There's a bit too much happening in Fang Fiction, tonally and plot wise. Tonally, you have a fairly silly and fun paranormal adventure/romance in New There's a bit too much happening in Fang Fiction, tonally and plot wise. Tonally, you have a fairly silly and fun paranormal adventure/romance in New York City on the one hand, and a serious and sensitive treatment of rape and its aftermath on the other, and the two don't quite mesh - which is not to say that they could not, but there's a jarring quality to how the story moves from one to the other (I will say that this could be intentional or meant to represent how such trauma is experienced, but it doesn't quite feel that way). Plot wise, the story feels crowded and overstuffed. I think this is partially due to the book not knowing quite what it wants to be: it is marketed as a romance, but the romance was the least interesting and memorable part to me. In all honesty, it felt like one of those older supernatural adventure movies where we get a perfunctory romance subplot that feels more obligatory than fully realized.
Overall, I think Fang Fiction needed either (a) to lean away from the romance and into the paranormal adventure aspect with a more fleshed out world, characters, and conflict and properly relegate the romance to a subplot, (b) simplify and consolidate the nonromance plots and focus more on developing the main romantic leads and their connection, or (c) just be much longer to be able to develop both aspects sufficiently. ...more
Thank you to the publishers for providing a free ARC for an honest review.
Entertaining enough to spend a couple of hours on, but overall Dark Spaces: Thank you to the publishers for providing a free ARC for an honest review.
Entertaining enough to spend a couple of hours on, but overall Dark Spaces: Dungeon feels like a later season episode of Criminal Minds with a trite and completely predictable twist ending. I feel like having one more issue (or ideally trimming some of the fat off the existing issues and reallocating that space) to focus on developing that twist or adding something novel to the narrative would have served the story well. Snyder and Sherman seem to be trying to ride the line between graphic, pulpy horror and a more psychological thriller, but more commitment to either avenue would have packed a much harder punch.
(view spoiler)[ The whole "you never escape your torture because you're obsessing/still there in you head" angle feels extremely overdone to me at this point, and I have a hard time ascribing much added value to this even as a true horror comic because the horror element of the story receives so little page time. (hide spoiler)]...more
Thank you to the publishers for providing a free ARC for an honest review.
I devoured Goosebumps books when I was a kid, and always had a special loveThank you to the publishers for providing a free ARC for an honest review.
I devoured Goosebumps books when I was a kid, and always had a special love for the choose your own ending variations, so Try Not to Die on Slashtag was a deliriously nostalgic, if significantly gorier experience. I enjoyed the book immensely, and did indeed die a lot. As in I think I managed to choose the wrong choice every single time (I'll admit some of it was on purpose). The deaths are pretty imaginative and varied enough to not get tedious, and they manage to stay on the right side of disgusting and disturbing.
The one fault I had was that I wish there was a bit more of it - not more deaths, we definitely have enough of that. But I would have loved a bit more variation in actual story. Paths that are eventually not the right choice, but that go more than one node off the main path. If I'm not mistaken, I believe basically every wrong choice results in instant death, and it would have been nice to feel a bit freer in actually choosing your own story, instead of essentially reading the one story with frequent but short detours into different death scenarios. I do understand there are fairly significant technical obstacles to that, especially with an e-book where flipping back and forth is harder, and that making more headway into a wrong choice before finding out that you're doing so might be prohibitively frustrating for some readers, but it would have enhanced the feeling of being in control of the story significantly.
Listen for the Lie is here for a good time, not a long time. I listened to this whole thing on the way to and during a 4-hour flight that that I almosListen for the Lie is here for a good time, not a long time. I listened to this whole thing on the way to and during a 4-hour flight that that I almost missed three separate times (I am ashamed to say that one of those times was because I thought there were 75 minutes between 11:55 and 12:10 instead of 15 - don't ask, I don't know) and it was perfect for that. Fun, fresh, and fast, I really enjoyed the narrative voice and all the extremely bad decisions being made. And then I got off the plane, a a few weeks passed and I forgot most of what actually happened and everybody's names, which is totally fine by me....more
Thank you to the publisher for providing a free ARC in return for an honest review
I honestly had a hard time getting through this one. And I was so Thank you to the publisher for providing a free ARC in return for an honest review
I honestly had a hard time getting through this one. And I was so excited when I saw it on NetGalley! It's a sapphic romance between an actor/director and an academic! It's set at USC! I go to USC! I'm an academic (in training?)! I love reading about academics and I love reading about actors/directors and I love sapphic romance, and it's set somewhere I spend a frankingly disgusting amount of time! So this should be perfect for me. And yet...
