Bloodline by Claudia Gray
Ugh I had such high hopes for this, it hits every single bingo block for me: Star Wars! Leia! Inevitable Doom with Irony! Instead, I found it lacking in a very similar way that WW84 was lacking–namely that 24 years later a woman who has now been a public figure the vast majority of her adult life is still being defined by or remembering four years worth of events from ages ago? With much of the EU (almost all of it) non-canon, Gray has the […]
On the Come Up by Angie Thomas
This was never going to be an easy sell for me, and at the end of the day this book gets knocked down for similar reasons that 1Q84 was ultimately frustrating (talk about genre agnostic comparisons): too many threads at the end of the novel hastily tied up. Normal comparisons will of course be to Thomas’ debut novel, The Hate U Give. They all fall into this liminal audience space, where I’m not sure if she’s writing “for” me (the non-BPOC audience working out their […]
The Prince and the Troll by Rainbow Rowell
I am not sure what this is, but I’ll attempt to define it by what I know what it’s not. It’s not a full story–it’s part of Amazon’s bizarre plan of world Prime domination, which apparently has focus tested “multiple short essay-to-short-story length Kindle Books” as a perk that people enjoy? Seems gratuitous–I have Prime because I want Video and to occasionally order things I can’t find elsewhere–but I’m not complaining if authors I like get some of that Bezos money. There’s a lot of […]
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Definitely more 3.5 stars, arrived at due to a 3 star first half and 4 star second half. We start on a planet(?) kingdom(?) post-apocalyptic-world-with-necromancy(?) realm(?) dimension(?) that is dark and gritty in the extreme–so, so very gritty. By about halfway through I realized that no one was an actual zombie/undead necromancer type, but I definitely felt like everyone should have taken a shower with a loofah at least once. For a cast of characters living in an stylistically(?) abandoned(?) / derelict(?) giant mansion(?) / […]
The Duke Who Didn't by Courtney Milan
I just don’t think that I get Ms. Milan. I previously tried The Duchess War and filed it as abandoned–I recall being on the subway platform and starting it, and just feeling sort of removed from the characters and not particularly invested. I felt similarly for most of this novel, sort of uninvested in the tensions and drama faced by both Chloe and Jeremy. I appreciated that in the author’s note a lot of the history of Wedgeford was described and pinned back to actual […]