This is a wonderful middle grade memoir in verse. She captures a lot of early childhood memories so well, and so many of her poems are incredibly moving. The emotion is the driving force behind her story and Woodson does that so well.

I found this a little disjointed and choppy, especially in the first half. It was difficult to keep my attention or really get into the story.

I hate when authors include something like the "it was all just a dream" trope. It makes me feel manipulated and lied to. I understand why it was included here, but it did not work for me at all and kind of just left me feeling pissed at the story.

It picked up in the second half once we started figuring out a little more of what was going on and who all these people were. I definitely got a lot more invested and actually started caring. And it was so depressing. Definitely not a "fun" thriller, but I enjoyed the second half quite a bit. I like when something is that depressing because it means I care enough to get emotionally involved.

Overall a decent thriller. It didn't pick up enough to be 4 stars, but I'm glad I read it and wouldn't steer people away.

This was fun. I was a bit on the fence between 3 and 4 stars, but overall I had a good time with this book despite the flaws. So I'd recommend it, although I'm not overly eager to get to more of Sager's books.

I love books dealing with trauma after the fact. Seeing how it changes a person. This did okay at that, but it was more vague information than actually delving into the trauma. Like Quincy has issues from the event, but it's mostly just oh now she has to pop xanax like it's candy and pretend she's over it. It didn't feel like it was actually given the time it needed.

To be honest, I wish this had been a bit more realistic. Some parts of it veered into the cartoonish or tropey instead of leaning into the realism. I never quite got the vibe I was reading about a real person who was really dealing with all these things. It was more about the idea of final girls and it being a known group than something real. And then it got more ridiculous.

But eh I had fun. I'd rather read a flawed book that's fun than something I can't get into. I was kind of into it just for the shitstorm you knew was brewing, but into it nonetheless. If you wanna try it, I'd say give it a go, but it's not gonna be a favorite of mine. Just a fun quick read, and that's all I wanted.

I'm gonna be honest, I wish I had read this before The Lost Man. It has a lot of similarities (rural Australian farmland, same town vibe, main character has a bad past in the town so everyone hates him, investigating a death of a farmer who had a lot of secrets), but I enjoyed it more. It's just reading it so soon after The Lost Man kind of had me thinking about that one. I'd recommend them both, but maybe give it a decent amount of time before reading the two.

I love Jane Harper. I'm going through all her books now, whenever my library holds are coming in, and they're all fantastic. Just genuinely wonderful thrillers. She writes complex characters and interesting stories, combined with enough drama for a good, slow paced mystery. I'm always so invested in her books.

I struggled a little with the ending. It felt a little too much like spoon feeding information for my taste. Like not everything needs to be tied up neatly with a little bow. She could've done less and I think it would have hit harder.

But I loved this. Read it in a day and then immediately started the sequel. I still think The Survivors is my favorite of her books, but this is a very close second. All her books are so worthwhile. If you're interested in a slow paced thriller, I can't recommend this enough. She's one of my favorite thriller authors now, and I only discovered her two months ago.

There's a lot of valuable information in this book. It's largely comprised of statistics about how the world is built for men, from medicine to government aid to transportation planning.

She does a great job at illustrating how people and algorithms unintentionally perpetuate sexism. It just doesn't come up and frequently the way the world functions has been designed with men in mind. If the people in power continue to be the same people the world has been designed for, they can't even see the problem to begin solving it.

There were a lot of interesting statistics and information, although sometimes they weren't discussed as in depth as I would have liked or she drew conclusions that seemed like a bit of a reach. Like correlation does not always equal causation. It wasn't a problem all the time, but there were more than a handful of instances where I would have liked for her to explain her conclusion from the statistic a bit more in depth.

It seems ironic (to put it mildly) that a book about the gender data gap excludes so many women. There was no mention of transwomen at all and no in depth discussion of any LGBT+ women. That does nothing but continue to perpetuate the data gap that Perez found harmful enough to write an entire book about. I'm not sure how she wrote a chapter about bathroom usage with discussing transwomen's specific concerns once.

There's still a lot of good information in here, which is why I gave it 3 stars, but I can't wholeheartedly recommend it like I wanted to.