There's nothing offensively bad or distasteful about Director's Cut, it's just a bit too boring in a way that makes me wonder if I am perhaps a toxic person. Valeria is a 29-year old A-list actress who also has a PhD in popular music or something along those lines and is teaching a class at USC because she thinks she needs to pivot her career because her foray into directing has not been going well, and the roles she's been getting since coming out have not been to her liking. Her co-professor Maeve is a bit tetchy at first, but they work out their issues pretty quickly and then embark on a romance. The timeline also didn't sit right with me - the actual on-page events occur in a fairly truncated amount of time so everything develops a bit too quickly to have any particular weight. Valeria and Maeve are cute together - it's the kind of relationship I'd be rooting for if they were my friends - but they're ultimately boring once the slight animosity between them is resolved (not that they were super interesting before) and I honestly had a hard time caring about them or their relationship.
What made it harder to enjoy the book was Valeria's character and issues. Look, I get it - acting and academia are both careers that are loaded with insecurity and impostor syndrome and just crushing depression and self doubt. Here's a story: on the first day of my PhD at USC, we had a presentation about impostor syndrome. My cohort was a group of ~15 people where most already had a couple of publications, or they had won awards, or they had done some very impressive community work. In all honesty, I was probably the least impressive person there by any scholarly metric (I got in off a waitlist, so that tracks). When the PsyD giving us the presentation on impostor syndrome asked "who here feels like they don't deserve to be here?", everyone except me raised their hands. So I'm not saying that Valeria's borderline constant stream of self doubt and insecurity is unrealistic, but I am saying it's pretty tedious. This woman had her first dissertation rejected at age 24, quit academia to go into acting and became an A-list actor who was able to pivot into directing her own feature film and finish her PhD by age 29. This is an immensely successful career by any metric - even if she had taken an extra year to rework her initial dissertation, getting a PhD at 25 is, while no unheard of, pretty impressive (and she pretty much would have had to progress to her final year with absolutely no lost time to get there, even in the less time intensive UK system). It took her all of 5 years to pivot into acting, become very successful, and then pivot again into directing and get a feature film made. I swear I have sympathy for her and her issues, but I mostly just wanted to give her a good shake and tell her to snap out of it and stop being such a loser. I'm not a mean person, but Valeria really took me there.
Overall, a boring relationship, a boring plot, and a mind numbingly frustrating main character. ...more
Thank you to the publishers for providing a free ARC for an honest review.
Glass Houses launched itself to the top of my "oh my god I want to read thisThank you to the publishers for providing a free ARC for an honest review.
Glass Houses launched itself to the top of my "oh my god I want to read this as soon as possible" list immediately, so I was thrilled to receive and ARC from TOR and, in a startlingly odd turn of events, was not disappointed! It was even close to being a 5-star read for me. I would actually suggest going into this book as blind as possible, because there are elements of it that move between genre boundaries that I feel are most rewarding when they are less expected. Overall, a fairly smart, pointed and fun read!
The best part about Glass Houses is the world building: Ashby creates a kind-of dystopian world that isn't really elaborated on but feels chillingly real and increasingly imminent with every off hand comment and bit of information given to us. Unexpectedly, most of the action occurs away from settings where a lot of this world building would be realized or seen on page, and I both like and am frustrated by this choice. On the one hand, this distance keeps the worldbuilding tantalizing and strong: like a horror movie monster, it's the kind of thing that feels like it may crumble if elaborated or focused upon too extensively. On the other hand, I'd love to see so much more of it. Despite the stranded nature of the main plot, there is a strong thematic and narrative fit between the two that keeps them from feeling disconnected from or incidental to each other.
There is a great deal of biting social commentary in this novel, and it mostly works! Ashby appears to have put a great deal of thought into technology and the political economy and social and political worlds in which it is produced and operates, and it comes across quite well for most of the book - it feels neither preachy nor underbaked. A lot of the observational or thematic points are salient and powerful and manage to not come off as trite or jejune, which a lot of similar types of stories tend to end up being. The social commentary does feel a touch more tired and superficial towards to end, but by that point I was invested enough that it only slightly turned me off.
