Thank you to NetGalley and Holiday House for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Murder for the Modern Girl was honestly one of the weThank you to NetGalley and Holiday House for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Murder for the Modern Girl was honestly one of the weirdest and most confusing books I’ve read of all time and I would’ve given it 1 star had it not been set in the Roaring 20s.
Wait. Let me rephrase that last sentence.
Murder for the Modern Girl was posi-lute-ly one of the weirdest and most confusing books I've read of all that and I would've given it 1 star had it not been set in the Roaring 20s, starting with that annoying word that Ruby Newhouse, our leading lady, says on what it feels like almost every page of the book. It's not like she says it all the time, but it's enough for you to notice that she does and it's SO. ANNOYING. I wasn't sure if it was a typo in the ARC and it was meant to say "positively" but in reality, I think it was meant to be a combination between "absolutely" and "positively" and it drove me nuts.
Diving into the characters a little more, I definitely respect Ruby's ambitions and her dreams to become a lawyer, which is something that at the time, women weren't doing (at least not super commonly). I also appreciate wanting to break down the standards for what women were supposed to be and act like with the way she acts and dresses. I also loved the concept of her being an "angel killer" who went around to quietly kill men who were mistreating women. However, I felt that there were too many moving parts in her POV to keep track of everything in my head easily and nothing was fully developed. Everything eventually connects with each other to reveal the full mystery and plot at the end, but it's all very twisted (not in a macabre way, more in the sense of that meme with the guy in front of the board with threads and pins over pictures and evidence trying to connect everything and crazily explaining it to someone).
As for Guy, her love interest in the book, it felt like there wasn't as much dimension to his character in comparison to Ruby. He goes to work at the morgue as a janitor (and later as a researcher with one of the doctors at the morgue), he has feelings for Ruby, and he tries to learn about his ability to shapeshift and that's about it. We learn a little bit about his past but other than that, the bulk of his POV was doing research with the doctor about who the "angel killer" is based on the autopsies of the victims and being a simp for Ruby as he follows her around town as she tries to find out who's been attempting to hurt her family.
To address the giant elephant in the room about this entire story- Ruby is a mindreader and Guy is a shapeshifter. Ruby is able to be the angel killer because she can read the minds of all her future victims and what they're thinking about doing, and Guy works at the place that he does because the doctor he does research with wrote a paper about people possibly being able to shapeshift and wanting to do research alongside him to make sense of his own abilities. However, despite these two major elements of our main characters, it's never explained how to why they have these abilities and why no one else in the book has them or any other sort of magic powers.
I may be wrong considering I'm writing this review about 2 weeks after I finished the book, but I'm pretty sure that Ruby literally figures out who the person behind all the attacks on her family is through her ability to mind read (and the rest of the book is her attempting to find tangible evidence because no one would believe her if she said that she found out because she read the person's mind of course) but we never find out how she gets the ability and why no one else in her family has it.
There were also pacing issues I found in the book but that's not as major in comparison to the things I already mentioned earlier in my review. Unfortunately, I didn't like this book as much I thought I would've but I hope that other people find luck with this book and love it! — 2 stars
Trigger warnings:(view spoiler)[
murder, violence, poisoning, assassination attempts, dead bodies in a morgue, death of a family member, misogyny, kidnapping, sexual harassment, blackmail with people's nudes(hide spoiler)]...more
Chloe Gong, you’re responsible for making me cry in the club, and as such, you will be paying my therapy bills.
I really have no words right now to deChloe Gong, you’re responsible for making me cry in the club, and as such, you will be paying my therapy bills.
I really have no words right now to describe how I'm feeling after reading Our Violent Ends. I feel hollow and there's definitely a giant void where my soul used to be because I think whatever little of it I had in me left my body after finishing this book.
Normally, I'm not the kind of person who cries/tears up when reading books or watching movies/TV shows with emotional scenes. I think it's because I know it's a work of fiction and none of the characters or events are real, so because they're not real, I have no reason for crying or being sad. In the same vein of things, I don't really get attached to fictional characters either for the same reason.
I don't know what kind of drugs Chloe Gong laced into this duology, but damn, was I emotionally attached to Roma, Juliette, Ben, and Marshall. I was constantly finding myself relating to Juliette and her upbringing in Western culture and how her family members and the Scarlet Gang see her because of it as well as her constant drive to do the right thing according to her own morals rather than what the people around her are telling her to do. I was constantly finding myself rooting for Roma and Juliette to find their way back to each other (and tearing up a little every time he called her "dorogaya"). I said in my review of These Violent Delights that I didn't really feel a connection between Roma and Juliette until the end of the book and that definitely set things up for their romance in Our Violent Ends. Like...THE ANGST!!! THE SLOW BURN OF THEM GETTING BACK TOGETHER!! THE ENEMIES TO LOVERS BACK TO ENEMIES BACK TO LOVERS!!! (view spoiler)[Also, the scene of them boutta get down and dirty in the safehouse while there was a literal riot happening outside...they're built different. Like, good for you guys for making up and all, but having sex while there are gunshots and violence happening outside at the same time...they're a different breed ahaha (hide spoiler)]
(I was rooting for Marshall and Ben since like, the beginning of the first book. I knew there was something more going on between the two than just being best friends and roommates hehe)
As for Rosalind, I definitely knew she was suspicious and I wasn't really surprised that she did what she did considering how absent she seemed most of the time, and the same goes for Kathleen/Celia towards the end of the book. I can definitely say they weren't characters I got extremely attached to but I do understand what lead them to do what they did in Our Violent Ends.
