this is a book about sisters, scams, paris, magic, sapphic romance, and ghosts.
that's like 6 of my 10 all time favorite things.
turns out it also has athis is a book about sisters, scams, paris, magic, sapphic romance, and ghosts.
that's like 6 of my 10 all time favorite things.
turns out it also has a lot of my least favorites.
what it doesn't have enough of is story. it's not even 300 pages long and yet we don't have enough content to cover us! we try our hand at multiple perspectives (all my homies hate multiple perspectives) that cover the SAME TIMELINE, resulting in the first 200 pages becoming totally redundant as we sit through the same story once more. 150 pages of the first pov, 100 pages of the next one telling the same story, all with a slow pace and an actual plot beginning at the halfway point. by the time we catch up to where the first perspective left off we have less than 50 pages to go.
did that description make sense? it was so surreal as i was reading it i'm struggling to capture the experience.
and the bummers continued apace. this is allegedly set in paris, but it has literally 0 atmosphere and contains a bizarre choice to write one perspective in what i can only describe as "old-timey british dialect." two unredeemed, deeply annoying protagonists were the killing blow.
the writing and synopsis aren't quite my cup of tea, but i thought this could be the exception to the various rules in my hater's heart.
throw in a bunch of unresolved thoughts about familial abuse, suicide, depression, infertility, motherhood, social class, and love...and it's safe to say it was not.
bottom line: it was the best of tropes, it was the worst of tropes.
i enjoyed — although maybe enjoyed is the wrong word — this author's fii was actually scared to read this.
and i should've been. but for other reasons.
i enjoyed — although maybe enjoyed is the wrong word — this author's first book, because while it didn't have much going on besides shock value and gore it at least did those two things in kind of an interesting way.
reading this was completely unpleasant from start to finish, and not because of the gross-out content. the writing is actively bad, full of clichés and adjectives, and somehow even though all of these stories (?) are very short, they drag on, not ending at the moment they'd be effective or shocking. characterizations are inconsistent, and in fact characters seem almost beside the point — none of these figures feel comprehensible, let alone human or real.
there's repetition here of whole details or lines of dialogue. favorite words are used to the in point of incomprehension — play a drinking game with covet, sense, decidedly, merely, perhaps with 911 on speed dial. this is teeming with repeated images (we get it, wounds have lips), adverbs, em dash breaks for more synonyms and more adverbs.
it's overwritten to the point that words have no meaning, which makes for a wildly frustrating read.
terrifying.
bottom line: i was anticipating this as a book that would make me truly scared, and i am: for the future of publishing.
the REAL haunting was the disappointment we found along the way.
and we found so many:
the names in this — lucky, maverick, rebel — are so insane as to the REAL haunting was the disappointment we found along the way.
and we found so many:
the names in this — lucky, maverick, rebel — are so insane as to actually continually take me out of the story. it's like reading a quirky romance novel while a series of "unique baby names i love but am not going to use" instagram reels autoplays at the same time.
beyond that, the romance (which is, yes, the plot), centers around maverick (sigh), who is a supernatural ghost hunter type tv show guy, being extremely protective of lucky (don’t even get me started), who is…also a supernatural type tv show ghost person.
i do not like Alpha Male Protection type setups at the best of times and this particular one is just ridiculous. this is the rough equivalent of the vp of your department calling you at 9:45 am every monday through friday while you write emails because he’s worried for your safety. THIS IS JUST WHAT BOTH OF YOU DO FOR A LIVING.
she also says at one point, completely seriously, that she avoids anywhere she thinks ghosts might be. she says this in conversation with her ghost-hunter love interest, while in their second haunted location, while in the midst of filming their second ghost-centered project.
there are so many moments like that: very self-serious, emotional conversations that actually have no connection to what is literally going on. i don't know if i've ever felt this before, let alone said it, but it seems like this book was written on vibes. no plot, no plan. just whatever happens happens, logic be damned.
this book is so weird, and so unnecessarily long, and so frustrating. i can't quote to you from my ARC but it also feels...the polite term would be "under-edited."
