I hadn’t read a John Green novel since about 2013, and reading this now definitely took me back. I didn’t like this one as much as I remember liking some of his other books in middle school and high school, but I do think he’s improved on several fronts since then, especially when it comes to diversity.

The Star Wars fanfiction thing really threw me for a loop. I was not expecting Daisy to be a Rey x Chewbacca shipper, but she is. Bizarre.

This book contains mystery and teen romance (that blissfully isn’t the main focus) and a prehistoric reptile called a tuatara and also what I think is the first proper strong female friendship in a John Green novel. There’s a lot going on for such a short book, and I thought that most of it was executed really well.

The main focus of the book, though, is Aza’s mental illness. The symptoms of her OCD are described in poetic but extremely graphic ways throughout the book, and it was occasionally difficult to read. I never felt like it was sensationalizing mental illness, though. The focus is on how much Aza longs for recovery but also fears it while knowing that she will never be fully “well.” She has a lot of intrusive thoughts, which she calls “invasives,” and she spends a lot of time lost in the spiral of those thoughts. She also, ironically for a fictional character, spends a lot of time questioning reality and thinking that she might not be real. That almost feels like a cruel joke on the part of the author, but it worked for this particular character.

This book is also full of John Green’s signature philosophical teen dialogue that I thought was the smartest thing ever when I was thirteen. I still don’t mind it, but wow does Davis come off as pretentious.

CW for discussions of dead parents, including some vague spoilers, in the rest of this review.

The only thing that really bugged me about this book was the way it handled the topic of dead parents. Dead parents are often a plot device in contemporary literary fiction, including in lit fic aimed at teens, and Turtles All the Way Down definitely fell prey to that to an extent. In the past, Aza and Davis were brought together because they both had a dead parent, and in the present, they spend a lot of time talking about the subject. 

Some things felt incredibly realistic: The way that Aza almost weaponizes her dead parent when talking to Daisy. The way that Daisy had failed to consider how much having a dead parent would have impacted Aza’s life in the same way that Aza’s privilege and self-centeredness had blinded her to the realities of Daisy’s life (that whole conversation and the ensuing disaster was actually the most impactful part of the book for me). The way that Aza keeps her father’s old phone just to still have a piece of him.

But then we get those classic John Green ruminations on life and death that are often so poignant, but in this case, Aza’s meditations on how having a dead parent changes you fell completely flat for me. They also never came up again. It was very apparent in that moment that the author had never lost a parent and didn’t actually understand what it would be like and was just making things up based on other loss he’d experienced in his life. And that’s okay! I don’t think that authors need to experience everything they’re going to write about, especially not something as horrible and life-altering as this. But I do think that sometimes it’s wise to avoid having your fictional characters philosophize about a subject that you don’t understand. 

This romance-dominated science fiction type thing isn't really my genre, but Winter's Orbit was a very enjoyable read. I thought the book's approach to gender was absolutely fascinating. Each culture (or at least each planet) in this book has its own system for communicating gender to outsiders, whether that's through hairstyles or accessories or something else. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the idea that gender could be that easy in a futuristic sci-fi setting, and I couldn't help but wonder how things would work if someone used multiple pronoun sets or neopronouns or pronouns that weren't traditionally associated with their gender. I guess people could wear multiple types of ornaments? But I do think that the extremely gender-neutral societies depicted in this book are very freeing in a lot of ways. 

There is a main plot in this book, but we spend most of our time with the main characters and their budding romance. I liked both main characters a lot. Kiem's friendliness and enthusiasm matched well with Jainan's introversion and repression. I definitely rooted for them to get past their problems and grow and be happy together.

I really appreciated the sensitivity with which this book approached domestic abuse, and Jainan's character arc was hard to read at times but ultimately cathartic.

There's just SO MUCH miscommunication. I don't like unnecessary miscommunication even in small doses, and it felt like about 40% of this book was just the two characters failing to talk to each other about very basic things. Some of it made sense for the characters—especially Jainan—but most of it was just frustrating. The two characters were barely ever on the same page, and that lessened my enjoyment of the book pretty considerably.

