But that's what she was going to get. At 23, she had nearly ensured spinsterhood when a damn widower comes to town and needs a wife. He'll settle for old maid Addie. Desperate to escape, despite never doing anything in her 23 years to do so before - aside from hiding in her parents' house-, she runs to the woods and prays to the old gods to grant her a way to be free. An old god answers, but a dark one, and because she doesn't really know what she wants only what she doesn't, she manages to garner herself a pretty terrible deal. She gets her freedom, and an immortal life complete with her eternal youth and health - but in turn she cannot be remembered. Everyone she knew before would forget her, and everyone she meets going forward will forget her as well as soon as she's out of sight. This leads to a pretty miserable couple of years figuring out how to exist when always just out of people's sight and mind. She can't own anything, she can't tell anyone who is she is or her story. She can't make a mark, or change anything. But eventually, she starts to figure out the rules. Eventually she starts to squeeze in moments of joy and wonder between trying to find a place to sleep for the night. All the while, the old god from the wood dogs her step, trying to convince her to give in and surrender her soul. She holds on to it out of spite, and despite everything her curse puts her through, there's always more to see. And eventually, she makes it to modern day. Eventually she meets a boy who actually remembers her.I feel like a bit of an asshole for not having much sympathy for Addie. As a woman born in the 20th century, I have everything she wanted - I have independence, I have agency. I can travel, I can choose to be married or not, have children or not. But maybe it's the times we're in - we're all craving something simple. Something comfortable. Hell, there's a whole movement of people obsessed with the provincial aesthetic and lifestyle (granted, with less patriarchy). Something about the way Addie sneers at the people of her village - the weak-chinned man who she's betrothed to, the childhood friend who is content to marry and have children and play her part - leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This new spin on the Not-Like-Other-Girls Girl is the extent of Addie's personality for a large portion of the book, before her stubbornness takes over. And I thought this would be examined at some point - not necessarily that Addie would regret her decision, even after the years of suffering she goes through because of it, but that she would look back on her old life and realize that there was value there, and there wasn't really anything special or more deserving about her. But that's literally never discussed. You're apparently supposed to take Addie's aimless desire at face value.I spent a good chunk of my adolescence reading about sad immortals, thanks to Anne Rice. Lestat de Lioncourt, interestingly, has a similar origin story to Addie. Doomed to a backwater life in 18th century France, desperate to live a life that is something more, he finds himself in the path of a powerful immortal, who damns him to a dark eternal life. The difference is that Lestat, like, actually does stuff before this point. He runs off with his boyfriend, he joins a group of traveling actors. Lestat is a bipolar vampire, but you feel his lust for life from the very beginning. You get none of this from Addie. Even as she starts to enjoy her life as a ghost, it is as an observer. Wow, she likes opera, why should I care?A book like this should be lush and decadent. A character like this should drip with agency and passion. I feel like this book thinks its doing that, it seems very impressed with itself. But Addie's various encounters throughout her long life are not very interesting. Even the old god (who Addie names Luc) who granted her wish over the centuries is not very interesting, neither is their relationship (which is a pretty big handicap, as its important to the plot). This book actually seems very uninterested in anything eternal - while Luc points out that Addie is barely human anymore after her 300 years, she never once examines herself from this lens. The effect this curse has had on her humanity is never discussed. Likewise, Luc may be a god, but he is treated in the most mundane ways. A good chunk of this book is Addie and her doomed sad boy lover, Henry, going to various art installations around New York City, much the same way Addie figured out the best way to survive 300 years was to just to see a lot of stuff. I don't need a bunch of student art projects described to me, thanks. I wasn't a fan of [b:If We Were Villains 30319086 If We Were Villains M.L. Rio https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1480717682l/30319086.SY75.jpg 45743348], but that is a great example of doing that well. However, M.L. Rio only does this two or three times, and she makes a point to really dig into the emotional impact of the art (and the scenes are described gorgeously), not to mention how they are wound in with the plot. This is genuinely just Henry and Addie doing stuff because art is nice, I guess. And yes, there's the theme of Addie being a muse, but I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be getting out of all this.Let's talk about Henry real quick. I was hearing some criticism about this book and how white it is. The thing is - it's not, actually. Henry is Jewish, his best friend is black. Yes, Addie spends most of her life in predominantly white areas, except when she spends thirty years in New Orleans (which is basically skimmed despite it being pretty important to the finale!). Here's the thing though - it feels really white. It feels like a lot of privileged white whining. As if the preoccupation on art installations and stuff weren't enough, you have Henry and his sad. I already talked about how Addie's problems during her mortal human life seem quibbling, and I'm not here to belittle what sounds like Henry's clinical depression and possible personality disorder. But his problems are never presented this way. Rather, he just...feels things! Super hard! As far as I can tell, aside from having a jerk for a brother, Henry has never had it particularly rough. But like Addie he can never decide on what he wants so he dates the wrong women and studies the wrong things, and before you know it he's contemplating suicide after a marriage proposal gets rejected (do you know what kind of guys do that? Not good ones). Again, I thought this would be addressed in some way. But all Henry is told at the end is to, like, actually live his life and stuff, whereas I think some better advice would be to go the therapy and consider medication. I have rambled about this enough. My point is that there are no peaks and valleys to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. There is no plot development that I didn't see coming a mile away. There is really no rise, not compelling conflict. It just kind of...goes? The same way Addie lives day to day, I just drifted from page to page, not really getting anything out of any moment in particular. There are a lot of ways to make a story like this more compelling - but a lot of them mean making it darker and more dangerous. Anne Rice was a master of fabulism and sweeping you off your feet - but the content she wrote was deeply problematic at times. Maybe the kind of shamlessness this book required is not really possible in this day and age. Instead, Schwab had the bones of the concept, and just filled in the space in between. But I guess for most people it worked.

