This was fun and sexy I guess. I didn't get a lot out of it, but I can definitely see how someone could.

Ultimately, though, it was just too cishet for me. There was a LOT of bioessentialist language used, and all the discussion around genitals made me pretty uncomfortable. I probably won't be continuing with the series, but again, I can definitely see why this would appeal to people. I ultimately am not the target audience and that is okay.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

The idea of this book immediately intrigued me. The cover is fun and sapphic. It's a collection of essays about the intersection between sapphic identity and pop culture (or at least that's what it claimed to be). I thought it would be right up my alley. Unfortunately, my issues with this book ended up filling a very long document in my phone's notes app.

There were a few things I enjoyed. The essay on Orange Is the New Black was solid and interesting and just personal enough. If the whole book had been that caliber, I think I might have actually enjoyed it. Some of the musings on fame were interesting, and I definitely connected to a lot of the discussions of misogyny. I give credit where it's due to Jill Gutowitz for those parts of the book that I actually found interesting or valuable.

Now, my first issue with this book isn't a critique so much as an observation: the marketing indicates that I am the target audience. I am not. Unless you are a white cis femme lesbian who is obsessed with pop culture and has fairly poor media literacy skills, this book is not for you. I am only one and a half of those things, so a lot of it simply did not resonate with me. This is fine. Books don't have to resonate with everyone. Unfortunately, I also had a lot of actual issues with the writing and the content.

The writing was pretty poor and definitely not as funny as it was trying to be. The author also definitely thinks that she's much more famous than she is (I'd encountered her name maybe once before reading this book), and her overinflated sense of her own fame (which I'm sure this book deal added to) made her writing unpleasant to read at times. 

The use of queer terminology was messy and confusing. The author used the terms "lesbian," "sapphic," and "queer woman" pretty much interchangeably throughout the book. This included referring to famously bisexual or pansexual celebrities like Janelle Monáe, Tessa Thompson, and Kristen Stewart as lesbians or "celesbians" as well as claiming that certain things were universal sapphic experiences when they were definitely specific to lesbians and should be discussed as such (I'm thinking specifically here about a discussion of lack of attraction to men, which is really important to discuss as a specifically lesbian experience).

The author seemed to know almost nothing about the history of sapphic media or sapphic pop culture for someone who wrote a whole book about these topics. She divides the entirety of sapphic media history into four eras. The first one includes everything from the dawn of time up till the 1980s. You're really telling me that you think it makes sense to put Sappho of Lesbos in the same category as Josephine Baker? (Not that the author mentioned either of those people.) She claimed that sapphic visibility in the media started in the 90s, which completely ignores the entirety of sapphic Old Hollywood, every culture where sapphic relationships have ever been normalized, and of course every sapphic book ever written. I'm not sure the author has ever read a novel. On top of that, the chronology of the sapphic media that she DID discuss was laid out in a messy and confusing way, and if I didn't already know of all of the films, shows, and artists she talked about, it would have been much worse. It is next to impossible to learn anything about sapphic media history from this book.

Maybe the most infuriating part of this book for me was the essay titled "One Day, You'll All Be Gay." In this essay, Gutowitz spends several pages discussing Perez Hilton and the harm he did to the queer community in the early 2000s with his agenda of outing celebrities. And then she uses all of this to talk about Taylor Swift and to argue that it's actually fine to speculate about Taylor Swift's sexuality and that this is in no way similar to what Perez Hilton did and also totally not taking attention away from all of the visibly sapphic musicians out there who deserve the attention that this author and her ilk give to Taylor Swift. 

Other miscellaneous thoughts I wrote down while reading:

Overall, while there were individual passages and one full essay that I genuinely enjoyed, I found Girls Can Kiss Now to be confusing, reductionist, and generally unhelpful. I feel true sympathy and compassion for what the author had to endure as a queer person growing up in the early 2000s. I value and honor all of the harrowing personal experiences that she put into this book. I acknowledge that the book was a deeply personal labor of love. But I didn't like it. I wouldn't recommend it. I hope the author goes back to writing inane commentary about popular TV shows because she's probably better at that.

Content warnings: this book contains intense descriptions and discussions of rape and sexual violence, as well as multiple mentions of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and toxic and abusive relationships. Oh, and there are some Harry Potter references as well.

I really enjoyed this book! The main characters were likable. Their relationship was sweet (though I’m simply unable to take teen romance seriously in contemporary contexts especially). I think the subplots were stronger than the romance. I loved how nuanced Ishu’s relationship with her sister was. I hated Hani’s friends, especially Aisling. This just really isn’t my genre (it wasn’t even when I was the target audience), but I thought this book handled a lot of topics really well and was generally cute and sweet and important. I loved the focus on Bangladeshi culture and how Hani and Ishu both felt connected to their culture in different ways. I also loved how the book refused to tolerate bigotry or microaggressions, even when the characters did.

I honestly didn’t love the treatment of bisexuality, which I think is a very unpopular opinion here, but I think the simplicity of Hani’s bisexual identity was pretty inevitable in the context of the YA contemporary genre.

Also I’m just really glad that they actually got narrators with Irish accents to do the audiobook cause I don’t think I could have handled another audiobook where the characters had the wrong accents.

This was by favorite in the series so far for sure! I really enjoyed revisiting characters from book one with some additional new characters and a new plot. I also appreciated the additional worldbuilding and the expanded thoughts on the whole portal fantasy system that’s going on in these books.

Some of the diversity felt a bit flat to me? Like I get that these books are too short for complex characterization, but Cora in particular felt more like Good Fat Representation than she did like a fully fleshed-out character. But I still really enjoyed the characters and the world(s) and the story and will be continuing with the series for sure!

I requested and was approved for an advanced reader copy of this book before I finished reading the first book in the series, Tess of the Road. This was a mistake. The first book had some good aspects, but its handling of gender, as well as a few other aspects, made it really hard for me to get through. So I started this second book optimistic that it would be better. Unfortunately, the characters continued to be awful and various serious issues continued to be treated poorly.

I might pick this one up again sometime, but for now, it’s a no from me. I still love Rachel Hartman’s previous two books in this universe, Seraphina and Shadow Scale, but I don’t really recommend these ones.

I really enjoyed this book! I’m always here for anti-capitalist and anti-aristocracy sentiment in historical romance or anywhere else, and Cat Sebastian absolutely delivered on that front.

I liked both main characters, and I thought they had a good dynamic. I also really like the 18th century as a setting. I think it’s under-utilized in historical fiction, and this book fully took advantage of the time and place.

Also sidenote but yay lube!

Some of the plot twists felt simultaneously predictable and a bit clumsily executed, but I didn’t really mind.

The pacing was weirdly slow for a book with such an exciting plot, and I do wish that there had been literally any racial diversity, but overall I really enjoyed this one and will be reading the sequel when it comes out!

This book is excellent, but it was also a very intensely triggering read for me. Michelle Zauner describes her grief, as well as her mother’s cancer and eventual death and all that came with it, in a lot of detail, and it was really difficult to read. If you’ve lost a parent (or any loved one) to cancer, this might be a very cathartic read, but I’d also recommend approaching it with caution.

I loved the way that Zauner used food to look at family and culture and her connection to her Korean heritage. Reading this book definitely made me hungry.

I loved the way this book talked about art and science and the way that women’s contributions to both are constantly undervalued/ignored. I also appreciated the fact that the younger and less privileged character in the relationship was also more experienced with sapphic relationships. It helped offset the power dynamic for me. 

I liked Jack and Jill more than Nancy, but the plot of this book wasn’t quite as good as the first one. I still really enjoyed it for its take on vampires and portal fantasy, and I’m excited to continue with the series!

I really enjoyed this book. I just didn’t love it as much as I wanted to.

The worldbuilding is fantastic. I loved the way the different cultures played off of each other. The plant magic was intriguing. The different creation myths were fascinating. The use of language and geography and food was rich and realistic.

And Priya and Malini’s relationship was such a strong centerpiece to this book. I loved how they played off of each other, and I loved how balanced their relationship felt even though one of them always had more power than the other.

The pacing was rough at times. I know this is a controversial opinion, but I didn’t like all of the extra character POVs. I don’t think they added anything, and in fact I think that repeatedly meeting minor characters and getting a chapter from their POV

only for them to die at the end of that chapter

ruined the book’s momentum and made those scenes much less impactful than they would have been from the perspective of Priya, Malini, Bhumika, Rao, or Ashok. 

Also, why did no one warn me that the magical cure trope was such a big part of this book? It’s an ableist trope that I’ve definitely seen handled worse but that certainly wasn’t handled well in this book, and I’m disappointed in the dozens of reviewers I’ve seen recommending this book for the sapphic romance without mentioning any other aspect of it.

Overall, I would still recommend this book, and I look forward to the sequel, but I wish I’d loved it more.

EDIT: Looking back on this book a year after reading it, I still think that the characters and the worldbuilding are fantastic. However, my interest in reading the sequel has dropped to almost nothing because this book put me off of high fantasy for several months with how rough the pacing and use of point of view were. I know that this is an unpopular take on this very popular book, and that's fine. I just found it to be such a struggle that I honestly would not recommend it to anyone who pays a lot of attention to craft and pacing issues while reading. If you're only there for the sapphic aspect and the interesting lore, you'll definitely like it better.