I would still definitely recommend Winter's Orbit to any fans of arranged marriage plots, sci-fi romance, or interesting gender systems, but it's not necessarily a book that's going to stick with me in a very meaningful way. 

This is a really cute story about self-expression and finding community that just wasn’t really to my personal taste. I think I’m too anti-monarchist and anti-capitalist for books like this to really be that enjoyable for me. I really liked the art style, though.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. I don’t really read thrillers very often. But it turned out to be a fascinating mini character study of both the narrator, Korede, and her serial killer sister, Ayoola. The narrative is structured in a slightly non-linear way, which I enjoyed. And there were some little moments of humor that were unexpected but enjoyable. I would definitely recommend reading this book if it looks at all interesting to you!

This book is beyond incredible. The writing is gorgeous. Rin is a compelling character who experiences growth and corruption simultaneously throughout the book. The supporting cast is fantastic. The worldbuilding is utterly fascinating.

But this is a VERY heavy read. It deals with intense subject matter in a pretty unrelenting way. Please make sure you’re ready to handle some seriously triggering content before you read it.

For me, the four stages of reading The Poppy War were as follows:

1. Wow damn this is a really good fantasy book with a military academy setting.
2. Oh this is a book about religion and spirituality and power where those things are channeled through drugs.
3. Actually this is a book about genocide.
4. OH SHIT OH FUCK OH MY GOD.

I really only have one critique, which is that the part where Rin gets her period for the first time was executed kind of messily. I get that the arrival of her first period at age seventeen and her reaction to it and general ignorance of the subject was meant to express just how ignorant and malnourished she was in Tikany, but because she still doesn’t care for her body at all when she’s at Sinegard, it didn’t quite land for me as a reader.

Weird period thing notwithstanding, if you want to read a beautifully crafted military fantasy that explores war and genocide and imperialism and loss through one character’s part in all of it, this might be the best one there is.

This book was an incredibly satisfying conclusion to the duology. The stakes were just high enough. The themes of grief and social change and reconciling the past with the future were executed brilliantly. The main characters all got the perfect ending. I especially loved what this book did with Nasir and Altair’s relationship and how it played into the directions they took at the end of the book. 

Zafira and Yasmine’s friendship also went in some heartbreaking and realistic directions. They had to learn to navigate change and betrayal and figure out who they were able to be for each other in the future. It was lovely.

And I love Kifah. Just in general. She’s wonderful. I also think that she comes out as ace/aro in this book, but I had to read the page three times to confirm what was going on, and I’m still not totally sure that’s what was intended.

A lot of side characters also got some very nice bits of development in this book.

I was deeply frustrated by the romantic subplot at a lot of points in this book, mostly for personal taste reasons. They just spend far too much time refusing to communicate with each other, which makes sense for their characters, but I do find it a little bit silly that they both spend so much time thinking about how perfectly they understand each other but they don’t talk to each other for about three hundred pages. When they finally DO communicate, though, the payoff is worth it. I just didn’t feel as invested in their relationship in this book as in We Hunt the Flame even though it was much more of a focus here.

I think my main issue with this book is the pacing. It REALLY drags for a whole long section and then picks up again very gradually, and then the ending is very fast-paced and the climax and resolution happen pretty quickly. 

Overall, I would absolutely recommend this duology to anyone looking for a mature YA fantasy (mature as in characters are older than in most YA and there are some complex themes but the content is very much PG-13) with intricate worldbuilding, a unique take on magic, an extremely compelling found family, and an enemies-to-lovers romance.

Well, now I’ve read a Bridgerton book, and honestly? Fuck you, Julia Quinn.

The thing is, I liked a lot of aspects of this book. Anthony and Kate’s banter was really fun. The scene in the library was so well executed. The angst mostly felt realistic considering who the characters were and where they were coming from. I even think their trauma was handled shockingly well. Like there’s the whole “love can save you from anything” thing, which, yick, but I actually felt like this book showed a pretty thorough understanding of the concept of triggers and how they work.

And then there’s everything else. Some of my issues with this book are very unimportant, but others are not.

