I was kind of ready to give this book a three stars (or even leave it unrated and move along with my life), but the longer I read it the more it annoyed me. And then the very ending Kirwan went on a strange rant about the modern day and the evils of tv and how music is now a nonessential luxury. It just all seemed very old man shaking his cane at all these damn kids.

And about 350 pages in he said he wasn't one to complain about record labels, even though he'd spent so many pages already complaining about all the garbage his last record label had put him through. Like why bother lying at that point.

I liked the politics and the stories about his family. To be honest, I'd be a lot better off just finding a book about politics. The music industry stories bored me and unfortunately that was a good half the book or more.

So if you're a fan of Black 47 and want a lot of behind the scenes stories about Kirwan's life and the band, maybe give this a go. I will probably just stick with listening to the music.

This was just as fantastic as everyone always says. I loved reading about Eleanor, and the revelations about her past and the trauma she's experienced. I really really loved seeing her growth as a person. In all honesty, this felt like a coming of age story because she really grows up a lot and kind of becomes her own person for the first time. It was really beautiful.

I really liked her interactions with the people in her life. She's not likeable most of the time, and is a very judgmental person, but it was fantastic to see her perception of the world.

The writing style was gorgeous. It's a little bit odd, because you are getting it from Eleanor's perspective and she's not typical, but it flowed really well for the characters and what they were doing. I was sucked in from the beginning and couldn't put it down.

My only issue was the pacing in the final third. It was a very messy, complex situation, and it felt like the ending resolved it a little too easily. It definitely needed more time for the growth Eleanor experienced in this book. It was all just a little too fast and a little too neat and a little too easy.

But this was wonderful. If you've somehow managed to miss the hype train for this one, you should definitely give it a go.

I have some conflicting thoughts on this book. I did really enjoy it. It was incredibly worthwhile and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who's interested. It's a really close look at rape in India, how it affects women's lives and how it's dealt with politically in the broader system as well as individually.

It's really heartwrenching to take a deep dive into this case of two girls who are found dead, and whose deaths mobilize the country in protests (again) for the safety of women. Faleiro takes you through the girls' childhoods, their final days, their deaths, the aftermath in their families, and the aftermath in the country as a whole, while discussing rape and violence against women as a larger issue. It was fascinating to read.

But I was never excited to pick this book. Despite enjoying it quite a bit, I didn't love it. Mostly, it felt a little basic in terms of structure. Like fantastic information, but it wasn't structured very well as a narrative. It did read as rather dry at points, and lacked a connection with the events of the story.

I also think there was too much information for the book to handle. Not only is Faleiro tackling this entire years long case of the girls deaths, but she also discusses a number of other cases of violence against women, sometimes in a great deal of depth. And she really wants to give the reader every single detail of the case, even when it's not overly important. All of this, in what amounts to about 280 pages of actual story (because a fair amount of time at the end is spent on notes/references/etc). It's just too much for this book to hold. It comes across feeling like an onslaught of information.

One thing that also bothered me was in the author's note at the end, Faleiro discusses her desire for objectivity in this book. Nothing bothered me until she said that because objectivity isn't possible in journalism, and especially not here. There's so much bias that goes into the decisions of what to research, and how to research, and who to talk to and trust, that objectivity isn't a realistic goal (which is fine, there's still plenty of room for worthwhile and trustworthy journalism). Especially in this case, by the time you get to the end, people have come to so many different conclusions and everyone has spent so much time lying, that what you think happened comes down to who you believe is telling the truth. Saying her goal was absolute objectivity just makes me feel like she's not confronting her own biases and judgments, and that makes me trust her a little less. Again, had zero issues with that until I got to her final note, and it kind of had me reflecting on my experience again.

But I would recommend this. I think it was an incredibly close look at violence against women in India, and a heartwrenching account of what appened to these two young girls who died because of it.

I found this book really boring and none of the characters behaved like real people, especially the women. It's been years since I read it, but overall just not a fan.

Tihs book felt so disjointed. It was part romance, part legal thriller, part coming of age/self actualization. I get that books can combine a lot of different elements and genres, but these weren't combined at all. There was like 150 pages of a romance novel and then it stopped and became an entirely different genre. Then we followed the legal thriller for a little while and then that stopped to. None of the elements worked together. It was like she had the idea for several different books and then just combined them all into one mishmash of nothing that I wouldn't recommend.

This was one of those books that was well done and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend, but it just wasn't for me. The ghost aspect was a little bit too weird for my tastes, with the romance and how it was handled, but it wasn't bad. Just meant for a different reader. Glad I gave it a try and if it sounds more up your alley, there's a good chance you would enjoy it a lot more than me.

This was a gorgeously slow book that explored the relationship of two people who met online and are marrying for reasons outside of just love. I adored pretty much every second of this. It felt so real and all of people with all of their flaws were entirely believable. It was one of those books were people have complex motivations and you can't just push them into easy categories of good or bad. They're petty and annoying and considerate and thoughtful and all kinds of wonderful detailed aspects to their character.

But I did lose a little bit of interest in the final portion of the book where the focus was taken away from the relationship. That was really the driving force of the story to me, so when it was put into the background, I didn't care quite as much.

But I would recommend this wholeheartedly. It was really wonderful.

This book felt overwritten, but to be honest I didn't always hate that. If pretentious writing gets on your nerve then this definitely isn't for you, but it's kind of enjoyable for me. So I was a fan.

It did feel like this book needed a second pass just to smooth out the various story elements. There were so many plot threads that were picked up randomly and dropped or left hanging that it came across feeling a bit messy, and not in an intentional way. Or perhaps it was intentional, but I didn't feel that it came across in the writing. It just seemed like there were too many ideas on the page that weren't always handled well.

But that being said, I did just love this. This was one of those books that I could see all of the flaws of, but they didn't detract from my experience. It was so enjoyable and I would love to read more from Schaitkin.

This book was fascinating. It was kind of weird and definitely out of my comfort zone, but I wound up loving it and would highly recommend to anyone interested in dystopians that deal with sexism or the dynamics of consent.

One thing I really loved was that the discussion of consent wasn't black and white. It was really nuanced, where characters could say yes but feel violated by the sex, or characters thinking that if it's technically not rape then there's no moral issue. There was a lot of real discussion and growth and I adored it.

I did struggle a bit with the depiction of sex. It was incredibly graphic and made me uncomfortable, but I also feel like that was kind of the point. It just wasn't my favorite thing.

On a whole, this was fantastic and I can't recommend it enough.

I dunno how to really describe this in a review. It's an anthology of journalism articles about or relating to crime. Like, if you think you'll like this book, you probably will. It just is what it is.

As with all anthologies, I'm not rating each article as four stars. Some were fantastic, some I really hated. But in general, I was always excited to read this book and always interested in what the next essay would bring.

One thing that struck me as odd was how many of these articles were conservative leaning. Arguments for why police should have more power and less oversight, authors who gave credence to conspiracy theories about Palestine, an apologist for an Islamophobic murder after 9/11, RFK Jr defending a cousin of a murder charge. It was a little strange how frequent it was.

I also wound up skipping a few essays entirely because I'd read them in other places.

But the essays in here that were worth reading were really wonderful and it offered a lot of variety of topic. So if you think you'd like this, I'm sure you would.