I love her so much that I knew if this book even made me think about her, I’d be a fan, but it did way more than that. I felt like I love Jenny Slate.
I love her so much that I knew if this book even made me think about her, I’d be a fan, but it did way more than that. I felt like I was in what appears to be the single most magical non-fictional place in all the world: inside Jenny Slate’s brain.
If you have so much as watched an interview of hers, it’s immediately clear that she sees the world in a way that is totally unique to her. It is such a gift to be able to see that perspective for 304 pages.
She uses language differently. Words are lovely and flowerlike and carefully selected. Images are clear and breathtaking. This is an extraordinary thing.
Now, for a small request.
I would like every book I read to be written by Jenny Slate, thanks very much.
Okay, fine, compromise. I at least would like her to write 100 more books.
I got one dose of the beautiful starlike lens through which she perceives everything and just one look through her perception is not going to cover it please and thank you.
This was so gorgeous that when I finished it I immediately wanted to restart.
Also now I want to again.
Bottom line: This is a perfect little book.
---------------- project 5 star
welcome back to PROJECT 5 STAR, an event in which i revisit books i used to love and see if i still do out of masochism or completionism or...something.
i feel (gag) hopeful about this one.
update: not to worry. STILL FIVE
---------------- pre-review
while i was reading this, i had to stop for a moment, close it, put it down, take a breath, and whisper to myself: oh, my gosh. i love this so much.
review to come / 5 stars
---------------- currently-reading updates
i am 11 pages into this book and i already know i've never read anything like it in all my life.
---------------- tbr review
i love jenny slate and i can't wait to have this book in my brain....more
Can you believe that of all the eras we could have been born in, we are all blessed to live in the one in which TOTO, WE’RE NOT IN YA FANTASY ANYMORE.
Can you believe that of all the eras we could have been born in, we are all blessed to live in the one in which Leigh Bardugo is publishing books?!
I have often felt like Leigh is able to sneak into my brain and write exactly what I need. (I am calling her by her first name because if she is, in fact, a presence inside my mind then it’s a given that we’d be on that level of familiarity.)
For example: I love heists and ragtag groups of friends and slow burn romance and did I mention I love heists.
And I love fantasy stories and darkness and twists and magic and New England, but I’ve been feeling dismal about young adult books lately, like maybe I’ve grown out of them.
Boom. This book.
I am one happy camper.
This took me a whileeee to get into. I’m talking 100 to 200 pages, even. But once I was in, I WAS IN. I could not put it down and also I wanted to climb inside the pages and live there and give Alex a kiss on the face and also do her homework for her because oh my god she was not doing it and it stressed me out.
This rivals the later Harry Potter books for repeated mentions of homework that the main characters simply are not doing.
I love Alex and her thorniness and her fierceness. I love Dawes and her loyalty and her secret goofiness and her sweaters. I love Yale and its secrets and its grounds and its impenetrability.
I love Darlington because obviously.
(view spoiler)[I had a feeling Bardugo didn’t REALLY kill Darlington...he’s just too good of a character. I knew she would’ve had an affection for him. I guess you don’t kill your darling(ton)s after all…and yes, it’s official, I am the funniest person alive. (hide spoiler)]
I even love teeny-tiny characters who shouldn’t have enough characterization but in fact do and are fantastic (Lauren, Mercy, even Tripp and Hellie and people with like single lines of dialogue).
God damn it I need the next book NOW. Leigh, if I didn’t have all the respect in the world for you, I would scream because you are writing 82 books and 300 TV and film adaptations and I just want you to let me back into this world right now, please and thank you.
Honestly...I am profoundly impressed by the fact that this book felt N O T H I N G like anything else I’ve read by Leigh Bardugo. She is just such a good writer.
Also, speaking of the fact that this is very un-Bardugo.
This IS NOT a young adult book. In young adult books, things can be relatively happy-happy-joy-joy. General fiction has no such obligation.
There is a lot of violence and gore and intense imagery in this story. It is not a comfy read. You can say that this is not your cup of tea for those reasons, and you are well within your rights to say so.
But it’s not fair to say this is a *bad book* because it has those things.
There is not a cap on the upsetting content that a story can contain before it’s gone overboard. A book is not bad because it dares to address multiple difficult topics.
This is a book where awful and disturbing things happen, yes, but it isn’t a book where awful and disturbing things happen for no reason. They don’t happen in a vacuum without cause or results. The characters are affected by them.
It handles multiple tough topics with care and with sensitivity. It is a well written and well handled book. Trying to “cancel” it because it does so is equivalent to banning books.
Anyway. Censorship rant over.
Back to the important stuff.
GIVE ME THE SEQUEL.
I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO INVESTED IN THE PLOTLINE OF A BOOK THAT HASN’T COME OUT YET.
Logically, it seems that maybe shorter books would be harder to love. You spend less time with the characters, the narrative complexity must be limited, you live in the world for a minimal amount of time.
But for the past few years, I’ve found that I’m more likely to adore short books. Maybe it has something to do with the incomprehensible length of so many young adult fantasy books I’ve read, which have no need or right to stretch so far past the four hundred page mark.
Or maybe I’m endlessly impressed by the power of some authors to touch me with the strength of their voices, their prose, their characters, their stories, in less than three hundred pages.
I had fallen in love with this book, for example, within a few dozen pages.
Salinger’s writing is glorious, Franny and Zooey and the Glass family leap off the page, I could spend unlimited volumes sprawled in the overcrowded living room of their glamorous unusual apartment. The ending hits like a physical strike. I was reading of both feelings I’d always had and never put into words and emotions I had never imagined.
I need a modern day Frankenstein - someone to wake Salinger up and tell him I need enough of the Glass family’s words to spend the rest of my life with.
I don’t care about the ethics.
Bottom line: Literally no one needs me to tell them this book is amazing, but it is and I’m saying it anyway.
---------- reread updates
welcome back to another installment of PROJECT 5 STAR, an excuse for me to revisit all my favorite books and feel joy again.
for once.
update: it worked!!!