I haven’t read the first book, but I have seen the show and am aware of the differences between them. This story definitely handles the issue of consent a lot better than that one does, and there’s no sexual assault, but there is a lot of dubious consent. Anthony and Kate have this whole conversation on their wedding night that’s partially about consent, and the way Anthony behaves in that scene and the things he says should have been sweet. Unfortunately, he’d already kissed her without her consent twice at this point. He’d also locked her in a room with him.

And also HE SUCKED BEE VENOM OUT OF HER CHEST WITHOUT HER CONSENT I’M SORRY BUT WHAT THE FUCK.

There’s also this thing where Anthony is a rake but would NEVER DREAM of besmirching the honor of a young lady of noble breeding (even though he literally does that in this book). Truly all I can say to that is yikes. Like I know this book is mostly a fantasy and I shouldn’t be expecting an awareness of class issues from a romance about English nobility, but I still found that aspect of this book to be quite distasteful.

I should have been glad that Kate was on Penelope’s side when people were being fatphobic to her, but actually I was just disappointed (but in no way surprised) that Penelope in fact gets thin in between books and they’re just mocking what she used to look like. Great! Also, I know I shouldn’t expect too much historical accuracy from this sort of book, but why are we pretending that thinness has always been the beauty standard? It’s exhausting.

Speaking of historical inaccuracies, I almost tore my hair out when Mary mentioned Jane Austen. This book is set in April through June of 1814. Mansfield Park was published in 1814 but not till July. And Jane Austen didn’t attach her name to any of her work that was published during her lifetime. So how on EARTH was Edwina reading “the latest novel by that Austen women”?! This is extremely basic information that a Regency romance writer should be expected to know. Just mention by name a book that was actually published in the right time frame by an author whose identity was known at the time! Please! 

Also it probably goes without saying, but this book is EXTREMELY white and cis heteronormative. Like more so than most things I’ve read that were actually written in the era when this is set (yes, including the works of Jane Austen). Do not expect diversity of any kind here, unless you consider a pair of sisters where one is blonde and the other is brunette to be “diverse.”

I will be watching season two of the show because it’s definitely going to be much better than season one, and I know this for three reasons:
1) There’s a corgi in this one
2) Simone Ashley is playing Kate and she’s going to be fantastic
3) This story is just so much better than that one. But that one had a horrible main character who raped her husband and was then excused by the narrative, so that’s really not saying much.

I have a lot of complicated feelings about this book. I’m going to attempt to untangle them in this review.

I reread Seraphina and Shadow Scale a couple months ago, and I very much felt like they held up. I still really enjoyed and appreciated them and recommended them both to people. So I was very excited when I learned that Rachel Hartman had written another book in the same universe.

Tess is very different from Seraphina, but you really need to have read those books to understand what’s going on in this one. Part of that is because none of the worldbuilding gets explained here, and part of it is because most of the enjoyment I got from this book came from references to the other two.

It’s not that I thought this book was bad. It was very ambitious. It was messy and even clumsy at times in its handling of certain topics. Tess was a deeply frustrating main character.

But there were a lot of things I liked, so let’s start there.

I loved the confirmation that Seraphina is definitely in a relationship with both Kiggs and Glisselda and everyone knows but people just kind of ignore it. That was fun.

The linguistics nerd in me loved all the stuff about contradictory case in Quootla. That was a super cool worldbuilding detail and evidence of all the work Rachel Hartman put into crafting this universe.

I liked how episodic this book was. There were a lot of self-contained little adventures, and whenever I didn’t like one, Tess would soon move on to something else.

I really enjoyed the beginning of the book. I liked how Tess’s relationship with Jeanne was established, as well as her relationships with both of her parents. Duchess Marga’s introduction was perfect. I was obsessed with her from the first sentence. 

And Tess was relatable in that deeply flawed way that characters sometimes are.

I was reading passages out loud to my roommate, and we were having a great time with it all.

And then the book ruined it.

The specific scene where I realized that the rest of the book was going to be a slog and wasn’t going to deliver any of the things I wanted was when Tess and Pathka spent about three pages messily explaining quigutl gender. Why was this necessary? Why was it so messy? Why was it SO LONG? We may never know.