i can really see why so many of the reviews are from readers who couldn't get through it.
bottom line: i didn't DNF this book, but i might as well have.
to me, there is nothing that symbolizes the lack of romance in modern life quite like tpretty great title if you ask me.
so at least i liked one thing.
to me, there is nothing that symbolizes the lack of romance in modern life quite like the qr code. the fact that this book is full of them is the least of its worries.
among the biggest of my worries, you're surely wondering? thank you for asking. that's simple:
WHY DO MEN NEED TO WRITE SO MUCH ABOUT PENISES. i'm no prude but at a certain point spending this much time on phalluses takes up what we should've allotted to regularly scheduled programming, like character development, or themes. you know. the little things. (buh dum ch.)
in fact, an inexcusable section of page count is spent on shock value, masturbation, gross-out descriptions, pop-culture references, and brand names. what we're left with couldn't amount to much even in the best case scenario.
i enjoy an unlikable character more than a likable most of the time, because i am annoying and my brain is a cesspool, but i can't bear an unsympathetic one. we spend 300 pages in the mind of glue, and what is intended to be an exploration of the millennial experience left me unmoved and unrepresented. and in spite of the synopsis' claim that this book centers around hong kong's protests and "demise," that felt like an afterthought at best.
i liked the author's first book, but this reads a lot like the sophomore novel of someone whose debut was praised for its originality and literary quality when its most interesting portions were its observations of other art.
which is, you know. what happened.
bottom line: it's never a good sign when you're writing a rant on netgalley.com.
i'll never be able to see the words milk and honey without thinking of instagram poetry. thanks rupi kaur.
but i liked this about the same as i would ii'll never be able to see the words milk and honey without thinking of instagram poetry. thanks rupi kaur.
but i liked this about the same as i would if it were in that genre, so. fair enough.
this is just not my type of book (no more pandemicish dystopian, please, i'm too fragile) nor of writing style.
more frankly, this is overwritten, with words used for how they sound rather than what they mean. "hulkings," as a synonym for hills. "humping" instead of rising. "eloquent" for an image of a graffitied d*ck. i didn't like it when cormac mccarthy did it, and he did it a lot better.
beyond that, between piles of adjectives, this landed heavily on cliches: "it wasn't until i hung up that i realized he'd never asked my name." no way! really?
add to these its gimmicks: "my employer" unwieldily used as many as four times a paragraph, as what was a fun style choice in early pages loses its sheen by the halfway point. if only there were a short, one or two syllable thing that we could call a specific person in order to reference them.
there are haystacks of em dashes every time another language is used, in an italy surrounded by expats as our monolingual protagonist.
there's italicized dialogue instead of the proletariat quotation mark.
in other words...a lot of unearned style here.
and ultimately my interest in the idea of an illicit, hyper-gifted chef cooking in secret in a dystopian world without food died when met with an untalented line cook. that, and a nonsense plot hinging on the justification-less idea that she'd be portraying a woman of another nationality at least decades her senior.
not to mention that goofy ending.
anyway. this book doesn't know what it wants: for us to condemn its cast of wealthy, even as they do more than the politicians it can't bring itself to frame as the good guys; to extol the virtues of our protagonist, deliberately ignorant to the selfishness and ego and greed that rival anyone's; to approve of fine cuisine or skewer it, same with capitalism and global travel and age- and power-gap relationships and money and philanthropy and and and.
it's mealy mouthed in every way you can imagine, and it leaves a sour taste.
this book is truly nothing more than its title: extremely simple, almost annoying and cloying writing about very preschool-level topics, like imaginarthis book is truly nothing more than its title: extremely simple, almost annoying and cloying writing about very preschool-level topics, like imaginary friends and hitting and stuffed animals.
i read this book because of its title, and its title is the explanation for everything i hated about it.
life is so cruel in its ironies.
bottom line: i can't believe i'm giving this one star, and i can't think of any reason to give it more than that....more
i expected to like a book with a 2.88 average rating because i think i'm special.