I am not the target demographic for this book. This was a read suggested for the two-person book club a friend and I started, and I was looking for something different. I had already been thinking about picking up a memoir, so this seemed fitting. However, Glennon Doyle didn't write this for me (I doubt she would say she wrote it for anyone but herself). I have been queer for longer than Doyle, I've been thinking about patriarchal structures and gender expectations since I was 11. I became obsessed with Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism at 18, so I've been processing how values are mutable for quite some time. This book is not for that kind of person. It is for the type of woman who has been so busy keeping up with what has been asked of her, that she has had little mind to ask where she and what is being asked diverge. It's for privileged white moms, for the most part. It's for people that are just beginning their journey of questioning the world around them.

And I think it's pretty appropriate in that respect. Untamed is less of a memoir and more of an educational text, as the details Doyle provides of her life are largely anecdotal and more exist to serve the larger messages and themes she wants to discuss. It is a primer, if you will, on becoming more aware of yourself and society around you, using Doyle's many own mistakes and learning as a reference point. The central thesis is that when you take care of yourself first, value your own desires and needs and self-worth, then not only will you be more fulfilled, but the people around you that you love will benefit more than if you neglected yourself to put their needs first. Not a revolutionary concept by any means, and if you spend enough time on the right side of TikTok, you're likely to find plenty a 25-year-old saying the same thing and then some. Doyle's style honestly resembles TikTok, doling out her experiences and wisdom in bite-sized chapters that, as one reviewer said, seem made to put on an Instagram inspirational post.

Doyle's style of prose is florid and a bit overindulgent, but I suppose that's how she intends to keep your attention. It's charming for a while, but sometimes I felt like she was just padding out page count. She is fan of metaphors, something she willingly admits, and she uses everything from cheetahs to doorbells to make her point. Not to mention repetition. While there is plenty of self-deprecating humor, in general, she is achingly sincere. Like utterly cringe. She transcribes the words of her friends and family in a way that is just far too perfect and sanded-over to be true. When she talked about talking to her teenage son's friends and coaxing out a more heartfelt conversation from them, I couldn't help but think “Oh god, she's that mom.” Like, crunchy, God-loving, everything-is-a-form-of-therapy mom. In her mid-forties, after the life she's had, she has every right to be as cringe-worthy as she likes, honestly.