I think this book was trying to get at some really interesting things about misogyny and double standards and internalized misogyny in particular. Tess’s early flaws, like the fatphobia and the slut-shaming, are there to give her a lot of room to grow over the course of her adventures. I just don’t really think she did.

Pathka was a frustrating character in all the wrong ways. I’m still not sure I understand the whole World Serpent thing. I did try, but it felt weirdly underdeveloped for something that took up so much of the book. 

Why did Tess, a minor at the time, have to be in a sexual relationship with a man ten years older than her who had previously had a thing for her sister? I was actually okay with his character in general, including with the treatment of his disability, but their relationship was very yikes. He could have been younger or she could have already been eighteen or they could have just not had a sexual aspect to their relationship, and the overall result would have been the same. So what was the reason for that?

Unfortunately, that was one of the better sections of the book after the beginning (Tess’s brief mining job was also fun).

Honestly, I didn’t dislike this book. I’m just confused about the directions it took. I had issues with certain decisions it made. And I don’t think it really accomplished its goals. I’ll be reading the sequel soon, and there’s really a lot riding on my hopeful enjoyment of it because if it’s bad, it’ll probably ruin this whole universe for me, but if it’s good, it could redeem this whole mess at least somewhat.

Additional content warnings for childbirth, religious trauma, underage sex, drowning, misgendering, and general fantasy bigotry.

This book pleasantly surprised me. I shouldn’t have been surprised because I liked Chloe and loved Dani, but I just wasn’t expecting to like Eve much as a character, and I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the tropes that I’d heard were present in this book. But I was very wrong.

This book is light and fun in a way that the other books in the series weren’t quite—though this one does deal with some serious topics. I can see some readers being totally turned off by the whole her hitting him with her car thing, but I felt like it was handled well. I loved the Lake District as a setting, and I also really enjoyed Eve and Jacob as characters.

I related to both of these characters more than was comfortable. I had fun with them. I even tolerated the miscommunications because they were very charming about it. 

But I majorly just came out of this book (and this whole series) really wanting at least one book about Gigi, who has got to be the coolest grandma to ever exist. 

Also, Eve’s music taste is far too gay for her to be straight. Sometimes two siblings are bi. Just saying.

I think everyone has their favorite out of the three Brown sisters, the character they find more relatable and more wonderful and whose book they enjoy more than the other two, and for me, that character was definitely Dani.

I loved Danika Brown from her first appearance in Chloe’s book, and I loved her even more in this one. She was such a vivid character who jumped off the page from her first appearance and never stopped feeling vibrant and real. I can’t speak to the experience of being a Black woman in academia, but I do know the experience of being a queer literature person, of wanted to impress a scholar you admire, of being in an English seminar discussing Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market, and Talia Hibbert depicted all of those experiences perfectly, down to the minutiae of the students discussing the potential antisemitism in the text. I related to Dani. I wanted to be her friend. If Zaf weren’t there and she were real, I would probably want to date her. She’s just one of those characters.

Zafir was also wonderful. I didn’t think that I would be okay with Dani ending up with a man, but Zaf was absolutely the perfect man. He’s attractive, yes, but more importantly, he’s sensitive. He’s her friend before anything else happens (and I’m always a sucker for a good friends-to-lovers arc). He’s actually interested in her work, and she’s actually interested in his. His family and best friend were just as fleshed out as hers were, and I would absolutely read a book about any of the side characters (though maybe especially Saoirse).

This book and these characters absolutely wormed their way into me in a way that I didn’t think contemporary romance was capable of. The framing of romantic feelings as something else and not something “more” in comparison to friendship is something I haven’t seen enough in romance (or in life). The discussions of trauma and oppression and mental illness were always done sensitively. The characters got proper closure where they needed it outside of their relationship and put in the work to be there for each other properly.

The third-act breakup absolutely destroyed me because I somehow tricked myself into thinking that this book wouldn’t have one because the characters were so well-adjusted and good at communicating.

Favorite quote:
“The world wasn’t split into unhappy endings and happily ever afters.”