---------- pre-review
this book feels like it was made for me in a lab.
review to come / 5 stars
---------- currently-reading updates
30 pages in and i am already absolutely in love with franny...more
okay, and also, i’m in a terrible reading slump - like, a can’t-talk-about-it-for-fear-of-fairytalSally Rooney i love you
that's it. that's the review.
okay, and also, i’m in a terrible reading slump - like, a can’t-talk-about-it-for-fear-of-fairytale-style-curses worst-it’s-ever-been capital-B-Bad slump - and my brain is currently a hostile environment and so in times like this i turn to little beloved books.
of all the books i’ve ever read, approx 6% (that’s an actual figure) are 5 stars. there are even fewer i’m confident would hold up to a reread.
this 33 page lil thing is one of them!
---------------- additional reread updates
i am so tempted to five star this right now it's crazy. check back in with me in the morning
i will officially read absolutely anything Sally Rooney writes. luckily she wrote short stories so i don't have to try to scrounge up her grocery lists yet...more
It’s reached a concerning point -- seemingly 1 in 3 or 4 books I read is actually a reread. Previously I was wI have a debilitating rereading problem.
It’s reached a concerning point -- seemingly 1 in 3 or 4 books I read is actually a reread. Previously I was way too picky about adding books to my to-read list to suffer a massive TBR issue, but now that I’m barely reading new books, the pile (which is a physical one in the corner of my room, stacked by color because a) rainbow shelves forever and b) I am out of shelf space) is looming. Concerningly.
If I die mysteriously, I was probably crushed by the blue stack. (I also seem to have a problem with buying blue books, specifically.)
Anyway. My sole limit has always been that I must wait at least one year after my initial read before reading it again. This is my last shred of rereading-related logic and sanity.
This book smashed that sh*t to pieces. Less than five months after I read it for the first time, I was rereading.
I could make excuses. “My flight was delayed and I only brought one book, ” I could say, and it would be true (and a fatal mistake and a shame upon my bookworm title). “I happened to have this one because the person I lent it to gave it back.” But it was a nighttime flight, and I finished my first book on board, and I had to go out of my way to turn on that reading light that is really more of a goddamn chandelier considering how well it illuminates everything in an eight-foot radius. (Sorry, everyone around me.)
Also, it was a short flight and I only got 50 or so pages into it. I easily could have put it down.
This is where it’s the book’s fault.
This story is not action-packed, nor particularly suspenseful. Neither is it jam full of what you’d call Exciting Events or even a traditional love story that gets you rooting for your couple in any familiar way.
In spite of all that, it is absolutely unputdownable.
Conversations with Friends, if you are one of the few who somehow haven’t read it yet, is about Frances and, less so, her best friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi. Frances is thoughtful and cool (in the less-used definition of the word, according to my lexicon), Bobbi is effervescent and charming. They encounter a married couple, Melissa and Nick, and much of the novel is devoted to the changing ways in which the four interact with each other.
The writing is beautiful. Sally Rooney’s style is clean and sharp and true. Each word is thoughtfully chosen. Each image feels real and complex. Her New Yorker profile (which I read in a fit of desperately needing to get my hands on everything Rooney has written, in the wake of my first encounter with this book) highlights a description of a party at Melissa’s home as “full of music and people wearing long necklaces.” Conversations is teeming with terse, evocative descriptions like that, and if you’re anything like me once you start reading writing like that you’ll never want to stop.
Being forced to stop by the dearth of Sally Rooney material has been very difficult for me.
Like the writing, the characterization is somehow spare and complete at once. Frances and Bobbi, Melissa and Nick, even the background actors and extras of their lives are stunningly real. I think about Frances and Nick especially all the time. I can identify statements in life as “very Bobbi” or “exactly Melissa” or “totally something Frances would say.”
Above all, this book crawled inside my head and stayed there. It ever-so-slightly changed the way my brain works, but mostly it made me feel noticed and heard. It seems a way of looking at the world I hadn’t realized I ascribed to is captured in these pages. It’s surprising and kind of spooky and I’m truly grateful I encountered this book at all.
Lastly, it wouldn’t be a review of mine if I didn’t confidently write about something I’m likely not qualified to. And I want to say f*ck everybody who acts like Sally Rooney is some kind of lesser writer because she’s young and a woman. There’s a difference between saying “this writer is not for me” and “I didn’t like this book, and therefore everyone who calls her brilliant or talented is actually wrong.”
You don’t spew that sh*t about the bajillion dead white male writers. Your internalized misogyny and ageism is showing.
Bottom line: Sally Rooney is brilliant and talented. The end. ❤️
----------- reread 9 updates
starting the year as i mean to go on: reading this book for the 9th time and buddy reading with elle
----------- reread 8 updates
my 8th time reading this book begins...now.
this time i'm doing it for a book club - follow along / join the fun on instagram or discord!!!
----------- reread 7 updates
it's been almost a year since i last read this, which is unthinkable. time to fix that
have been truly dealt a series of death blows this week from the heartless chaos of the universe, so i will once again be rereading the book that simultaneously makes me feel better and so, so much worse
----------- reread 5 updates
when you see me and lily rereading this every month in 2021, mind your business
----------- reread 4 updates
reread this in its entirety on a plane to be on my main character sh*t
----------- reread 3 updates
what has to be wrong with a person for Conversations with Friends to be a comfort reread for them? asking for myself
----------- reread 2 updates
just as just as just as good
----------- reread 1 updates
there's never a wrong time to read sally rooney.
even if that means a reread less than 5 months after the first time you read it.
----------- pre-review
upping this to 5 stars because i can't stop thinking about it, and also in all that thinking i can't remember a single flaw
----------- currently-reading updates
i bought this book 2 days ago and have not really put it down since...more
I have exactly one criticism of this book, and I will get it out of the way immediately:
This takes place in purgatory (awesome). Purgatory is set up aI have exactly one criticism of this book, and I will get it out of the way immediately:
This takes place in purgatory (awesome). Purgatory is set up as an airport terminal in which everyone has to figure their sh*t out in order to catch their flight to heaven (amazing). Everyone stays in an airport hotel with lumpy mattresses and an orange motif (also fitting).
Existing in a world where every food is wrapped in a jiggly nightmare of savory Jell-o is nothing short of hellish. That cuisine has absolutely no place in anywhere other than hell itself.
Now that we’ve got the complaining out of the way.
This is an almost perfect book. Ignore the bit I just complained about and it is totally perfect.