we can all see how that went.
this is a surreal book that is also poori expected to like a book with a 2.88 average rating because i think i'm special.
we can all see how that went.
this is a surreal book that is also poorly written, which means, in other words, that it was for the most part total nonsense.
someday i hope i love anything as much as this author loves adjectives. we should all hope for a muse that leads us to use over 100 adverbs in less than 35 pages.
oh well.
bottom line: turns out i am like other girls....more
this is an untraditional, timeline-twisting book in which a company has accidentally invented time travel and is committing inter-time violence accordthis is an untraditional, timeline-twisting book in which a company has accidentally invented time travel and is committing inter-time violence accordingly...
and somehow the most unrealistic part was its depiction of human emotion.
the thing they never tell you about sexism is that it's boring. that's the worst part of misogyny: just the most boring female characters you've ever read.
ok, maybe not the worst part. but it's not in my personal favorites.
i am personally of the opinion that if you are going to tell me something relatively insane, such as time travel is real and being hoarded for evil by corporations (with some parts of that being less insane than others), you need to ground me in the narrative. maybe give me some lovable characters. maybe give me some real-feeling feelings. dare i say give me a dose of reality via human relationships, or human life, or human thought patterns.
this book skipped all of that, and the result was dramatic and annoying.
bottom line: logically i know i read this as a book. but in my heart, this is one of those budgetless interchangeable shows you scroll past on a lesser streaming platform and know no human has ever watched or talked about.
the feeling of satisfaction when you finish an incredibly long book: wired
the feeling of satisfaction when you finreading incredibly long books: tired
the feeling of satisfaction when you finish an incredibly long book: wired
the feeling of satisfaction when you finish an incredibly long book without enjoying it for even a moment: whatever is better than wired
reading murakami is always a balancing act between how brilliant he is and how misogynistic he is, and let me tell you this one was pretty heavily leaning one way!
it is actually just arduous and difficult to read 1,318 pages of women being described by their breasts. i have a pretty high tolerance for sexism in media, perhaps to a worrying extent, but sexual assault, pedophilia, and harassment were at the core of this plot. it's a lot harder to ignore the very strange way murakami writes women when that's the case.
but even beyond that, reading from the perspective of a female character who cannot go a chapter without thinking about her boobs...it gets old! i don't know when murakami encountered a beautiful woman who apologized to the ugly older men she slept with for the size of her chest, but i'm praying for her healing.
bottom line: i'm going to keep reading murakami. i'm just going to delete this book from my brain....more
this book gave me the heebie jeebies, but not in the way i wanted it to.
the story itself wasn't scary, but the depictions of addiction, of women, of fthis book gave me the heebie jeebies, but not in the way i wanted it to.
the story itself wasn't scary, but the depictions of addiction, of women, of fat people were really one-note and devastating. more inhuman than the evil presence driving the plot was the way these characters were rendered on page.
(view spoiler)[the alcoholic mother is revealed to be a cold, cruel, unfeeling monster. the overweight bedridden man who is constantly referred to as disgusting is eaten and does the eating. (hide spoiler)] it's cringeworthy and wrong.
it's also dual perspective and dual timeline, and if there's one thing i continue to learn again and again in my reading life, it's that i am a single perspective, single timeline kind of reader. rarely do i read a story and think, wow. this really benefited from dividing its time and narrative strength between two things.
beyond that, the storyline itself was slow and moved in fits and starts, and the writing felt awkward and unwieldy. things that are imbued with huge significance never come up again. points of view you think will coalesce are just left as loose ends.
the connection it tried to make between vices and monstrosity would have been much cooler a hundred years ago, before we had modern lines of thinking and understanding of why people do what they do.
bottom line: i wanted to like this, but i couldn't find much to like.
my only hope and desire for this book was that it scare me so much i would be rendered completely unable to sleep.
so imagine my devastation when it wamy only hope and desire for this book was that it scare me so much i would be rendered completely unable to sleep.
so imagine my devastation when it was not only not scary, but bad.
here are just a few of the myriad examples of its eternal capacity for disappointment:
1) this is so unbelievably british that i actually googled if the author is even from england. it's giving one direction fanfiction written by an american 15 year old with a polyvore account. i'm ready to throw my hair into a messy bun and gaze into harry styles' green orbs.
