I think I complained that the last few Karin Slaughter books I read had felt a little more watered down than her earlier books. Um I think she maybe heard me because that was not an issue here. This book feels like a return to my favorites of hers, the earliest books in this series. It also doesn't hurt that my favorite character, Lena Adams, is back.

One thing I don't like and never like in this series is the drama between Will and Sara. They're romantically involved and have been romantically involved for like six books and four years. Every book there's one small issue they have that has them passive aggressively fighting the entire book only to be solved in half a conversation at the end. It's so completely unnecessary. It's never a big part of the book, but I wish Slaughter would just chill and let them be cool for a minute. There's enough drama in the case that you don't need the romantic drama too. And it's always some lame miscommunication that doesn't need to exist at all.

But onto the positives. Lena Adams. My favorite. I love her role in these books so much. Lena is a cop, just like all the other characters, but they all hate her. Like so much. It's not a book with Lena unless she gets called a heinous bitch at least twelve times. Literally both of the main cops had to be kicked out of her house to stop from physically assaulting her while she was eight months pregnant. Lena sucks as a person and a cop. She's lazy and selfish and does dumb things because she cares more about her badge than other people. But the main characters aren't golden children either. They literally watched a man beat a chained prisoner and then looked the beaten man in the face and said they didn't see anything. It's hilarious to me because Lena is hardly worse than they are and none of them see it. She wasn't in this book much, but I just think her presence improves everything.

I also quite liked the actually crimes they were investigating. They were brutal and graphic and horrible, even in the context of thrillers. It was all so awful, but honestly I read these books because I want something awful.

I also guessed who the killer was pretty early on, but I'm always a bit pleased by that. I don't mind being surprised, but I'm good at guessing and this wasn't an obvious twist.

I don't know what more to say. This is the tenth book in the Will Trent series and I've reviewed them all. If you like cop thrillers full of unlikable characters and horrible graphic crimes, you should probably give Slaughter a go. She's one of my favorite thriller authors and this is by far my favorite cop thriller series. This is a good addition and it makes me pleased that this book seems an improvement on the last couple. Not that they were bad (Slaughter at her worst is still better than most at their best, imo), but they seemed lacking in a way this book does not. It's just a good read.

I think this book was handled a lot better than the previous one. I still think it would've been a better story had it just been about the queen candidate instead of an imported foreigner, but at least in this book you get to see the Raka movement on their own. It isn't just Aly's story anymore. And there are a number of points where Aly is told to sit down, shut up, and listen, because it isn't her fight and she doesn't have the same skin in the game as everyone else.

I also just think the spy bits were much more fun here than in the prior book. They're back in the city now instead of dealing with living in the country and you actually see the rebellion in action.

Overall, I still do like this series, but it's probably my least favorite of the Tortall books. There's just no getting past the colonialism, and this is a story that's been done so many times by authors of color about people of color. Despite enjoying it (and probably a good portion of that was due to nostalgia), I couldn't wholeheartedly recommend this series to others.

This was one of my favorite series as a teen and one of the only high fantasy books I enjoyed (pretty much this and Tamora Pierce). I've reread a lot of Pierce's work in the past two years and while I still enjoy them, they're riddled with issues that make me cringe as an adult. I was worried Pellinor would be a similar situation, but I adored this book just as much as I did fifteen years ago.

Maerad is a great character. She's the chosen one with a great deal of power, but it feels like every chapter almost we're learning something new about her and her past and her abilities. Not like it's trying to top itself, but just that the main characters are coming from the same place of ignorance as the reader. They just literally don't what she can do and there's so much to explore. It never gets boring.

I love her relationship with Cadvan. I think he's a fascinating character on his own because he's someone with a dark past who's gone so far in the other direction out of necessity. He has to be what he considers objectively good, but he's also a jerk and rude sometimes. It makes him more interesting, and I love how the trust between Cadvan and Maerad is built.

My main issue with this book is that there is a lot of info dumping. They do it through songs and stories and lessons, but it does feel like something that's constant throughout this book. Honestly, I skim those parts a bit. It's good information, but not always super interesting. I wish it had been woven into the story a bit more naturally.