The plot itself was engaging and a fun ride to be on, even if it's pretty apparent early on where this is all going. There are a couple plot elements that I didn't fully understand or felt were underdeveloped or unnecessary (view spoiler)[ mainly the main characters past as a serial killer; I've given this quite some thought and I'm not sure what exactly this adds to the narrative or themes beyond being something shocking and unexpected to reveal. I wouldn't have an issue with that necessarily, except it feels a bit out of nowhere and isn't developed well enough to give it the necessary heft or believability in my opinion, although I am totally open to the possibility that I'll have a different opinion on this once I read through this a second time, which I intent to do. (hide spoiler)]....more
Thank you to the publisher for providing an ARC in return for an honest review.
Rising political star Harry Leonard is on the verge of huge things whenThank you to the publisher for providing an ARC in return for an honest review.
Rising political star Harry Leonard is on the verge of huge things when his past starts to catch up with him - mysterious postcards using an old name and threatening him with justice start showing up at the office, sending his chief of staff Krista Walsh on a quest to find out what exactly he's hiding or hiding from. Pike Island is a brisk thriller that is a quick and fun read. It's all very believable, if not extremely thrilling; the shape of things that have happened becomes more or less clear around halfway through, but there's still a decent amount of tension to be drawn from the question of where this will end up. A bit over written, and could have done with a bit more character development for Krista, but overall a perfectly serviceable thriller. ...more
Kevin Wilson has a talent for weird and tender tales that are somehow both ridiculously unusual in concept and intensely focused on the mundane aspectKevin Wilson has a talent for weird and tender tales that are somehow both ridiculously unusual in concept and intensely focused on the mundane aspects of life. Now is Not the Time to Panic is a touching, beautiful story about two teenagers who inadvertently cause a upheaval in their sleepy town through their artistic creation and the fall out of it decades later.
Frankie and Zeke's teenaged summer almost has the quality of a fever dream, a tone that works extremely well with the emotional state the characters are experiencing. The intense connection and yearning between them and Frankie's single-minded obsession with their art is palpable and almost suffocating. However, I found the latter half of the adult timeline to be even more emotionally evocative and fascinating. The obsession and inability to move on from something you did decades ago while you were still a teenager, holding on to who you were and what you did with such ferocity only to find that (view spoiler)[ so much of your understanding of it, the weight you've carried around about it is wrong (hide spoiler)] was thrilling to read and touched something deep inside of me that I'm not sure I'm ready to look at too closely as of yet....more
Great concept and setting that is unfortunately let down by characterization and structure. Dead SileCloser to a 4-star than a 3, but not quite there.
Great concept and setting that is unfortunately let down by characterization and structure. Dead Silence started off strong and then tapered off. The inside of Kovalik's head was not a great place to be for the entire story - what is gained in immediacy and desperation is lost in the repetitiveness and despondency that gets grating after the first 100 pages. Structurally, the framing-device-turned-plot-point and (view spoiler)[ the return to the Aurora, and Kovalik's quasi-acceptance of it (I understand she was under duress and felt obliged to her crewmates, but her being given no choice would have been much more horrific) (hide spoiler)] take away from the claustrophobic inevitability that the setting would otherwise provide. The climax also does the same thing, but worse. (view spoiler)[ Yanking the main characters back from what seems to be certain death not once but twice feels like a cop out in a setting and genre that entails and rewards brutality and harsh decisions. (hide spoiler)]
That being said, the atmosphere was chilling and creepy enough and the eventual reveal satisfying enough that I am looking forward to Barnes' next book!...more
First petty thing first: the cover that I got for this, the purple cover with fireworks, is pretty atrocious. It looks like a placeholder cover they pFirst petty thing first: the cover that I got for this, the purple cover with fireworks, is pretty atrocious. It looks like a placeholder cover they put up on a website rather than an actual book cover.
I am vacillating between a two and three star rating for this, partially because I read it right before At First Spite and it doesn't feel fair to give both books the same rating. At First Spite deals with better conceptualized characters and more serious subject matter with a lot more grace, and is better written than this, but it kind of makes a mess of what it's going for. A Long Time Coming, on the other hand, is much less substantive and doesn't really touch anything than the occasional mention of grief, and pulls off a trite and steamy romantic comedy pretty well, but feels hollow. It's the kind of story I would have loved if I was reading it on AO3 when searching under PWP for a fun time, but I suppose I wanted something more here.
