This is a really good book. It's better than the first one in a lot of ways. I also liked it slightly less. 

 

I loved the use of multiple points of view, especially because April was such a specific type of narrator in the first book. April is also a lot less interesting now that she's marked as even more specialTM. Maya, Miranda, and Andy are more compelling characters who have a lot to offer the story as narrators. However, none of their stories would have been capable of carrying a whole book, which is why it's so great that we got all of them.

While the first book was largely about internet fame, this one is mostly about the future of the internet and the possibilities of virtual reality and other technologies, especially the darker implications of the corporate internet and the influence it has over our lives. 

There were a lot of interesting musings about the internet and technology and fame from all of the characters, and most of them were super compelling. Miranda's chapters were definitely my favorite because of her specific outlook on the whole thing (and I like the book a lot less when we lost Miranda's point of view for a while for plot reasons), though Maya is my favorite character and I think that Andy had the most compelling character arc.

My main problem with this book is Carl. In book one, I enjoyed the science fiction of it all, and I was excited to learn more about Carl. Maybe I shouldn't have been because I feel like all of the alien elements were simultaneously under-developed and over-explained. Some of Carl's monologuing kind of felt like Hank Green trying to justify his own narrative choices in the first book, and I didn't feel like that was necessary.

In the first book, it felt like April was just at the right place at the right time, and in this one, we learn that she was actually chosen much more deliberately by Carl. This ultimately isn't all that different from an algorithm seemingly randomly choosing certain people to become internet famous, but it definitely contributed to April and Carl being the least compelling characters in this book for me.

Also, one more spoilery note about Carl:

Since Carl doesn't actually make it to the end of the book, I didn't really like that they were a narrator. I know that there was an explanation for where all of their chapters came from and it wasn't actually an issue in-universe, but it still bothered me.

I did really enjoy this book on the whole, though, so here are some more random things I enjoyed:

These books are more of their moment than almost anything else I've ever read. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing feels like an alternate version of 2020, which can't have been deliberate because it was published in 2019. A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, however, knows that it's a pandemic book. It's specifically a book about post-pandemic life and readjusting to a world that has been changed and wants to pretend that it hasn't been. It'll be interesting to see how it ages.

I thought that I just didn’t like contemporary romance because I had a lot of issues with the last several contemporary romance books I read. And maybe this still isn’t the genre for me, but this book definitely changed my mind about some things.

This book is fun. It’s cute. It’s sexy. The characters are engaging. It’s wonderfully queer. It’s perfect for fans of cooking competition shows.

Even when this book used tropes or kinks that I don’t like, I didn’t mind because the characters didn’t take themselves too seriously and I never felt like the author was trying to force me to be into those things.

This book is friends to lovers and I would say somewhere comfortably between slowburn and insta-love. They’re attracted to each other from the beginning, but the author takes the time to build their friendship between putting them in explicitly sexual or romantic situations.

I relate to Dahlia a lot. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. But I would probably also fall for London cause they’re very cool.

I was bothered by some of the pacing near the end of the book, but it’s definitely possible that things will change before publication and overall I enjoyed it a lot. 

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

This book feels way too long and ambitious and I am too stupid to deal with it right now. I received an ARC but won't be able to finish it by publication date, so I will probably just wait until the sequel comes out and then see if the series is worth it.

I genuinely enjoyed this. I don’t know what to tell you. The butt has gold wings and one eye (?????) and the whole thing is very consensual and has a weirdly sweet message about self-love. 

No rating cause I don’t care enough to bother with one.

I enjoyed this book a lot! Most of the things I've been reading lately have been either YA or contemporary literary fiction, and this was a very welcome change from all of that.

I love reading about messy adults in fantasy settings, and Amberlough absolutely delivers on that front. The characters were engaging and complicated. Amberlough City was immersive and fascinating. I loved the 1930s vibes.

Amberlough is very much a story about tragic love in the context of a rising fascist regime—with an added dose of smuggling and cabaret performances. The main couple is enemies AND lovers simultaneously, so if that's something that interests you, I highly recommend reading this.

There were some points where I wanted more information about certain things, but since this is the first book in a trilogy, I'm not too worried about it. Overall, it was a super engaging read and a very impressive debut novel.

I find it difficult to describe this book. It’s about the experience of being gay and black in a predominantly white space. It’s about trauma and repression and repetition. It’s about invisibility but specifically about making yourself invisible.

I actually got this book at an event at my college a year and a half. Brandon Taylor read the first chapter, and I got a copy, and then I proceeded to not read it until now. But I follow him on Twitter, and I like his general persona and writing style, so maybe that affected some of my impressions of his novel.

Taylor’s writing really is gorgeous. I can’t remember the last time I marked so many beautiful or affecting lines in a book. And so much of this works beautifully, though I agree with other reviews that the last chapter felt like an odd note to end on in some ways.