I do wish Doyle had kept things more personal at times, because the chapters on racial injustice and even sexual identity felt particularly stale and out of place. But, as stated, this is like a beginner's manual. If you are, say, a woman in her fifties, who's child just came out as gay, then a book like this might help you to begin. If you're starting to question the biases and prejudices that were programmed in you, this book may give you the confidence and the language to start learning more. But I think where this book really excels is when Doyle talks about boundaries, and how to make decisions that are right for you, even if they are not right for other people. How to recognize your emotions and what they are saying to you, and how best to serve others by serving yourself.

And by the look of some of the other reviews, some people were not ready for that information. I get it, it can seem counterintuitive to claim that its healthy and good actually to tell your mother she can't see her grandchildren until she processes her internalized homophobia. But giving yourself space also means giving others their space to do their own work. The same way good fences make good neighbors, walking away when you realize you can't accept an apology is good for everyone involved, even if it doesn't always feel like it.

So yeah, I think this has value. Does it drone on way too long and venture into territory it probably should have left for others? Goodness, yes. It is an unwinding of patriarchal structures from the perspective of someone who has largely benefited from those structures her entire life, so of course, its reach is going to limited. However, I wonder if this book will mostly end up in the hands of people who a) are already aware of most of this, or b) only capable of looking at this from a superficial level. You know, the ones who are calling her a narcissist for talking about herself so much...in her own memoir. Or those who don't understand the difference between Doyle talking about the way women internalize society's expectations regarding appearances, and being “obsessed with looks.” Just saying, not trying to start beef or anything, but there are some insecurities showing up in these reviews. Overall, this book is fine, with a few solid gems of wisdom, but I think she could have gotten her point across just as well in an essay instead of a whole book.

A few years ago, if you had asked me what my favorite kinds of horror films and stories were, slashers would probably not even be on the list. I doubt I would have even though of it. But slashers are having a moment right now - one that sociologically was pretty predictable, if you're paying attention - and this past summer when I watched Netflix's Fear Street movies, I found myself reminded of how the paperback slasher-thrillers produced by the likes of R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike were what I used to live for when I was a preteen. Before I ever saw my first horror movie.So now, I'm all in. Between Fear Street and Hell Fest and the new Halloween movies, I'm here for it. And when I saw this book listed, I don't think I even read the synopsis. The title is the concept - and this concept, with this author, is gold.The Final Girl Support Group exists in an alternate universe, one where the surviving victims of mass homicides get first dibs on the rights to their story (this is a surprisingly topical idea actually, as the present interest in true crime has raised the question of who gets to profit from who's story, and the fine line between raising awareness and exploitation). As such, this is the world where the mythos of the final girl came first, before the movies. In Grady Hendrix's world, there are alternate versions of the final girls we know of - Laurie from Halloween, Sid from Scream, Sally from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, even Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street (how the supernatural elements of that story are incorporated into a world of knife-wielding spree killers is brilliant!). It would come off as cheap if Hendrix wasn't so damn good. Then there's Lynette Tarkington, the final girl who isn't really a final girl - she didn't kill her monster, she merely survived him. Lynette's life revolves around keeping herself safe - there is not an escape route she hasn't thought of, security measure she hasn't taken, a mode of violence that she isn't aware of. And yet, when someone comes for her and the other final girls she's been in therapy with for years, she's caught off guard. Every precaution she's taken suddenly crumbles to dust, and Lynette begins to realize that in order to save anyone - let alone herself - she has to do more than just survive. The Final Girl Support Group is swift. Like [b:My Best Friend's Exorcism 41015038 My Best Friend's Exorcism Grady Hendrix https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1533059241l/41015038.SY75.jpg 46065002], it is brilliantly paced. Hendrix is freaking surgical with the way he creates his thrills and beats. But even so, I read this book a lot more slowly then I expected. Because while it feels like being in a slasher movie - it's action-packed and thrilling and funny - it is first and foremost about trauma. Most importantly, what happens after trauma. Hendrix had a mission with this book - it was to imagine who these women really were, who they became after the worst day of their life. Which ones used what they were given to make something greater, or those that are barely hanging on. Which ones have scars and disabilities, which ones have partners and book deals. Lynette may be a paranoid shut-in, but she makes a living writing romance novels. Hendrix was intent on giving each of these women texture, and not just the gritty kind that is given to Laurie Strode and Sarah Connor.That's actually something that this book intentionally tries to subvert - the way the bad ass loner trope has infiltrated female representation in media. It wasn't healthy in men, and certainly isn't any healthier in women. Lynette is so intent on protecting herself, that she isolates herself from everyone and everything - and she's not better off for it. And she's not a bad ass. She's scared, she's clumsy, she's a terrible judge of character. Her trauma didn't turn her into a superhero - it turned her into a wrecking ball barreling through life, lucky if she doesn't destroy everything around her in the process. Lynette is a frustrating and terrifying protagonist to follow, and as the story rounded the corner of its final climax, I felt like I was trying to pump the breaks on a car skidding out of control. This book has its tongue-in-cheek moments, the way all of Hendrix's work does, but overall its pretty damn dark and unflinching. Hendrix's humor is less about cheeky irreverence and more about acknowledging the absurdity of our realities. And this book in particular is very unapologetic about what it wants to say. I daresay some may even find it preachy in how overtly it wants to examine our impulse to watch bad things happening to women, not to mention our need for revenge disguised as justice. That's why Hendrix is so overt about the movies he's referencing - he wants you to be thinking about the victims of Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger and Jason Vorhees when you read this. He wants you to be thinking about what you felt when you watched those movies, and how you feel when you see those characters in this different light. And if even with all that, this book is incredibly entertaining. But it is not always an easy read.

