alisarae's Reviews (1.65k)

This story is a perfectly paced eerie mystery. The cover and title give nothing away as to how dark and disturbingly satisfying this book truely is. All of the characters are terrible, narcissistic, manipulative liars and you cannot trust anyone to have good motives. There is a ton of interpersonal teen drama, but I think it all served the story well.

I really love Nova Ren Suma’s books, and this book reminded me a lot of her writing.

The world building and how magic works is so amazing and the concepts are cool and creative and full of potential. But this is such a downer bummer of a series.

This story is about Will, a former fervent Christian who lost his faith in God, and his obsession with Phoebe, his girlfriend who becomes enmeshed in a cult. Well written and character driven. I liked that this book was short and made every word pull its weight.

What!! nooooooooooo

I loved this collection. It's wry, melancholy, and feminist to the core.

"Ode to My Period Underwear" had me grinning.

"Alternate Universe in Which I Am Unfazed by the Men Who Do Not Love Me" is about the strong, independent woman we all aspire to be.

"Manic Pixie Dream Girl Says" is about those pop culture characters who on the surface appear to be the aforementioned independent woman, but only exist to serve the male's development.

Once in college I had to take a gen ed physical sciences class. At the time, learning about dark energy and black holes sounded way more exciting than learning about geology. The class was taught by a tenured prof who would rather be in his lab (can you blame him?) and TA’d by a gaggle of single guys who hardly spoke English. It was an awful class, I understood very little and I spent so much time going to office hours to learn about math equations from a guy who couldn’t explain it. This book would have been a great pre-semester primer, because it covers the same material albeit at an even more surface level.

One thing I would like to learn about is all the theories to explain things that astrophysicists currently argue about, but I want to learn about this in a pop-sci way. This book, and that class, spent very little time on the cool parts of astrophysics and spent a lot of time explaining different types of waves, light spectrum, and chemical properties. To be honest, I think I would enjoy geology a lot more after all.

This book was heavy and pretty freaky! I didn't want to listen to it when I was home alone at night. During the daytime I didn't feel very scared though. Sometimes I am itching for a very scary story, and this is a good one for that—all the terror tropes in one place, so if one thing doesn't push your buttons, probably another one will.

Adorei este livro pequeno, cheio de vida. É ficção, mas mostra um pedaço da vida típica de garotas da Costa do Marfim (Côte d’Ivoire), repleto de sexismo e abusos. Mesmo mostrando tudo isso, as personagems tem tanta personalidade que a história acaba dando esperança.

This was one of my favorite Stephen King novels (my all time fave is 11/22/63). It’s a pretty straightforward police procedural with a supernatural twist—a monster based on Mexican folklore. I liked the characters, too. It’s easy to like a book where the good guys do good and the bad guy is a monster.

Plus, that folksy language that Stephen King always uses is just the best. In the age of international blockbusters and language flattening, we need regional dialect revival in literature.

Fun flirty romantic comedy full of juicy gossip. And the descriptions of all the delicious food made me want to travel to East Asia and eat everything!