It is Emily Henry-esque, which is, as anyone who has the misfortune of knowing me knows, the highest possible praise I can give any object, individual, media, or element of matter.
It is so funny. The concept is brilliant. The writing is descriptive and visual and lovely. The main character is a gem. Okay, all the characters are gems.
And yes, fine, maybe I could have lived without the romance, but I didn’t hate it and I see its purpose and overall that may have much more to do with my cold unfeeling heart than the romance itself.
Bottom line: I can’t wait for Gabby Noone to write another fantastic creative funny ridiculous book so I can graduate from “appreciation” to “complete obsession.”
(Disclaimer: I have read her Twitter feed as if it were a book once or twice.)
------------ pre-review
hey if this book isn't on your radar you are making a BIG MISTAKE.
HUGE, even.
review to come / 5 stars (i think)
------------ tbr review
couldn't think of a better place to read this, a book about a world in which purgatory is an airport, than while waiting for my plane...more
I know a lot of people are still waiting for their Hogwarts letter, and that’s fine and all, but I’m still over here waiting for my formal invitation I know a lot of people are still waiting for their Hogwarts letter, and that’s fine and all, but I’m still over here waiting for my formal invitation to attend college with Anne and Gilbert and Philippa and the gang.
I’m sure it just got lost in the mail.
I adored Anne of Green Gables (in spite of the fact that I read it for the first time at 21 years old, on a whim, having no intention of reading it beforehand and, in fact, only having a copy at all because it was very pretty and I’m very book-shallow). Against all odds, I loved Anne of Avonlea just as much.
And even more unlikely-ly, I loved Anne of the Island most of all. (So far.)
The writing is beautiful. The settings are immersive. The storyline(s) are charming. And somehow all the characters are lovely, regardless of whether they’ve been there since the beginning or were just introduced two pages ago. I love all of them.
So you understand my confusion at the fact that I have not yet been invited to Prince Edward Island, let alone accepted to Redmond College, LET ALONE inducted into Anne’s friend group.
But like I said, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
(I love this series way too much to consider the alternative.)
Bottom line: GIVE ME THE NEXT ANNE BOOK!!! Please.
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i was late for work because i physically could not put this book down.
review to come / 5 stars
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hello i would like to live inside these books and be best friends with anne and also be of the island thank you that is all...more
I picked up a book I had no intention of reading on a whim and discovered one of my new favorite series.
This must be positive karma for an immensely lI picked up a book I had no intention of reading on a whim and discovered one of my new favorite series.
This must be positive karma for an immensely lovely deed I did in a past life. (It couldn’t have been this life, because I spend most of my time reading and eating cookies, and while I’d count both of those as immensely lovely activities I don’t know if I can unbiasedly say they’re really contributing to the greater good.)
I did not own this book when I finished the first one, an evil I had to counteract by purchasing this the next day. And then reading it immediately. And, once again, enjoying every second of it.
I do not know where all this good karma came from but I DO NOT want it to stop.
These books are just so lovely. I don’t even want to pick up the next one (which would be book #4) because then I’m one book closer to finishing the series, and I absolutely can’t have that because I want to live in this series forever.
I don’t know if I’ll ever really be able to write a true review of an Anne book. I definitely couldn’t with Anne of Green Gables. I think the best I’ll ever be able to do is write at length about how desperately I wish Anne and her kindred spirits were real, and I could live in Avonlea with them and visit Green Gables and all their beautifully named haunts. I’d go to school in the early twentieth century (previously a nightmare scenario for me) in a heartbeat if Anne Shirley would be there.
I just love these books so much.
Bottom line: It’s a very rare thing to find a story you love so desperately that you feel lucky to have discovered it. That’s how I feel about Anne.
My original review of this wasn't much of anything, because I believed (and still kind of do) that everything worth saying about this book has been saMy original review of this wasn't much of anything, because I believed (and still kind of do) that everything worth saying about this book has been said.
However, there are things that I believe no one should say emerging in real time, and so contributing my likely already-expressed thoughts might counterbalance them, to some degree.
In my first foray at writing about this (which you can still see below), I focused on the immersion of it. I said I "loved" its characters, though of course I meant more that I loved them as figures, considering they are unlikable murderers. I wrote about it vaguely and glowingly, thinking everyone had sort of...gotten the point of the book, already.
But then I read this review in Gawker, so I'm coming back.
The Secret History follows mainly our narrator, Richard, as he looks back on his time in the classics program of a liberal arts college. Richard is unhappy, impressionable, desperate. His values are more ideas than ideals - vague and dim reflections of what love, and beauty, and wisdom, concepts he's never known, might feel or look like, rather than what they are.
He arrives at his preppy and prestigious(ish) New England college to slowly become obsessed and then part of the mysterious and selective classics program, a cultlike group of trust fund babies led by an often-overstepping and charismatic professor.
Coming from a poor and abusive background, where beauty is nowhere to be found, Richard wants nothing more than to immerse and lose himself in this group of wealthy and charming students. He wants to befriend them, to sleep with them, to live with them, to do everything he can to become them.
Including, as they indulge in ever-spiraling hedonism, murder.
And it never works.
When our story ends, our group is decimated, some members dead, some irrevocably changed, all unwilling to return to the story of that fateful year - all except Richard, who is unable to leave it behind.
When I hear this, I don't believe that the point of the story, or what Tartt is trying to tell us, is that a love of beauty is equivalent to an amoral life. I don't think she condemns an appreciation for the aesthetic, or even a classical scholarship.
I don't think you're supposed to like these characters, or even think they're very realistic - they are, after all, portraits in hindsight written by someone in the throes of unrequited obsession.
I don't think you're supposed to relate to them, or to see their story as something that might happen to you if you read too much Greek myth or like pretty things too much.
To quote the article that inspired the fit of rage that has me typing away, I don't think this is "about all the things [its writer] loved," while "miss[ing] the point of them entirely." At the age of seventeen, they continue, they "wanted (I thought) exactly what its youthful characters wanted: a poetic life, a mythic life, a life shot through with meaning. I loved (I thought) exactly what its characters loved: nostalgic emblems of an era imagined as significant."
To that I say: huh?
As I grow older, I care less for lovely or perfect or nice or even good (in the moral definition of the word) characters, and find myself only wanting to read about the unlikable, the complex, the ones who have something to say on what I shouldn't do, rather than teach me about what I should.
