I read the Will Trent series by Karin Slaughter last year, all of the full novels. I gave the novellas a pass because at the time I wasn't big on ebooks. Since I'm currently going through an ebook binge, figured why not? I loved the novels, so let's see how the shorter stories went.

It was fine. Like I dunno what else to say really. It wasn't bad by any means, but it was just kind of okay. Like sure it's technically a Will Trent story and Will Trent is the main character, but I didn't care. It didn't add anything to the overall series. I think if you're not big on ebooks, but you love the series (as was the case with me last fall), you're not missing out on much.

There were a lot of chase scenes in this, and a lot of following people with the cameras in the airport. I'm not a huge fan of chase scenes because they kinda feel dull to me. The perp runs, Will runs. The perp turns a corner, Will turns a corner. The perp pushes through a crowd of people, Will gets shoved on his way through. Like it just drags and doesn't add anything. It's normally something I overlook because it doesn't bother me too much, but this book is only seventy pages long and it felt like a good percentage of that was chase scenes. Ten pages out of 350 is not a whole lot, but ten pages out of 70 and it's suddenly a big portion of the story.

I liked the mystery aspect (this girl has been kidnapped, we must find her), but it didn't really feel like anything special. There weren't any plot twists or interesting developments. It just kind of unfolded the way you would expect.

There's nothing that stood out to me about this. I didn't dislike it, but also I won't remember it tomorrow. I've read better and significantly more memorable books by Karin Slaughter. It felt like she turned this into a novella because it was originally a story idea that didn't have the legs to carry a full book.

If you like Will Trent, I'd say go ahead and pick this up. It wasn't great, but there was nothing wrong with it either. It was just kind of fine. It won't take up much of your time and it was fun to see an extra little Will Trent snippet. There's nothing about this that will stick with me, but I was pleased enough while reading it and tomorrow I'll probably read the second novella in the series.

I very nearly gave this book five stars. As I was finishing up, I thought about it, but honestly if I have to think about it, that book probably isn't five stars. But this one was close. It's genuinely the first book I've read this year that I've loved (excluding rereads).

A lot of this book is about religion and I think it's important to state right off the bat that I'm not religious. Sam is a pastor's kid and this book deals with a combination of her family issues, a missing girl from her church, and her struggles with faith. It makes up a large section of the book. But despite the faith focus, it's not a book I would shelve in the religious fiction section. It's a book about a girl who is religious, not a religious book. Like the point of the book isn't her finding faith, even if it is a big part of the story. The point of the book is just Sam's character. It's a subtle distinction, but one that I think makes the book readable for people like me who aren't religious.

I would also highly recommend this if you're looking for a YA book that handles religious well. It's never preachy or pushy. Religion is just a part of Sam's life which makes it a part of the book and it's really well done. I think it's easily become one of my favorite contemporaries dealing with religion.

The missing girl storyline was such a weird subplot. It's strange to say, but I almost feel like this book would have been stronger without it. It does have an effect on Sam perspective and life, but I don't feel like it truly changed the story in any consequential way. If it had been removed, I think it largely could have been the same story with a few tweaked details. And I think a little less drama would have helped, if the focus had been solely on Sam's life instead of Sam's life and also this huge hunt for a kidnapped kid. That may have been the main thing keeping this book from being five stars.

I'm not sure how I felt about the ending. I wasn't sure while reading it and now, the next day, it's still a question in my mind. I think it wrapped up too many things and had too much closure. This is a book I could have seen with a more open ending, letting the readers draw their own conclusions. It could have just ended right after the climax. But it kept going and going and there was still a decent amount of book left. I did feel a little negative toward that, but also I liked seeing Sam's life wrap itself up. I liked having answers to all my questions, at least on a surface level. I guess I just think it was too much in such a short period of time and maybe we didn't need all of it.

The list of other things I loved is too long because it was very nearly the rest of the book. I loved Sam's relationship with the youth group leader at her church and how that changed over the course of the book. I loved her overall struggle with being the pastor's kid, and how it was mirrored by her mother's struggle being the pastor's wife. I loved how she didn't feel allowed to question her faith out loud for fear of reflecting badly on her father. I loved her mother's growing role in the book, starting out as completely absent until she's even more present that Sam's physically present father.

