aimiller's Reviews (689)

I will say right off the bat, I received a copy of this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, and I'm grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

This was a really interesting collection of mysteries, all different enough to not feel like the same material over and over again, and yet definitely feeling connected and in touch with the gothic theme. I think my favorite story was the first one, but each one was interesting in its own way, and each story was sort of bite-sized enough that I raced through this book. If you love gothic, and/or Sherlock Holmes, you'll definitely want to pick this up.

This was... sort of wild. It, I assume, was intended to be a kind of melodrama, and in some respects it definitely fulfilled that, but it was also just. Gross, in a lot of places? There was a lot of body shaming, like a LOT, and literally all of the men except the romantic hero were disgusting?

There was also a rape sequence in addition to the disgusting sexual abuse of nonconsensual voyeurism, and it was just dropped as a plot moment that then like had no real impact on the story. It was totally unclear to me why it had to be like that.

It also wrapped up way too quickly, as if we hit the third act and suddenly had to tie up all these loose ends that made no sense. I'm a person who is pretty okay with melodrama, but this was just way too poorly paced and underplotted to really enjoy.

I have to open this by noting that I received this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, and I'm grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read this.

This was a really fun and enthralling story! I went in not very sure what to expect--the "musical fiction" kind of threw me for a loop, and in the opening pages I was absolutely this was going to be a slog, as I'm not a person who cares very much about the kinds of musical fandom that Nick and his friends do, but rapidly I got sucked into the mystery plot, and I really have to say Holliday did an amazing job of making like deeply relatable and realistic teen characters. Nicky especially was just a masterclass in that tension of being almost-an-adult, and not having full control over like your emotions and reactions, but still fully facing the consequences of that. All of the characters, though, were really lively and lovely. And I bet if you like and care about like the 60s British pop music scene, you'd be way more clued in than I was about all of that stuff.

Will say there's some period-based homophobia that ends up lingering, but I was able to continue reading and didn't find it particularly triggering, more just annoying.

A pretty good and interesting collection; I should have read it less broken up, because I think some of the history of the Vanguard feel a little broken up/unclear to me, but it's absolutely worth it for the Vanguard Revisited reprinting, because there's so much good work both from the original Vanguard and the youth involved in the Revisited project.

This is one of those like weird books that has, at the beginning, some discussion of how Threepio was made (which was really nice actually, I learned some new things--like that he's "3" because he's the third member of the Skywalker family after Shmi and Anakin and uh I needed to lie down after that.) The middle section is basically a recap of uh everything Threepio was involved in, just rewritten out as a narrative? Which was kind of weird, to be honest, and obviously is out of date and wrong at this point; the book came out I assume shortly after The Phantom Menace, which strongly colors the narrative. The last section is uh a listing of the different kinds of products C3PO is on?? Which might be cool if you're a collector, I guess, but was really weird for me.

Overall this book was sort of interesting but mostly weird and honestly I bought it in the first place because the shape of it was so WILD (it's like... cut diagonally? It's shaped like a weird rhombus?) and it was about C3PO, but I had a good time reading it so. Mixed bag!

Just an incredible book. Woubshet does an amazing job of reading all these different texts with such care and nuance, and although it's tough materials, it's a really incredible read. The last chapter leaves so much room for future work, and is really an incredible piece of scholarship, but every chapter honestly is so good. I strongly strongly recommend this for all folks interested in AIDS history and mourning.

Right off the bat, I have to say I received a copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I am grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read it.

I didn't find this book super gripping? The plot felt a little weird, especially because the mystery at the beginning took forever to work through in flashback, and once it was "resolved" it felt really obvious, and should have been obvious to Alfred? But it was still an okay book overall, and I had no major complaints about it. I would actually like to see a sequel of Alfred beginning his next journey, as I think that has a lot of plot potential!

But it definitely wasn't a bad book, and it made me want to read more fantasy that relies in some ways on historical fiction (it REALLY made me want to return to Tamora Pierce's work, which I would recommend as a read-alike even though this is not YA.)

A really interesting book, though I'm not sure it doesn't suffer from most of the problems of like microhistories in some way? I would love to have seen this on a more macro-scale, though I'm not sure if the documentation is there (and this is my problem with early America as a field, not necessarily with this book alone.) I would have also loved to see their framework be used way more explicitly, rather than kind of namedropped in the beginning and then just sort of falling away in favor of archival reading work.

All of that being said, it was definitely an interesting premise and I could absolutely see using this in a classroom with students--it's short enough to assign in whole, not just in excerpt, and I think it might have some good things to teach about writing as well as about the subject matter.

[really more like 3.5 stars] A very thoughtful and thorough book, though I think Rifkin gets caught up sometimes in the complexity of his own thoughts (especially given the amount he uses "said another way" as a construction--enough that I took note of it!) Some really interesting and useful pieces in here, especially surrounding the bribe of straightness, but I don't know that I would use it in a classroom per se, just because I think there are other things going on. Might use the introduction in excerpt though, since it has some really interesting things to say about sovereignty! But definitely worth your time to read though.

I want to first of all acknowledge that I received this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I am grateful to the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

In short, this book examines what we know about Dumbledore's choices and actions over the course of the core Harry Potter series and guides you through them to try to discover what drove him and why he made certain choices. Khaytman's style is very easy to read (in a good way!) and he does a great job of citing his sources and explaining where he disagrees with the folks he's citing. I would say if you're really into Harry Potter, you should definitely read this. I don't know that I agree fully with his conclusions, but I think Khaytman does a great job of identifying where he's just guessing, and his arguments definitely are compelling.