It was clear to me that The Secret History is not the latter example, but the former.
Our merry band of classics fetishists may think they are living a life of poetry and meaning, but we, the readers, know they aren't. We know that life's beauty lies not in pleasure without regard for others, in the fulfillment of selfish desires, but in case we get confused, Donna Tartt shows us that a life lived by those guidelines leads to irrevocably damaged relationships, unfading pain, and death.
The Secret History is not a nihilistic book because its characters' behaviors result in no meaning. Quite the opposite - it is a book about what makes life meaningful by showing us what meaning is not.
The Gawker piece quotes a Tartt essay in which she writes, “'Something in the spirit longs for meaning — longs to believe in a world order where nothing is purposeless, where character is more than chemistry, and people are something more than a random chaos of molecules,'” and in this vein concludes, "To take Tartt the essayist seriously is to wager on that meaning. Even if that means leaving Hampden behind."
And I would agree. To find meaning, one must leave Hampden behind - for it was never intended that what happened there should be lived by as example.
(I also think there's something very interesting in the class dynamics here. But I'll save that for the next time I get mad enough to write almost 1,000 words.)
Bottom line: Book so nice I reviewed it twice.
------------ book club update
this is the july pick for the beautiful world book club!! elle and i will be vibing amidst the dark academia and the gluttony and the classics. please join us!!
------------ original review
Here is the problem with reviewing every book I read: Sometimes I throw around terms before I really need them, and then once I read THE book, The Story that requires and deserves that descriptor, I have nothing to give it.
Right now I have this problem. Because I have used the word “immersive” before, and immediately upon my completion of this book it became clear that I should have saved it for right now.
I felt like I lived inside these pages. I felt like I began to think in the beautiful and sharp prose that fills them. I felt like I knew the characters, ate decadent lunches and walked the snowy campus and whispered with them. I felt an aching emptiness, a genuine longing, when I read the final words.
I miss living here.
This was very, very slow - to the point that about halfway through I said (inexplicably, aloud), “I don’t know what they’ll even do for the rest of the book” - and yet I was gripped by it.
It’s genuinely masterful.
I love Richard and I LOVE Camilla and I love Francis and I, fine, okay, at least like Charles and Henry and even Bunny and Julian.
And I miss them all.
This is an incredible work, but maybe the most incredible thing is how the reader is Richard. I, too, miss my bygone days at my prestigious New England college with my whip-smart group of eccentric friends, and, like him, I am too quickly forced to realize the fallacy of such a feeling.
After all, it was all a fiction.
Bottom line: I’m raising this to a five star rating.
------------ pre-review
you'll have to excuse me, i'd love to actually write something here but my brain is broken and i am incapable of thought.
also seems absurd to try to use words when donna tartt took all the good ones.
Someone PLEASE procure me a striking, modern, big-city apartment with lots of windows, where I can hold a glass of expensive wine and gaze unseeing ovSomeone PLEASE procure me a striking, modern, big-city apartment with lots of windows, where I can hold a glass of expensive wine and gaze unseeing over the skyline at night, because apparently I’m going to feel melancholy for the rest of my life over never again being able to read this for the first time and if I’m going to do so I at least want to be glamorous about it.
Or, at the very least, I need to locate the sort of old-fashioned library described in 1920s mystery novels with a bar cart stocked with aged scotch and shelves filled with leather-bound tomes, except their antique spines will be a façade for the kinds of things I actually enjoy reading, rather than being 800 different copies of the Bible or whatever, and I will never drink the scotch because everything about the process of drinking scotch is like the scotch is asking you not to drink it. (Scotch is the poison-dart frog of beverages.)
Basically what I’m saying here is - Ever since I read the last page of this book three months ago, I have felt a small, unrelenting sadness, which I believe will only be solved by one of the following methods: a) I dedicate my life to tracking down a door to the Starless Sea, and either I find one or it turns out the real reward was the friends I made along the way; b) I experience repeated memory loss, allowing myself to read this book over and over again for the first time, re-beginning every time I finish it; or c) I live the rest of my days in homage to this story.
All options will require funds that I will never have (I’m an English major, after all), so please kindly Venmo me at your convenience. Thanks.
This is the most gorgeous ode to stories and literature. It’s a thank-you gift to anyone who has ever been a Reader, with a capital R - not just someone who reads but someone WHO READS, as an identity, as a life-force, as a passion, as the meaning of life.
I dare any true bookworm to read this book with an open heart and a ready mind and not feel grateful that their life overlapped with its publication date.
Erin Morgenstern’s ability to create divine settings you can see and smell and lust after and yearn to experience is unparalleled.
My favorite book ever is, as anyone who has so much as made the online equivalent of eye contact me knows, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I love it with enough passion that everything about it is my favorite of that thing: my favorite characters, my favorite prose, and, naturally, my favorite setting.
Before I read this book, my unrivaled first runner-up was the setting of the Night Circus.
Now, I think both Wonderland and the circus may have been bumped down a slot. Never has a setting known me, seen my soul, like that of the magical underground great world of stories in these pages.
Plus, I didn’t have to slog through a Night Circus-level instalove romance to get there.
This was a perfect book. Mysterious, confusing, strange, magical. Beautifully written and populated with characters you love hard and immediately. I read this so slowly because I SAVORED it. I, a compulsive speed-reader whose simultaneous highest compliment and M.O. is reading a book in a day or so, knew that my finishing this book would be a small heartbreak, and so I tried to postpone it as long as I could.
So instead, I’ll pay the highest compliment to this that any reader can pay to any story -
Bottom line: It was hard to pick up another book after reading this one.
------------- rereading updates
THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!!!
all month long, i'll be rereading this fav as part of my book club with my lovely elle! follow on instagram here or join the discussion here.
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Yes, I teared up upon finishing my reread of this book like a starlet in an old movie. No, I don't want to talk about it. I JUST WANT THIS TO NEVER END.
And since usually I end up five starring less than 10% of the books I read in any given year, I was thinking "not very likely."
Dear Melissa Albert: Thank you for making this book (which I basically had the idea for - I mean, you mentioned it in a different book, but I am on the record as saying I would like it to be a real book before even you were, so), and thank you for making it everything I wanted it to be, and thank you for giving me a five star read against the odds.