Both of the main characters are pretty annoying. There are some extremely cringey lines, some mildly toxic behaviors, severe codependency, and an overall ability to take any of these people seriously as functioning adults. I particularly severely disliked how isolated Lia was, which is explained in text as a result of her grief, but I would have much preferred her to reach out to old friends or make new ones that are not entirely in her new boyfriend's orbit (or actual family) than to build relationships with Breaker's sister-in-laws.
That being said, I was looking for a spicy friends-to-lovers romance, and I got what I was looking for. Not so hot on the actual romance part of it - the relationship felt pretty flat most of the time, honestly - but the spicy bits were pretty good and I was satisfied by that aspect of it to the point where I feel like a two star rating would be unfair, but a three star rating also feels too high.
Second petty thing: The names in his book killed me. ...more
I really enjoy the concept here - spite houses, petty bullshit between love interests, forced proximitMaybe 2.5. This one didn’t really do it for me.
I really enjoy the concept here - spite houses, petty bullshit between love interests, forced proximity, all that fun stuff. But At First Spite isn’t really a fun book in that way. There are plenty of moments of lightheartedness and fun, but overall it’s a story about two people with some serious mental health baggage dealing with that in their own way. There’s some fun banter, but overall it’s Athena dishing out a lot of spite and Matthew just taking it as some form of penance for the way he wronged her. This dynamic, while sweet, isn’t really fun. It’s also based on an admittedly understandable but deeply frustrating series of miscommunication and incorrect assumptions. I would have loved to see Matthew dish out some spite of his own in response to Athena’s frankly childish antics, but that isn’t the kind of person Matthew is. And that is part of the problem. I’ll go into details with this in the spoiler section, but overall I’d say that while I enjoyed the book while reading it, it didn’t live up to the fun romcom promised by the blurb and didn’t leave a great taste in my mouth.
Like some others have pointed out, this is pretty heavy at points, and it deals with serious depression and the loss of a loved one and resulting trauma. I think Dade handles these themes pretty well, and I felt so deeply for both Athena and Matthew and their struggles. As someone who has experience with similar mental health issues, it felt very real and grounded. However, I also think the contortions she has to do to handle them while also committing to her timeline and the expectations of an HEA romance take away from both the romance aspect and the treatment of trauma and mental health in a way that soured my enjoyment the more I think about it.
(view spoiler)[Around the halfway point of the book, Athena discovers that Matthew was actually a pretty good guy who’s been trying to support her in unobtrusive ways, and she spirals into a deep depression and suicidal ideation. She doesn’t leave her house for days, and Matthew eventually climbs in through her third floor window despite his fear of heights to check in on her and make sure she’s okay.
It’s around this point that I started to think that this relationship probably isn’t a very good idea. There's a very sudden escalation of emotional and especially physical intimacy when Athena is at the low point of her depression - Matthew cleans her house, feeds her, sets up doctors appointments, etc., and even gives her a bath when she says she doesn’t feel up to washing herself. He goes to great pains to ensure he isn't taking advantage of her, and this is all wonderfully helpful to someone who is so deep into a crisis they can’t at the moment care for themselves. However, this sudden escalation - well intentioned as it is - combined with the sexual overtones of the bathing scene, despite Matthew’s determination to not make it weird did make it weird, kind of. There’s nothing lecherous or skeezy about it, but it still didn’t quite sit right with me when Matthew immediately, albeit inadvertently, stuck his semi in Athena’s face and his hand between her legs in that situation. The same scene without the sexual aspects would have played much better for me.