This is the fourth book from Silvia Moreno-Garcia I've read. The first, [b:The Beautiful Ones 55311334 The Beautiful Ones Silvia Moreno-Garcia https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1611470492l/55311334.SY75.jpg 54122902], remains one of my all time favorite books. After that was [b:Certain Dark Things 54785481 Certain Dark Things Silvia Moreno-Garcia https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1615238352l/54785481.SY75.jpg 48011064] and [b:Gods of Jade and Shadow 36510722 Gods of Jade and Shadow Silvia Moreno-Garcia https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1543268579l/36510722.SY75.jpg 58230232], both of which I was less excited for. Not that I didn't appreciate them, Certain Dark Things in particular I liked, I mostly just wanted it to be longer, but I just felt like there was something missing from both that meant I wasn't getting pulled in. And now there's this book, Mexican Gothic. The breakout star. And I'm sorry but I just don't get it.Noemi Toboada is a headstrong rich girl living an exciting socialite life in Mexico City (in I think the 1950s), when she is instructed by her father to visit her recently married cousin, Catalina. Catalina has been sending her uncle strange letters, causing her uncle to worry about her mental health and a possible scandal if her new marriage is falling apart. Noemi agrees on the condition that when she returns she will be able to go to graduate school, and so she embarks to find out what has happened to her cousin. What she finds is a gothic, decaying manor perched on a hill in a small town, and her cousin's new in-laws - the austere Doyles. The longer Noemi stays in the house, the weirder things get - but aside from a lot of disturbing dreams, not a whole lot actually happens until the end.I felt a little embarrassed reading this. The copy I have is one I bought for my mother for Christmas last year - my mom loves a good thriller, and I thought she would enjoy a new Latinx author. She is not, however, a fan of horror, but as many reviews and articles will tell you - gothic romance is not really horror. But it looks like my favorite pet peeve has struck again, because once again a popular book got the “it's not really horror” sell, when, in fact, it is. In particular, this book has a lot of goopy body horror, with a mix of eldritch psychological horror. Not exactly what I expected out of a so-called gothic romance. Sorry, Mom.Moreno-Garcia does a lot to establish the atmosphere. Yes, I want to hear all about the tarnished candelabra, the velvet seats and moldy, rose-colored wallpaper. A young handsome man with a mysterious darkness to him? Step right up. The fussy older woman who makes sure she's judging every step the heroine makes? You got it. You signed up or a mysterious, gothic manor, and you're gonna get it, goddammit. But I just couldn't get past the fact that once that atmosphere is established, and the stuffy, privileged Doyles are introduced, the story feels largely aimless. Noemi has come to High Place to see Catalina, but the Doyles only let her see her for a few minutes at a time, and each meeting is not particularly productive, so she doesn't have much to do with the rest of her time. She gets yelled at for disobeying rules, she develops a relationship with the skinny, unassuming cousin, Francis Doyle, and has a lot of unsettling dreams where the walls of the house are alive and her cousin's husband, Virgil, is assaulting her in some way.Ok, we need to talk about how many times Moreno-Garcia is going to have to use the evil entitled rich boy thing. Like, hon, we get it, you hate these boys. Virgil Doyle does have more texture and complexity than Nick Godoy or Martin Leyva, but he's also a lot more diabolical. Unlike Nick or Martin who remain one-note throughout their journeys and you will smirk happily when they get their comeuppance, you will absolutely loathe Virgil Doyle by the end of this book. Which brings me to an important point - if you are sensitive to portrayals of sexual assault and/or nonconsensual touching, this book is probably not for you. Moreno-Garcia puts in the work to make you angry about the stuff that happens in this book, and if it was difficult for me to read, then it will be painful for a lot of others.I think what never clicked for was Noemi. She is sold at the beginning of the story as an intelligent, independent woman who enjoys doing things her own way. She seems like the perfect character to come in and disrupt the lives of the long-established Doyles. But almost as soon as Noemi arrives at High Place, she basically hits an immediate wall. It doesn't matter how many witty remarks she has or what kind of reputation she had back in Mexico City - in High Place, she's just a girl in some nice dresses, stuck in a house with a bunch of white supremacists. None of the previously established character work really contributes at all to where Noemi ends up. She could have been written as timid or bookish instead and it would have made little difference. Unless it was Moreno-Garcia's intention to humble her heroine (she does have that thing about rich kids), but that's not a character arc I'm terribly interested in.Overall, this book is rich with atmosphere and has some great villains, but a less interesting heroine and not exactly a strong plot-driven core, despite its short page count. When the source of the creepy stuff is revealed, it should have been the type of stuff that is right up my alley, but I found myself just wanting to get through it as fast as possible.