2) you cannot have this unbelievably intrusive, annoying person-narrator and also have the narrator be omnipotent. this is creative writing 101. you have to pick a lane. if i'm picking for you, i'd choose the option that isn't giving theater kid, but it's up to the author really.
3) okay, you chose theater kid. that's fine. except having a narrator who is a bad writer just means your book is going to be poorly written. and i guess that's fine too. but maybe consider the rest of us when deciding page count next time.
4) so many nouns used in back to back sentences. you know that thing? does that bother anyone else? catch me rephrasing in my own head instead of reading. just freelance, unpaid copyediting for nothing but a bad attitude and a love of the game.
5) for a book that uses the word island on every page it sure forgets where it is. calling an ambulance if you're in the middle of the sea isn’t going to help, bucko!
6) the plot has some serious holes in it, as in i don't believe that characters would do what they end up doing. in spite of spending a lot of time spent talking self-indulgently about the importance of motive, the book doesn't listen to its own advice.
7) it also can't decide whether it's about one truly evil person, or a group of bad people, or the inherent badness of everyone, and ends up somewhere unsatisfying between all of them — one person punished excessively, the others floating off to a life of joy after their sins and their pettiness to spend their days dancing and doing yoga like a yogurt commercial.
even though they, too, suck.
as does this book.
bottom line: the scariest part of this whole thing was that it somehow kept getting worse.
at any given time, i feel like i'm reading romance as a cry for help.
when i find a romance novel i love, it's my favorite kind of genre to enjoy. justat any given time, i feel like i'm reading romance as a cry for help.
when i find a romance novel i love, it's my favorite kind of genre to enjoy. just so comforting and fun and feelings-y.
but the vast, vast majority of the time, i am way too picky to bear it.
and in this case, well...this book is just bad.
sorry.
i really wanted to like this book, insistent product placement of the author's weird side quest cupcake wars-appearing bakery and all.
but it was too quirky and too much for me. there were CLIFFHANGERS in this book. like, chapters that ended with ellipses. "until he saw who was in the room..." and "she wasn't ready for what happened next..."-ass sentences. it feels silly.
this was unfortunately a not-good book on a sentence level (lots of weirdly constructed ones), on a plot level (clichéd confessions, an undue level of love interest-on-love interest obsession), or on a character level (we have a quirky gal and a boring guy, much like every romance of the last 5 years seems doomed to contain).
on top of that, this was arduous to get through. we're talking 320+ pages of miscommunication followed by 10 pages of happiness followed by, you guessed it, MORE miscommunication.
and for two people who tell each other 1100 times they'll be harmless (maybe "be harmless to each other" can be our always), they never tried to talk at all.
sheesh.
bottom line: i don't know what i did in a past life to deserve it, but this was a punishing read....more
this is one of those books i'm so excited to read it feels like it's been ordained by the universe.
let's see what happens (feat mini reviews for each this is one of those books i'm so excited to read it feels like it's been ordained by the universe.
let's see what happens (feat mini reviews for each story).
UNKNOWN BY UNKNOWN a girl gets laid off with generous severance only to be invited to house sit in a beautiful home for money and no responsibilities but walking a dog...this is my dream.
even if it did end abruptly at the most exciting part. rating: 3.5
LI FAN this is so clever and so unique and so empathetic and so well-executed. in my humble opinion.
it is also so short. rating: 4
TO GET RICH IS GLORIOUS you have to love a scammer. you HAVE to. rating: 3
FAREWELL HANK i can only hope that one day i become a creepy and controlling old lady with a nickname so pervasive no one remembers my real name anymore. rating: 2.5
CURE FOR LIFE this story would have gone craaaazy if it were written during the #MeToo era. as is: it's fine! rating: 3
KLARA friendship breakups are worse than any romantic breakup and that is the dark secret of adult life that no one tells you. rating: 3.5
A VISIT well this made me feel vaguely sad and guilty for a reason i can't quite pinpoint. a feeling to which i say: no thank you! rating: 2.5
FLIES this story contains a description of a dead rat so vivid and disgusting that it occupies a permanent section of my brain previously reserved for my siblings' names and my favorite cookie recipe.
