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| B0757KL9SL
| 4.01
| 912
| Aug 25, 2017
| Aug 29, 2017
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it was ok
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This book was wild. Shrinkflation Christian Grey belts this guy's ass twice and he's so dickmatised he's all "but Daddy, I love him!" This is the thin
This book was wild. Shrinkflation Christian Grey belts this guy's ass twice and he's so dickmatised he's all "but Daddy, I love him!" This is the thinking girl's pornography, written by someone who heard someone else say, "BDSM requires open communication" and just ran with it. When these characters aren't having (admittedly hot) sex, they're having very long, very involved conversations about their most intimate feelings, absolutely no holds barred, nothing left to the imagination, nothing left to tantalise the viewer, just spaffing their deepest darkest secrets into each other's faces, and it makes the whole thing read like one long and incredibly unethical therapy appointment. I give it 2 stars because for the first half of the book, River's inner monologue was torturously relatable, and I actually liked Ellison (though I have no idea why this man can be bothered with River). I unashamedly love this genre but this book does exemplify some of the worst things about it, which is that it's drawn-out, it's wordy, and oh my good lord is it repetitive. My rating is: definitely better than Axel's Pup, whose characters enraged me to the point where I was ready to bite my phone in half, but far too annoying to warrant any more than two stars. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Sep 23, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1419760866
| 9781419760860
| 1419760866
| 3.84
| 177,765
| Aug 23, 2022
| Aug 23, 2022
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did not like it
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*Vivaldi's Concerto in G minor, Op. 8, No. 2, "L'estate" plays feverishly* "It was a yolky thing" "The gauzy white curtains blew back in the breeze, tra *Vivaldi's Concerto in G minor, Op. 8, No. 2, "L'estate" plays feverishly* "It was a yolky thing" "The gauzy white curtains blew back in the breeze, trailing her arms, falling against her bare knees, her toes. She crept out onto the balcony, the stone cold beneath her feet. Breathed in salt and brine." "By finding the bondbreaker, I'm saving him and his realm, Isla convinced herself to counteract the guilt." "He was a demon, death itself." "A reminder of why it was important to stay under the radar." "A stripe of chill danced down her arm at his slightest touch." "The curses killed countless of my people." "Juniper might be the most or least trustworthy barkeep on the island, Isla still wasn’t sure." "Harsh as the ruler who ruled it." "Intentional—every detail at the Centennial was intentional, that was what Terra had taught her." "The man had eyebrows larger than his eyes" "Grim. What a terrible word, Isla thought, worn with pride." *** Gasping, I bend over, bracing my hands on my knees. Sweat beads on the tip of my nose, then drips to the floor with a soft plink. I look around, but - I can't see it. I can't see Lightlark. It's gone. The sentences have run on without me. *** Aveyard and Maas and Rowling Amateurs, keep fucking coping Fuck their wives Drink their blood Come on Alex, get 'em! - Bo Burnham, kind of *** ...more |
Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Aug 24, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0684836270
| 9780684836270
| 0684836270
| 3.79
| 21,161
| 1996
| Aug 20, 1997
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 11, 2022
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Aug 15, 2022
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Jul 11, 2022
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Paperback
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| B08HJDG47W
| 3.59
| 189,699
| Oct 16, 2020
| Dec 2020
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it was amazing
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Look. This book is controversial, and I can see why, in that I can empathise with the problems other people had with it. I did have problems, but not
Look. This book is controversial, and I can see why, in that I can empathise with the problems other people had with it. I did have problems, but not the same ones. My problems with this book were the RIBBONS. WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THE RIBBONS. I spent more time staring into space trying to work out what the absolute fuck was going on with the ribbons than I did actually reading the words on the page, which by the way were very entertaining and high, high camp. I mean it. Like, I cannot stress enough how CAMP this book is. It's one thing after the other and the ludicrousness of it never ends. A guy gets killed and then snow pirates tie him to their snow ship and the heroine has to throw him overboard with her RIBBONS. SKIN RIBBONS THAT GROW OUT OF HER BACK. And then this guy comes aboard and his name is Commander Rip because he rips people's heads off (Lord have mercy on me). There's this absolutely batshit interlude in the middle of everything where the heroine is describing some kind of mythical bridge to the faerie realm and how the bridge is gone now because someone tried to walk across it (am I remembering that right?) and she lives in a cage that extends the whole way around a castle. This cage is made of gold and it goes through various rooms. I can't describe it better than that. You just have to use your imagination for this one. Absolutely 10/10 bombastic nonsense and I loved it. Do not recommend thinking too hard about the ribbons coming from her back through. Ribbons. Ribbons made of skin?? I can't do this anymore. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 05, 2023
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Sep 27, 2023
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Aug 10, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 1250195667
| 9781250195661
| 1250195667
| 3.56
| 31,902
| Apr 02, 2019
| Apr 02, 2019
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did not like it
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[image] To say that this book let me down is an understatement. It disappointed me in ways I didn’t know were possible. Is it me? Maybe. Is it the book [image] To say that this book let me down is an understatement. It disappointed me in ways I didn’t know were possible. Is it me? Maybe. Is it the book? Oh, definitely. You’d better get your landing gear on, guys, because this is going to be a long one. Warning: gentle spoilers. The biggest problem with this book is the worldbuilding, in part because the relationship between the gods and the people doesn’t make sense. The pantheon of gods in Wicked Saints is comprised of deities that can be quantified (that talk directly to clerics and give them magical powers), but characterising gods as tangible voices with personalities drastically shifts the power dynamic. It eliminates the essential subjectivity of religion. The Zoroastrians did not believe in their principal deity, Ahura Mazda, because they had heard him speak; they believed out of pure necessity. Why, they asked, does rain fall from the sky? What is the moon? These are questions of faith. How do we prevent crime? How can we legitimise the absolute rule of monarchs? These are questions of churches, religious institutions being separate from faith itself, but what they have in common is the answers can be adapted to survive in different cultural climates. Faith, at its core, depends entirely on belief in a power that cannot be quantified. Tranavia turned away from the gods, but there is no real discourse as to why; that the existence of the Kalyazi gods can be proven should heavily impact the way that religion functions across the world, and should give Nadya an immense amount of power over her countrymen, but because there is no explanation ever given of the role of the gods in Kalyazi life - there is no explanation of Kalyazi life, period - the concept crumbles. This world, at its basest level, doesn’t feel lived in. How can it, if all we know is what we see on the page? When the characters leave the page they turn to dust, because Kalyazin and Tranavia are like Flat Earth. If you leave the designated area, you’ll fall off the edge and die. There is nothing across the horizon. The gods in Kalyazin (this religion has no name) are listed here by the author, who asserts that this is not an exhaustive list, though for the amount of time we spend inside Nadya’s head, it falls short. There is a god of silence, but no god of sex and fertility. There is a god of speed, but no god of the hearth. How? [image] The hearth has, from the most ancient eras of history, stood as the central pillar of the home and community; for instance, the Ancient Greeks would greet new immigrants and visitors to their region in their town’s common house, known as the prytaneum, near the communal hearth and a statue of Hestia. The hearth was the pin around which community and family life revolved, family being another fundamental building block of any society: this, why gods and goddesses of sex, fertility, and childbirth feature so prominently in a wide number of polytheistic religions across the world. Even monotheistic/Abrahamic religions, while not extending separate deities to preside over sex and fertility, cycle through multiple stories of miraculous birth, sacred unions, virgin mothers, divine marriages, and father figures. The Abrahamic God is exhaustively referred to as a father, which - while the Abrahamic God maintains an asexual veneer - stresses the archaic role of a father as a genetic creator. (On somewhat of a tangent, it is also worth noting that the idea of clerical celibacy is rare; for example, Judaism has never enforced celibacy for its rabbis or kohanim (priests), and in Islam, lifelong celibacy is forbidden. Sex, family, and reproduction are at the core of most, if not all, religions). Once could argue that this isn’t directly relevant to Nadya’s journey to assassinate the king (more on that later) but… Isn’t it? There are vague mentions of Nadya praying, and she spends swaths of time condemning the Tranavians to heresy, but where is the intricacy of her faith? There are no rituals, social parameters, or legal systems discussed that in any way hint at the power of religion over Kalyazin. The gods don’t influence Nadya’s clothing, food choices, language, sexuality, literacy, or her understanding of her environment; the only time Nadya ever references the gods is during battle or when she is mumbling about the Tranavians being heretics. Heresy has no concrete definition, but is generally understood as dissent from a commonly established religious belief. ‘Heresy’ is a deeply nuanced and complex topic that Wicked Saints, of course, does not have the mettle to tackle: Nadya deems the Tranavians