I wish the magic itself was explored a little better. I feel like after rereading this, I still don't have a good grasp on what it is or how it's practiced. (And okay, I know Cadvan would get irritated at me for calling it "magic," but whatever.) I can't remember if it's dealt with more in later books, but it left me wanting a little more.

I mostly just adore the story. It's so well crafted and there are so many moving pieces that all fit together. It's masterfully done. Croggon is a wonderful writer.

Rereading this has made me want to immediately delve into the rest of the series because it's been so long since I experienced them all. This wasn't even my favorite book of the four back when I first read it, so I can't imagine how much I'll enjoy the rest of them. I highly recommend this book if you like YA fantasy. It's just fantastic in so many ways. Truly one of my favorites, and probably always will be.

I had a hard time getting into this book. I think in large part it's because my expectations going in were pretty wrong. I had mostly heard this book spoken about with conversion therapy so I expected it to focus on that. And there definitely is an emphasis on conversion therapy and the trauma it causes (both in general and Conley specifically), but he was an outpatient there for like eight days.

Most of the book focused instead on his religion and struggles with growing up in a very homophobic church as well as the rape he experienced as a freshman in college. I personally found the religion grating. I don't think it's a bad thing to focus on by any means, but I probably wouldn't have picked this book up had I known that was the focus instead of the conversion therapy. I just don't enjoy reading about religion like that.

It also felt like the book didn't have a whole lot of closure. By the end, I knew what his relationship was like with his faith. He spoke pretty bluntly about how he felt now. But I couldn't tell you much about his parents or anyone else from his past. Or honestly how he's living now or how he reconciled his internalized homophobia and came to accept himself. The book sort of just stopped and I felt like I had more questions.

My last negative thought was the writing style. It felt overwritten to me, and like he spent a lot of time on unnecessarily flowery descriptions of things that didn't matter in the slightest. It felt a bit ridiculous to hear him go on about random details that added nothing.

I dunno. Most of my thoughts on this book are negative, but I didn't actually feel that negatively toward it. It was fine, if a bit boring, and I struggled to feel connected. If you're more interested in reading about someone's relationship with religious extremism and how their faith was impacted, you might enjoy this better than me. But it isn't a story that will stay with me.

I do not understand the appeal of this book. Maybe the other books are better, but I truly cannot fathom why this has an average rating of over 4 stars. This took me the better part of four months to read because I was so bored of it that I never wanted to pick it up and when I did I'd just fall asleep.

First of all the writing style. I know this is translated, so I don't know how much of my issues are true to Sapkowski's original text, but I can only comment on what I read. I've not read a book before that was told so much through dialogue. Like either he was literally in the middle of a fight scene stabbing all the baddies, or people were just talking. For paragraphs and paragraphs. Half the time the dialogue was the actual story because that's all that was there. I had the hardest time forcing myself to read and not just skim as fast as possible to get to the end.

And I just hated the writing itself, like the descriptions and the dialogue and just the words used. I can't really describe it because at a point I tried to stop paying attention, but it grated on my nerves. It would be stuff like "Geralt was somewhat surprised because x, y, z reasons" and then the next line would be "this random dude noted his surprise."

Also the sexism, dear god. There was this whole passage about how the sorceresses have to make themselves fake pretty but they still have the cold and angry eyes of ugly girls. Like what? There's so much wrong with that that I don't even feel like unpacking it all. And that wasn't coming from a character, that was just the narration of the story. At the end of one story when he was fighting a woman, weird sexual things kept happening like ripping her dress to expose her breasts or Geralt stuffing his face in her cleavage. In the middle of fight. It was constant throughout the book.

I also don't really like fairytale retellings in general and I had no idea this book was largely retellings (or inspired by basic fairytale plots). Although ironically the only story in this that I actively enjoyed was the Snow White retelling. I don't think it was really much different than some other Snow White retellings I've read, but it was still an interesting story.

Honestly, I don't remember many of the stories. Like they didn't stick with me. Even the ones I just finished in the last week were immediately out of my head. I just finished the last story like thirty minutes ago and I'm already a bit hazy on the details. They were so boring. Geralt finds a village with a monster problem. He insists he's not a hired killer. Then he kills something/someone. The end.

