This was a very cool YA with a great concept. The writing was very good, and the story progression (while maybe predictable) worked very well. The love story aspect I had some issues with, which kept it from being 5 stars for me, but still I really liked it!

Jasmine Guillory can always be relied on for a fun, steamy, and heartfelt romance. I liked the world of this one and all of the characters were great. I did get equally frustrated with both Luke and Margot, but I liked their chemistry enough that I can get over that. 

Even though the title tells you where this story goes, it still tore my heart out. There’s so much love and humor in this book, and it’s balanced by the absolute heartbreak that the author goes through. His description of his husbands illness is so real and detailed, it made me have to pause while I read it to process my own feelings. My only note would be that the pacing with their history, or details that are hinted at and more fully explained later, took me out of the story a little bit. I still loved this story though. 

I liked this from the unreliable narrator standpoint, but the story itself was pretty lacking. 

If this wasn’t a book for my book club, I would not have picked it up. I’m not necessarily mad I read it, but I have no desire to read it again. It felt very braggadocios and self serving, simultaneously negative towards men and somehow still treating women as objects. Honestly if it had leaned more fully into the alien possibility I would probably have liked it more. 

I loved the concept of this book and the writing was great. I wish there had been even more to it, though. Sometimes it moved too fast to really grasp what was going on, but Lucy and Bee’s friendship made up for it. 

I liked the concept of this book, and found the characters quirky and charming. I almost wish this had leaned even more into the true crime genre and made Phoebe question Sam even more, but it’s a romcom so I get why that didn’t happen. I also found the third act break up lacking, I didn’t get the motivation behind it. But Connor and Shani were delightful, and I wish Alison was in the book more. 

This is the book I’ve been waiting for all year. While I’ve read books I’ve liked, none have truly touched me. And then I found Babel. I went in with basically no expectations or knowledge, other than many people I knew loved it, and I think that allowed me a good entry into the book. It is so complex and richly woven, with amazing characters and a central message that only grows as the book progresses. In the last pages I was in awe, even if I saw where the story was going. This is a book i want to return to and dive deeper in, which doesn’t happen as often as I would like. 

I liked a lot of things about this, like the main character herself and her struggle. Yes, she was a bit selfish at times, but I honestly felt like she deserved to be with the actions of the people around her. No one really supported Madeline, or explained to her about the book store. 

If Astrid has talked to her like she did at the end about closing the store, I feel like Madeline would have been able to accept it quicker

. There were a few too many moving parts at times,  but it was manageable. Really though, the letdown for me was the romance. Jasper was fine, but there wasn’t much to him. 

Plus, I hated that he was pranking the store “because he was in love with her the whole time”. How does actively sabotaging an indie bookstore work as a flirting strategy?? And Madeline seemed to all of the sudden be into him too, which felt too weird for me.

 This was a cute YA, just needed some fine tuning on the details. 

Honestly half of this book was unnecessary. I also just don’t like books that feel like they have to split the narrative like this; to me it just feels like a cheap way to build tension. There wasn’t really anything that happened in this book, it was just two people who were always going to end up together. I didn’t dislike it, it was just a bit boring for me.