It’s also a deeply pretentious book. And I’m okay with that! I’m a pretentious person in many ways, and I think fiction has the right to be pretentious and experimental and anything else it wants. But would this book, with all of its experiments with tense and point of view, have been published in this form, as a debut novel, if the author  weren’t a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop? Would it have gotten as much critical acclaim? I don’t think it would have.

I do think that Brandon Taylor deserves that critical acclaim. I just think maybe there’s another conversation to be had there. Maybe.

I was prepared for this to be a very heavy book going in, and it was. I was also prepared for it to be relatively plotless, and it’s that too. Taylor’s writing—and Wallace’s inner life—is what carries it. If you like plot-driven stories, this one will not be for you. 

I was not prepared for the presence of SO MANY nematodes. There are a lot of dying nematodes in this book thanks to Wallace’s grad school research.

I recently embarked on a quest to find all of the good queer dragon books, and I had high hopes for this one. Unfortunately, I have been disappointed.

Let’s start with the good, though. This book delivers what it says it’s going to. It’s a fantasy story about asexuality and dragons and forging your own path. The author is asexual themself, and I thought that the ace rep in this book felt very genuine (though I might come back and edit this review based on the opinions of a friend who actually identifies as ace and is planning to borrow my copy of the book). I liked the dragon, and there were several other characters who had potential, though none of them lived up to it.

Now, on to my issues with the book. Where to start?

My issues with this book are threefold: the writing, the politics, and the representation.

First, the writing:

This book is painfully slow. Nothing happens for large chunks of it. Conversations repeat over and over. 

There were a lot of references to other fantasy books (the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, the Protector of the Small Quartet), and while I share the author’s love for those books, I didn’t think the references were integrated well at all.

I’m not someone who can’t visualize things at all while I’m reading, but I do struggle with it. I need some help. Not long descriptions necessarily (my ADHD brain tends to skim those), but physical descriptions of some variety are necessary. Unfortunately, this book had almost none. The characters’ races are to be assumed based on their names—Gerald and Erick are white, Omar and Padma are brown, etc. Gerald complains about not looking like his family, but I never quite managed to work out what any of them are supposed to look like. In fact, the only character who gets a detailed physical description is Nedi, who is also (probably) the only Black character. Very interesting. 

Additionally, it was impossible to tell the dragons apart. I respect the author’s choice in giving the dragons neither names nor genders, but they also didn’t have any distinguishing adjectives. I had to use context clues to determine when "the dragon" was the main dragon character rather than some other dragon. Would it really have been so hard to make them different sizes or give them different ages or colors or scale shapes or SOMETHING?

If you just want to read a dragon book with an aroace protagonist, go for it, but it was really hard to get through this book.

Anyway, moving on to the representation issues:

As I noted above, the only Black character is also the only character who is given any sort of helpful visual description, much less a racialized one. This felt othering. She’s also not treated well by the narrative. Gerald dislikes her for no discernible reason, but maybe it’s not racially motivated because Gerald also dislikes every single other woman character in the book. Seriously. This character hates women so much. It's genuinely hard to read at times.

A particular storyline also left me asking, “is this bad disability representation or just bad writing?” I still don’t know the answer.

I appreciate the presence of nonbinary characters in this book (unsurprising, as the author is agender), but I would like the record to show that I LOATHE the word “princex” as some sort of nonbinary alternative to prince or princess. You really want me to believe that the sort of modern gender discourse that results in an X at the end of any word supposedly making it gender-neutral or more inclusive would coexist with a pseudo-medieval fantasy world in which all of the royalty are forced to marry each other?

Which brings me to my real issue with this book: the politics of it all. 

I think that books about royalty can work in two different ways.
1) the royalty are the royalty and this isn’t going to change. There is no question that there will be a king or queen or whatever. The system is just going to stay in place. I tolerate this because it’s fantasy and yeah, sometimes it’s fun to read about royalty. 
2) actual politics and social change. These stories are messier and more complex. They involve overthrowing governments and installing new ones. They question the role of the monarchy. 

This book somehow manages to be both options, and it does not pull it off well.

Gerald and his friends are armed with the language of leftist revolution. They talk about systemic issues and wanting to overthrow the system and improve everything, and then what do they do? They just reform the system so that the royals are still all being forced to marry each other but at least animals aren’t being abused anymore. It felt like a bunch of liberal nonsense. And I think the fundamental problem is that for all the talk of systemic change, never once does the author question the existence of, apparently, a THOUSAND monarchies in this world. We meet exactly one human character—an unnamed steward—who isn’t royalty. It’s exhausting. It’s frustrating. It’s the fantasy equivalent of a show like Brooklyn 99 but with none of the humor and with less engaging characters. 