I'm sure there were many more, but I thought this book was just spectacular. It's a really wonderful story and I was completely invested the whole time. I'd highly recommend this if you're interested in ya contemporaries that focus heavily on coming of age, family issues, or societal expectation. I wouldn't recommend picking this up based on the fact that it includes a kidnapped girl because it's not a huge focus of the story, and I think that could throw a lot of people off. But for what it is, it's fantastic.

I liked this novella better than Snatched, the previous one. Honestly considered giving it four stars, but it was just shy of that for me. It was more fun and had a more interesting story. There were some pretty decent twists and turns and it definitely held my attention start to finish. It's only about 70 pages, but I just flew through it.

I think the ending wrapped up too quickly. There was a lot going on and it was all revealed over the course of two conversations. I feel like this could have benefited from another twenty pages.

There was also enough in this book that I had trouble following it. Too many people that I kept mixing up, too many relationships and lies and moving pieces. I think it needed more time to unfold. As it was, a lot of the story didn't make sense to me and I still can't remember which bad guy was which.

But to a degree, it doesn't matter that much. So what if I mixed up the bad guys? At the end of the day, they're all just the bad guys and basically doing the same thing. It was a good time. I'd recommend this a little more than the previous novella, but I don't think they really hold up to the rest of the full length novels. Worth the read if you're a completionist or really love the series, but they don't add a whole lot and you're not missing much if you give these a pass.

I really wanted to love this final book and finish the series on a strong note, but I didn't. I struggled to care throughout the entire thing. A big part of that was because of my distance from the series, I think. I much prefer reading series all at once, back to back. It feels a lot more cohesive than having to dip in and out of worlds and stories. But I took months to read this series and I think my negative thoughts about the finale were the end result. I never got into this book and I never cared and I had to force myself through from the first page to the last page.

As a result, this isn't going to be a long review. My thoughts probably would have been more positive if I'd picked this up immediately after books two and three. Can't blame the book for that.

But I did feel like this was unnecessarily choppy. The sections seemed shorter than in previous books and it felt like we flipped around so much that I forgot what was going on.

I also felt like it didn't build up some of the climactic moments enough. There were really big scenes and shocking twists in this, but none of them felt big until the end. I'm sure a big part of that was on me just for not caring, but even beyond that. It felt like some of those big moments were treated too casually.

I'm glad I finally read this and got through it, but it took me nearly a full month to read and I think I'm just disappointed with my overall experience. I do think it's a fitting end to the series and I liked a lot of the elements, I just ruined it for myself.

I quite enjoyed this. Going in, I didn't have any idea what it was beyond the movie (which it doesn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to) that I saw probably around ten years ago. I didn't even know it was set in the 60s. I expected this to be a straightforward narrative of her experiences, but it's not really a narrative at all.

The best way I can describe this book is snapshots. It feels like snapshots of her life. She rarely gives you a full story of a situation, instead it's all brief moments and within those moments you get glimpses of the larger picture. I was kind of more interested in a play by play of the almost two years she spent in a psychiatric hospital, but this was just as good once I got into it.

Kaysen has such a wonderfully graphic way of capturing moments that I didn't feel like this book was lacking, despite all the holes. She gets married at one point and discusses the romantic buildup ever so briefly, then mentions that the marriage wouldn't last long, but that's pretty much it. I don't even think you learn her husband's first name. It's kind of peripheral to the story and you only see her outside life in the periphery.

I'm doing such a poor job of explaining this concept, but I thought it was so well done. I'm not ordinarily one for choppy stories, but despite the fact that she was jumping to different, unrelated scenes every few pages, this book had a cohesiveness that enthralled me and made it so easy to get through.

Honestly, the ending bored me. The last few chapters/essays dragged and I struggled to keep from skimming them. They got a lot less personal (for the most part) and focused specifically on what clinical borderline personality is according to the DSM (whichever current number is accurate). Maybe if you have no idea about it that section is more interesting, but I was bored.

Honestly, despite my enjoyment for this book, I don't know that it will stick with me. It was interesting and Kaysen's writing style is definitely different in a positive way, but it didn't hit me hard emotionally. It was just interesting and worthwhile and perhaps not an amazing book. But if it sounds like your kind of thing, I would wholeheartedly recommend this. I've wanted to pick it up for years and I'm so glad I finally did.

