Eh. It wasn't horrible, but I didn't connect with anything in this book and it was pretty dry. Like I really wanted to, but there was a huge distance between the main character and the reader. He's telling his story almost from afar, with (what feels like) a great deal of time from the events taking place. It was difficult to form any kind of attachment to him, which was what I wanted.

A lot of this book was action scenes, which to be honest, just bore me. It doesn't matter what the action is, I don't connect well with that type of writing and never have. I found myself having to go back and reread constantly because I was only skimming the page instead of paying close attention.

There were a few really great moments, though. I really loved the way it ended, both with the aliens and with the main character's life. The alien bit there was cool and his personal life for the last couple of pages was the only thing in this book that touched me emotionally. I wish more of it had been like that, but I did quite enjoy those bits.

I think if you're reading this from a historical scifi perspective (what it meant at the time and what it did for the genre, etc), you'll probably enjoy it a whole lot more. I understand it was very important and I can totally get people who love it for that. But just not for me.

I thought about knocking this up to 3 stars, but I think I'd only be doing that because it's a classic and "important." It can be important and still not a book that I enjoyed very much. It just didn't do anything for me.

This book doesn't need to exist. Like I enjoy Gilmore Girls, I grew up watching it, but this book missed out on a lot of things that made that show worthwhile. I got this book to have more as a memorabilia for the show than a book I was actually interested in reading, but I figured it's on my shelf, I really ought to read it.

First of all, it's a bit weird that it's only from Rory's perspective. The show is more of an ensemble, even if you're disregarding Lorelai as the other main character, so only seeing what Rory sees is so incredibly limiting. You miss out on a lot of great and important moments because of that choice. To make up for it, there are some quick summaries Lorelai will give Rory, like when she has a date or a fight with Sookie, but whole scenes are just missed.

It also felt like there was a lack of description. I only know the tone characters' used because I could hear it from the show. I only knew what outfits they were wearing or what the scenes looked like because of the show. Sometimes in minor ways, but sometimes in ways that matter. A few times I had to think back to what I remembered from these specific episodes in order to tell if a character was joking or serious.

The fast pacing and super short scenes also don't work as well in book form. It felt choppy and disjointed. The characters also felt different. Rory's thoughts didn't seem totally in character with how she was portrayed on the show, and without Lauren Graham's acting, it was hard to get a read on the character of Lorelai.

To be honest, I didn't expect this book to be great. Novelizations of tv episodes rarely are. I wouldn't recommend this unless you're a hardcore fan of the show, and even then it's probably just more enjoyable to watch these episodes instead.

I really enjoyed this. It's such a heartbreaking story and it pulled at my emotions constantly. If I hadn't been reading this at work, I would have been in tears for the second half of the book.

The emotion was fantastic. That was really the strong point of the book for me. When Wingate wanted to make you cry, she made you cry. It was sad, but in a way that felt earned. These characters had such full lives that I wanted to feel something for the pain they went through.

I didn't love the romance. It happened in the present day portions of the book and it didn't work for me. It was such a small part of the story and so underdeveloped, but also so obvious. If it was going to be included, I wish it'd had more screen time in order to be fully developed. It felt like a cheap add on that took away from the important parts of the story. Plus it added an uncomfortable cheating element to the story that I didn't enjoy.

I also struggled a little with the dual perspective. They were both really well done, but the switching often felt jarring to me. Like I always wanted to stay with the one I was reading and having to alternate felt like an interruption. But I was always able to sink into the characters' perspectives eventually. The transition itself just wasn't as smooth as I would have preferred.

This made me want to read more nonfiction on the subject, to hear what the real children went through. The kidnapping and selling of children is so horrifying and everything in this book felt so real, I just want to learn more. I had known in general that this was a thing, but not in the details that Wingate shared here. It's different hearing the specifics. She did such a fantastic job weaving the historical details into her fictional story. I also greatly appreciate the list of titles at the end and I'll be doing more research on those.

I would highly recommend this if you like tear jerkers, historical fiction, and dual perspectives. A really well done, well written that hit all the right notes for me.

I want so badly to like Tana French. I genuinely do. I feel like she's almost an author I love, but there's always one thing in her books that holds me back. I read In the Woods years ago and couldn't stand the ending. It wrecked the entire book for me. What wrecked this book was the premise.

Essentially, the main character Cassie is a cop who looks a lot like a murder victim. So much so, in fact, that they tell her roommates and friends that she survived the murder attempt, and Cassie goes undercover pretending to be her. For weeks. I just can't. You always need some suspension of disbelief when you read thrillers, but this was too much for me. I never for a second bought into the idea that this detective managed to fool her four roommates/best friends who she'd known for three years. Not a chance. If this was a fantasy story, sure maybe. But not a realistic fiction thriller. Doesn't matter how it's written, I could not get past that.

But the fact that I gave this three stars anyway is kind of a testament to how much I enjoyed all the other elements of the story. French writes really dense thrillers, and I love that. I love the way the story unfolds, the slow pace and the overabundance of details and scenes. I love her complex and frequently unlikeable characters. I love her writing style.

I can't recommend this book because I really can't get past that premise, but I want to keep reading her just to find a book I love. There's so much about her I enjoy, she's got to have at least one that I wholeheartedly adore.

Usually I quite enjoy these books. I've been collecting and reading/rereading the Dear America books for the past few years, and I have always come away with a positive rating. But this one I didn't enjoy.

The historical aspects felt off to me. I'm very ignorant of the Navajo removal and Navajo culture in general, but it just didn't feel right. Checking reviews of some other people who were more educated on the topic basically confirmed my feelings that this book wasn't quite accurate. I highly recommend checking out some other reviews because they'll be much more helpful and detailed than mine.

It didn't feel as bad as it should have. It focuses on The Long Walk, when soldiers rounded up Navajo people and marched them several hundred miles to an internment camp. Many people died. Many people were murdered. And it feels very glossed over here. Like I said, I'm reading a lot of these books and they cover some absolutely tragic events in a child appropriate manner. People were killed, but it focuses more on the "good" white man than all the tragedy. The tone just felt off.

Half the book is also Sarah Nita telling stories to various people, which lifts the mood. I understand the attempt, but I think that also went a long way toward trivializing the events. Everyone smiles when Sarah Nita finishes a story, regardless of the fact that a pregnant woman just got shot for going into labor and they're starving. I think this structure could have worked had it been written different, but it almost feels like it infantilizes the Navajo people.

This is the first of these books that I've read as an adult that I wouldn't recommend, to adults or children. It's just not worth it.

This was probably the most painful reading experience I've ever had and the best book I've read this year. Chanel Miller tells the story of her rape, both the trauma inflicted directly by that and every time she was retraumatized later by the justice system, the lawyers, the press, the institutions. It's awful.

But this book is a lot more than just a story of trauma. Miller is insightful and her words are powerful. She offers criticisms and hope and her words resonate. I think people could gain so much from reading this book, seeing what she went through and the pain it caused her. Seeing how much she went through for her rapist to only spend three months in prison.

Her writing is also gorgeous. Every words was so carefully chosen and so beautifully constructed. You can see it in just her victim impact statement, but given a whole book, her skill is even better showcased. I hope she continues writing because I would love to read more from her, both for her insights as well as her writing itself.

This book feels like a power statement. I cannot recommend it enough, but it is a very difficult reading experience. If you do not feel up to this, I would at least recommend looking up her victim impact statement.

I don't get this collection. Like I just genuinely do not understand the point of half of these stories. They're not stories from his life, they're made up. But that's not generally what Sedaris does, and I was confused why he had these random fictional stories that had no purpose in with some of his more standard essays. None of them were funny, regardless.