heretics - a term that historically justified mass slaughters, notably during the Spanish Inquisition - with such wild abandon that it completely delegitimises the term. The word just stops meaning anything. There is a vague reference to how magic is only supposed to come from the gods, but Nadya does not quote scripture, makes no reference to any pulpit preaching or schooling, and the gods themselves don’t offer any clarity. “Blood magic” is not a reason to waste money, lives, and time on war, and nor does it elaborate on the ramifications of heresy in Kalyazin; are there misconceptions about Tranavians? Are there stereotypes? It’s never discussed. They’re just “heretics”, and the reader is expected to accept that without any further clarification. An example of the enormity of the notion of heresy is the use of fatwas in Islam. Fatwas are a woefully misunderstood concept in the West; after the hoopla around Salman Rushdie, a misconception of fatwas grew, in which the West characterised fatwas as “religious death warrants”, which is like saying that yoghurt is strawberry flavoured. Some is, but most of it isn’t, and only eating strawberry yoghurt when there are a thousand better and more interesting flavours is wilful ignorance at best. A fatwa is a legal opinion delivered by a mufti (Islamic scholar) on a question posed by an institution, community, or individual. Fatwas are legally non-binding, but given that they’re issued by qualified experts, they can and have influenced shifts and actions across the Muslim world. Historically, fatwas were used to spread Islamic doctrine among the wider populace, advise courts on aspects of sharia (Islamic law), and encourage resistance against colonial rule. The historic use and context of fatwas is incredibly complex and speaks to the textured tapestry that is the Islamic legal system, but one interesting historical usage of fatwas was to enact a controversial practice known as takfir, in which communities or individuals professing to be Muslim were declared by a mufti to be kafirs (unbelievers), therefore justifying resistance against them or excommunication. Takfir was imposed on the invading Mongols, who claimed to be Muslim, but who were declared apostate by Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyyah due to their opposition to sharia. This is only one example of the immense complexity of the notion of “heresy”. Nadya claims exhaustively that Malachiasz is a heretic, yet she does not put up an iota of resistance against him, and even their theological arguments are flirty and cutesy, which, if you’ve ever seen theologians get into a quarrel on faith, you’ll know is disingenuous at best. Neither character ever moves beyond the most childish questions of faith or religious warfare. Furthermore, at no point is any concrete explanation given for the long and costly war between these two nations, other than their divergent religious beliefs. This in itself is a dangerous model: religion doesn’t cause wars, politics and class warfare does, from the modern wars in the Middle East to the Jacobite Rebellions, and to notably the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most destructive conflicts in human history, which boils all the way down to Martin Luther’s landmark break from Catholicism, stemmed from his disenchantment with the corruption and money-grubbing of the Catholic Church. The fatwa I previously mentioned about the Mongols being declared kafirs is a good example of this. One might argue that this fatwa endorsed religious warfare, but what were the Mongols doing? Invading, and this fatwa mobilised the affected Muslim communities to push back against colonial rule. Politics were the root reason for this, not religion alone. Simply put, religion is a vast, complex, and nuanced topic that Wicked Saints does not have the range to tackle. Most of the page time is wasted on a forced and saccharine romance between two bland characters: an alleged cleric who bizarrely seems to know nothing about her own religion, and a limp analogy for Kylo Ren. I said in my status updates that I had a lot of feelings about this comparison with Kylo Ren, and I do. There’s no but here. Just buckle in. [image] Kylo Ren is an infuriating character, mostly because his turn to the dark side is conflated with Darth Vader’s, whose story is vastly more layered. (I could rabbit on here about the excellent and subtle examination of church corruption that is mirrored in the Jedi, but seriously, I can’t. Oh, I want to, Long Pause, but I can’t.) Here’s the thing. Death of the Author is a legitimate angle in literary criticism, and there’s a great video here where Lindsay Ellis explains it, but it’s almost impossible to fully extract the author from this work, partly because she has a flourishing internet presence. Duncan makes no secret of her fan status for Kylo Ren, and the hallmarks of his character are so blatantly obvious in Malachiasz that I cannot in good conscience ignore it. Not only are both characters physically identical, but ideologically, they’re the same. Kylo Ren’s quest for power at the detriment of his own sanity and moral integrity and his (fan-interpreted) thirst for a plucky Jedi (space monk) hang around Malachiasz like a bad smell. But pulling from a character as loathe-worthy as Kylo Ren left a really bad taste in my mouth, and I think I hated Malachiasz for the same reasons that I hated Kylo Ren. They both follow this exhausting arc of the “broken boy” who was made this way by a flawed mentor and who has a good side that was ripped from them in some contrived way; granted, Malachiasz was forced to become a vulture, but when offered a chance to escape a life of 2005 Goth Torment and live with the space monk, he turns it down in favour of more power, a mirror of Kylo Ren killing Snoke with Rey, but then turning against her and seizing his seat of power for himself. Of course, Wicked Saints boasts none of the political complexity that makes the Sith/Jedi conflict compelling, and while it makes a half-baked attempt at “political intrigue” it fails on the most basic level, mostly because the politics of Tranavia are not remotely interesting and the politics of Kalyazin don’t exist. But here’s the crux of it: if you’re going to rip off a character, at least make it a good one. (I know there are some Darkling vibes here, but the Kylo Ren comparison stuck out to me.) I suppose you could argue that Kylo Ren’s desire to be like Darth Vader is an allegory for how power-hungry people pluck half-truths from history to suit their own personal agenda, but the fact that he is a Skywalker and “the one that Luke couldn’t save” leans into the narrative conflating him with Darth Vader. Alas, because no coherent or sympathetic build-up was lent to properly justify Kylo Ren’s turn to the Dark Side, it just feels…uncomfortable. Anakin Skywalker is my favourite Star Wars character, and Revenge of the Sith is my favourite Star Wars movie. Sure, it has holes and the acting is ropey, but what a layered, nuanced portrayal of a villain arc. The thing is, that villain arc was built slowly and methodically from The Phantom Menace, rooted in Anakin from his early childhood. Anakin’s arc is about servitude, manipulation and corruption: he was born a slave and ripped from his mother by the Jedi order, but while the Jedis professed to have freed him, all they did was force him into a more subtle indenture. The Jedi order treated Anakin like a tool to be used, like a slave all over again, and the pain of Anakin’s arc is that he was the chosen one, but was so stunted by his upbringing and the manipulations of the corrupt Jedi that he fell prey to Palpatine, who offered him only another form of bondage, this time to the Sith. Anakin’s sole moment of personal agency was when he turned on Palpatine and killed him, saving Luke, but condemning himself to death. Anakin’s final moments, in which his sweet son forgave him, were the only moments in which he was ever truly free. Contrast this with Kylo Ren, whose arc revolves around him being a privileged brat who, after one (probably drunken) moment where Luke considered killing him because he thought he was a child psychopath, turns into a mass murderer. He is tolerable because Adam Driver is a truly excellent actor, but it’s the edgelord “limpid tears” quality to Kylo Ren that Malachiasz captures. I hated him because all I could think about was Kylo Ren’s mask, that he wore for no reason other than to be a theatrical douchebag, while Anakin’s mask was keeping him alive. (I love this very specific trope, and another character who pulled it off beautifully was Christopher Nolan’s Bane, whose backstory was excellent and heartbreaking, and please stop these tangents. Please. I am begging myself to stop.) I said in my status updates that this book could have benefitted from being reworked as an adult novel, and this is perfectly encapsulated in Serefin’s chapters: he is 19 and leading an army, and he’s also an alcoholic. What a relatable character for teens, right? Serefin had no arc, and instead spent most of the book wafting from one boring locale to the next, until his story culminated in some utterly batshit nonsense about moths and stars. I wanted to avoid talking about the author’s reprehensible behaviour on Twitter, where she slams readers for daring to criticise her book, as if the only reason anyone would dislike it is because they’re dumb, but I think it’s worth noting that if a good number of people come to you with the same criticism of your product, you might consider doing a bit of self-reflection. Put it this way: say I’m shopping for vibrators on Amazon, and I see one with fifty reviews out of a hundred that say it put them in the hospital. I’m likely to trust that verdict and save myself an injury. Books are art, yes, and art is subjective, but when everyone complained about the finale for Game of Thrones being rushed, it wasn’t because millions of people just suddenly lost their collective marbles. It was because the finale was rushed, and that’s the tea. The author argues that it’s fine for a book to be “confusing”, and goes on to say: “I just… think readers could do with becoming comfortable with things not being explained in rote detail. / Anyway! Plenty of fantasy authors will hold your hand! I won’t, sorry!” (10/05/2019) What a lot of nonsense. “Confusing” is an error in storytelling; complex, mysterious, or abstract are legitimate literary techniques (Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal does this brilliantly). The ending of this book was a complete mess, not only because of the absurd, anachronistic, and poorly edited prose (a feature throughout the book) but because it’s just so fucking jumbled, and I won’t stand for being mocked on a hellsite like Twitter for this book’s own lack of basic detail or coherent plot. The characters’ bid to kill the king makes no sense besides; their initial plan is to kill both the king and Serefin, which will create a power vacuum and only exacerbate the problem, but the Dramatic Showdown reads like the view from a Go Pro thrown into a bag of fighting cats. The inept chaos of it isn’t even good for a cruel laugh. Furthermore, the side characters could have been backspaced from the text and it wouldn’t make the blindest bit of difference. At one point, Malachiasz tells Nadya that Parijahan, one of their token POC companions on this journey, has gone missing which may mean she’s dead. Nadya makes no comment on this, despite naming Parijahan as her friend in a previous scene, and instead flirts with Malachiasz and faints dramatically in his lap. That said, Nadya becomes a side character in her own journey, as the author forces Malachiasz down our throats like salted corn into a French duck, but it’s telling that two of the few characters of colour are scarcely given a backward glance when their lives may be in danger. Similarly, Ostyia, the only explicitly queer character in the book, has no agency or depth, just a talking doll for Serefin to frown at. Serefin has the potential to be queer, though all of his romantic interactions are directed toward women and he shows no romantic or sexual interest in anyone of any other gender. At this point in my life, I am not willing to hunt for queer representation. I am sick to fucking death of begging for scraps, and I will not sit around parsing through lines of text with a magnifying glass, pawing for sustenance like a starving possum. The answer is no. This book suffers because of the romance, which hoovers up page time, chapter after chapter dedicated to Nadya mooning over Malachiasz. Landmark beats like crossing the border into enemy territory and battling through a duel and getting attacked by the vultures flit by as Nadya laments about her “broken boy”. This is not high fantasy, just the story of a ghost-girl and a Kylo Ren body double coldly bumping together, as much chemistry between them as two puffs of inert gas. Us gays are over here starving for rep while this is the accepted standard for straight romance? Give me a fucking break. I can’t praise any element of this book and maintain my integrity, but if it were reworked as adult and another hundred pages added, this could have been an interesting story. If the sexual element was completely removed from the central relationship, Malachiasz aged up to forty and Nadya aged down to nine, and the connection between them rewritten into a tender friendship between a crotchety father figure and a stubborn, angry orphaned child, this could have blown me away. What a tale that could have been, especially if it revolved around a civil war, with Malachiasz and Nadya being actively chased by Serefin, aged up to thirty-five. Give Serefin a menagerie of bastard children and an earned reputation as an actual axe murderer and I could have really gotten on board with this. But I can’t, and nor can I ethically endorse another botched Slavic fantasy. If you’re interested in Slavic fantasy written by actual Slavic people, then I’d suggest Andrzej Sapkowski or Lana Popović. There’s also a list of authentic Slavic reads here. I suppose it says more about me than it does the author that I’d have preferred this to be grimdark, but what would I know? I’m just a woman, standing in front of a bookcase, waiting for an author to hold my hand. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 08, 2019
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Jun 20, 2019
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Dec 03, 2018
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| B002RI97MK
| 3.66
| 6,807,948
| Oct 05, 2005
| Feb 26, 2009
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it was ok
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I genuinely can’t believe I finished this book, and I don’t mean that in an offhand, wow, what a garbage fire sort of way. I mean that I’m actually fu
I genuinely can’t believe I finished this book, and I don’t mean that in an offhand, wow, what a garbage fire sort of way. I mean that I’m actually fucking surprised that I managed to turn the last page of this and not immediately die of organ failure. And then my sister would have to come and break down my front door and find me contorted on my bed in my crusty old pyjamas with Dorito dust under my fingernails, and morticians would have to break my bones to pry this book out of my cold dead hands, and I’d need to come back as a ghost years later and write “It was for science” in lipstick on the bathroom mirror just to clear my name. [image] In the year of our lord 20gayteen, it’s difficult to offer any sort of fresh or remotely nuanced critique on Twilight without resorting to edgelord tactics, like declaring that it’s a feminist read or that it was all an imaginary coping mechanism constructed by Bella to make returning to the shite little town of Forks bearable. But I think our judgement has been clouded for the past ten to twelve years - at least mine has, by the endless slew of stale “still a better love story” memes and the constant personal jabs aimed at Stephenie Meyer by mainstream media. There’s also the YA scene’s insidious desire to erase all memory of it from genre history: when I was doing research for this review, I found this video in which multiple YA authors explain what their influences were for writing female-centric YA stories, and not one of them mentions Twilight, which… Whoa. Like, that’s astounding to me. It's just disingenuous as fuck, that they had the gall to brazenly omit Stephenie Meyer from their credit lines, particularly when one or more of them started their careers in paranormal YA on the tail of the Twilight boom. Even this video, which claims to illustrate the history of YA, downplays Twilight's influence on the genre. YA existed before Twilight, of course, but it baffles me when the YA industry now slaps its hands to its ears and la-la-las over the indisputable truth: YA was a marginalised genre before the Twilight phenomenon. Was it a coincidence that YA paranormal romance exploded upon the rising popularity of Twilight? You could argue that it was, of course, and you’re entitled to your wrong opinion, but I did not unironically Google “Edward Cullen star sign” for you hoes to come at me with “what about Catcher in the Rye”. Fuck Catcher in the Rye. I’m not explaining that opinion any further and not will I defend it. Fuck that book and fuck all of its smug knock-offs, because if you polish a turd it’s still a turd. I'm sorry, but I don't make the rules. The basic breakdown is this: I enjoyed this book, and I mean I genuinely enjoyed it, and was invested, until about the halfway mark. After that, it was impossible for me to ignore the cloying creepiness that perverts a sweet and tender love story into something that, as an adult, is difficult for me to justify. When I was 13, I was a stan for Twilight, but not because of the books - I had only seen the movies, and for this reason it feels like a missed opportunity, because I can’t accurately compare my feelings then to my feelings now. This inaccuracy stems mostly from the fact that the movies were a farce that in no way capture the spirit of the characters or any of the relationships between them. It’s because of the movies that this series is the focus of such intense ridicule and hatred in the media; it’s the self-seriousness of the movies that’s so infuriating, because while the book is melodramatic and depressing, it’s light and jubilant where the movie isn’t. My main problem with the media’s perception of the series is that it’s based entirely on this self-seriousness, and in particular Kristen Stewart’s dead eyes. The truth is that Book Bella and Movie Bella are two starkly different people, and you can fucking fight me on this. It doesn’t surprise me that Stephenie Meyer is over it and has Moved On, because if I was her, I would genuinely be bitter as fuck, the most poisonous bitch, an actual Viṣakanyā, not only for the unstoppable barrage of media abuse but also for the forced image of my creative work as something completely separate from what it is. Meyer has weathered a barrage of criticism for her Mormon lifestyle, and this has bled into her storytelling, and to an extent I agree, because heavy-handed morality is an easy way to drop a story down a U-bend. However, while Meyer’s inherent religious biases have centred heteronormativity and gender-based parameters, it may run deeper than this. The artery of conflict that threads through each book in the series is opposing ideals within the central relationship, and if we look at these characters as theological models, their connection does boast a bit more nuance: Edward is Mormonism and Bella is modernism, thus their relationship is a wrestle between starkly defined historical values and modern flexibility. [image] To explore this model, it's worth analysing each character as an individual, not both as a unit (we'll get to that later). My impression of Bella is that she's confident in familiar situations and, contrary to common criticism, mostly generated from the appallingly weak and lifeless character in the movies, is not defined by low self-esteem. When several boys ask her out to the dance she never defaults to this modest cry of, “who, me?”; she’s weary of the attention, and shrugs off her pursuers by diverting their romantic efforts to her single friends (with whom she shares close, if superficial bonds, to be expected from people who haven't had much time to get to know each other outside of school). She never shrinks away from male attention, and while she does often acknowledge that Edward is aesthetically pleasing, her reaction to being seen with a "dazzling" and notorious man is a natural one: “Won’t people wonder why someone so special is out with someone so ordinary, like me?” This is not a new or particularly groundbreaking question to ask oneself, especially in young and emotionally charged relationships, and especially with someone like Bella, who is defined by her low-key and utilitarian outlook, and her discomfort with an excess of attention in social circles. Bella mentions that she was not popular in Arizona, but for defined reasons: She is not sporty or excessively outgoing, which the book lays out as defining traits of most Arizonans (as a non-American, I’m unable to confirm this as truth or condemn it as a false stereotype, but the author does live in Arizona). She also states that her last school was densely populated which, naturally, provides an ease of anonymity. Her move to Forks batters her with the scrutiny of the tight-knit community, due for the most part to her mother’s vaguely sordid reputation as “the Chief’s flighty ex-wife” (12), the Chief being Charlie, a trusted pillar of the community. Renée’s notoriety as an ex-Forks resident, an elusive outsider who left the town in her dust - an uncommon novelty - marks her as a kind of traitor to the community, and by extension, Bella shares this burden. Even without considering her mother’s impact on Forks’ social circle, Bella invites