I dunno. Unpopular opinion, apparently, but this whole book dragged for me. It was kind of a miserable time and easily one of the most unpleasant things I've read this year. The next book I have is by a different translator, so I am interested in seeing if the writing style improves for me. But I wouldn't recommend this. I didn't get anything out of it. I'm not looking forward to continuing on, but I've already committed myself to the first three so fingers crossed they improve.

This whole book felt a little surface level. As much as I was curious about the story and where it would go, I never cared about the characters or felt invested in their lives. I always wanted more from the story and it felt liked it only scratched the surface of the emotions it could have had.

My favorite part of the story was Lakshmi's job, her role as Henna artist and abortionist, and how she helped people. I loved seeing the insight into the lives of the rich and how her Henna helped them as well as the poor and desperate and the different remedies she had. It was a fascinating look at Indian society in the 50s and the relationship between her and her clients was very well done.

But the story seemed like it drifted away from that quite a bit. Instead of delving deeply into Lakshmi's career, her relationships, or her younger sister's troubles, it felt like the book hit on every point briefly, just long enough to explain the issue without giving time to explore it. I think part of that was because of how fast paced the book was. It covers a whole year in just under 350 pages, and there aren't any large time jumps. It just sort of skims the trials and tribulations of their lives.

We don't actually get to see any of the characters' development, the easiest example being Radha, Lakshmi's younger sister. She shows up in the beginning as a village girl who's never left home, but at some point becomes confident in the city and rebellious against her sister. When did this happen? I have no idea. We didn't get to see any growth or change apart from Lakshmi giving her a list of instructions on how to act.

I didn't dislike this book, but I really did find myself struggling to care. I felt so distant from these characters and their lives. Nothing about this book hit me emotionally. Even when things got difficult for these characters, as they nearly always do, it felt almost clinical.

Overall, interesting story in theory and there was enough I enjoyed about the culture of the time to make it worthwhile, but it's not a book I'll be excitedly pushing on others. If it sounds interesting to you, I'd recommend picking it up, but I didn't think it was anything spectacular.

I think this was largely a case of me being the wrong reader for the book. This is a collection of nonfiction writings (introductions, speeches, articles, etc) that Gaiman collected from many different points of his career. I'm not sure exactly what criteria he used to pick things for this book, but it kind of seemed to fall into whatever he wanted. Different sections had themes- there were a series of pieces about comic books and another decent chunk of introductions he wrote for various books- but overall, it mostly varied.

I think my main issue with this was simply that I went in not knowing much about Neil Gaiman and expecting it to be essays appreciated by a general audience. Instead, it was a lot of specialized information for which I definitely wasn't the appropriate reader. It's hard to listen to a dozen (or more) introductions to books you've never read by authors you've never heard of. Like it's nothing to do with what he wrote, literally just the topics. Or he'd wax poetic for ten pages about a dear writer friend who had passed away and all their great contributions to the art, but if you the reader are not previously familiar with said friend, it drags quite a bit. It's just not written for you in that case. And I felt like at least two thirds of the essays in this book were not for me.

This is the kind of book I'd recommend for Gaiman fans, especially if you go into it knowing you'll pick and choose essays instead of reading the whole thing (and I was listening on audiobook, so skipping around wasn't an easy option). I think that's more of the way it's meant to be read, instead of cover to cover the way I approached it.

Some of the essays I did rather enjoy, though. There were a few about libraries I found interesting and some newspaper articles he'd written that I enjoyed listening to, but honestly even those I didn't love. Had I really liked them, I probably would have just given this book three stars and gone about my way. But something about Gaiman rubs me a bit the wrong way. Like I don't get along with his humor style, maybe? There was a disconnect for me and I found myself more irritated by him than interested in what he had to say, even though I wasn't disagreeing with much of anything he had to say.

I feel like you'd find this book a lot more worthwhile if you just looked at it for specific essays. Like if you're interested in the comic book industry, there's a decent chunk in this book that might be of interest to you. Or if you want Gaiman's thoughts as a reader, especially if you're already decently well read on weird/speculative fiction (which I am not). Or just if you're a super fan and want more from Gaiman in general. I can see people liking this book quite a bit if they're going in with the right expectations and are already interested in those topics, especially if you skip around. As a whole, however, it wasn't for me and I can see a lot of readers getting bored if they try to sit through the whole thing, as I did.