The only one that had any merit was the SantaLand Diaries, but that had the creepiest vibes. At one point he discussed a perk of the job as seeing teenagers half naked changing into their elf costumes. ("Many of the elves are young, high school and college students. They're young and cute and one of the job perks is I get to see them in their underpants.") He was in his thirties at the time, so that was super gross. He also used slurs, not just in that essay but a few of them.

He had one essay (short story? I think it was fiction?) in the form of a Christmas card about a woman whose husband just found out he had an illegitimate Vietnamese daughter and also the woman's first grandchildren was born addicted to drugs. It went places, but I didn't get the point. It wasn't funny, it wasn't clever, it wasn't biting. It was just kind of gross and bitter.

Another was about a family who constantly had to one up their neighbors in terms of giving, which led to them being homeless and missing a few organs and dying. Again, fiction? Not funny either way.

I dunno. I don't love Sedaris all the time, but there was nothing here to enjoy. Usually in his collections I find a handful of essays I enjoyed, but here I can only say that maybe the Santaland Diaries is worth reading? Only I work customer service and I get a million stories like his every single day. There was nothing particularly standout about any of them. This whole collection was a miss for me.

Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative in the 80s to provide legal representation to people on death row, convicted as children, who are mentally disabled, may have been wrongly convicted, etc. This book splits its time between Stevenson's life and the various cases he represents, as well as one particular case about Walter McMillian, a black man on death row awaiting execution after being wrongfully convicted.

I really loved the structure of this book. Even though McMillian is the only case we see in depth, Stevenson brings in a lot of other cases and victims of the system. Some are children who were sentenced to life in prison at just 13 or 14 whose sentences he tries to commute, arguing all the way up to the Supreme Court. Some are mentally and/or physically disabled. Some are guilty, some are innocent. He treats everyone and each story with respect, regardless of the situation, and fights for their right to live.

I never found it difficult to keep up with the various stories or people involved. They're all so distinct in the book and all have such important meaning to the story. Each case Stevenson mentioned brought in something new to discuss in the book.

I highly recommend this if you're interested in the justice system, prison reform, or just want to educate yourself on a few of the flaws in our current system. For most of the book he does focus specifically on racism, since that was a defining part of McMillian's conviction and so many others. Such an important book and I loved it. I truthfully just wish it could have been longer because he had so much to say. Every second of this was worthwhile.

So the synopsis sounded fantastic. The anticipation and excitement to read it were probably the best part of this experience for me.

It wasn't so much that this book was bad than it was that this book wasn't anything. I read this in less than 24 hours and in that time I literally forgot I was reading it. It did absolutely nothing for me. I've definitely read thrillers I've disliked more, but this was so void of anything positive that I couldn't justify giving it three stars.

The strange thing is, I can't sit here and list a bunch of things I hated about this book. The dual timeline was fine. The characters were okay. The various plot twists were a little underwhelming but passable. The actual investigation part of the book is kind of dry. The connections Margot makes between different cases is a bit of a stretch. Like nothing good, but none of those things were particularly bad either.

The ending kind of sucked, depending on how you like your thriller endings. I can enjoy an ending that lacks closure, but this one gave me the vibe that Flowers just didn't know how to end it. It kind of just stopped abruptly and then gave us a whole lot of unnecessary details on a separate plot point. Like maybe I would have been more annoyed by the ending if I was invested in Margot at all, but I wasn't. Just didn't care what happened to her.

It's very much inspired by JonBenet Ramsey's murder and perhaps that made me feel a bit more negatively toward this book on a whole. (It's clearly not meant to be a complete rehashing of the case, but there are too many similarities to ignore.) I don't usually enjoy when thrillers are based on real people's suffering. It feels exploitative and takes away some of my enjoyment. And also with this specific case, it's received so much press for so many years that I don't want to read another rehash of it. I'm already familiar. I'd rather read something different.

I wouldn't dissuade anyone from reading this if you were really interested, but I'm gonna completely forget this book in a week. It was just so nothing.