attention as a rare new face among a close circle of scandal-starved teens. Again and again, Bella is verbally lashed for a lack of personality or strong voice, but while Bella’s narration is introspective, this doesn’t strip her of personality (I mean it; this criticism is repeated ad nauseam). She’s a quiet, orderly girl who respects authority and values her studies, as much a cliché of its time as the “strong female protagonist” that has haunted YA for the past six years and has launched an oftentimes distasteful attack on traditional femininity, creating a dichotomy between “strong girl” and “weak girl". But Bella can’t be neatly categorized with her knock-offs: she forfeited her happy, sunny life in Arizona for her mother’s benefit, a notably selfless choice, and not a courtesy that her mother necessarily deserves. Renée's neglectful parenting is often brushed aside as she hounds Bella via email and phone, creating an unsavoury illusion of parental concern. In reality, Renée is immature and self-involved, leaving bills unpaid and the fridge bare, darting off to pursue an unsustainable life on the road while she has a dependent minor at home. This is commented on in a particularly telling passage wherein Bella is concerned about leaving her “erratic, harebrained mother” (4) to fend for herself: “Of course she had Phil now, so the bills would probably get paid, there would be food in the refrigerator, gas in her car, and someone to call when she got lost” (4). It's a troubling role reversal that plays out in a similar, albeit softer, fashion when Bella moves in with her father and is immediately forced to take on basic duties in the home, due to her father’s ineptitude in the kitchen and in homemaking. But Bella is an independent girl who doesn’t want to shoehorn her mother into the same situation that she fled in Forks, so she moves away to stay with her father purely for Renée’s benefit. But her relationship with Charlie is tender: when Tyler’s truck nearly crushes her, she’s thinking fondly of her father, who got up early to put snow chains on the wheels of her truck. It’s the same sort of quiet thoughtfulness that defines Bella. When people like Jacob and Angela are being sidelined by their friends - ignored during a group conversation - Bella notices this and acknowledges them. Bella’s personality is quiet, but I wouldn't call it weak. (It's worth remembering that, in 2005, a "ladylike front" was very much in fashion and not only in religious circles like Meyer's. This "touch my butt and buy me pizza" attitude didn't come into fashion until Tumblr became mainstream, and until the internet popularised the Anna Kendrick brand. You know, this "I'm a gross girl and I wear sweatpants and I like to swear". That mentality wasn't part of the media hive mind yet.) Is this what catches Edward’s attention? In part, yes. Though more prominently it’s Bella’s mystery that attracts Edward. He can’t read her mind, thus their courtship requires rituals, wooing, a thrill that is missing entirely from Edward’s life. I mentioned in my status updates that I had a lot of feelings about Edward, his past and his pain, and to an extent I do; it’s another missed opportunity, because Edward’s past is handwaved, even though it influences every facet of his questionable behaviour, from his total lack of awareness about road safety, to his absurd and oftentimes bewildering fascination with Bella’s average life. Here’s the thing about Edward: he’s either too old or too young, depending on how you look at it. He was born on the cusp of living memory, which means that in 2005, he’s the same age as some people’s great grandparents, and this is what makes his relationship with Bella unacceptable. He’s not a relic, like Carlisle, or merely an older man. He is geriatric, and this adds an element of unavoidable perversion to his romance with a teenage girl. With a clear mind, it’s almost impossible not to recoil when Edward describes Bella as “appallingly luscious” or during this exchange: “‘That’s probably best. Be careful, though. The child has no idea.’ I brindled a little at the word child. ‘Jacob is not that much younger than I am,’ I reminded him. He looked at me then, his anger abruptly fading. ‘Oh, I know,’ he assured me with a grin.” (305) If we look at this from Carlisle’s point of view, then it becomes apparent that Edward’s age was a huge narrative blunder. Carlisle is 362, and if we sit back and contemplate the enormity of that, and the sheer gulf between him and someone who is seventeen, then it almost wouldn’t be so bad if Edward were also old as balls: he could be considered something other entirely, not an elderly man but a creature from another world, wholly divorced from Bella’s insular world. It would be as if she had fallen in love with an alien, or some eldritch beast from a parallel universe. It would require a lot more effort on Meyer's part to explain exactly what it is that makes their relationship hold together, and the politics between them would be more complex, but this would arguably have made for a more cerebral read. (Conversely, this is why I struggle to fully get on board with Outlander. Granted, I've only seen the TV show, but how could Claire and Jamie possibly find anything to talk about that's remotely relevant to either of their lives? He's never seen a bean can and he doesn't know what the telly is.) But ageing Edward up could, with some moral gymnastics and a constant reminder that Yes, This Is Weird, But We’re Going With It, remove him from Bella’s socio-political sphere just enough that it would almost be more acceptable. It's the poor decision to time Edward's birth at the beginning of the 20th century that really hits the nail into the coffin here. While it does comfortably serve the theological dichotomy between Edward and Bella (anyone significantly older would probably not be Mormon, as Mormonism wasn't a thing until the early-to-mid 1800s) it is a stumbling block for the believability of the romance. The movie and the book both struggle desperately to reconcile Edward’s point of view with Bella’s, neither one with enough sleight of hand to properly explore the intricacies of it; that said, at least in the book, Edward is fun: “‘You scared me for a minute there,’ [Edward] admitted after a pause… ‘I thought Newton was dragging your dead body off to bury it in the woods.’ ‘Ha, ha.’ I still had my eyes closed, but I was feeling more normal every minute. ‘Honestly—I’ve seen corpses with better colour. I was concerned that I might have to avenge your murder.’ ‘Poor Mike. I bet he’s mad.’ ‘He absolutely loathes me,’ Edward said cheerfully.” (85) In the movie, it’s impossible to understand why the hell this old man is chasing after this little girl, but in the book he’s charming and eloquent, and there are instances that beget genuine empathy—I couldn’t stop thinking about Edward’s total disregard for his own personal safety, his exclusion from society, this insular environment that Carlisle’s bite condemned him to. He is an old man caged in the body of a teenager, and his family only enables his self-destructive behaviour. I wouldn’t even call him a pervert: I would call him someone who is so psychologically damaged from a physical assault that he is clawing desperately to human affection to try to manufacture a sense of normalcy in his life. And Carlisle, his attacker, is now his sole benefactor, the puppeteer of a collection of ageless marionettes that obey his authority over their household. They survive at Carlisle’s pleasure; they play by his rules. But Edward states that the vampires do not sleep, and while sleep is necessary for growth and repair, it’s also vital for mental health. What has this created in Carlisle, a man who hasn’t slept in around 340 years? Is there any way to measure the psychological damage this could cause, or are we seeing it now in this strange, macabre puppet show that is the Cullen clan? Is this an intentional angle? It’s hard to say. I doubt it, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as “reading too much” into stories, especially those that deal with extremely weighty topics such as immortality and love and pack mentality. What strikes me most here is that Bella is a victim of the Cullen clan, but so is Edward, and of course Rosalie. Edward, Rosalie, and Esme were all turned by Carlisle without their consent, and while they all were dying, and though this is passed off as noble by Carlisle, it doesn’t ring true. As asserted by the narrative, the “lawless” vampires, i.e. those who do not belong to a "safe" clan and who are not under the control of any other entity, and who hunt humans, are the villains of this story, but what makes them villainous is their disregard for human life, and that they justify this by citing their natural instincts. The vampires’ natural attractiveness, their smell, and their heightened senses all function for ease of hunting, and the Cullens are not exempt; the difference between them is that the ungoverned vampires hunt humans, and the Cullens do not. Or do they? Perhaps what Carlisle did can’t be labelled “hunting”, but it could be something worse. It could be the ultimate act of power and control, to stockpile living bodies, to use acts of brutality and violence to manufacture close familial bonds. Carlisle professes not to have given in to his baser instincts, but the truth may be that he did, not by killing but with a cultivated community of psychological torture. Edward states that Carlisle was lonely, but the problematic element to this is that Carlisle knew why he was lonely - it was because immortality made him that way. His solution to this was to condemn other people to the same fate. One could ask why Carlisle was so certain that the other “Cullens” would bond with him, but my answer to this is that Carlisle made it that way: this was his design, to collect a trove of ghosts and lock them behind the doors of his estate. The Cullens will always be connected by the things that make them “other”, and in the end, so will Bella. She will become a Cullen too, but I’d say it’s not Edward’s fingers that are plucking her puppet strings. Is James the villain here? Perhaps. Perhaps not. [image] [image] This is a new prototype for my review layout and I'm hoping to create more graphics/interactive content in the future. If you enjoyed this, please consider supporting me with the button below so that I can take the time to improve on this format! [image] - ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 26, 2018
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Sep 23, 2018
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Aug 26, 2018
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Kindle Edition
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| 1492656623
| 9781492656623
| 1492656623
| 3.79
| 51,748
| Apr 15, 2018
| May 22, 2018
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it was ok
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Ugh. What a waste of potential.