More importantly, the way Matthew has been characterized up to that point was someone who puts everyone else in his life before him to his detriment, someone who sacrifices his own happiness for the happiness of others. He’s something of a control freak, seems to have trouble dealing with and externalizing strong negative emotions, and feels immense responsibility for everyone around him. All of this is tied to the unresolved childhood trauma of his younger brother's death and parents’ subsequent checking out, leaving him at the age of eight to raise his surviving baby brother. Matthew needs to be in therapy, but he isn’t and it isn’t brought up as something he needs. His issues are arguably not as severe as Athena’s acute and deep depression, but they’re there. His care for Athena, before, during and after him breaking into her house during her mental health crisis, also plays into this and is initially born from a feeling of being responsible for her circumstances due to both his role in her break up and his role as his brother's parental figure. This dynamic at this point does not feel healthy or good for either of them. Athena at one point admits that her whirlwind engagement to Johnny was partly due to him offering her a safe haven from the difficulties in her life, and it’s hard not to see this as a kind of mirror to that, albeit with more love involved. It felt more like a right person, wrong time scenario for both of them, where the main characters needed time to work on themselves and their own issues before engaging in a serious relationship with each other - or at least pumping the breaks a bit. Instead, their romance is also significantly whirlwind-like. About a week or two after they get together (and a good chunk of this time is spent with Athena visiting her parents outside of Harlot’s Bay), Johnny finds out and demands that his brother break up with Athena because he wants her back. Matthew begrudgingly agrees, Athena overhears the whole thing and is heartbroken that Matthew doesn’t love her the way she deserves and isn’t willing to fight for her. Once he gets his head screwed on right, Matthew tells Johnny that he intends to marry Athena as soon as possible. Again, they have been dating for maybe two weeks and been in contact for less than six months at this point. This also seems to be Matthew’s first significant romantic relationship, which makes the whole thing feel that much more ill advised.
As is expected from the general genre conventions of a HEA romance, there isn’t much that happens on page that isn’t related to the relationship between Matthew and Athena, which doesn’t help. A lot of the work Athena does and the passing of time between this and the main characters going into a full fledged relationship isn't really seen on the page, making the stated timeline of I think two months between Athena’s crisis and their initiating a relationship feel non-existent. We also hardly see Athena interacting with anyone from her non-Harlot’s Bay life, which seems odd for the kind of character she is. Keeping up with friends and loved ones while depressed can be prohibitively difficult, but I would expect someone of Athena’s age and disposition (it’s mentioned several times how everyone takes a huge liking to her and cares about her deeply even after knowing her for only a few weeks) to have some established relationships outside of her family, or to at least have people calling her or trying to get in touch. We also don’t get to see a lot of her interacting with her family, or her new friends in Harlot’s Bay. This wouldn’t necessarily be an issue in another context, but all of these factors together make it feel like Matthew and his love were what saved, for lack of a better word, Athena. Even the few mentions of Athena’s therapy and coping mechanisms are almost exclusively in connection to Matthew and her relationship with him.
I think it could have worked better if rather than discovering her depression diagnosis during the story, Athena was already in treatment, doing the work but aware that relapses and backsliding happen and intentionally cultivating a life that would serve her needs, with Matthew being a part of that instead of virtually all of it. Or, perhaps, if we had more time on the page that wasn’t focused on Matthew and Athena together but on them each dealing with their struggles in a way that didn’t involve the other. Or at least having a way to more tangibly signal the passing of time, and a longer timeline for their romance, could have let the whole thing feel much more healthy and strong. Having these two stories crammed together on such a short timeline detracts from both the romance and the mental health journey. (hide spoiler)]...more
Reading Midnight Sun at the age of 28 was an oddly healing and existential experience. I was crazy for Twilight in middle school and reread the first Reading Midnight Sun at the age of 28 was an oddly healing and existential experience. I was crazy for Twilight in middle school and reread the first book maybe six time in a year. Then I hit high school and my NLOG phase, and shat on the series for a significant amount of time before settling into a comfortable middle ground where I could happily admit to having enjoying them quite a bit despite the obvious flaws and significantly problematic relationship dynamics. Going back to the series with an installment I had been crushed to have postponed was an odd experience, where I felt like I was both celebrating and mourning my pubescent self. There are some thing that, if you are given the blessing of a somewhat healthy and stable life, I think you don't really experience or truly desire after adolescence. Sneaking around, hiding things from your parents, the desperate grasp for independence and boundaries in a caring parental relationship, figuring out what you want in relationships and life when everything feels so immediate and overbearing. I cannot articulate or pin down why exactly, but reading this story again through fresh eyes brought back all the emotions of the petty thrills of my own early teenhood in an almost embarrassing way.
All that being said, it also really spotlights the creepiness of the whole love affair and the actual tragedy of Bella's life at that point. There's something to be said about how - even ignoring the actual age gap - Edward's vampirism functions as a pretty strong parallel to the kind of havoc being in a relationship with an older adult can have for a teenager: the secrecy, the sneaking around, the danger, and the constant anxiety of your own struggles and issues feeling petty and inconsequential in contrast to the real life of this grown person.