There are two major issues with this book. The first is the characters. They do not have enough differentiating them - in particular, their characterization and their voices, but also in background. What makes the best heist thrillers exciting is a bunch of characters coming from different places, different motivations and often having different goals. There is none of that here - all of these characters are elite college students, all coming from families with high expectations, who all have a similar motivation of returning a piece of their ancestral history to its home. That leaves the story with little friction or dissonance to make things exciting to read, and on top of it there is no distinctive voice to any of them.

Which leads me to the second problem - the prose style. For a heist book, the prose here is very....sleepy. Dreamy, if I'm being generous. It's pretty, at first, but it becomes a droning one-note very quickly. The pace never picks up to create any sense of urgency, and descriptions are often so repetitive that they evoke very little. So while I wanted to stay in it at least to the first of five heists, by the time I got to it, I was mostly skimming. At which point, I realized I had to give up.

This is a pretty big bummer. I was hoping for something exciting, slick and fun. But on top of the very unrealistic premise (five students with zero experience get randomly chosen by a company to conduct a huge complicated heist?? in what universe??), which I was initially willing to let slide as a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy, this book doesn't have much else to offer in terms of characters or tension.

I just want to be clear right off the bat - this book is very boring.When I came into this book I was anticipating something as complex and challenging as [b:Annihilation 17934530 Annihilation Jeff VanderMeer https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403941587l/17934530.SX50.jpg 24946895] was. What I did not expect was something so deeply committed to the concept of “Kafka-esque” that there would be very little that happened outside of the bickering of colleagues floating along in a crumbling institution. There is little in the way of thrills or horror, zero interesting characters, and nothing seems to really be going anywhere.I'm giving this two stars because it took be a good damn while to notice that nothing was happening and nothing really was going to happen, and that's a feat in itself. Jeff VanderMeer is very clever and actually a very funny writer, and for a while you're riding the tongue-in-cheek quality that the writing has. When you slow down and really read it - which is what I had to force myself to do in order to not chuck the book out a window - the writing is genuinely beautiful and smart. It felt largely for naught though. If you have the patience for it, then its possible to enjoy this book if you look at it line by line. As a whole though, for me, it felt like a whole lot of nothing.