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Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 30, 2019
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Oct 03, 2019
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Mar 04, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 4.14
| 7,486
| Jan 31, 2017
| Jan 31, 2017
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it was amazing
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Just so good. My sister and I have a running joke about this series; if one of these books is left unattended, lying on a table or the couch, one of u
Just so good. My sister and I have a running joke about this series; if one of these books is left unattended, lying on a table or the couch, one of us will holler to the other, “Lud, Lady Helen has been left here unchaperoned! Most irregular!” It’s the tense, frustrating, heartbreaking ultimatums between the characters themselves that makes these books so gripping; it’s not just a case of “let’s fight demons” but also their impossible conflicts of the heart, so well drawn and slow-burning, filled with tangible emotion. And Lady Helen is not only a distinctive, admirable character, but also authentically a woman of her era. I’ve read and hated enough unrealistic, cartoonish renditions of this time period to recognise a good one. The author is not afraid to push the boundaries of history, but to remain true to it. As a result, Lady Helen’s regency world is immersive beyond belief. It’s a rare thing to be so wholly sucked into a story and a setting, but here I am, genuinely worried for the fates of these characters as if they were my oldest, dearest friends, and that’s something special. This is one series that I’ll be sorry to leave behind. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Dec 25, 2018
Jul 30, 2017
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Jan 10, 2019
Aug 05, 2017
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Jul 29, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1444788981
| 9781444788983
| 1444788981
| 4.28
| 126,415
| Mar 28, 2017
| Mar 28, 2017
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liked it
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**spoiler alert** I’m going to reread this. Which means new RTC. Also, this old review was just hot garbage.
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Apr 09, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1250095255
| 9781250095251
| 1250095255
| 3.98
| 632,550
| Sep 29, 2016
| Jan 31, 2017
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did not like it
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I cannot even express to you guys how bland this book was: like tofu, like unseasoned chicken breast, like brown bread with no peanut butter. Just mis
I cannot even express to you guys how bland this book was: like tofu, like unseasoned chicken breast, like brown bread with no peanut butter. Just miss me with that shit. Miss me with it all the way. Back in the day, when I was a snarky teenager, I used to enjoy writing reviews that were really, really, venomous. Kids can be cruel, and while I stand by my right to love or hate any media, and to express my opinion, it can go...a little far. Then again, hyperbole is hyperbole. When, at seventeen, I went around saying that a book was so bad it gave me measles, you might want to take that with a pinch of salt, and also for its obvious comedic value. People are more than welcome to get irate about my reviews - they often do, bless them - but at the end of the day, books are books, a form of entertainment. It's not life or fucking death, guys. I don't think a cheeky sarcastic review is going to stop any author from paying their bills and nor is it going to bar anyone else from enjoying the book. These days, I'm still not one to hold back, but one woman's trash is another's treasure. Everybody likes things for different reasons. It's also a testament to how my writing has improved that I no longer write critiques like an angry goth whose elders don't "get her vibe". I like to think that I write now with the same energy and aesthetic as a French person saying "bof" if you ask them how their meal was at the Hard Rock Cafe. I'm saying this because as a teenager, before the Terrible Twenties swept over my home like a harbinger of end times, a wicked power that even the lamb's blood smeared over the threshold of my door could not ward off, I would have torn this book a new one. But now, all I can do is look at it, sigh, and say, "Well, at least that's over." Okay, listen. I have read worse books. But I don't think that's a compliment, is it? This was just so tired, so expected, so flat. The last twenty percent of this was completely unintelligible, and maybe I could have forgiven it this (view spoiler)[- all of this nonsense with people coming back to life and a stupidly elaborate plan just to get Tella and Scarlett away from their father when they could have just stabbed him in his sleep, all of the bullshit that everyone put Scarlett through that she fucking forgave them for, and the fact that this whole thing was just one big humiliating runaround for Scarlett that accomplished absolutely nothing since their father still knows Scarlett is alive and could still come after her - (hide spoiler)] if the characters had not been unbearably flat. It was so difficult to care about anything because the essential emotional thread of the story just didn't exist. Julian is a horrible fucking liar, Tella is a manipulative arsehole, and Scarlett is so painfully gullible, and you might think that this could make them interesting, but it doesn't - they're all painted in such a positive light, everything they do justified, and I would have preferred a cast full of villains to this. (view spoiler)[And on paper, you might think it's clever and exciting that it all turns out to be an elaborate game, but the whole thing is so shoddily cobbled together, so nonsensical, that it just feels like reaching. This whole book is just reaching, basically. (hide spoiler)] Frankly, this book reads like an early draft that need a lot of polishing. It's all over the place, and I can't invest myself in that sort of story, where I can feel every move the author was making. It's so difficult to get on board with a book that's written that way. Because you can feel every move the author made, or rather, every misstep. It feels rushed and messy, lazily plotted, poorly paced. But these are serious, fundamental problems with the story structure itself. The whole premise is a problem, because it just doesn't make any sense why any of this is happening, and it makes even less sense the further you go. It is actually shocking to me how shoddy it is. Take it back to the drawing board; invest some more time in it. The very bare bones of this story could potentially be interesting, and I do like the idea of the circus (kind of. Not really. I'm just trying to be nice here). With a few massive rounds of editing it could have been something cool. But as it is, it's sort of a wreck. The kicker with the prose is that I see what the author was trying to do: magical writing for a story about magic. But there is no magic here. And it wouldn't matter what sort of book this was, what the story was about, because writing like this never works. This book is badly written and there is nothing else I can say about this, except to deliver some examples, because it has to be seen to be believed. "Every touch created colors she had never seen. Colors as soft as velvet and as sharp as sparks that turned into stars." what "Tella loved danger the same way candlewicks loved to burn." the "She remembered his rows of sharply defined brown muscles." actual "Fierce as a kitten who'd just gotten claws, willing to shred the whole world to make this right." fuck "Shades of the rich ruby love she'd felt during the game mixed with hues of deep-indigo hurt, turning everything just a little bit violet." is "Scarlett wanted to melt into the night, wink out of existence like a broken star." this "Tella beamed, brighter than candlelight and glass-cut glitter" ??? That's a good question, isn't it? I'll leave you to ponder it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 24, 2017
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May 28, 2017
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Feb 04, 2017
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Hardcover
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| B00SLWM28C
| 3.92
| 126,097
| Jul 31, 2014
| Jul 31, 2014
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did not like it
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This book was pretty damn bad, but my review for it was also hot rambling garbage. Let me just be succinct: if you're looking to read the Oseman backl
This book was pretty damn bad, but my review for it was also hot rambling garbage. Let me just be succinct: if you're looking to read the Oseman backlog, don't bother with this one. It's not worth it.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 22, 2017
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Jan 24, 2017
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Jan 22, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0399547967
| 9780399547966
| 0399547967
| 4.13
| 117,939
| Sep 12, 2017
| Sep 12, 2017
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it was ok
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Wow! Huge surprise here! I didn't like this book! Bet nobody saw that coming! The shittiest plot twist of 2018 is this: that this book was not my cup Wow! Huge surprise here! I didn't like this book! Bet nobody saw that coming! The shittiest plot twist of 2018 is this: that this book was not my cup of stewed lukewarm tea. The biggest gripe I have is that this actually genuinely interested me for about 80 pages, before it devolved into Fifty Shades Of Dull Turgid Heteros and boring fight scene after boring fight scene after boring fight scene. I can't even be bothered to write a long involved GIF-filled snarky review for some butthurt stans to curl their lips at. She's such a bitch! they'll say, as I lie in bed in my cosy flat with crumbs in my hair and Sudocrem on my fucked up pizza face. Honestly, what would be the point? I didn't buy this book, so I can't even lament the money it cost me. I borrowed it, so it's up to the person who spent her hard earned money to wax about the seven! quid! she! wasted! What I will say is that Marie Lu and I have got to part ways. It was never going to work between us, not after The Young Elites. It was never meant to be. I wish her all the happiness in the world, and it's clear that she is an artist with talent. I'm glad she's done so well. I just hated this book. That's all there is to say, really. Slàinte mhath! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 10, 2017
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Feb 18, 2018
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Jan 17, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1681195771
| 9781681195773
| 1681195771
| 4.27
| 707,729
| Sep 05, 2017
| Sep 05, 2017
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it was ok
