I was excited about this premise, sounded fun and super hot, but the writing style wasn't for me. 

Edit: after reading some reviews, I skim-read the entire thing for the smut. No regrets lol, but my skim-reading also didn't turn up much in the way of plot. It was all very quickly handled, and light. Not inherently bad, I just prefer my romance to dig into things a little more. If you're looking for a decently smutty, fluffier read, this will likely work for you.

This is actually quite funny, but it's not holding my interest at all. I think I'll return to it one day, when I'm in the mood for something lighter.

This is actually very good, and I'm confident I will love it one day, but I'm not in a place where I can read it right now. It is epic in scope, with so many characters and perspectives introduced right off the bat. It throws you right into the world without anything to hold onto, slowly filling in the gaps. My brain is struggling to piece everything together right now, and I'll return when I can give it more time and attention. 

It's violent and explicit, but I'm bored. Read some reviews discussing the ending, and I'm okay to check out here. I don't think it's bad, just don't think it's for me.

This was actually quite good, if you can overlook the many ways that Stephen King's works don't age well (which I *usually* can - it's often an accurate portrayal of a certain sort of time/place/person, and sets the scene for horror). But this was my second attempt at a vampire book this month, and I have come to the conclusion that I don't care about vampires. I got to the part where the action began to ramp up, and that's where I lost interest. Which was telling. There are a few more vampire books I would like to try, but nothing about this freaked me out. 

I had fun every time I picked it up. I'm the problem. When will I finally accept that I cannot get into urban fantasy books? Probably never. 

I started to lose faith in the writing when O'Farrell told us 5 times in one paragraph that Hamnet and Judith were twins. 

In almost every way this seemed like a book I would like - the setting, the themes, a hint of the bard. I was convinced I would love it. But the writing! It was overwrought, repetitive, drowning in metaphors in a way that we're supposed to think is beautiful but reads to me like the scene in Elf where Buddy pours syrup on top of the candy-topped spaghetti breakfast he has made. Too much. I love beautiful, lyrical writing (and novels written by poets especially), but there is still a level of control required to pull off lyrical writing that I did not find in Hamnet. The third person present perspective held me at a distance that made it hard to connect with the story. Characters felt more like archetypes than real people. I was ready to be destroyed by this book, and I was, just not in the way I anticipated. There are other books in the world that can give me what I was looking for here (an exploration of grief and parenthood). And if I want historical fiction, I think I'll stick with Hilary Mantel (I know her writing bothers people too, so it's fully a matter of preference. I'll take her raw, sometimes baffling prose over this any day). 

Promising at first, but this is extremely wordy and slow, with nothing to break up the text. It's possible it would work better if I attempted the physical copy, but I'm not sure I'm feeling the pull enough to attempt it. 

You know the stands at the front of the library that have new books facing outward? They got me. I borrowed this for the cover, knowing nothing about it, and... I'm just glad I saw it at the library and not in the store. 

The writing made me feel like I was back in an undergraduate creative writing course I took. He compared her accent to an apple. Am I supposed to think that's clever? I've been scouring reviews, and I feel validated in ending this journey here. Vibes are off, friends. 

I officially stopped here, at this heavily contrived display of woke-ness: