I don't read much horror so I was pleased to find that this book is so much more about the characters than it is Dracula himself.

I adored the first section. Jonathan Harker's diary while he's at Dracula's castle for the first 70 pages of the book was outstanding. Genuinely the best thing I've read in a long time and if I could give that section alone five stars, I would. It took my breath away. I loved the atmosphere and his increasing knowledge of what was going on and who Dracula was. And then it just stopped and was actually kind of terrifying because there's so much you don't know. It's fantastic.

I never quite connected with the rest of the book the way that I connected with that first bit, but I did enjoy it. After that we follow Harker's fiance and one of her friends as Dracula invades their lives. There's so little on Dracula in the book until the end that I almost didn't care about him. That was one of my biggest struggles. Once Lucy's plotline achieved closure and we continued on to learn about Dracula, I kind of lost interest. It felt like the story had ended in all the meaningful ways and it was difficult to keep my attention for the final hundred pages to the climax.

But I really enjoyed all the characters. The epistolary format makes this so interesting to me. I don't think I'd have cared as much if we weren't reading the letters and journals of all the characters involved. It was fascinating, apart from some dragging toward the end.

Van Helsing had me cackling. Like who does this dude think he is. This poor woman dies after some vampiric ill deeds and her fiance says he imagined them married after her gave her his blood in a transfusion. And my guy Van Helsing starts laughing his head off over polygamy because four different men gave her blood. My dude, read the room. I don't know what his deal was, but I loved him.

I loved this. Would highly recommend if you like slow and character driven books. It was fascinating and I had a great time.

As much as I wanted to love this, it was only okay for me. I thought the purpose was to paint a picture of meth use in a small town, who and why and how. But so much of this book seemed like it was intentionally not doing that.

I never felt like I got a vibe of what meth was doing to the Oelwein. We met meth users and people (police, doctor, prosecutor) whose jobs were affected by meth, but those always felt like individual stories. For me, they didn't add into anything more. And there was just so much biography and background on people, in a way that didn't contribute to the book and felt a little disrespectful. Reding actually talked about how upset people were in the town after he published the book, which just gives me an uncomfortable vibe. He said he almost ruined a friendship with one man in the book who didn't necessarily appreciate his portrayal, especially as a politician. And that dude even got veto power. I can't imagine how everyone else felt.

Reding writes with a kind of typic journalistic style, frequently separating himself from his reporting. There was often a lot of distance in the writing. Sometimes I felt it was gorgeous and fit the story so well, and sometimes it felt dry. Like when he was specifically discussing Oelwein, I really liked the way he wrote. But for the rest of it, the style grated me some.

There was also a lot of history on meth itself and the trafficking of drugs from Mexico into America, and some specific meth dealers in places other than Oelwein, but to be honest, most of that was pretty dull to me. It just wasn't what I was here for and wasn't detailed or insightful enough to add anything. I really wanted an in depth look at this town, and it felt like for a lot of this book I instead got a general overview of the meth trade and history.

At the end, he also talked about how he got a number of basic facts wrong in the first edition- like calling Iowa City the largest city in Iowa. He calls them inexcusable factual errors after people pointed them out, but it left me feeling like if he can't even be trusted to fact check the most basic of information, how can I trust anything else he wrote? I assume the majority of those errors were corrected by my edition, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about any of the subject matter to notice.

Not a bad book, but a little dull and not as insightful as I wanted. It dragged in places for me, but there was enough I found interesting to make it worth the read. It just unfortunately wasn't one that affected me very much.

This was really enjoyable.

The best part of this is how emotional it is. McBride had me tearing up at multiple points, about several different topics. She's fantastic at drawing that kind of pain and happiness out of her writing. Her husband's death is heartbreaking, her interactions with trans children are hopeful, her own story of transition is powerful. I highly recommend for that alone. Memoirs that hit your emotions that hard are so much more powerful.

It's so hopeful while at the same time covering her personal story that was often heartbreaking. I'm glad she has a great relationship with her parents now, but it broke my heart at the beginning when they reacted so poorly to her coming out.

The politics are good, but kind of general and not especially groundbreaking. I enjoyed hearing about her experience advancing legislation in Delaware (she's now a state senator in Delaware) and working as a trans rights advocate. I kind of wish she'd gone into a little more detail on her advocacy work and the day to day of her jobs, but it was still really well done regardless.

I also had a great time with the audiobook. It's read by McBride and she does a fantastic job narrating, so I'd highly recommend reading it that way.

Great book by someone with a wonderful story to tell. I would highly recommend.

It took me a very long time to get into this book, but the more I read it, the more I enjoyed it. It just took so long that by the time I was invested, there wasn't a whole lot of book left.

The narration was so jumbled, which was both a positive and negative for me. It's the majority of the reason it took me so long to care about what I was reading. At times it was borderline incoherent. But at the same time, that worked really well as it was telling the stories of these drug addicts. Their thoughts weren't coherent, so it made sense that the book wasn't either. By the end I really appreciated that.

I loved watching Fred/Bob lose himself. It was so interesting and while I've read other books that tackled that basic premise, I've never seen it done quite like this. There was no solid line between them, just an uneven tide. It was fascinating.

His author's note at the end left kind of a weird aftertaste for me. This didn't feel so much like a book about drug addiction so much as it did a book about the corrupt systems in place around drugs. Thematically, there was so much more about cops than there was addicts, for all that the book followed a group of addicts. It felt like I was on a completely different page from the author, which was a really strange feeling. And honestly, I think it made me feel a bit more negatively toward this book than I would have otherwise.

Such an interesting book. I'm not sure how much I actually enjoyed it, but it did make me think a lot. I'm definitely down to try another of Dick's books. I don't think he'll be a new favorite for me, but I like an author that makes me think.

Here's the thing. What Courtney Summers does well is absolutely fantastic. And what she doesn't do well, is kind of passable anyway. And this is her debut, so I expect reading the rest of her backlist will be even better.

I was so invested in Parker. I really liked her. You're not supposed to like her because she's a bitch (her words), but she is so likeable and relatable. I love that you see her as a person throughout her whole life, not just post trauma. Like her intense reaction toward trauma doesn't come out of nowhere and Summers spent so much time on character development. It was fantastic.

I loved Parker's relationship with her exboyfriend Chris. It would have been so easy to fall into stereotypes of the cheerleader captain and her jock boyfriend as the high school power couple, but it didn't at all. They have complicated feelings for each other and it's not always positive, but it feels so real. Their growth throughout the book hit me hard.

In a lesser book, the flaws might've ruined this. Parker keeps passing out at school. Just like randomly fainting in art class or the hallway or whatever, and it happens kind of a lot. It's very melodramatic. There are a lot of moments that just hit kind of wrong. Like I'm not really feeling the moment because it's written in a way that's too over the top. Like she has a scene where she freaks out and it just doesn't feel right. It feels like a put on, and a melodramatic soap opera. And this has irritated me so much in other books, but everything else was so good in this that I almost didn't care at all.

And the whole new boy comes to town and totally falls for ex cheerleader captain who's not popular anymore is kind of tired. I just don't have it in me to care about that kind of story anymore. Summers makes it real so I can get through it, but it's one of those stories that I've just read a million times.

I cried a lot, over like six different things. And it's barely 200 pages long. I love anything Summers writes at this point. She is one of my favorite authors. I probably wouldn't recommend starting with this book because (in my opinion), she's done nothing but improve throughout her career, but it's still a worthwhile read.

I'm picky with mystery/thrillers, so this one was fine, but not really anything special to me. I liked the characters and the overall story, and especially toward the end I got invested with what was going on. It was a fun story overall and I was along for the ride, but I'm not sure I'll pick up the other books in the series.

I didn't really get along with the writing style. It felt kind of stilted to me and didn't flow well. The scenes were all very short (generally less than two pages) and it made the book feel a little jumpy. I was never able to get in a good rhythm with it. The dialogue also felt off, like the characters were always over explaining themselves.

The physical descriptions of characters were a lot. Almost every time we were introduced to someone new, the narrative would pause and we'd get a paragraph describing their appearance. Sometimes, we'd even get multiple descriptions, like when a different POV character was introduced to them. I get that physical descriptions are important, but it always felt jarring to me and kind of over the top. On page 201 (of 214) we were introduced to a new character who existed only on that page for that one paragraph and there were six sentences about her, down to the allergy bracelet on her wrist. It felt so entirely unnecessary.