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"With you gone, my lord, I... I took the night to visit my parents." [Chaol] tried not to cringe. A family. [Kadja] had family here, and he'd never bot "With you gone, my lord, I... I took the night to visit my parents." [Chaol] tried not to cringe. A family. [Kadja] had family here, and he'd never bothered to ask-- [image] You may as well pick up your bows and your quivers, because being shot in the vagina with a poisoned arrow would probably be less painful than reading one more page of Chaol's Boring Journey to God Knows Where with Fuck Knows Who doing Who Fucking Cares. Bonus points for the chapters, many of which I skimmed like no woman has ever skimmed before, detailing Nesryn's Boring Journey to Some Fucking Mountains with Some Dude and The Spider I Vacuumed Up Last Week. Honest to god, guys, this book was so boring I nearly died reading it. The hell happened? I'm hardly the biggest fan of the one with Feyre and Rhysand and all of their strange chiseled friends, but at least it held my attention. I low key went into cardiac arrest trying to get through this. The kicker is this: both Empire of Storms and Tower of Dawn were boring and full of fillers. The obvious solution should have been to smoosh them together into one book, but... $$$ I guess. That's just kind of sad. The basic premise is this: Chaol goes to Antica to rally support for Aelin. Okay, so we can work with that. But what we ended up with was just loads of stuff just straight up stolen from Game of Thrones! I mean, come on - Chaol is Hand of the King! Hand of the King is a title invented by George R. R. Martin. "Hand of the King" was never a title held by any historical figure. It's literally just stolen. There's no getting away from it. Before this book, I actually really liked Chaol. I also sympathised with him, given that everyone took him for granted, and he went so far above his pay grade it's not even funny, just to be scorned by all and sundry for running away when an actual demon was trying to shear him in half with otherworldly magic. I still don't get why everyone has this weird attitude to him but I banged on about that for long enough in my review of Queen of Shadows so I won't bore you all with it now. After Tower of Dawn, I'm not sick of Chaol for the same reasons that most people attest to: I've heard a lot of folk saying they hate him now because of the way he treated Nesryn. Nesryn dumped him via a note - actually, nah. I bet it was really a napkin, just thrown down on his dresser. Literally just Cho, I'm sick of you, don't call me, kthxbye and that's that. That's like Ye Olde Break Up Text. Truth be told, they were barely together to begin with. But that's not even the crux of the matter: I just hate Nesryn because she's so boring. Words can't even explain how little I care about her. She could have made like me the first 637658386 times I played Minecraft and tried to dig straight down (don't do that!!!!) and ended up in a lava pit, and I wouldn't have given a tiny rat's ass. I cared even less about her than I did about that bit at the beginning of Fallout, when you have to pretend to be devastated that your wife got shot and your baby got kidnapped, when really you're just waiting with bated breath to charge into battle #mwi on chems and make sweet gay love to that hot creep Hancock (there's no wrong way to play!). Speaking of gay... I thought Chaol was queer? Did no one else think that? See, this is another missed opportunity. There's Hasar and Renia, though Hasar is a total arsehole and Renia is this weird wet rag of a character who keeps being referred to ickily as Hasar's "lover". I was feeling it between Chaol and Shen more than I ever felt it between Chaol and Yrene, and this is the problem with SJM: she has this weird ability to unknowingly write pairings with great chemistry, most of which are non-hetero, and then blow a big dumb hole right through it with the same enemies-to-lovers straight romance that we've seen six trillion times before. I always felt that Yrene's story was the least interesting part of The Assassin's Blade, and now I've got to sit here and pretend to buy her romance with Chaol? Are you trifling with this? So one of the biggest problems I had with this book was Yrene, and not because she's the same crap character that we've seen a thousand times before - I've come to expect that. The worst part was that she is the shittest healer ever. The most unprofessional, the most rude, the most entitled. I have a high tolerance for fuckery, especially with high fantasy, but the scene where she allowed those little bitches to tear Chaol down off his horse and then trot him out like a wooden doll, as if, as a disabled person, he's just a thing to be toyed with, turned my fucking stomach. Then, after this, the Healer on High wafts over to Chaol with a sickly wee smile on her face and says, "Welp, that's our Yrene. Don't be mean to her. She's had a hard life." Fuck that. Fuck all of them, for treating Chaol in that way. It was disgusting. And then they have a little argument about it, and it's all forgotten about. Seriously? No. I literally couldn't stop thinking about that. We keep being told that Yrene is so talented and amazing and the next heir to the Torre Cesme, and yet she is still at the stage where she's treating her patients like this? Where the hell is her bedside manner? (I'm also pretty pissed off about Chaol being healed in the end, and the cop-out with the life bond to Yrene, but that's a given. Why we can't just have a handsome male character with a rounded story arc who is just straight up in a wheelchair, disabled, is a mystery to me. There is no reason why Chaol needed to be magically healed. I'm so sick of this cast of Olympians with their rippling muscles and their perfect swordplay, and this is another reason why it's relevant to note Game of Thrones: it has its issues with representation, absolutely, but it is notable in its portrayal of multiple well-rounded and layered disabled characters.) The trouble is that the setting of Antica was cool...but derivative. The idea was good...but executed badly. This book was full of good ideas that went down the toilet, and I'm kind of pissed off about it, because this is the sixth book, and it certainly wasn't cheap, but it's not the money I'm bitter about. It's the fact that I've committed to this series and these characters, and SJM won't stop butchering them. Not to sound like Disgrunted 4chan Fan #67546453, but how is that fair? Don't build up fans' expectations, then then disrespect the first three (excellent) books in the series with this piece of nonsense. FIN ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 11, 2017
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Oct 27, 2017
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Dec 13, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0571326803
| 9780571326808
| 0571326803
| 3.29
| 8,429
| Sep 01, 2016
| Sep 01, 2016
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really liked it
|
Maaaaan, guys. That was fucked? This is a book about a sad, strange, loathsome asshole who makes terrible decisions, and it's all so bloody entertaining Maaaaan, guys. That was fucked? This is a book about a sad, strange, loathsome asshole who makes terrible decisions, and it's all so bloody entertaining. I'm not surprised that this book got middling reviews; it's a Marmite thing, probably a very, very acquired taste that not everyone will enjoy. But I loved it. I would have given it five stars, but there was an unnerving air of internalized misogyny that really bothered me, and was completely unnecessary. River is an asshole, but she didn't need to be problematic. There was also some really thinly veiled racism, and I am never, ever here for that garbage, so keep it 2763473537 feet away from me. In terms of plot, this book is gripping. In terms of writing, it's stellar. The writing was, for me at least, exquisite: it beautifully captures the eternal cringe of emo teen philosophy, dragging me right through a time warp and back to my high school goth days. "We're all gonna die". Yes we are, and teens think they're the only ones who realize this. This book knows that, and it's willing to play with it. At the same time, it feels appropriately teen. It's not shying from stuff that teens do, like swear and drink and take recreational drugs and have sex. It's also refreshingly frank, and takes the monumental risk of a protagonist who is a garbage human being: River is dreadful, self-obsessed and pedantic and selfish and cruel. She is a hypocrite, a bully who frowns on bullies, but she is also a girl with nobody to turn to, a frightened cornered animal lashing out at any outstretched hand. She takes her jealousy and twists it into hatred and obsession; she sees people with things that she doesn't have, and she lusts for them. She idealizes an unobtainable life, and the Graces represent everything that she wants to be. She wants to be powerful, because she is powerless. She wants to be cool, and effortless, and so she very effortfully creates a character, like an actor reading from a script. I love the way River's character has been crafted. She is a girl filled with rage and loneliness, crippled by low self-esteem. And her inner hatred turns to outer hatred. She is desperate to be loved, and so she creates a disguise, and so the Graces love her not for who she is, but for the part she is playing. It is agonizing and thrilling to watch. This book is just seeping with atmosphere, tense and tight but not sparse. It's paced brilliantly, and I just could not put it down. It was like a slow fall off a cliff, something everyone knows is going to end brutally, but that's impossible to look away from. I wish the ending had been fleshed out a little further. I liked the mystery of it, but it didn't feel quite full enough. It was slightly abrupt, but during that last scene on the beach, I was sitting up on the edge of my bed, literally talking to the book. It enraged me, like the whole book enraged me, but in the best way. The Graces is a story about obsession, loneliness, desperation, and the agony of navigating the dreaded mid-teens. It's about low self-esteem, and how it can literally rip away personhood. It's about envy, and jealousy, and bitterness, and how a villain is really made. Because River is our protagonist, but she is not our good guy. She is the villain of this story, and it's excellent. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 07, 2017
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Jan 09, 2017
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Dec 12, 2016
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765382547
| 9780765382542
| 0765382547
| 3.70
| 5,015
| Feb 16, 2016
| Feb 16, 2016
|
it was ok
|
Fun in places, agonising in others, with an ending like one of those Lord of the Rings movies: endless, fucking endless, filled with impossible stunts
Fun in places, agonising in others, with an ending like one of those Lord of the Rings movies: endless, fucking endless, filled with impossible stunts and going through a bitter divorce with physics. There's also the last chapter, which I absolutely could not wrap my head around. What the fuck was going on there. (I also want to add, because it was something that stuck out to me, and something that bothered me, that Marcus was my favourite character. I really, really liked him. He was barely there, barely spoke, barely had any input due to Gideon arbitrarily hating him, but I really, really liked him and I was so interested in him. I wish this book had been from his point of view. I want to know more about him. I might even read the sequel just for some more insight into him. He had a cool horse and a really interesting power, and I just...loved Marcus. I connected with him, while I didn't connect to any of the other characters in this book.) You bet your perky little ass I'm going to review this. Don't expect any less of me. RTC. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 02, 2016
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Sep 06, 2016
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Sep 02, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062385453
| 9780062385451
| B019WVN4O6
| 3.80
| 113,323
| Sep 20, 2016
| Sep 20, 2016
|
it was ok
|
How could a book with such a promising premise fall so flat? (This is a stupid question and by now, having been a Goodreads member for seven years, I
How could a book with such a promising premise fall so flat? (This is a stupid question and by now, having been a Goodreads member for seven years, I ought to know better.) The thing is, right, that the first chapter was absolutely mesmerizing. In fact, Katharine remained the only character I was even mildly interested in for the rest of the book. But sometimes I like to look at it this way: if I were a literary agent, and this book came into my query inbox, and the author had attached the first five pages, then I would have requested the full manuscript. That's how good the first chapter was. Everything after the first chapter was punishing. Absolutely nothing about Arsinoe, or the limp, anticlimactic backstory of Jules and Joseph, is in any way interesting. Mirabella is just another special girl who can control the elements, the same as the 95,000 other YA heroines who can "command fire" or "command water". Elemental power is so fucking tired at this point, while I know that any overused trope can be reinvented to be fresh, this book doesn't manage it. It's dry as fuck. Whatever, dude. I'm bored of even writing this review. I'm bored just thinking about this book. But the thing is, right, I was promised a story about a deathly showdown between three sisters (remarkably relatable for me) and what I got was bland shite romance and nonsensical world building and overused tropes that feel overused. Just a giant meh from me, I think. FIN ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 05, 2017
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Feb 18, 2017
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Mar 12, 2016
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 4.65
| 2,397,013
| May 03, 2016
| May 03, 2016
|
really liked it
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None
|
Notes are private!
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2
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Apr 28, 2017
May 25, 2016
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May 04, 2017
May 31, 2016
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Feb 22, 2016
|
Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0062235818
| 9780062235817
| 0062235818
| 3.94
| 26,052
| Sep 17, 2015
| Oct 06, 2015
|
it was ok
|
**spoiler alert** The first book was a fun caper; this one felt like a bad fever dream. God's sake, HOW is it possible to write such a tone-deaf, irre
**spoiler alert** The first book was a fun caper; this one felt like a bad fever dream. God's sake, HOW is it possible to write such a tone-deaf, irresponsible, waffling protagonist? And Ash! Ash, go to hell! The dude is a hired companion and yet he has the cheek - the bare-faced cheek! - to talk about "common prostitutes" as if they're worthless! This dude telling us all about how awful it is to be a sex worker, talking shit about other sex workers whose job is EVEN MORE dangerous than his! And who are at far more risk than he is!* I knew from the first book when Ash guilted Violet into backtracking on the only smart decision she made (to break up with him) that he was a sack of shit, but damn, he's a piece of work in this one. *Of course, the "common prostitutes" are women, and the companions are all male, and Ash is a misogynist, so the mystery of why he feels that the companions are superior to other sex workers is effectively solved. I hate Ash. And by the way, this is the most poorly organised revolution ever: people [fucking Ash!] are given really important positions even when they aren't qualified for them, just so that their feelings don't get hurt. Should it not be Violet, who has actual magical powers, leading the charge? Oh, but no! Then Ash might cry his tiny male tears. We have to all make sure that he feels important, even if it fucks up the uprising and gets us all killed. This book isn't boring - the pacing of this series is remarkably, brilliantly fast - but the plot is so flaccid. The plot just cannot get it up. Maybe it drank too much or it's just not in the mood. But shit, guys; you're going to have to do better than 250 pages of filler, a totally random colonisation backstory that makes no genetic sense, and then a mindless cliffhanger that we'd all give ten times as many shits about if Hazel had been more to us than a lump of bloody chalk thus far. I couldn't care less if I tried. The only character I liked was Lucien. He had the good sense to hate Ash and to keep secrets from Violet, who is such a dumbshit that it's sheer luck that she's even still alive. He was smart and his backstory was fucking tragic, but I guess we're supposed to hate him because he doesn't indulge the self-importance of these thick teenagers? Bonus points to Ash for making fun of the fact that Lucien's body has been mutilated, not once but twice! Oh, Ash. I'll give the last book four stars if Ash dies. Five if Lucien kills him. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 30, 2015
|
Jan 04, 2016
|
Jan 05, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0552573744
| 9780552573740
| 0552573744
| 3.81
| 52,267
| Jun 28, 2016
| Jul 07, 2016
|
liked it
|
**spoiler alert** EDIT: This seems incredibly random, and it is, so let's chalk it up to shower thoughts - but it's been niggling at me, especially as
**spoiler alert** EDIT: This seems incredibly random, and it is, so let's chalk it up to shower thoughts - but it's been niggling at me, especially as I contemplate picking up the second book. I sincerely hope that someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but considering this is based on history, is it not...incredibly straightwashed? In history, Mehmed and Radu were lovers for years and years, and yet in this book, the author has actually gone out of her way to avoid this, by gender bending Vlad the Impaler and pushing Lada and Mehmed together, and shoving Radu out to the perpetual "I love you like a brother" zone, even though, historically, this romance belongs to him. The author has actually strayed further from history for no reason other than to shoehorn in a straight romance where historically there was a queer one? I haven't read the sequel so I don't know what happens there. But creating what is essentially a fictional character and inserting them into a historical novel and going to all of these lengths to create a fake het romance in the place of the historically accurate and less boring queer one seems like a lot of hassle to go to when you could have just... made them in a queer relationship... like they were in real life? Am I wrong? Tell me if I am. This was just my understanding of what went down, and it made me raise an eyebrow. In terms of an actual review: I don't have one. Let's make it quick and dirty. This was one part boring, three parts thrilling, and beautifully written. It's a shame I hated Lada and Mehmed so much. Like, the thought of them now makes my eye twitch. Radu deserves better. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 24, 2016
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Aug 02, 2016
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Oct 30, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062286951
| 9780062286956
| 0062286951
| 3.73
| 23,848
| Oct 13, 2015
| Oct 13, 2015
|
it was ok
|
My first words when I finished this book were, "So annoyed. What a shit show. Two stars." I loved Snow Like Ashes. I frickin' loved it. Meira was an aw My first words when I finished this book were, "So annoyed. What a shit show. Two stars." I loved Snow Like Ashes. I frickin' loved it. Meira was an awesome heroine, Angra was a scary villain, the world-building was cool, the writing was smooth, the story was daring. And I had a huge, stupid, embarrassing crush on Theron. Like, it's just as huge and embarrassing as my crush on Paul from A Thousand Pieces of You. Just as huge and embarrassing as my crush on this Russian girl I used to work with. So imagine my disdain when this book took the story and Meira and Theron and the fantasy raucousness that was Snow Like Ashes and dumped some sort of, I don't know, turgid inner-city refuse all over it and then laughed in my face. I got blood on this book because my finger has a big cut on it that won't heal, and that blood has not turned brown like dried blood does, but has stayed red like my broken heart. I think the fact that I bled on this book says a lot about my relationship with it. We have Meira travelling all over the kingdom for...some reason, maybe an alliance and maybe a treaty and maybe because Raasch wanted to "show us" some more world-building that wasn't necessary, and we have some intensely boring Mather chapters - seriously, who asked for a Mather POV? I most certainly did not. Anyone who followed my comments and status updates from Snow Like Ashes knows that Mather and I are like oil and water. He is so bland and so unbelievably convenient and irritating, and any other POV would have been preferable. Nessa could have stayed behind and kept track of Winter. Or maybe Conall, who ended up being one of my favourite characters in this book, despite his abysmal development. In fact, I even liked Conall in Snow Like Ashes. He felt real to me. He interested me. But Mather is the epitome of a character who's filling a slot and that no one asked for. Even the writing is so much more melodramatic: "They reached Rintiero a few hours before sunset, the seven of them flying off the boat in a swirl of white hair and determination". Are you kidding me? Come on. I know that the author has better words than this in her. Honestly, I'm not surprised that the first words in the acknowledgements were "Sequels are hard". Therein lies the problem; this sequel was too hard. This book really shouldn't have existed - with a little more rounding off and a few tweaks, Snow Like Ashes could have been a bold, brilliant, clean standalone. It could have broken the YA fantasy mould and said, yeah, one book is enough, and you don't need sequels to be great! But I guess this one was obligatory, and that's why it exists? Okaaay. But it's not just the muddying of the plot, which meanders here and there, unconfined to its own rules, which it breaks constantly (since when does magic fully possess people? What actually is the Decay? You'd think there would have been a concrete explanation for what it is and what it can actually do other than "it's dark". What?) and it's not just that that the thundering climax is a strange blurring of all of these mythological elements that don't make sense, it's the characters, and that holes have been blown through them, so much that they're unrecognizable: Mather's entire existence suddenly revolves around Meira, Sir isn't the strong silent type that he was in SLA but an emotionally dead pushover, and the other refugees - Dendera, Henn, Finn and Allison - fade into the background, thin as a puff of smoke, only cropping up when Meira needs a shoulder to cry on or someone to pick her outfits for her. And then there's Theron. Don't even fucking get me started on Theron. (view spoiler)[So Theron was supposedly corrupted by Angra's Decay in Abril, and okay, fine, that's why he had a personality transplant, but there are so many tiny moments that are meant to convince the reader that actually he wants to be corrupted, and there's a bad seed in him anyway. At the end, when he chains himself into that cell to let Mather and Meira escape, he screams that he agrees with Angra and Meira explains that it's just his own natural faults exacerbated that made him this traitorous imperialist asshat. Seriously - over and over again, Meira (paraphrasing) says shit like, "I can't leave him to be Angra's puppet...but when he said that totally unforgivable thing just then, I swear it was all Theron" or "Mather is so uncomplicated...and Theron is a lost cause" or "Theron secretly wanted