I picked this book up because it was written by Nina LaCour, who I love, rather than because I was actually interested in the story. On the surface, it's a little light for me. Emi is an 18 year old getting involved in the movie industry as a set designer and she finds a letter by a recently deceased classic movie star that sets her on a mystery to uncover. It's just a little bit of an over the top, cutesy concept, which I usually would avoid.

LaCour has such a wonderful way of writing that it doesn't feel like too much, though. Despite all the elements, these characters still feel like real people with real lives, and it was easy to get involved with them. I really appreciate books that feel like they're capturing real people's problems and real solutions to those problems. This is one of those books that reminds me of bit of Sara Zarr, how it feels so small scale because it's not melodramatic (again, despite the overall concept). It's just these girls and their lives and romance.

I loved the way set design was brought into the story. The way Emi talked about how each individual piece of the set matters because it's how the audience gets to know the characters was lovely. It's how I see the little pieces and description in books. Even the seemingly unimportant details matter so much. It's one of the reason I love LaCour's writing.

I think the main thing I struggled with was just that this is a light contemporary. I like for my books to have high stakes. Even if things turn out okay in the end, I want to be invested enough in the story that I'm right there worrying about it too. But in a book like this, you know nothing *really* bad is going to happen and because of that, I feel a certain amount of distance. Which isn't a critique on the book itself at all, just my relationship with it.

Otherwise, just a few small things kept me from truly adoring it. Emi and Ava weren't my favorite as a couple and I wish there had been more development between the two instead of just the attraction. I didn't really feel the chemistry as much as I would have liked, especially knowing how well LaCour can write relationships.

I would definitely recommend picking this book up. It's really fun and well written and just an overall lovely story. I don't think it will stick with me as long as her others books have, but I'm still so glad I finally got around to reading it.

Getting close to the end of Lisa Gardner's published books and I'm still having a good time. I may not love all her books, but they're always entertaining and I'm never against reading another.

In general, this book felt a little overblown. Like there was just constantly too much going on. Too many characters, too many bad guys, too many melodramatic backstories. I like a good amount of drama in my thrillers, but I felt this needed to be much more simplified. I only spent a couple days on it, but even getting close to the end I had a hard time keeping all the characters straight and read one whole passage thinking it was a flashback with a long dead character when it was really happening in the present with one of the main cast. It was all too much to keep track of.

The ending of this got rather disjointed. There were a half dozen characters involved and it jumped between them frequently, like every few paragraphs for a while. It felt like a cheap way to make the ending seem fast paced and more dramatic, when really it just took me out of the story and made it difficult to follow.

There was also the problem that some of the backstories seemed more interesting than the current book I was reading. There was this whole bit about a pedophile case the main detective had worked two years before that seemed way better, and I was honestly a bit disappointed to find out it wasn't its own book.

But overall, it was fun. At the end of the day, that's all a thriller really needs to be for me. It wasn't fantastic, but I like cop thrillers and this took me for a good ride, like Gardner always does. It wouldn't be on the top of my list of recommendations, either from her (Find Her is my favorite so far) or for thrillers in general (Karin Slaughter is fantastic), but I had a good time with this and I'm sure I'll have a good time with the next of her books that I pick up.

I feel like with David Sedaris, I find him consistently funny about a third of the time. The man has essays that literally made me cackle while I was listening to this audiobook at work. But he also has essays that I find utterly forgettable and a few where he comes across as one of the world's most irritating people (which I'm pretty sure he's intentionally exaggerating for humor's sake based on his tone, but I still find it annoying to sit through). He also has a bit of a judge-y vibe at points, which again I'm fairly certain is intentional to be funny, I just don't always find it funny. Humor is a bit hard to review because it's mostly just whether you get on with it or not.

Overall, it's hard for me to rate these books high or low. He's four stars on a good day for me, but most of the time probably sits around a three and this was no different.

It's also a bit harder for me to talk about this book in terms of specific essays because I listened to the audiobook and my brain just doesn't differentiate between stories or retain them as well in that medium, but my general thoughts are this is a recommend if you like David Sedaris or want to give him a go. Not my favorite from him, but enough good bits that it's worth it and I'll probably listen to another of his books in a few months.