spoiler alert, i guess. rating: 3
SHE WILL BE A SWIMMER this is one of those stories that fails at what it was trying to do and thereby does the exact opposite. unfortunately. rating: 2
PHENOTYPE if this story was a full-length novel it would be trendy on bookstagram and have, like, a 3.53 average rating.
which is a compliment. rating: 4
ME AND MY ALGO this is just the worst, i'm sorry...this is middle school creative writing prize level writing...
i can't stress enough how much i thought i would like this book. rating: 1
PERSONA DEVELOPMENT this had traces of what i thought this entire collection would be.
and a great title. rating: 3
TOMB SWEEPING never a good sign when the title story doesn't hit. rating: 2.5
CAT PERSONALITIES what are we even doing here. rating: 1.5
OTHER PEOPLE this started somewhere and made me think it was doing something and then...i don't even know what happened.
aaaand that's it! rating: 2
OVERALL at no point did it even cross my mind that i might not like this book, which a) is one of my most anticipated reads of the year, b) shares an author with a book i unexpectedly really loved, and c) has a gorgeous cover (most important).
but this felt very shallow and thoughtless where the author's debut was the opposite. bummer. rating: 2.5...more
a friend and i joked recently that whenever someone says "can you believe ai made this," we watch every video and read every paragraph like...yeah. yea friend and i joked recently that whenever someone says "can you believe ai made this," we watch every video and read every paragraph like...yeah. yes, we can.
this book manages to do the inverse: i'm pretty sure it was written by a person, and yet it would make a whole lot more sense if it were by artificial intelligence. and it seems like the author's only other publication is the novelization of a forgotten movie, so maybe it was.
we follow alice, who is pretty. alice's best friend is sadie, who is controlling. sadie's mom is celine, a camille paglia-esque feminist scholar who alice starts sleeping with. that, in all of its cliched and cringing drama, is our plot.
it's overwritten to the point of feeling heavy. this book barely scrapes 250 pages, but it wouldn't make it over a hundred without taking advantage of a thesaurus and an innate desire to record one's own uninteresting thoughts as ascribed to flat characters. (you wouldn't believe how much time we spend wondering alongside sadie if one is supposed to apply sunscreen to one's eyelids.)
this book made me wince: at its sex scenes; at its page-long years-late diatribe to making a murderer; at its inconsistencies and errors; at the single weird voice shared by every character regardless of gender, age, or personality; at the dialogue so divided by paragraphs of internal monologue that the actual responses make no sense. it seems like even the copyeditor couldn't get through it.
and i'd say what this book needed a strong edit, but what it actually needed was one more editor saying no.
bottom line: it's not that i hated this book. it's just that it doesn't do anything well.
i like an unlikable protagonist, but it turns out i can't stand 3 miserable ones.
for me, the experience of being alive as a woman isn't defined soleli like an unlikable protagonist, but it turns out i can't stand 3 miserable ones.
for me, the experience of being alive as a woman isn't defined solely by hating my body, or by thinking about men, or by hating other women. i have moments of all of those, sure, but they don't make up a significant part of my life. let alone the majority of my experience. let alone all of it!
in the universe of this book, that's all women have.
we have three perspectives and they are all the same: just absolute victims of patriarchy, with the same voice, living the same experience. one looks like emrata, one is thin with "bad boobs," one is fat, but all three are obsessed with their bodies and male validation and nothing else.
there's a lot this book is trying to do, but it overplays its hand a all of it. creating three of the exact same character to do the same thing in an over the top and nonrelatable way and facing down an abrupt and meaningless ending doesn't work for me even from that standpoint.
beyond that, the writing grated on me: all thoughts are merciless or relentless. people are both nervous and worried. skin is knotty and bumpy. this stacked adjectives on top of each other to see what sticks.
the answer to what sticks is my frustration, even reviewing this a month after the fact.
bottom line: i love women! i love being alive! i wish this book did too.