this anyway, no wonder Angra got to him...but it's a shame he's been hijacked like Peeta". Fucking hell, man, I've never seen ship manipulation like it. It's like the author saw that fans liked Theron better than that fucking Mather so decided to totally gatecrash the former and then give the latter this self-serving, woe-is-me, self-indulgent POV so that we'll all fall in love with him. I feel like she loves him, so thinks we all do too, but he's just so painful to read about. I'd rather watch my toenails grow. Does anybody prefer Mather to Theron at this point? Why would you? What I loved about Theron in SLA was that he was so subversive - so often in YA there's the childhood love interest and then the Jacob who comes along later and it's always the heroine's bland relationship with the former that comes out on top, because he's the one who "gets her vibe". I liked that Meira got sick of waiting around for Mather so moved on and found this kind, sweet, gentle dude who liked books and art and stuff. Theron was fresh, nothing harsh about him, and nothing weak about him either. He and Meira were kindred spirits, both tired of being used as pawns, and the one thing that stuck out to me the most was that Theron didn't seem to have any interest at all in being a prince - he wasn't political. At one point in SLA Meira says she believes that if Theron could get away with spending all of his time reading and painting and writing poetry, he'd never leave his little book nook. Why, then, would somebody like that suddenly become extremely politically savvy and brutal, even with the Decay, even if the Decay does attack the host's most prominent traits? Meira constantly states that the Decay exaggerates and twists the host's strongest beliefs, but why would Theron's strongest beliefs be politics? Surely knowledge, art, books, and words are at his forefront? Meira constantly says that Theron's biggest wish was for everyone in Primoria to have magic and for magical equality, but when has Theron ever said this? He never mentioned this in SLA. I'm pretty sure Theron's biggest wish was to waft around the library and write poetry. He never ever mentioned any interest in magic or politics, and he never discussed his future as king, and he spurned the political marriage to Meira not because he didn't like Meira but because he didn't want a political marriage. All of this is water under the bridge when you look at the true motive behind Theron becoming this evil big bad. It's just grey enough that you can't really complain about him doing a Gale, because it's apparently "the Decay" but we're told enough times that Theron was basically asking for it because deep down there's badness in him. As if you can ask to have your mind fucked. Whatever. I'm just mourning the Theron I loved because there was no need for this, and I'm furious that this book did a 180 and looked up at me with big, beseeching eyes and said, "Please love Mather! He's so uncomplicated!" Don't even bother. (hide spoiler)] The whole Theron thing all ties back to this series' mythology and culture and how it has this weird obsession with blood and birthright; like, your blood determines whether or not you are totally evil or totally good, and there's no leeway with it, except if you're a special snowflake like Ceridwen. (view spoiler)[She did not appeal to me for a number of reasons, one being that she and Jesse bumped uglies and then both wondered why his wife was mad about it. And it was supposed to be so sweet and sad, like how they could never be together, but I don't feel sorry for them, especially not Jesse, who was wearing a fucking ring on his finger. But of course Raelyn, the queen, turns out to be evil anyway so we can't feel sorry for her and the obvious humiliation she must have felt when her husband and father of her three young children wandered off and shagged someone else. (hide spoiler)] Meira's not a special snowflake because all of the Winterians are inherently good and their motives are never ever questionable. They're kind and blameless and they'll happily trudge down mineshafts and live in doorless shacks while their queen lives in a palace and cries on her eiderdown bed like a Disney princess. They're also a-okay while she throws away their resources on creating flimsy alliances, rather than investing them and using them as exports to build a treasury so that they can pay an actual Winterian army to guard Winter. (The only dude in the whole of Winter who questions this monarchial class divide gets his ass kicked and then changes his mind later even though he was right in the first place.) But if you're from Cordell or Spring you're automatically evil, and if you're from Summer (except special Ceridwen) then you're automatically a slob and if you're from Yakim then you're basically Erudite from Divergent. This book has taken a leaf out of that series anti-intellectual dogma and damned anyone who values education and intellect as shady and Slytherin. (view spoiler)[Of course, Theron's badness that the Decay latched on to was obviously a hunger for power from his Cordellan blood. Duh. He's from Cordell, so we gotta make him evil, because that's how genetics and ethnicity works! (Nah.) (hide spoiler)] What's hilarious is that when Meira arrives in Ventralli, she takes a look around and spits that there is no poor district, no slums or homeless, and everything looks clean and nice, and that this is apparently such a bad thing. She looks around and says that she sees Cordell everywhere, and I suppose that's meant to be an insult? Ventralli is apparently shite because it's not Winter, but I'd think that having a kingdom where all of the housing is in good repair, homelessness is pretty much non-existent, and cities are clean and habitable is...good? I never understood why that was such a problem for her in SLA, when they arrived in Cordell and were all so angry that there were no beggars in the streets or filthy slums. I know that the whole point was that the Winterians were suffering while Cordell was so wealthy, but each kingdom's first priority has to be its interior. I guess it was a different kettle of fish with Cordell, because they were already invested in Season politics and were geographically and politically closer to the Winter-Spring-Autumn conflict, but it makes no sense why Meira would be so furious that the Rhythms all the way across the continent, with whom the Winter-Spring conflict has never had any contact, have not stepped in. It's not politically or financially sane for those uninvolved, separate kingdoms to jump into a costly war. That kind of nonsensical and culturally blind interference is part of what caused so much unrest in the Middle East - the West tangling itself up in problems that it doesn't have any business solving, and only making the situation a thousand times worse. Meira basically rolls up on the doorstep of kingdoms that are on the other side of the continent, that are traditionally nothing to do with any of the Seasons, and randomly asks them for an alliance, giving them nothing at all in return. Someone should have sat her down on the day of her coronation and said, "Kid, the rule is that nobody gives you shit for free." It's a pretty simple rule. Did I like this book? Meh. Not really. It pissed me off, and what's worse is that it tainted the joy of the first book, which I loved. I truly did love it. And I wanted to love this one too. But it was not to be, was it? Our names were not written in the stars. Only stellar reviews will convince me to read the last book. As it stands right now? I'm done with this series. Unofficially done. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 13, 2016
|
Feb 22, 2016
|
Feb 12, 2015
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Hardcover
|
|
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|
|
|
|
my rating |
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|
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 4.01
|
it was ok
|
not set
|
Sep 23, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.84
|
did not like it
|
not set
|
Aug 24, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.79
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 15, 2022
|
Jul 11, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.59
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 27, 2023
|
Aug 10, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.56
|
did not like it
|
Jun 20, 2019
|
Dec 03, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.66
|
it was ok
|
Sep 23, 2018
|
Aug 26, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 3.79
|
it was ok
|
Oct 03, 2019
|
Mar 04, 2018
|
|||||
|
| 4.14
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 10, 2019
Aug 05, 2017
|
Jul 29, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.28
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Apr 09, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.98
|
did not like it
|
May 28, 2017
|
Feb 04, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
did not like it
|
Jan 24, 2017
|
Jan 22, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.13
|
it was ok
|
Feb 18, 2018
|
Jan 17, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.27
|
it was ok
|
Oct 27, 2017
|
Dec 13, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.29
|
really liked it
|
Jan 09, 2017
|
Dec 12, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.70
|
it was ok
|
Sep 06, 2016
|
Sep 02, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.80
|
it was ok
|
Feb 18, 2017
|
Mar 12, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 4.65
|
really liked it
|
May 04, 2017
May 31, 2016
|
Feb 22, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.94
|
it was ok
|
Jan 04, 2016
|
Jan 05, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.81
|
liked it
|
Aug 02, 2016
|
Oct 30, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.73
|
it was ok
|
Feb 22, 2016
|
Feb 12, 2015
|
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