Speaking of the ending...WHAT THE HELL? Seriously, I took one star off for that ending and that ending only. That ending should be illegal. To be completely honest, I can't say I didn't see the ending coming considering I read Romeo and Juliet in 8th grade and know what happens at the end (to be fair, I feel like everyone and their mom knows what happens at the end of that play at this point) but there was just a little part of me that held onto hope thinking it wasn't going to be...that. (view spoiler)[At least one couple got their HEA :') (hide spoiler)]
So even though Chloe Gong shattered my heart in a million pieces, I'm glad to say this duology is one that has become one of my favorites. I can't wait to see what she has in store for the characters in the Foul Lady Fortune duology! --- 4 stars...more
Pre-review/pre-read thoughts: I made a poll asking what book I should read during my "mini-break" from the GrishaVerse after I finish Crooked Kingdom.Pre-review/pre-read thoughts: I made a poll asking what book I should read during my "mini-break" from the GrishaVerse after I finish Crooked Kingdom. Even though the poll is still up at the time of writing this, it's so obvious that the people have spoken and want me to read this so this will be the first book I read after I finish Crooked Kingdom haha.
Anyways, I think about how Chloe Gong is almost 2 years older than me and she published this book while she was STILL IN COLLEGE WITH A DOUBLE MAJOR and like...we love a successful, thriving queen.
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”Empires can fall in mere hours. This one is no different. Here in Shanghai, whoever shoots first has the best chance of surviving.”
Chloe Gong had me at "Roaring 20s." I'm a sucker for any historical fiction books that take place in the 1920s or right at the turn of the 20th century in the Victorian Era. I'm not sure why, it's just the way I am. Like seriously, just tell me a book takes place in the 1920s and it's an auto-buy/auto-read for me. Now, when you take the Roaring 20s, but make it an Asian-inspired Romeo and Juliet story, I'm sold. I'm sure many of my American GoodReads friends have sat through high school English at some point in time (or you'll get there one day) reading Romeo and Juliet in class and found the play to be terribly boring and/or gross, because it's essentially 2 hormonal teenagers who fall in love at first sight and decide they can't be without each other even though they met like, 2 or 3 days before...well, they both die.
In Chloe Gong's take on a Romeo and Juliet retelling, she gives Romeo (Roma Montagov) and Juliet (Juliette Cai) a backstory and history. They were childhood lovers, then broke up because of their families' blood feud, became enemies, and went back to lovers. They're both flawed in their own ways and in some ways are polar opposites of each other, but come together to stop the madness spreading through the streets of Shanghai, taking out both innocent people and people from their own respective gangs, the White Flowers and the Scarlet Gang.
I loved all the little references back to the original play throughout the book, including the one scene where Roma and Juliette go undercover to get information and says Roma's last name is Montague. The parallels between the characters in the book and the characters in the original play are uncanny:
Roma Montagov= Romeo Montague Juliette Cai= Juliet Capulet Rosalind Lang= Rosaline Benedikt Montagov, Roma's cousin = Benvolio Marshall Seo = Mercutio Tyler Cai, Juliette's cousin = Tybalt Lourens = Friar Lawrence Paul Dexter = Count Paris
I found it interesting how Juliette is technically Chinese, but spent a lot of her recent years in America and the West, and grew accustomed to the culture there and fell out of touch with her Chinese culture despite her being the heir to the Scarlet Gang's operations. Her inner struggle is definitely something I relate to due to me being Asian American. This quote really hit home for me personally:
”The kids in New York made fun of me. They asked what I was called and then they laughed when I told them, repeating those foreign syllables back at me over and over again as if speaking it in song made it funny.
She had been five years old. The wound of mockery was healed now, covered by rough skin and rough calluses, but it still stung on bad days, as all old injuries did.”
If there was one thing I would change about the book, it would probably be the way the romance was written in the first half of the book. Maybe it's because I knew Roma and Juliette were going to be together just based upon the events of the original play, because they spent most of the book going back and forth with each other and trying not to kill each other (well, more Juliette than Roma), or some combination of the two, but I didn't really feel a strong spark or connection between them until the end of the book and their romance took a backseat to the violence of the madness spreading throughout the city.
Speaking of the madness and violence, there's A LOT of somewhat graphic scenery and gun violence. I'm not going to describe it here but if you can't handle gore and graphic violence, you might want to skip over this book despite the rave reviews it gets. I still have no idea how I was able to stomach any of the snacks I was eating while I was reading about people dying in descriptive scenes and not lose my appetite.
With the plot twist in the very last few pages of the book resulting in a cliffhanger, I just know Our Violent Ends is going to run me over like a truck. November 16th can not come soon enough!...more
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