Even if I've read 30+ so far this year with only one more five star to my name. So what. We count our blessings.
This is a book of fairytales (my favorite) that is full of darkness and blood and powerful girls and selfish girls and powerful girls and violence and anger and revenge and badassery (all of which are my other favorites).
It is, in short, a dream.
Bottom line: More please!!!
------------ pre-review
when the book you dreamed up lives up to said dream >>>
review to come / 5 stars
------------ currently-reading updates
i don't want to be dramatic but i think this is the prettiest book that has ever existed
------------ tbr review
i WAS trying to buy fewer books this year...but then this one came out.
"I want to read Tales from the Hinterland (Grandnanny’s book) so badly. If Melissa Albert is smart, or loves me or the world or both, she will write that spinoff."
"We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do no right with no effort bec"We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do no right with no effort because he can detect the obvious."
A few years ago, I watched the first season-ish of the TV show adaptation of this book. Here is what I remember: - scary Nazi man with family - San Francisco - the phrase "the man in the high castle" uttered very ominously - lady leaving her husband, or the home where she lived with him or something - torture stuff - a VERY smooth move performed on aforementioned lady by a non-husband man in which she was crying and sitting on the curb and he, in one motion, wrapped her in his jacket and also IN HIS ARMS!!!
As you can tell, 17-year-old me was most impacted by that last one.
What I don't remember: - an in-depth exploration of morality as it relates to empires, and whether any one side of a war is better than the other; whether it really matters who wins a war, or if we'd be wrapped up in moral complexity and evil and bigotry either way; and how and if humans can steer themselves toward the moral right, and if it really matters if it does.
This book is a game changer for me. At first, I didn't like it. It was slow, and racist, and sexist, and the biases show in it probably even outside of the ways they're intended to.
But...the only way I can describe it is that this book opens up. You know how sometimes you're listening to a song and it gets big? Hannah Hunt by Vampire Weekend, or Titus Was Born by Young the Giant. Just a normal song, and then suddenly - huge and loud and overpowering.
This book did that. It takes everything it's been doing for 150 pages or so, and shows you that something else, something huge, has been happening all along.
I felt really overcome when I finished this book, which was about 8 seconds ago. So I still do.
I had to raise this rating.
Bottom line: This book is tough and difficult and punishing, but it is worth the work....more
There is an old cliché that goes, "Laughter is the best medicine."
In a literal sense, this is wrong, because the best medicine is a combination of ibuThere is an old cliché that goes, "Laughter is the best medicine."
In a literal sense, this is wrong, because the best medicine is a combination of ibuprofen, junk food, and complaining. There is no illness that this all-star lineup cannot solve.
And in a figurative sense, it is also wrong, because while I am a huge laughter stan the actual best medicine is a book getting into your hands right when you are best equipped to appreciate it.
In other words, I am sorry to everyone in the comments who agreed with my original three-star review, because it turns out this book is actually perfect.
I read this book for essentially no reason, in 2019, when the world was okay (not awesome but not on fire) and I was young and innocent and my favorite genre was still, somehow, against all odds, YA contemporary.
Why, I do not know. Seems a recipe for disaster.
Now, three years later, this book has returned to my mind due to the fact that it sounds so up my alley the universe may have prescribed it to me. Character-driven, almost-boring, beautifully written literary fiction about complicated (read: annoying) women is all I want to read.
So I picked this one up.
And holy Moses. (Is that an expression?) This one hit me hard.
Every year I build a favorites shelf of every new-to-me read I five star in that year. I never add rereads, even if they're newly five stars, because it's so specific to that year in my head.
This one got added to favorites-2022 (and thus broke the rules I made up) so fast it broke the sound barrier. Sorry to dogs and fireworks appreciators for startling you and getting your hopes up, respectively.
This was just so exactly what I needed.
I don't know that I've ever annotated more, or savored a book more slowly, or felt so seen and still learned things. This book is riddled with underlines, and I read it in a matter of pages per day, and I never wanted it to end. It made me feel so normal and so seen and so okay.
And it gets better. Because for some reason there's a sequel???
Just when this couldn't be any more perfect for me right now, it turns out the universe decided to give me more. I picked this up for a reread completely arbitrarily only to learn it's getting a sequel 6 years after publication, right after I five starred it.
Everything is perfect.
Or actually everything is pretty bad, but the universe is being really nice to me about it.
Bottom line: I don't know what to say about this, really. It's beautifully written, it's incredibly real, it is the ibuprofen/junk food/complaining of books, for my broken brain.
--------------- original three-star review
Sometimes, I finish a book and I don’t know how I feel about it.
This happens a lot of times, in fact. And I have two main strategies for dealing with it. In one, I rate it approximately, confidently say review to come, wait four months (I’m in the midst of a major backlog, okay, I’m not any more a fan of it than you are. In fact I’m probably way less of a fan, because it spares you from having to experience my reviews - a definitively good thing - while it only makes me aware of the fact that I have, like, 100 pages of review-writing ahead of me. And it’s the kind where I can’t remember the book. A true nightmare), then maybe change the rating and post the review.
That’s the good method. (Hard as it may be to believe. The standards are low.)
The bad method, and the one I employed here, is not even rating it. Not even giving it a temporary rating. Just...leaving it in weird review purgatory.
Out of pure laziness and an inability to employ my critical thinking skills.
This was a strange book to read, and, true to form, it’s a strange book to review.
This is one of those slightly radical literary fiction reads with a unique way of looking at the world and a unique style to match that always end up changing my internal monologue for 7-10 business days.
The main reason I don’t read literary fiction (beyond the fact that I spend most of my time reading and trashing YA contemporary) is that, whether I like it or not, I basically live inside it while I’m reading it and for days after.
That’s debilitating.
For this book, which is sad and intense and basically unsatisfying as a rule, that was nothing short of consistently mildly to severely unpleasant.
But I don’t think it’s a bad book, necessarily. I think the writer is very good, and I was fairly consumed by this start to finish. (Obviously.)
It’s just...at the end, I was left feeling a bit, well, awful. And I couldn’t figure out what the point of it was - me feeling that way, or the book, or any of it.
Not a promising way to feel about a book.
Bottom line: I still don’t know any of the answers to any of these questions, so...three stars.