It is also pretty hilarious at some points....more
This is a high 3 stars, mostly because something about the book left me feeling cold. I'm not sure if it's the characters being hard to connect to or This is a high 3 stars, mostly because something about the book left me feeling cold. I'm not sure if it's the characters being hard to connect to or understand (there are some plot threads that make it hard to differentiate Victor from the familiar character archetype he could have been - or maybe is? I'm never quite sure what the story is trying to tell me on that point), or my general lack of passion and fucks to give about revenge stories.
I feel like there are so many interesting questions posed but not really discussed, which is extremely frustrating because they really are so, so interesting and it could have been so wonderful....more
A fantastic premise wasted on a book that is at best mediocre.
I think the biggest issue here is the style of writing. The main character's thoughts aA fantastic premise wasted on a book that is at best mediocre.
I think the biggest issue here is the style of writing. The main character's thoughts are obviously meant to be funny or at the very least entertaining, but they very quickly veer into grating. I started reading the ebook months ago, dropped it about 5% in because I couldn't really do it, and then picked up the audio book when it popped up as a skip the line loan on Libby. I was hoping that the narration would make the voice more bearable, and it did to some extent since I actually finished, but toning down to some extent would have made this a much better book.
The plot is pretty straightforward and unsurprising. There are some moments of comedic brilliance, but not really enough to cut through the fairly trite events. Thematically, it goes for the most obvious and on the nose interpretation of its concept; the matterhorn could have been extended or deepened to make its thematic point resonate more and in a more interesting and insightful way....more
**spoiler alert** I love the concept for this book, but in the end it fell flat for me.
I had to suspend my disbelief a bit too much because of who the**spoiler alert** I love the concept for this book, but in the end it fell flat for me.
I had to suspend my disbelief a bit too much because of who the participants were and because everyone but Adina knew what the Finish was. I could buy this type of thing if all the contestants were in the dark (although they would have begged the question of how they kept this covered up from the other wealthy families who would have been looking for their daughters) or if they were all from backgrounds where their families wouldn't have the pull to go after the Remingtons (which wouldn't have worked for a marriage competition for obvious reasons). As it stands, it doesn't really make sense to me as something that all these girls would be willingly participating in. One or two truly bloodthirsty girls, sure. But too many of them went into this eyes wide open to be believable.
One possible interpretation is that these wealthy families are willing to send off their daughters to fight to the death for social climbing, the way Pen's family was. I'm willing to believe this is what the author was going for but fumbled it by not actually commenting on it. However, even if this was the case, I'd expect some to be there unwillingly - under duress from their parents under threat of being cut off, for example – girls and for it to show. And it would have been an easy fix, if more of these characters were developed instead of being left as underwritten red shirts.
Adina, for her part, felt dissapointingly un-self-aware, and not in a way that worked in the favor of her character or her arc. From the text, it seems that she's pretty solidly middle class, deeply driven to escape Suburbia, not wanting for anything more than the extreme privilege she sees all around her. Now, I can understand what being a middle class teen surrounded by the actually rich can do to someone. I've seen it in my friends who went to elite private high school on partial or full scholarship and spent years feeling like they're lagging behind their peers because they couldn't go to Ivy or Oxbridge schools, or because they can't afford to go on multiple overseas vacations despite being in jobs that land them around the top 10 percent of income before they turn thirty. There's a very real distortionary effect to spending your formative years surrounded by people who are privileged enough to not have to worry about money when you're not in that position. And Adina is definitely underprivileged compared to her classmates; not only is she not in their tax bracket, she's a Black girl in a very WASPy situation. However, her constant asides about the other girls not being hungry or not understanding struggle or not needing to be there started to grate pretty early on. Because, honestly, Adina didn't need to be there either. She didn't need to go to an Ivy school. She wasn't going to end up in extreme poverty or on the streets if she didn't win the Finish. I'm perfectly happy to believe that Ivies were a fantasy after her violent outburst, but I'm having harder time accepting that she wouldn't be able to get in anywhere that would give her a diploma worth the paper it was printed on in the next admission cycle since she was still a graduate of a very prestigious high school with grades and extracurricular good enough to get her into Yale. Hell, there are plenty of very good school in Europe that would likely cost less than Yale including room and board that would likely be good options for her. She spends a good chunk of the novel thinking about the privilege and entitlement of others without recognizing her own very real privilege and entitlements, and it gets old fast.