There's a common criticism you might see in the reviews of this book - that it should not have been YA, and instead it should have been written as an adult novel. Being a supporter of the complexities and wide range of YA for a long time, I wasn't sure how this could be. And then I read it. This absolutely should have been an adult book. Aside from the content and the absolute uselessness of the characters being high schoolers, it's about the type of story this is. Recently Maggie Stiefvater wrote something about the difference between YA and adult novels, and that it isn't so much about bad words and coming-of-age stories, but rather stories written for people with fewer life experiences. Characters in adult novels travel through the story in a different way than those geared towards teens, who don't have the experience to put certain events in the right context. Similarly, an excellent video from SuperEyePatchWolf on YouTube (a channel that has some great advice about building character and stories through the lens of anime, game design and even pro-wrestling) talks about the inherently adult nature of Cowboy Bebop. Not because of its content or age of its characters, but because of where they are in life - well past their big conflicts, and now waiting in a kind of purgatory before they end their stories.This is exactly where Felicity Morrow is in A Lesson in Vengeance. A year after her girlfriend dies in a terrible accident, leaving rumors swirling about Felicity's part in the incident and Felicity herself struggling deeply with grief and depression, she returns to the elite boarding school, Dalloway, intent on finishing her senior year at one of the few places that hold meaning to her. New to the school is Ellis Haley, the 17-year-old literary prodigy, who has decided to come to Dalloway to write her sophomore novel inspired by the Dalloway Five - a coven of young maybe-witches from the school's early days in the 1700s, who all fell to a mysterious and violent deaths. Enlisting Felicity to help her, since Felicity had once been obsessed with the Dalloway Five and is also a practicing witch who is trying to now stay away from magic for the sake of her sanity, the two get embroiled in a deeply toxic relationship that is obviously going nowhere good.And that honestly is a straightened out version of the major conflict, because A Lesson in Vengeance does not have a particularly strong central narrative. This book, while sumptuously written with atmosphere and character galore, doesn't seem to want hold too tightly to any part of its narrative. Between Felicity's mental health, her girlfriend's death, the Dalloway Five, maybe witches and curses and maybe not witches and curses, and nevermind what Ellis is really trying to accomplish, there's no aspect of this story that really gets put front and center, and as such it all just kind of blurs together. Honestly, I think Victoria Lee should have saved the Dalloway Five for another book, because that plot point just doesn't gets what it deserves here. I think she took all the things that make dark academia what it is (old institutions, murder mysteries, ghosts, morally ambiguous characters, etc), and instead of trying to refine it, tried to cram it all into one narrative (which is one of the pitfalls of trying to make an “aesthetic,” something inherently nebulous, into something concrete).It's interesting that dark academia has fascinated so many young people, and now has resulted in a lot of stories taking it and adapting it for YA narratives. And while “prep school” is one of the potential puzzle pieces that make up dark academia, it's important to not ignore that its seminal text, [b:The Secret History 29044 The Secret History Donna Tartt https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451554846l/29044.SY75.jpg 221359], is an adult book about college students. Specifically it is about that point in life between adolescence and adulthood where you have so many freedoms, but not a proper understanding of them and your responsibilities to them. Trying to take that square peg and shove it into the round hole of high school life - even when they are deeply privileged and educated high schoolers - is just...weird.This is probably why I felt the most comfortable with this book in its finale, when it goes full Secret History, even paying homage to some of its plot elements. The last fifty pages or so is also where A Lesson in Vengeance finally decides what kind of book it is. This is where Lee embraces the ambiguity of her protagonist, having her do some unforgivable things without passing judgment. Which is not something that is often done in YA. The effect ends up being something along the lines of Baby's First Literary Thriller, which is an idea that I'm not opposed to. The kids gotta learn at some point that their characters can do bad things, even your main character, and that “meaning” goes beyond whether something is morally right or not.That said, for me, the moral bankruptcy of Ellis Haley made it really difficult for me to see her as a sexy love interest. A lot of this book rides on the tension between Ellis and Felicity - otherwise you're basically just watching Felicity wander around reading books and cooking dinner with her housemates - and I was not feeling it all. All I kept thinking was that Ellis was very clearly manipulative and abusive towards Felicity, so I just didn't get it. Cool clothes and a Georgian accent can only get you so far.Overall, I feel a little uncomfortable giving this book a star rating at all. Despite its problems, it shows a lot of skill, and I meant it when I said that I liked the ending a lot, despite the fact that it was a bit of chore to get there. Lee shows great flare for atmosphere and character development, she just bit off more than she could chew with this one, and on top of it wrote it within the constraints of a genre (genre? marketing demographic?) that just handicapped it further. This isn't a great book, but its an interesting thesis on dark academia, on literary conventions and perhaps how far you can push things with teens.