To be honest, this reminded me a fair amount of Agatha Christie. I read a handful of her books last year for the first time and gave them all three stars, so maybe it's just not for me. If you're a Christie fan, you will probably have a much better time with this than I did.

I think this is a must read. Kendi offers such an in depth look at racism in America, from the 1500s right up to present day. I genuinely cannot recommend this enough. It has so much to offer. I genuinely don't know how he managed to cram so much information into a less than 500 page book without it feeling too brief or vague. It flows beautifully well. He doesn't talk down to the reader, but he explains everything in a very straightforward way that makes it incredibly easy to follow for a book that covers six centuries of history.

My one issue was definitely a personal thing. I simply didn't understand this enough to feel honest about rating it five stars. Audiobooks are lower comprehension for me in general, but I was listening to this on a lengthy road trip and could not focus as much as I needed to. I would really like to pick up the physical book at some point and give this a reread. I think that would help solidify the points that lost me. Again, it really wasn't a difficult read, it was just the way I was reading it.

Highly recommend. Like if you're trying to educate yourself on antiracism, for sure pick this one up. It benefited me greatly.

This book hurt to read. Like there was so much wonderful about this. It was really an indictment of the Japanese justice system when it comes to its treatment of rape victims. The way Ito was treated was awful to hear about, and the fact that she managed to survive it all and tell her story is so commendable.

Something that struck me about this was how dispassionate her tone felt at times. She was talking about herself and her trauma in such stark, almost bland ways, like it was so painful she couldn't fully open herself up to it in her own writing. It hurt my heart so bad to read. Like that's not a negative point at all. I read Chanel Miller's memoir last year and she wrote beautifully and graphically about her pain, and opened her heart. Ito takes the opposite approach, sharing the bare bones, the facts, and speaking about her own pain from a distance. It was equally powerful, just in a different way.

Something else that hurt was how defensive she was of every single action she took. You could really see the affects that the justice system and media had on her, questioning and accusing her at every turn. Ito is constantly explaining herself, even down to fairly obvious reasoning. Again, not a negative, just something that really illustrated her experience that I don't think was entirely intentional.

This book almost felt like a police investigation in some ways. The police basically refused to investigate for her, so she investigated for herself. She interviewed witnesses, obtained correspondences, documented all the evidence she could find to prove her case. She puts in so much effort that she barely has anything left to take care of herself.

I'm not sure how I felt about the translation. The writing frequently felt a little stilted and didn't flow smoothly for me. I adjusted as time went on, but it never really felt 'right,' if that makes sense. I don't know if that comes from Ito or the translation. But that was a pretty minor issue.

Overall this was fantastic. I adored this book. I highly recommend, regardless of if you're Japanese. Even though so much of the book is specifically about the Japanese justice system, it's unfortunately a story that relates to most areas of the world and Ito tells it wonderfully. My heart breaks for her, and I think many people would benefit from hearing her story.

This was a super lovely romance. I picked this up two months ago when I was really craving some good romance and unfortunately skipped on it for a month due to the medium (I don't usually read ebooks). I think I would have had a better experience if there wasn't such a large gap, and I definitely wish I'd picked this up earlier in my romance craving.

This was super fun. I loved the vibes this book gave, and I really loved how you could tell Axelrod knows the music industry. Like she really knows the music industry. It feels so real in the book, and so realistic. I love when there are stories about rockstars and stuff that don't feel like fake melodrama. It was by far the best aspect of the book.

The romance was cute. I'm not sure I was as invested as I wanted to be, but it was nice. I wanted them to wind up together. I wish there'd been more realistic planning of their relationship in the long run. Like realistically it just wasn't practical and that took me out of things a bit. There was so much going on in this book that I didn't really think it needed the forbidden romance aspect of "no fraternization" clauses in their contracts. I wish there'd been more time building Nia and Seb.

But this was pretty great. Not my favorite thing ever, but a really solid contemporary romance that I'm so glad I picked up. It scratched my romance itch like nothing else did. If it sounds like your vibe, I'd definitely recommend giving it a go.