------------------ tbr review
this sounds more interesting to me than the alternative...more
well, i accidentally read taylor swift fanfiction.
it did not go well.
this is partially due to the fact that i am no taylor swift fan. i know this is cwell, i accidentally read taylor swift fanfiction.
it did not go well.
this is partially due to the fact that i am no taylor swift fan. i know this is currently tantamount to committing domestic treason or to thumbs-downing videos of baby animals forming interspecies friendships, but i can explain. i'm not secretly a 29 year old man recording too-close tiktoks of himself ranting about how now he can't watch the big game on sundays without seeing her face. i have simply always been neutral, and now she is everywhere. that's fine.
it's also beside the point, because in spite of my fairly opinion-less take on her...even i think this book, which claims to be solidly pro on the topic, has a pretty unfair depiction of her whole deal.
it is very weird to profit off of the most famous person in the world in what you claim is a love letter to her by perpetuating the meanest stereotypes about her — that she profits off her breakups on purpose and wouldn't be famous without them.
i have a lot of criticisms, beginning with carbon emissions and ending with money chasing, but even i can't deny she's talented.
on top of that, this book is just bad. in some silly ways, such as: - the liberally inserted very bad song lyrics - the number of adjectives - the moment when taylor-by-another-name escapes a crowd of rabid fans by (check notes) walking down the street and putting sunglasses on - essentially-taylor insising wearing her full wedding dress onstage...every single show, because nothing says "ready to perform" like 20 pounds of tulle - taylor-insert making our male main character do a fashion show to determine his new rock star look, ultimately deciding on (again let me check my notes) a "rakish bow tie" and "glasses" like a "lounge pianist." she skated straight past rock star to theater kid - the idea that our love interest could just open his laptop and buy a ticket the day of the final show of a tour we've been repeatedly told is sold out - imagine playing piano and asking the musician how they want it to sound and they go "like sunrise after sleepless nights." i'm putting in 2 weeks notice
it's also bad in some not as silly ways. this couple had less than no chemistry, to the point that i assumed we were still early in the book until i was flabbergasted by a surprise kiss and looked to see we were at the halfway mark. the only thing more surprising was the sex scene.
this is a second chance romance, and it seems like all of their love story is predicated on the idea that one time they had chemistry and that they share musical talent. but neither of those are on page so i don't know what we're doing here.
not to mention the writing. if you're into emotions described like "I snuff the rogue indignation" or "She endeavors to smile" or "inquisitive disappointment," this is the book for you.
so much of this book is just STRANGE. our love interest's tragic backstory is that his family's retirement home is closing. our heroine is dragging around her newly divorced mom on a pop concert tour she doesn't seem interested in. why were these choices made??? we spend so much time on these bizarre plot points and it's like...why put them in at all???
and i just can't stress enough how if your retirement community is failing, i don't see how dating taylor swift for the publicity is the best way to handle that. last i heard geriatrics weren't her primary demo. it's one thing to sell jerseys to teenage girls, quite another to try to convince them to put their grandparents into a home in the rural south. and the book just ends without resolution on this so who knows!
riley (read: taylor) is one of the least likable protagonists i've read in memory: completely selfish, fame-obsessed, describes "what she does" as "reaching everyone with her music," listening constantly to her own songs, inviting her ex husband to events "for inspiration," and unable to understand why everyone doesn't immediately kowtow to her in a scenario where basically everyone already does. i don't really know how to describe how unrealistic and unfeeling and borderline sociopathic this character is, but it certainly isn't a flattering portrayal of taylor swift!
so if this book isn't for her fans, and it isn't for her non-fans...who is it for?
bottom line: this is a money grab with no plan to get the money.