Again, I can understand this distortion: Ivy degrees and extreme wealth and privilege aren't needs, but its easy to see it that way when you're surrounded by it. And that would be a very interesting point for Adina to get to. She does get close, but in the end her rejection of the Remingtons and their world is on the basis that she won't let it change her, she won't play by their rules, she won't allow them to sandpaper her rough edges and dim her shine. It feels like a disappointing conclusion to arrive at. When she received the pay out, she goes straight to international travel and living in expensive cities - which are obviously okay things to want, but it feels like Adina is uncritically leaning into her newfound privilege. Which would be much more palatable in a situation like we find in Ready or Not (which fantastic, go watch it if you enjoyed this book at all) where the main character doesn't spend so much of her headspace on her relative lack of privilege and means in relation to those she's fighting against.
Speaking of conclusions, a million dollars?!? I'd be pissed if I went through all that and all the blood money I got out of a 6 billion dollar pot was 1 million. For reference, that is 1/6000 of the Remington fortune. I mean, it's no chump change and it's definitely life changing money, but it's also for sure not "you can do whatever you want, let's go travel Europe and move to NYC with no plan!" money, especially after the taxes she'll no doubt have to pay, which both the wealthy Toni and the not wealthy Adina and her family should be able to recognize. It feels like another indication of the disconnect between Adina and her actual financial reality, further cementing her as a fairly clueless middle class kid who think she's poor because her friends are rich instead of the savvy, class conscious underdog she thinks she is and is presented to be.
And a special mention goes to all of the romance and Adina “hooking up” with Pierce in the woods. The weird romantic asides felt wildly out of place in Adina’s head given the circumstances and felt more like an attempt to comply with genre convention than anything else. And did I miss the actual hookup, or do teenagers today consider making out hooking up? I don’t have the copy on me to go back and check.
Overall, a great concept that needed some work to be become more internally consistent and believable, as well as to deliver a more pointed social critique, but poor execution that keeps the message from landing in a satisfactory way. ...more
One day, I will actually learn to stop going back to things that have chronically disappointed me.
I love Jack Reacher. It all started at an airport, One day, I will actually learn to stop going back to things that have chronically disappointed me.
I love Jack Reacher. It all started at an airport, where my brother and I were waiting for an endlessly delayed flight back home after visiting my grandparents and ended up picking a random action movie on Netflix sharing one pair of earphones between us – that fateful choice was Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher movie, and something about it was magical to me. It was partly down to the exhaustion of delayed travel, partly down to the nostalgia of watching it the way we did, but in the end it came down to one thing: Reacher is a fucking weird guy. And that was super compelling to me, for some reason.
One thing about me is that I have an oddly strong memory for book covers and names – I remember the plot details and character names weeks after I’ve read a thing, but my mind has always been a steel trap for what book we do and don’t own in the family, which is not an easy thing to do considering our bad habit of essentially book hoarding. I wish my special skill was something more useful, but alas. In any case, it served me well here; the movie was based on a book, and the authors name was oddly familiar, so I went digging through the cabinets full of a completely unmanageable amount of books when I visited my mother. It took hours but I was rewarded with an old secondhand copy of The Visitor by Lee Child. I devoured that book. Reacher and his idiosyncrasies were fascinating. I still have a hard time articulating exactly why I love him so much, but it was an instant and deep connection. My mom had the same experience when I passed the book on to her. We spent the next year desperately tracking down every Reacher book that had been published (we weren’t living in an English speaking country or traveling abroad at the time, so it was an easter egg hunt of second hand stores). We read them all out of order, which didn’t make the smallest difference. It was a genuinely wonderful experience for us, partly because of the jubilation of having found one of the missing books – and there really is something to be said for delayed gratification like that in a world where you can instantly get anything you want online, each book was a treasure to be savored, and partly because of the speed at which it moved. Reacher books are not heavy reading. The Secret is probably the longest time I’ve spent reading one of the novels, and it took me three days, and only because I was travelling and was persuaded to not spend the whole day in my hotel room reading. For most of the series, I finished a book in a sitting, maximum two, and those were usually because I absolutely had to stop reading to go do something else.