---------------
well now i'm all melancholy.
review to come / rating also to come
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it is with great sadness and regret that i must inform you...
this book stole the working title of my autobiography...more
It’s a rendition of life in its mundanities and monotony, a display of the fallacies and frustrations that make up our daily story, but one that refuses to flinch away from the breath-stealing beauty of it. The miraculousness and gorgeousness and fated magic of life.
And that type of story rarely wins awards. It is dismissed and mocked as treacly and feel-good. In all honesty I feel that if this book were written about or by a woman, it’d be relegated to a corner of by-rights-less-serious “women’s fiction,” called even a romantic comedy and never ever ever spoken of in the same sentence as the word Pulitzer.
But it is not overdone and tired to depict everyday life as wonderful and gorgeous. In fact, it’s the bravest story you can write.
That’s all I have to say.
Bottom line: How lovely.
---------- pre-review
reading this book was like: sitting in a brightly lit room when the lights are suddenly extinguished, and there is a moment of discomfited surprise before the realization that you are actually quite tired, and the reprieve from the fluorescence is a loveliness and a mercy, and you settle into it and shut your weary eyes and the light has returned as abruptly as it was sent away.
i didn't want the beautiful vacation that was this story to end.
review to come / 5 stars
---------- currently-reading updates
don't mind me, just jumping on a bandwagon two years late...more
It’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, plus Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, plus a ton of critical analysiTHIS BOOK IS MY DREAM.
It’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, plus Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, plus a ton of critical analysis and fun facts and biographical info and poetry and background and cultural and period information and bonus illustrations and basically all you need or could ever want to know, except if you’re me and your love for and curiosity about Alice and Lewis Carroll and Wonderland will never be satiated.
And also it’s about a square yard and the font is tiny and it weighs about 30 pounds and takes an eternity to read.
I loved this so much that it made my heart hurt to finish it. My version of paradise is probably something like this, where I’m alternating between reading the original text I love more than anything and eloquent, wise, humorous elaboration on things I had never known. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know.
I guess you could say I grew…curiouser and curiouser.
I love myself.
Anyway, my bookmark for this book was a folded-up sheet of lined paper on which I wrote down the titles and works of art and research queries I wanted to know more about as I read. I filled up both sides of that sheet.
Absolutely every aspect of this book is gorgeous and curated and fascinating. I don’t really know how to review this because it basically transcended reading for me.
It was just a perfect experience.
Bottom line: If you love Alice like I do, or really really like it, you need to read this book. It’s a gift. That’s all I can say.
----------- pre-review
i have never, in my entire life, cried in public over a book.
my skin is clear. my gpa is up. spring has come early. i'm hydrated. i have been cured of my nearsightedness.
i could not have d r e a m e d up a more my skin is clear. my gpa is up. spring has come early. i'm hydrated. i have been cured of my nearsightedness.
i could not have d r e a m e d up a more perfect book.
this book contains: trans women, gay women, bi women, straight women, pan women, black women, asian women, native american women, middle eastern women, white women, autistic women, disabled women. there are living women and dead women and women who are so dead that it's like, maybe she was born around the year 350? there are women i've heard of and women i've long obsessed over and women i'd never heard of because SOCIETY IS UNJUST.
the art is beautiful, whether it's the comic-style panels that make up most of the book or the two-page spreads at the end of every entry, all of which i want to Frame And Hang But Also Print On The Backs Of My Eyelids.
i've been struggling to read a bit this month — no book could catch my attention. i opened the package containing this yesterday, and must have kept it in the back of my mind since, because i picked it up today without thinking. and didn't put it down. through dinner or cleaning or cookie-baking or anything else.
i needed this book in childhood, and i needed it as a teenager, and i need it now and i'll continue to need it forever. i know absolutely that i'll return to this book always.
this is going on my all-time favorites list. this is a book that i will recommend to all women, and all men, and all people of all genders because it is so important and beautiful and necessary.
as i finished this book, i got choked up. because it's over, and because it is such a gift.
at the end, Pénélope Bagieu includes a list of 30 more badass women, and oh my god if this world is worthy of loving Bagieu will write a book for them, too.
bottom line: maybe i will come back and write more later, because i have the feeling i will never be done talking about this book.
thank you, thank you, thaaaaank you to fierce reads for the ARC...more
introducing: the runaway winner of the Most Personal Thing I Have Ever Put On The Internet contest!!! find this full review here if you dare: https://introducing: the runaway winner of the Most Personal Thing I Have Ever Put On The Internet contest!!! find this full review here if you dare: https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.co...
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At the end of 2014, I was in my junior year of high school, and I was in the deepest depression of my life. Before then and since, I’ve had bad days and dark spells, but none of it has ever been as bad as it was then.
In the winter going into 2015, I watched nine and a half seasons of the TV show Friends. I do not remember a single second of it. I would just go to school, get home, put Friends on, dissociate, go to sleep, repeat.
It was very bad. (The show, not the depression. I mean that was definitely not good, don’t get me wrong, but wow Friends is a very bad show.)
Even when I wasn’t watching possibly the least funny show that manages to call itself a comedy ever in the history of time, I was still on the internet. I don’t really know what I did - I don’t have many memories of that time of my life.
I know at some point during that time, I started listening to Serial. And something about the podcast format really clicked with me - maybe that I needed to do something else while I did it to stay focused. I don’t know. But it felt better than just putting garbage (and I do mean garbage) television on and staring at the wall.
Soon I started googling tons of podcast recommendation lists, which were really in a renaissance then. Honestly I think entertainment sites profited off of articles about podcasts more than podcasts profited off of podcasts. But anyway.
I saw one Vulture listicle on the best episodes of any podcast ever (isn’t it crazy that once upon a time there were few enough podcasts that that seemed possible? How times have changed), and it mentioned an episode of a show called Comedy Bang! Bang! that included a name I recognized: Bobby Moynihan, from SNL.
I listened to it. And I loved it so much. It made me actually smile, actually laugh, when that seemed kind of impossible.
I looked up more best episodes, and one name kept coming up: Harris Wittels.
I listened to every episode of CBB with him on it. I read his Twitter feed. I looked up his standup. He quickly became one of my favorite comedians, at a time when my favorite comedians were, like, SNL cast members.
I listened to an episode of Pete Holmes’ podcast where he was the guest, and he talked for hours about his addiction to heroin.
