alisarae's Reviews (1.65k)

DNF @ 28%
I just couldn't care less about what happens. The writing is fine and good but the voice is generic, like it has been thru the YA wash cycle a couple times. Meh.

I was primarily interested in this cookbook because even though my family is just two people, we easily eat the portions of double that and I am overjoyed if there are leftovers. So I am on the hunt for nutritious, bountiful, yummy, and interesting recipes that don't ask for too much work.

Actually, this cookbook is "for the whole family" because every recipe includes modifications for a baby and most have ideas for younger kids as well. Many of the recipes have suggestions for making the meal vegetarian, which I think is an added bonus. These recipes are modern, colorful, and flavorful, and the contemporary adult would be proud to use these to serve guests. Like most American household cooking these days, recipes are mostly Southwest, Middle East, or Asia inspired.

A whole section on baked goods and most of the breakfast section is lost to me (gluten allergy, hey-oh), but I am more than game to try some of these other dishes.

DNF @ 61%

We get enough of the patriarchy IRL, I decided that I don't need it in my fiction too.

Mind the trigger warnings.

Hummmm, Bon is acting really controlling and toxic in this one. I didn't really enjoy it. Also the story keeps dragging on and doesn't seem like it is going anywhere, so I might stop reading the series.

This book was okay. It mostly worked to expose how many names in the New Testament are women, and what their roles might have been both in the church and the broader culture. We often cast a 19th and 20th century view of gender roles backwards on Biblical times when in reality those cultures were more open and less conservative than we imagine.

I had hoped this book would talk about the church in the centuries CE, like up until the medieval era, but it didn't. I prefered The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr because she has a sharper exposition of the household code passages and she covers more history.

Most of the recipes in this book make me think of midwestern food in the 80's... Not really my style. Also, a lot of the recipes want you to freeze the meat before it is cooked, like freeze it with the marinade and that is the "make ahead" part. Well, I buy most of my meat from the frozen section already! Some suggestions for sides to fill out the meals would have been helpful.

The big beef I have with this book is that the premise of the book - FBI is looking for a serial killer who kills teens so they recruit 2 teens who have experienced a serial killer personally so they can offer the perspective of "the youts" - is so ridiculous. Multiple grown ass adults make terrible judgment calls because the teens get whiney about being left out. Also when the adults do make good judgment calls, the teens obviously disobey orders and sneak around behind their back.

Besides that, the writing was fine but the characters lacked chemistry with each other and with me the reader. At a point in the middle of the book there is a flirty romantic scene that comes completely out of nowhere and then disappears just as quickly -- I was like "Wait a minute there pardner, were all of the very normal and professional conversations they had up to this point supposed to be read in a flirty light???" because there was nothing that led in that direction.

There were so many times I thought about DNFing, even at 80% I was considering it. But I have been 50/50 on completing books on my spooky season reading list and I wanted to actually finish one to even things out. Meh!!

This was a really interesting true crime book, not so much because of the victims or the serial killer, but because of the setting and the history of a very specific time and place. NYC gay scene in the 80s and 90s - what an exciting and tragic period.

I grew up just a bit too late to witness the aids crisis and a bit too early to learn about it as history. So it really is shocking to hear how much loss the lgbt community suffered, and with so little public understanding of the disease. Plus rising hate crimes, "gay panic" being a legitimate defense in the courts, crack downs from NYPD, and high murder rates in general, there must have been so much fear in the air.

Even so, people went out. This was pre social media after all-- pretty much the only way to make friends in the community or find a date was to go out to a bar. The descriptions of the little niche gay bars was charming. It made me wish there was like an illustrated street sketch style book of the gayborhood from that time.

Overall a good listen! It was just a tad bit more on the meandering side than I had expected.

The creepiness of uncanny valley, the horror of realizing that humans are animals, the irony of the law of ethics.

I persevered through the first half, thanks to another reviewer who said to stick with it. It gets significantly more interesting after the halfway point.

Still though, I found myself very distracted by wondering if the haunted parts of the house were supposed to be fantastical or imaginary.... then I saw that the publisher is Tor and that answered the question for me, ha (the book does make it more explicit towards the end).

Speaking of the end, I really did not expect a haunted house novel to take the direction that this did! I was pleasantly surprised. Overall a good spooky season read.