I do have a hard time understanding why I love these books so much. They certainly have their flaws, and those flaws have put me off of other books in the genre before. I don’t identify with Reacher, if anything he half feels like a member of an alien species. But I have a deep, emotional tie to this series, and it has been causing me pain as of late.
Lee Child is stepping down and giving Reacher to his brother. That is his prerogative; Reacher is his baby and he can do whatever he wants with him. I’m not entitled to more books and I’m certainly not entitled to more books written by him in particular. I’m not advocating that we chain the man to a desk and force him to pump out manuscript after manuscript.
But my god I hate it. This is the fourth book Lee and Andrew Child have written together in the Reacher series. The previous three have been varied in quality. I honestly recall very little about these books, except for a sinking feeling as they went on, the distinct impression in The Sentinel and Better of Dead that Reacher didn’t really feel like Reacher – he talked too much and too openly, wasn’t smart enough, was just missing some essential Reacherness – and that No Plan B felt like an attempt to return to form, if not quite accomplishing it. I was hopeful after No Plan B.
The Secret is not good. Reacher feels off, but not egregiously. There are these little references to Reacherisms that feel more like fan service than anything else. It’s well written enough for a Reacher book. The real issue is that the plot is so stupid. I’ve been reading murder/mystery novels since I was ten years old and my exasperated mother threw a Mary Higgins Clark novel at me to get me to shut up at the beach - it was one of those old two-in-one books, and she literally ripped the second book out so I would let her read the first in peace. I am usually pretty good at figuring out the ending of these things, if for no other reason than genre conventions and technical choices. So I’m not hugely wedded to the idea of surprises and twists and not seeing it coming as being a necessity. But Reacher books have for the most part been oddly unforeseeable for me. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re actually that smartly plotted or because they’re operating in genre conventions and contexts I’m less used to, but I love it none the less. And even when I can figure out the ending before Reacher does, it never really feels like it’s because he’s too stupid to see what’s right there. Except this time it did. (view spoiler)[ How does it take so long for them to make the jump from “defensive biochemical-whatever” research to offensive research? (hide spoiler)] This one made me want to scream. There are all these little instances of things the authors clearly think are clever but that are actually just mind numbingly unnecessary and make no sense at all.
And the worst part is that even though I was so disappointed and dissatisfied, I’m still looking forward to the next Reacher book. I still hope that it’ll be good, even though it looks like Lee is dropping out completely at this point, so I don’t think that’s likely. But I still want it, and I want it now.
**spoiler alert** And Put Away Childish Things is an absolute delight. The story hangs on the kind of concept that could have been easy fodder for an **spoiler alert** And Put Away Childish Things is an absolute delight. The story hangs on the kind of concept that could have been easy fodder for an edgy, grimdark approach to the portal magic subgenre, and there were a couple moments where I got a sinking feeling in my stomach thinking it would, but it never did. Instead, it's hilarious and achingly tender.
Harry, our protagonist, is a hapless idiot who has hit a wall in his personal life and career and decides to latch on to the fading glory of his grandmother and her Narnia-like children's book series to try and revive his career. This ill-considered hail Mary leads to him discovering that Underhill, the magical kingdom of his Gran's books, is quite real, if not exactly how it has been portrayed.
Harry is the kind of character that exists on a knifes edge of sympathy, at least as far as I'm concerned. He feels unimportant, irrelevant, and when he's told he may be the the heir to a magic kingdom he just want to believe. It's all too easy for this kind of man to come off as a self obsessed asshole, but the context makes Harry's desires feel much more sympathetic than they would have otherwise. In these types of books, the Pevensies and other children are plucked from their mundane, often depressingly difficult existence time after time to have adventures in a magical kingdom where they are the sovereign rulers. They have control, they have power, they have an entire kingdom that is tied inextricably to their wellbeing and essentially exists for their pleasure and edification. The all too real mundanity of adult existence, where almost no one is really that important, at least not in that way, is almost as tragic as the forlorn and decaying magical creatures of Underhill.
This keen understanding and sense of subtle, tender tragedy is there for the entire thing. It's both hilarious and heartbreaking -although not nearly as heartbreaking as I feared it would be- and I enjoyed it in that childish, wonderful way I used to enjoy the types of books it's written about. The ending could have been a bit better, there are a couple of rough patches, but nothing significant enough to detract from my enjoyment....more
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