Where do I even fucking start? Gideon the Ninth is a barn burner, and what I mean by that it will burn up your mind like a house made of straw and gasoline.I'm not really sure how to summarize the basic premise of this book without going exorbitantly in depth - depth which this novel, mind you, doesn't really bother with most of the time. But here goes - Gideon Nav is an indentured servant, a foundling raised since she was a day old, to the House of the Ninth, Keepers of the Locked Tomb, creepy fucking nuns in death's head face paint who can raise skeleton servants from bits of bone. This is a world of necromancers - and space travel. And swords. Don't think about it too much, just go with it. Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon's nemesis since childhood, is called by the Emperor, Necrolord Prime, along with the heirs of each of the other seven houses, with their cavaliers, to stand the trials to become Lyctors, achieving the pinnacle of necromantic ability and serving the Emperor directly. Nonagesimus' assigned cavalier is a wimp, so she wants Gideon, who just so happens to very good with a sword, just not a rapier. Once they arrive at the First House, the “trial” they realize is a riddle wrapped in a experiment spiced with a whole lot of what the fuck.The reason why I hesitated so long on reading this book, despite the glowing reviews, is basically because of all of waves hands that. Adult hard science fiction and high fantasy, aside from often being very obtuse and big on new vocabulary, also frequently has an...ickiness about it. It often detaches itself from the body and the head's of its characters in lieu of creating vivid and complex settings, so much that the characters feel kind of like meat puppets that terrible things keep happening to. But Gideon the Ninth is wholly committed to its characters, in a way that most authors would not even attempt. It is so grounded it is subterranean. Gideon, reluctant cavalier, lover of comic books, dirty magazines and her longsword, is deliciously irreverent. This is like if someone took, I don't know, Game of Thrones or The Witcher, whatever courtly and swordly story suits your fancy, and mixed it up with Army of Darkness. Both in content and tone. There isn't actually a character with a chainsaw for a hand, but if there was it would not be out of place at all.Tamsyn Muir is doing her thing here. I was not at all surprised when I read the acknowledgements and saw that one of her Clarion instructors and mentors was [a:Jeff VanderMeer 33919 Jeff VanderMeer https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1522640540p2/33919.jpg], because what I kept thinking as I reached the third act of this book is that I so wanted to read the next book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. The reason being is because Muir writes on an edge between body horror and cosmic horror, that also overlaps with VanderMeer's New Weird. It's just absolute flesh chaos, at points. It's not just gore, its magicians using their own bodies - flesh, bone and spirit - to become terrifying weapons. It's unsettling in a way I did not realize I could be unsettled.Muir is also breaking a lot of story telling conventions, not really bothering to tell you the whole plot or the whole setting or how anything works. There are whole chunks of narrative that are just not there because Gideon wasn't there, or just wasn't terribly interested, and you just gotta roll with it. Muir puts a lot on her plate - nearly sixteen primary characters, a complex magic system, an interplanetary conflict, not to mention individual cultures, prejudices and fields of study for each of the Houses. There are a couple moments where the story buckles under the pressure (that poor continuity editor), but most of the time I didn't even notice what I didn't know, because I was having so much fun.Because this book is so much fun. Like I said, it's rooted in its characters and great character moments. The fact that Muir created such a unique an interesting cast is incredible. The fact that she so completely unafraid to make them irreverent, hilarious and utterly vicious has my head spinning. Gideon and Harrowhark are a fractious, charming and heart-breaking pair. You know as soon as you see how many different ways they say they hate each other that they mean more to each other than either of them will say. And on top of it all, you have some bad ass duels, epic monster fights, and a bunch of necromancers being unapologetically nerdy about raising the dead.Gideon the Ninth is a hell of an accomplishment. You can still tell its a debut novel though, as you can feel Muir testing things and experimenting as she goes, so technically I'm giving this 4.5 stars, but for Goodreads that's a 5, so who cares. This book is snarky, brutal and bat shit crazy.