blewballoon's Reviews (763)

This is one of my favorite books of all time, for sure. This story is funny, heartbreaking, uplifting, and it's all from the perspective of a creature that is essentially an amorphous blob that eats people to sustain itself. This is the kind of book that my little goth girl heart could have only dreamed of. I'm grateful to the author for putting this out into the world and covering complicated concepts with such nuance and care. Thank you for writing a book that feels like it was made for me. The audiobook was excellent, but I will be getting a physical copy to hold close to my heart as soon as possible. 

I mean, you know what you're getting into when you look at that title and cover. I wanted a fun spicy fantasy and that's exactly what I got. I had a great time the entire time, and I'm happy to read more from this series. This is not high brow stuff, I found some of the writing to be clunky and a lot of cliches are used. Part of me itched to do some editing to smooth things out, but I tried to focus on just enjoying the ride. This will also be a bit of a time capsule due to the very contemporary slang used. If you are craving the feeling of reading smutty fanfic at 2am on tumblr, this will hit the spot.

I found the experience of reading this to be generally unpleasant. Backwards as it may be, the more a book is considered a "literary darling," the more skeptical I become that I will enjoy it. The forward praising the book before it actually started made me appropriately apprehensive. 

I imagine there must be readers who like the main character Janet, but I did not find her relatable or sympathetic. In some ways she strikes a "not like other girls" chord to the extreme. She's above frivolous things like learning how to clean and sew, she is too busy with poetry and flouncing around her family's estate. She has the drama of Anne of Green Gables but none of the charm. Her single redeeming quality is that she likes animals and doesn't want them to suffer, but this is oddly juxtaposed with a total lack of empathy or understanding of people.

She can't mercy kill a pigeon, but she did try to kill her baby sister and she nearly killed another baby sibling by handling her with the care of a bowling ball. She also didn't care about sending two boys to get seriously injured in a decaying building. These boys in particular were just children who hadn't done anything against her.

  It's often hard to tell what age Janet or the other children are meant to be at a given point in the story, but even so, their behavior (specifically Janet's) and lack of understanding feels too strange to be explained by childhood. I mean, not to victim blame, but a lot of Janet's suffering is because of her own choices. She makes really bad ones. Janet isn't the only one, though. Every human character sucks, sometimes more and sometimes less, but none of them are a positive presence. The Jackdaw is the best character, but he's only there for a very small part of the book, and he's a bird.

There are many instances of animal cruelty and death that are hard to read, and they contribute to the overall somewhat gross and disturbing tone of the book. The

asylum scene

and the scenes with a variety of male characters after Janet has gone through some puberty also contribute to this vulgar tone, and there's a little fatphobia sprinkled in as well.

I listened to this on audiobook and the narrator was fine, but any parts where there were poetry or song recitations in the text felt grating to me. I felt myself clenching my teeth when they'd pop in.

If you want a fun, adventurous, queer,

mermaid (merman in this case)

fantasy story, this should hit the spot. It did for me! I loved these characters and, for a change, actually wished this was a series so I could have more time with them in this world. The writing style was straightforward and immersive, so it was easy to breeze through. It definitely fits the parameters of a YA book, but I found it very enjoyable as an adult reader. I'm really glad I picked this up, I had bought it because my local bookstore had a signed copy and I liked the colorful cover. 

I had high hopes, and really enjoyed this! At first I felt like maybe it skewed a little too young. It read as more YA than I remember the Bridgerton books being, but I either got used to it or it matured as the story went on. I really enjoyed how the parents story intertwined with the girls, and once I realized how it had to resolve I was glad to see it finally happen. The audiobook narrators were excellent. I'm looking forward to the next installment in the series for sure.

I was expecting a somewhat goofy romance with magic and cowboys, which I did get, but I got so much more! This is another book I'd recommend to people who love Harry Potter but don't want to support J. K. Rowling anymore (The first being Carry On by Rainbow Rowell). The guild feels like a magic school, and the different types of magic users creates a natural grouping of students sort of like the Hogwarts Houses. It also reminded me a bit of Gideon the Ninth, mostly in that the main character is so clearly starved for connection with others while everyone wants to be competitive instead. This is a much lighter story than Gideon the Ninth, but it's not quite as light as I was expecting. The stakes are high throughout. The story doesn't focus on too many named characters, but the ones that it does focus on feel mostly fleshed out. I definitely want to grab the next book in the series, and I appreciate that while it's clearly setting up that series in this book, the book doesn't JUST feel like the start of a series. It feels like a book on its own, if that makes sense, versus some series that feel more like a book cut into random chunks. The author narrated the audiobook and I thought they did a great job!

I grabbed this book because the author is local and we are both co-op members of a local bookstore. This is a fun middle grade adventure for fantasy lovers. As an adult, I still enjoyed this very much. Asperides the sentient sword is a unique perspective to be in, and the other characters were charming/engaging as well. The plot is fairly straightforward, but still compelling.

Really struggling to rate this one, there are a lot of things I liked about it conceptually, but something also felt off the whole time. I think the dialogue sometimes didn't flow right and bent unnaturally to accommodate humor or to obfuscate a plot point. I figured out most of the pieces of the mystery really early on, and it was frustrating how much the book put those reveals off, even though I usually don't mind when that happens for me in a mystery book. It made The Undetectables seem incompetent. I appreciated the fibromyalgia representation, and I sympathize with Mallory, but I did find her hard to like from the beginning when she

lashes out at Theodore

. I loved Theodore, and Diana was pretty great as well. If there are more books in this universe I'll probably check them out. It's kind of like Halloween town for adults, which is fun, and maybe the off vibes I felt won't be as much of an issue. 

I really wasn't vibing with this book until a little after the halfway point, then I started to feel more invested. Gemma and her sister kind of annoyed me in the first half of the story. Gemma's personality traits are basically whiny and quirky, and her sister is just a string of sex jokes. The sister gets some depth much later into the story, and Gemma has some character growth where she begins to consider not being so selfish all the time. (It's not really framed that way, though, the book doesn't necessarily consider her selfish.) I do feel like there's a lot of telling rather than showing throughout the story. Things that I didn't love but may not bother others: there are a couple scenes of somewhat toxic diet culture talk, and there is a lot of alcohol and drunkenness. 

I love friends-to-lovers romances, so that aspect worked for me, although I would have appreciated a little more actual friendship being shown. Dax is a good love interest, but his characterization felt a bit flat. I think this book would make for a good Netflix rom-com movie. If you're in the mood for reading something like that, you will probably have a decent time reading this. I listened on audiobook and the narrator was great.