Then, in February 2015, after just a month or two of him being an unexpected beacon of joy and laughter in what felt like my impossible-to-live life, he died.
I don’t know Harris. I wasn’t his biggest fan or his most ardent follower. But he meant a lot to me, and his death hit me hard.
I’ve listened to and relistened to his podcast appearances, watched his Vine compilations repeatedly, trawled his Twitter feed. I’ve seen Parks & Rec (which he wrote for and guested on) over and over, have fawned over the brilliance of Master of None (in which his role would have been immense, just weeks after his death).
I’ve consumed a lot more comedy since I was 17, and become a lot happier, but Harris has never stopped meaning a lot to me.
I’ve known this book was coming out since Stephanie Wittels Wachs promoted it on Comedy Bang! Bang!, and I’ve had it on my to-read list ever since, but I’ve never felt ready to read it.
I knew it was going to make me very, very sad. Cry-level sad, which is ordinarily an impossibly high level of sadness for me to reach.
But reach it I did.
This is the single most heart-wrenching book I have ever read. Never has a page carried emotion like these ones did. It is real and raw and breathtakingly sad and somehow, still, funny.
I read it, for the most part, in a day, swaths of it in public (yes, weepily). I stayed up till 2 a.m. to finish it. This is the first book to make me feel like I had to do that in a very long time. It was that level of unputdownable.
My heart hurt the whole time. Stephanie Wittels Wachs is a brilliant writer. I felt this so hard (and I’m not a reader who feels hard constantly or easily).
Like Harris, it’s a f*cking amazing, once-in-a-lifetime thing.
I feel so lucky to have picked it up. And so glad I finally did.
Even though doing so the day before my birthday made me spend it in a serious state of melancholy.
Bottom line: Do not miss out on Harris Wittels, and do not miss out on this book.
-----------
this was everything i hoped it would be and more.
review to come / 5 stars
-----------
reading this book (which i absolutely know beyond a shadow of a doubt will make me cry) in public is my version of living on the edge.
-----------
rip harris wittels, who died way too young three years ago today.
First off, this book is teeny as all get out and oh MAN I love a short book!!!
Come to think of it...I really love a short book. Three five star ratings so far this year, and they’re clocking in at 173 pages, 181 pages, and a whopping 190 pages.
Maybe I just hate reading?
No no no no I will not get distracted from the fact that this is the literary equivalent of someone hacking my Ok Cupid profile to build my perfect match. (I do not have an Ok Cupid profile.)
In addition to being the perfect length (which is to say, just a touch above nonexistent), this is also my ideal genre??? Say it with me: WELL DONE MAGICAL REALISM BABY!!! (Sorry if the improvised “baby” prevented you from saying it with me.)
This book is about a boarding school for children who have fallen into other worlds (magical ones!) and been unceremoniously dropped back into our boring old magic-less one. (Boo! Can you imagine.) Think Wonderland (!!!), Narnia, etc.
Which brings up two MORE ways this book is perfect for me! One, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (my favorite book ever of all time, in case you’re new here) is canon in this world. Two, MAGIC BOARDING SCHOOL. Who doesn’t loooove that trope.
Another perfect thing: a touch of MURRRRDERRRR?!?!?!?! Yes! Murder! We have blood and mystery on our hands folks! (Hopefully not literally. That sounds unpleasant. You may want to hand sanitizer that sh*t. Except not actually because that cute lil keychain Purell you’re holding is CONTRIBUTING TO ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE YOU LOON.) (Sorry for all the caps lock in this one. I’m excited.)
And perhaps the most perfect thing of all: This book is so diverse it puts literally every other book ever to shame. In 173 pages, this story contained more solid representation than pretty much every YA fantasy I read last year COMBINED.
Our protagonist, Nancy, is asexual. A pal of hers is trans. Essentially every single character is of color or non-gender-conforming or non-straight and there is so much mental illness rep it makes me griiiiin EAR to EAR. Which is actually a very off-putting image. But don’t let the creepiness of my physically improbably smiling deter you from this book please.
To conclude: amazingly short + wonderful magical realism + Alice + boarding school + murder + mystery + effortless immersive diversity = I am one happy camper. Dare I say...the happiest camper....more
There are a lot of movies about boring white-straight-male aspiring writers in their 30s being taught how to LIVE WHIMSICALLY by a manic pixie dream girl. There are books about the beautiful wonder of a child’s perspective. There are millions and millions and millions of TV shows depicting the dramatic trials and tribulations of the high school experience (as lived by gorgeous twenty-three year olds).
But none of it feels true. Maybe only Neil Gaiman can remember what it’s like to be a child.
It is wondrous, and beautiful, and whimsical, and even dramatic. But it’s also dark and scary sometimes. Inexplicable things happen, and the world seems uncontrollable, which is magical and horrifying. That’s childhood.
That’s also this book.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is actually terrifying.
It’s magical, but probably not in the way typically associated with fantasy novels narrated by children. It’s magical in the way that I felt the world was when I was a child. As it turns out, that’s much more magical. And much more amazing to read about.
This book is so, so short, and so devastatingly lovely. It’s beautifully written and emotional. It made me scared and it made my heart hurt and it made me smile.
I want to quote more of it, but really I want to quote everything. Maybe I’ll just excerpt ever-longer passages until I trick you into reading it?
So, better idea, just read it yourself.
Bottom line: It’s 181 pages. What would it hurt to read it read it read it read it read it?
------------------------- pre-review
things this book has in common with the graveyard book:
a) by neil gaiman b) first 5 star rating of the year c) totally f*cking rad
HOW DO YOU WRITE A REVIEW OF A BOOK THAT YOU LOVED SO MUCH IT MAKES YOUR HEART WARM AND IT RESTORED YOUR FAITH IN YA AND EVERYTHING IS GOOD IN THE WORHOW DO YOU WRITE A REVIEW OF A BOOK THAT YOU LOVED SO MUCH IT MAKES YOUR HEART WARM AND IT RESTORED YOUR FAITH IN YA AND EVERYTHING IS GOOD IN THE WORLD WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT AND FLOWERS BLOOM AND BIRDS FLOAT AROUND YOUR HEAD AND SING OR TWEET OR WHATEVER IT IS THEY DO.