I had pretty mixed feelings on this book. There were some things I enjoyed quite a bit, but a lot that rubbed me the wrong way. Positives first:

I really liked the romance between the two main characters. I think if that had been the only plotline I would have enjoyed this quite a bit more. Both Max and Jordan were fully developed, interesting characters. They both had flaws and those flaws impacted their relationship, but they were given time to work through them in the book. It wasn't that their flaws went away or their partner thought it was cute, but it was actually shown how their relationship was negatively impacted and how they communicated and dealt with the issues. I think that's not something that's actually shown in a lot of books and I loved that. The sections of the book that focused solely on them as a couple were my favorite.

My only real negative thought about the pair of them was that the romance moved really fast. The book took place over the course of about a month (ish) and it's hard for me to buy into them falling in love so quickly. It felt way too fast.

Had a few more thoughts on the negative side, though. First were the friends. Max and Jordan both have two friends (Max's "Amigos" and Jordan's "wives"). They were all excruciatingly annoying. Like insufferably so. Thankfully they weren't in the story all that much, but they felt like annoying caricatures rather than real people. Maybe it's because I'm getting older too, but I've never heard teenagers talk in so much slang. It sounded more like the way someone would talk online instead of in real life.

I also wasn't the biggest fan of Konigsberg's writing style. It's first person present tense which is never my favorite anyway, but there were also so many weird throw away lines that didn't make much sense. Like- "I remember wondering what it would feel like to be that spare." Like what does that even mean? There were a number of times I stopped in puzzlement for things like that before I just gave up and kept going.

It also felt like certain plot points didn't have full enough resolutions. Like I wanted some kind of big emotional payoff for all the struggle an issue has caused, and then it would resolve in a line or two. But at other points we'd have such long scenes for situations that didn't really deserve it. I never really felt satisfied with any of the story outside of the relationship. And of course it ended with a whole page of them discussing the importance of the title which was just such an annoying way to end the book. Like not terrible, but just generic.

I think the topics this book dealt with were too serious for the tone. There was so much that was cute and lighthearted and just the boys running around and falling in love and having fun. But also Jordan is about to be homeless. The whole premise of the story is that Jordan needs to make money with the food truck or he'll be homeless. But it never felt like it was dealt with with the gravitas it needed. Jordan himself rarely took it seriously and went on lemonade tests through all the Sonics in their area rather than save money. The way all the characters treated it just felt like it didn't fit in properly with the story. Like this could have just been about saving the food truck instead and for me the lower stakes would have worked better.

But not a bad book by any means. I probably wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it, but it's worth it for the relationship and is probably significantly better if you get along with the author's writing style more than I did.

I was torn between three and four stars on this because I really did like it, but I don't think much of it was to my taste. I can definitely see the love for it, though. I read most of this book in one night because I was hooked on the story and invested in seeing where it was going.

What I didn't like boiled down to the tone, mostly. It's a little bit over the top. It's not ridiculous by any means, but it does lean toward melodrama in the situations and characters' reactions. I much prefer contemporaries that have a more down to earth, almost quiet kind of feel. Even when big things are happening, I want it to feel small. I just consistently wanted this book to dial it back a couple of notches.

I also found the excerpts of the podcast a little annoying. I never like when excerpts of the characters' work is included in the story, whether it's podcasts or comics or their writing. I usually either skip it or skim it because I'm not interested and it rarely has much impact on the story. I didn't find the podcast interesting and that made it difficult to relate to the love for it that so many of the characters' had. I'd just rather it stay inside the story so in my head it can be as amazing as all the characters claim it is. I'll also admit that my issue with this is in part probably because I'm not a big fandom person.

I also wasn't a big fan of how short the chapters were. They were usually just a couple of pages in my ebook format on my phone, so I imagine that translates to just 1-2 pages in a physical book. It felt so choppy and took me quite a while to get into. Not every new bit of information or plot development or character growth needed to be a different scene.

But beyond that, it was a solid book. The narration grabbed me and I was always interested in where it was going. I liked the characters okay. They weren't my favorite people ever, but they were enough that I didn't feel like a few hours stuck with them was insufferable. The representation was also pretty good. It's nice to see a good bit of diversity that isn't just screaming at you to look at all the diversity. Especially with the asexual character. Although I was a bit disappointed that the ace character treated the people who cared about him poorly for most of the book. I think that's largely just because of how rarely I see ace characters, though.