welcome to THE FAMILIAR, the genre-bending, worst-of-both-woleigh bardugo writes it, i read it.
for better or worse.
guess which one it is in this case.
welcome to THE FAMILIAR, the genre-bending, worst-of-both-worlds historical fantasy universe of luzia. luzia is a maid. she is also magic. she is also boring.
luzia is an orphan who works in some middle class evil lady's house cleaning stuff all day. she is obsessed with her aunt, who has a lot of money. you may be like "why doesn't she live with her aunt, then?" because she is a kept woman. you might then wonder why luzia's girlboss self is so bothered by this: she is not. she sleeps on a dusty floor instead of on, like, glamorous cushions with her dear family member because her (dead) dad thought her aunt's reputation was bad and that's the worst thing that can happen to a girl. the concept of being near a bad reputation. because of wanting to get married.
do not dwell on that too long, because we're going to ignore it for the rest of the plot.
we're hot in the middle of the SPANISH GOLDEN AGE, and it's evil to be a witch but it's very rad to be so christian it actually makes you magic. luzia sets off to participate in a god's love contest, along with her abusive employer (ignore that), her aunt's bad reputation (ignore that), a million year old creep (ignore that, he's supposed to suddenly become sexy), her aunt's boyfriend and his wife (ignore that), and a few ragtag others.
discerning readers may remember we mentioned a creepy ancient man we are supposed to find unbelievably hot about halfway through. this wannabe edward cullen makes up half of the world's most soulless romance.
somehow i'm reading about magical star-crossed lovers and their doomed soulmate status but i know couples from my high school whose stories i'm more interested in. which is maybe not a fair comparison because i love gossip, but still.
on top of being a boring romance, this is not a convincing historical fiction. that doesn't bother me really (i hate reading modern writers try to write old-timey), but the fact that it's also not a convincing teller of its own story does.
this book is not sure how our protagonist knows so much, or expects more for herself, or practices her magic. it kind of just inconsistently provides her with whatever is convenient for the scraps of plot we're navigating and hopes we don't have follow-up questions or memory of what we've already read.
the writing, too, is style-first: sentences sound good, but when you take away the drama, they don't really fit together. the sweeping gestures of characters and of wording...both of them rarely make sense.
also, for some reason our narrator is omnipotent.
yes. all of the side characters' internal thoughts and feelings pop up from time to time like an annoying bug, seeming like a shallow afterthought compared to the protagonist's, with none of it going beyond what you or the main character would assume. so why bother? who knows!
that's not the only perspective choice that left me shaking my damn head either. to have it be speaking from the future and casting opinions on the events of the story was even weirder. it's so annoying to be like "perhaps if luzia had gotten a haircut that day everything would be different." ok butterfly effect!
i can always tell i really didn't like a book if i have multiple paragraphs' worth of thoughts about a single writing element. but i force myself to digress.
in the most annoying and present sin of all, this is not a story of magic trials and sorcery.
it's about old-timey european politics.
the climax occurs when a former secretary loses his job.
unforgivable.
bottom line: this book is nothing that it said it was, and nothing that it wanted to be, and nothing when you dig into it at all....more
for me, this book was love at first sight (that cover! girls falling in love at the university of edinburgh!)...and dislike at first read.
unfortunatelfor me, this book was love at first sight (that cover! girls falling in love at the university of edinburgh!)...and dislike at first read.
unfortunately, this is just not well written. that feels like the meanest criticism there is, but there's no avoiding it here. this book uses synonyms for said, is teeming with appearance descriptions, and has darlings on every page that likely should have been killed.
and this extends, sadly, to plot: everything seems to be going really quite well, and then suddenly someone does something quite unforgivable, out of nowhere and inexplicably. less than ten pages later the book ends. that's after hundreds of pages of what feels like flippant, underexplored inclusion of a dozen serious social issues.
i wish it could, but debut doesn't begin to explain it all away: this was under-edited by a lot. it feels tropey, shallow, cliched, and i came away thinking i needed more and less at once.
bottom line: if you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all...but i really wanted to like this book.