No, seriously, please tell me how. Because I read this book a month ago and I got nothin.
I suppose I will begin with what I know to be true, and what I know to be true is that Richard Gansey III is my husband. I have said this now in three (3) consecutive reviews of each of the three (3) books in this series I have read, and yet it only grows to be more true. Because he only gets better. (What does it say about me that I'm now one hundred percent convinced I just jinxed myself and will hate him by the next book? In other words what is wrong with me. This is a cry for help.)
I love Gansey. It’s an all-consuming love. It’s above analysis, so I can’t even tell you why I do. But I do. And I’m claiming him. He is THE book boyfriend for me now. (Goodbye, Étienne St. Clair from Anna and the French Kiss. It’s been a good three years, but I’ve grown. I've matured. I’ve moved on. And also, you’re short, and that’s just never been a viable option for me.)
Excluding Gansey (because I could talk about my love for that elegant man-boy for pages and nobody wants that)...things tend a lot more toward the "eh" end of the spectrum. As in, Ronan is still incredibly blah. Who caaaaaares. We get it. You're edgy. You can stop now. Also, Adam, still sooooooo eh. But I willllll say...a certain relationship begins to blossom and bloom and beautifully pop up from the soil...and that shindig is not eh at all. (Insert the smolder emoji here.)
But, quelle surprise, nothing is perfect because nothing is ever good or easy, and there is a relationship that is so incredibly eh it's almost like it's too eh for the world eh. Like, they tried to put a picture of this relationship in the dictionary next to the word eh, but they were like one, this is a fictional couple so that's impossible, two, is the word eh even in the dictionary, and three, THIS IS TOO EH EVEN FOR THIS.
That's the dictionary people, angrily shouting NEXT, as in "next person proposing an image to be added next to a definition." I bet you didn't consider how much time dealing with those queries takes for the employees of dictionaries.
ANYWAY. That horribly boring and blah relationship is...sigh...Blue and Gansey. That pairing can die, really. Brutally. That budding duo can get run over by a steamroller and come out all Flat Stanley'd and non-viable on the other side. Also, to clarify, I mean the relationship itself can die. I would never endorse the murder of Gansey.
ANYWAY AGAIN. When did Blue/Gansey happen? One second they're just a pair of pals and the next second they are SMASHING their FACES together PRETENDING they're KISSING. Horrible! Gross! For so many reasons! On so many levels!
Also, I am not saying this due to any repressed jealousy. That would be insane. And while I may be at a level of insanity that I would call dibs on the hand in marriage of a fictional character, I am not yet at a level of insanity wherein I am jealous of the fictional beaux of that fictional character. That would be, in case anyone is wondering just when this whole thing will officially have gone too far, the moment when help should be contacted.
But back to the characters. I literally did not even finish that section. God help me. ANYWAY. Blue is pretty cool in this book, because she always is. Noah is still my small spooky son, and I love him and he should’ve been in this book more, but that’s just because he should be in everything. In order for me to attain true happiness I need to reach a point where Noah is popping up even in content not created by Maggie Stiefvater. He’s a goddamn prince and he deserves it.
The Gray Man sticks around for this book, which is a thrill because I love him. (I do not know why this is true, because his literal defining characteristic is that he is gray, but I love him anyway.) AND PLUS, NEW PEOPLE COME. AND GUESS WHAT? THEY'RE ALSO GREAT.
Piper is a queen. A literal queen, because I am crowning her queen of all villains. This is legitimate and legal in the eyes of the law, because I crowned myself ruler of all books.
Piper's husband what's his name is also pretty sick. Which is really surprising, because one, male villains are so boring, and two, Evil Teacher Guy has also been done. Like, within this very series. Two books ago.
Hahahahaha oh my god. Whoa. I almost forgot about that horrendous bore. What a snoozefest that guy was. The improvement to this series just by this book alone is WILD my friends. WILD.
But there are even more new people! These include: - a woman who is cool (both the least spoilery AND least interesting way I could possibly put that) - a guy named Jesse who is pretty cute and lovable
Maggie Stiefvater can really crank out characters I care about. (A feat matched by, guess what, literally no other authors. I am semi-incapable of even fictional love and affection.)
The setting remains sick, because it always has been. The magic is even amazing-er than ever. (How does it keep getting better?!)
This book is just...a more action-packed version of the other two. More of the stuff ya like, less of the same filler sh*t from the first two. You know. Less “Adam is poor and insecure about it, Blue eats yogurt and let’s talk more about the whole amplifier thing, Ronan is angsty, Gansey chews a mint leaf and plays with toys and has a journal and is somehow very rich throughout, Ronan is angsty, Noah is blurry and also, oh yeah, (view spoiler)[dead (hide spoiler)], and of course, Ronan, in case you forgot, is extraordinarily, next-level angsty.”
Seriously, that's a spot on encapsulation of the first two books. I am honestly proud of myself. You could definitely just skip the first two books and cut to what matters based on that paragraph alone. (Please don't do that.)
I'm quite pleased I didn't give The Raven Boys or The Dream Thieves five stars, because this sh*t is on a whole other level baby. They aren't even in the same REALM OF EXISTENCE. If those two are books this one straight up has to be called something else. We have to make up a new word based on how much better this one is than those garbage monsters.
Ugh! I am filled with love. And also excitement. And also immense fear and trepidation and regret because oh my god the next one just cannot be as good there is no way it's impossible life is just an endless feast of disappointment with countless courses of sadness casserole, which is also known as just "casserole."
Um.
Just realized I'm not going to ever ever read the last book.
Bottom line: WHATEVER LITERALLY JUST READ THE SERIES FOR THIS BOOK IT IS LIFE-CHANGING AND I KNOW I DID A BAD JOB OF EXPLAINING HOW GREAT IT IS BUT JUST TRUST ME, OK? I'm not used to five star reviews.
------------------- PRE-REVIEW
my skin is clear. my bank account is full. my bookshelves aren't messy and my crops survived the winter.
ok well none of that is true BUT THIS BOOK CHANGED MY STUPID LIFE!!!!!!
review to come once i resurrect my laptop (even my keyboard died of shock at a five star rating)
------------------- CURRENTLY-READING UPDATE
ho
ly
shit.
IS THIS GOING TO BE A FIVE STAR READ?????????...more
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