alltheradreads's Reviews (1.9k)

A fun read, but one that frustrated me too! Oona time travels throughout her own life every year on her birthday, jumping forward and backward to new years at random. Little details and missing links bugged me as I read it (how did she always have a letter waiting for herself when she leaped if she never knew where she was leaping to?!??) but it was a fun concept and had a plot twist toward the end I did NOT see coming that made it better!

It’s been a WHILE since a book had me HOOKED and on the edge of my seat and so completely engrossed. Two women escaping bad situations (TW for domestic abuse) meet in an airport and trade tickets to trade lives, and it makes for suuuuuch a good story that kept surprising me.

This book was such a fascinating look at the lives of four Korean women fighting against patriarchy, societal standards, ridiculous beauty ideals, tragedy, abuse, and more. It wasn’t always easy to read, but it was eye opening for me to read more about a culture I’m not very familiar with. The parallel character chapters kept things interesting and evolving, even though it took me almost half of the book to really lock in who was who.

Such poignant and lovely stories about love, such nuanced glimpses at race and relationships and the ties that bind us— so, so good. Highly recommend.

Love, love, loved this one (even when it hurt to read or made me cry or made me angry at how real and rampant injustice is). Grateful for the ways it opened my eyes to more of my own privilege and what I can do about it, more of the division in our country and how it has formed, more of how other people are experiencing very different things because of their race, and more about how we can actually work to bring about change and true freedom and healing for all people. This one was challenging, convicting, powerful, and necessary. It’s well researched yet reads easily, doesn’t come across as condemning or preachy, and helped me to see and understand more of reality. A must read.

It took a while for me to get into this one, and overall, I never really felt like I got to know the main character, Penny, enough to feel invested in her love life and sexcapades with three different men (some overlapping, even). It had charming moments, but mostly, it felt like a Hallmark movie set in the UK, with a underdeveloped main character. I did appreciate that she was a woman who had battled breast cancer (and won) and desired to be a mother (although it would need to be through surrogacy), but I wanted to know much more about Penny to really be able to root for her.

I grew up listening to the Les Mis soundtrack on every family roadtrip and have always loved it. I've seen the production several times from several different groups (seeing it live in London took the cake though) and surprisingly loved the movie as well, but had never given the book a shot. I probably cheated by reading the abridged version, but hey. Gotta start somewhere. I adored it. It was more similar to the musical than I expected but the background and context and character development was richer than I had expected too. Diving deeper into the characters I've related to mostly through song until this point was a rich, wonderful thing.

Oh, these characters. I adore them. My heart goes out to them. A mother who has sacrificed all dignity to care for her daughter, a man whose life has been spent in chains because he, too, was desperate to feed his family, a priest who so beautifully displayed the mercy and grace of God to an undeserving man, the cat and mouse chase between an escaped prisoner and a police officer, a child who never knew her mother but so fiercely loves her father figure... I could go on and on. The parallels of faith and the depths of love and the passion behind it all is stunning.

ALL THE STARS FOR LES MIS.