This was definitely my least favorite of the series so far, so I’m sort of glad that I won’t be finishing the series until probably next year. I still enjoyed it. I just found it more confusing than the first two installments, which is probably just because I read it too quickly but also because there’s a lot going on and several more new characters are introduced. I sort of think that most of its issues just come from it being the third book in a five-book series, and the end definitely made me look forward to what’s next. I’m just a little bit burnt out on tweens going on adventures now.

I loved how this book handled different types of family dynamics and the impact that parents have on their children. I also liked seeing how the dynamic between Aru, Mini, Brynne, and Aiden has evolved and solidified between the second book and this one. Aru feels like a more mature and complex character now in a way that really works, and I’m excited to see how her internal conflict gets resolved in the last two books.

I was expecting a plot twist that never really came, but that’s on me for guessing things incorrectly.

Have you ever read a book and thought, "I could have written that and it probably would have been better"? Well, that's how I felt while I was reading this one.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

I do believe that Ritch C. Savin-Williams set out with good intentions. He wanted to write a really in-depth book about a frequently-overlooked demographic. He did a lot of research. He interviewed a lot of young people who are attracted to multiple genders. He wrote almost 300 pages of very in-depth discussions about bisexuality. So why did it fail so spectacularly?

Usually, when I don't like a book, it's for one of two reasons: it wasn't to my personal taste or I wasn't the intended audience. But I struggled to determine who WAS supposed to be the intended audience for this book. It's too academic to be useful to young people who might be questioning their sexualities. It wouldn't be a helpful resource to the parents and teachers of those young people. And it's not saying anything fresh or original enough to be valuable to other academics. It's certainly not aimed at me, a college-educated bisexual person: the word "we" is consistently used to refer to the collective of people who are not bisexual (as defined by this author).

The author makes a lot of fundamental missteps here that indicate to me that he doesn't actually understand what he's talking about. He includes identities like trans* and nonbinary under the bisexual (or rather bi+ or m-spec) umbrella and in fact continually treats gender identities as sexualities. The presence of the word "nonbinary" in the title does NOT mean that this book contains an examination of the ways in which nonbinary gender identities and m-spec sexualities interact with each other and the reasons why so many people identify as both nonbinary (or genderfluid, genderqueer, etc.) and bisexual (or pansexual, polysexual, fluid, etc.). No, the reason "nonbinary" is in the title is because the author genuinely believes that nonbinary gender identities are part of the larger bisexual (m-spec) umbrella. 

There were so many missed opportunities in this book. I kept thinking to myself as I was reading, "If only the author would actually examine the ways in which race and culture impact bi+ identity, taking into account factors such as colonialism. If only the author actually knew the definitions of the words that he's using and didn't lump in every single identity that's not straight, gay, or lesbian (or rather, according to this book, "heterosexual" and "homosexual") under the umbrella label of "bisexual." If only he acknowledged that the term "two-spirit" is its own umbrella that is exclusive to Native communities and not some new-fangled Gen Z gender label. If only the interview questions had been better, more complex, more focused on community and socialization and systemic power structures and less on biology and sexual activity. If only the author had demonstrated a knowledge of the history behind the labels he was discussing instead of claiming that nearly all of them (including things like political lesbianism, which dates back to the 1960s) are new things invented by today's youth."

Maybe this book will be useful to someone, but I cannot imagine who that person would be. If you don't already know about the wealth of experiences within the LGBTQ+ community, this book is a very bad place to start as it is confusing and full of incorrect information. If you're already more familiar with LGBTQ+ issues and you want to read an academic text that explores those experiences in-depth (as I did), you will likely be bothered by the lack of awareness of basic gender and sexuality concepts (as I was).

I probably would have found slightly more value in this book if I were a developmental psychologist, like the author is, but even then, I don't think I would have appreciated the author's methods. I really didn't need to keep hearing about every single interviewee's "first adolescent sexual experience." And because the book attempts to delve into other fields, such as gender studies and sociology, I feel more than qualified to say that it does not successfully accomplish what it tried to do.

I feel sorry for the young people who were interviewed for this book. I don't feel like their stories were done justice.

This book was a wonderfully nuanced exploration of grief and love and the bonds they form between people. The nonlinear narrative and the use of multiple narrators/points of view was very effective for telling the story that Akwaeke Emezi wanted to tell.

I’ve seen a lot of reviews from people who seemed to think that this book was a murder mystery, which it very much is not, and I for one am glad of that. 

The characters in this book are complicated, messy people who do a lot of questionable things. I loved them anyway, and I think that’s a testament to the author’s skill at inviting us into their lives and forcing us to understand them. But if you’re not willing to deal with difficult topics like transphobia and incest (yes, there is an incestuous queer relationship in this book), I don’t recommend reading it.