I dunno, not a bad book by any means, but the more I think about it the more this is just a solid three stars for me. A fine contemporary, but it's honestly not one that will stick with me very long. It joins the long list of books I've read and thought "sure" after finishing.

Reread 4/19/20

I really do still love this book, but the whole ending makes me cringe. It's not because of the bad things that happen at the climax, but because it would have been so easy for one of a million tiny decisions to stop it. Like there's so many little things that all have to happen for the bad things in the climax to occur, but any one single change and everything would have been fine. It was such an avoidable situation, but everyone made life difficult in every conceivable way. I don't dislike that in terms of enjoyment of the book, I just cringe.

Obligatory comment on the Jim Dale audiobook: he finally started saying Voldemort instead of Voldemor so yay, but he gave Bellatrix a French accent or something which seems kind of strange. Some weird choices, but I do thoroughly enjoy it overall.

***

I think after Prisoner of Azkaban, this is my favorite of the series (although we will see if rereading HBP and DH change that). I really enjoy Harry's raw anger throughout this book. I know some people find it annoying, but to me, it's a necessary step in Harry's growing up. He's never been allowed to be angry before. He grew up with nothing, built a life in the wizarding world, and now he's being stripped of everything in his new life as well. I just really love it.

I think this is one of those books that was solid in general, but hit a couple of tropes I really don't like. Like I'd definitely recommend this and would honestly consider looking into reading more Christina Lauren, but I'm not entirely sure I like the genre and types of books they usually write.

My first issue is one of my super petty pet peeves. It's the whole trope of writers in fiction writing thinly veiled memoirs of their lives. It's so unbelievably common, but I don't understand. The people who write all these things are writers and know that's not all writers write, but it seems like 90% of the writers in fiction (whether it's McGee from NCIS or the teenagers in this book) are only capable of writing about their own lives. It was actually used intentionally in this so it irritated me less, but I'm still not a fan. I'd rather them just be writing nonfiction if that's what they're gonna do.

In terms of the story, I really liked it and was super invested until about the two thirds mark (rough estimate- I was reading the ebook so I'm not entirely certain). I will give this book props for not having a generic final third that I've read a million times in every romance, but I really wasn't a fan of a couple of big events and the fallout from them. Obviously I can't get into details, but it felt like the authors went unnecessary places that didn't contribute to the overall story. Take that out and the book would have been a bit shorter without changing much.

I was also made very uncomfortable by the fact that the romance takes place between a high school student and a TA in one of their high school classes. It's a position of authority in a school setting, a high school setting at that. It's incredibly irresponsible. I don't care about their ages. They're only about a year apart and that's fine, it's just the TA/student relationship. From the way everyone talked about this book I thought it was about two students so I wasn't expecting that at all going in. He honestly could've just been a guest speaker at the school instead of having an official position, but I couldn't get past it for the whole book.

But beyond those issues, I did quite enjoy this. It was interesting and fun, for all the emotions were hard. I was excited to see where their relationship would go and how they'd deal with the issues of religion. I really enjoyed the writing style which I found easy to get through.

I just think overall maybe it wasn't the book for me. It may have been on track for 4 stars until the final third, though. I would recommend it if it interests you, I guess. Kind of lukewarm on this one.

I think this book captures so perfectly what I love about Sara Zarr. Everything is so meaningful, but nothing is dramatic. It's just a quiet kind of story with characters living their every day lives, but that doesn't mean that it lacks importance. Everything that happens matters so much to the characters and their lives, but it lacks melodrama.

One thing that I love so much is how this book captures Lucy's differences from the average teenagers. And I don't mean this in a "not like other girls" way. Lucy is a 16 year old in high school, but she didn't always go to school full time. For a lot of her life, she was a professional musician and spent more time around adults. It changes how she perceives relationships between adults and teenagers, and how she perceives her own role in the world. It's subtly done and she does have teenage friends as well, but I really loved the execution of that element.

I also really liked the family dynamic. Lucy lives with her parents, grandfather, and younger brother, and each brings their own unique and important relationship to the story. It never felt like their were too many moving pieces or anyone got left out. They were always so well crafted and I really enjoyed seeing each of them played out in the story.

I'm honestly struggling with what else to say. I just enjoyed this book thoroughly. It hasn't been my favorite of Zarr's books, but it's definitely up there. It's such a worthwhile, wonderful book and I'd highly recommend it.