blewballoon's Reviews (763)

This felt like a rom com crossed with a Disney Channel Original Movie in the best way. I felt as delighted by the whimsy and witchy plotline as I did watching Halloweentown as a kid. I had fun reading this from start to finish. I will say that the two leads felt (unnecessarily) super horny and that did make me roll my eyes a bit, but that's common for romance novels so I know it comes with the territory. Maybe other people actually experience that kind of ridiculous sexual tension, but I don't, so it always takes me out a bit. That's my only real critique though, and it's minor. If you want some cozy small town spooky Halloween vibes with lots of good people trying to be nice to each other, I recommend.

Too much animal suffering for me, gonna nope out of this one. 

I'm not really sure how to rate this. I may have enjoyed the book more if I had read it rather than listened to it. The audiobook narrator was giving very little, and for a book that seems like it has a narrative voice with a lot of personality, it clashed with narration that didn't add much life to the text. I found my mind wandering a lot and had to go back and re-listen to big chunks of the story. I'm not sure how well I grasped the worldbuilding either. I think this does read on the younger side, more YA/middle grade maybe? There are some spooky scenes though. 

Woah! So much tension, drama, action, history, passion in this story! This is my first book by this author and I appreciated the historical and cultural details. They were woven really well with the sweeping romance and family/cultural tensions. And for me, adding vampires to the mix made it all the more interesting. I loved how their presence highlighted the other threats and discoveries happening in the story.

I absolutely loved how Nena came to sympathize and reason with them, arguably one saved her life. It may be cliché but I love a good "the real monster is man" monster story.

I do wish the romance had

involved less miscommunication/hurting the other person. I could sympathize with their mutual bad choices given their different experiences and understanding after what happened, but once they both knew the truth they still fumbled a lot and Nena's constant one step forward two steps back with her treatment of Nestor was frustrating

A sweet comic with some beautiful fashion as well!

This is a well written story that explores mostly the struggles of women and immigrants in the 1600s and 1800s. It also touches on how mental health was often misunderstood and demonized in those times. While those themes are being explored in lovely prose, I know the story of the Scarlet Letter and I'm dreading reading this and watching the main character suffer. She's trying her best to make friends and support herself, it's been a struggle from the start and I can see it all crashing down. I would like to pretend she catches a break instead and things work out better. I may revisit this. I do recommend if you aren't as much of a softy as me. 

I recommend going into this blind. The story is written like a folk tale, which sometimes can make you feel a little removed from what's going on and also can feel a bit like a run-on sentence with how things are described and unfold. I think I generally prefer writing that feels more personal and easy to connect with, but I don't think that was the goal here. I think the goal of writing a story that feels like an ancient fable was achieved. I think the shorter length works in its favor in that regard as well. 

This book was everything I wanted it to be. The writing was charming and imaginative, the characters were interesting and amusing, and I loved getting the story through the lens of Emily's journal and footnotes. Watching Emily struggle to in human interaction while excelling at faerie interaction (and her bond with her dog) was a well handled and surprisingly relatable character journey, and it feels all the more wholesome when she does begin to make connections with the human residents of the village. If you are look for a romance focused book, that's not this. The romance plot shares time with a lot of other things going on, it's not as prominent as the book summary suggests, but I liked the way the story was balanced.

I think I would have appreciated this more if I had been closer to the target demographic. I was really excited for this, but I think I underestimated how much the love triangles with the Hawthorne brothers would be part of Avery's internal monologue. As a teen, I probably would have been more into that drama and understood the allure of the brothers. I also found the puzzles to be a little over-explained, but again I think the explanations are probably necessary for a less experienced reader who doesn't have as much exposure to different kinds of puzzles/riddles. I am not sure if I will continue with the series or not. Also, while my rating is a little low, I do think the book was fun, intriguing, and suspenseful! I can see why the series is popular, and I think it's deserved. It just wasn't quite what I wanted it to be.

I've read all of the Bridgerton books and I do think I liked this better? Maybe? It has more going on than the typical Bridgerton story and I liked that we got perspective chapters from characters outside of the romantic couple, it made the scope of the story bigger and allowed the reader to see the stakes more clearly. I did find the story a bit repetitive and frustrating though.

One of the main plots is that the king "is mad" and has these "episodes" and he hires this super evil sadistic doctor (who literally tortures puppies) and the king repeatedly dismisses and then re-hires this doctor. If something goes well, he dismisses him, at the slightest conflict, he's back to the clearly horrible doctor to get tortured. Apart from that, there are two occasions of either the king or queen overhearing and misinterpreting something the other one said in conversation to the king's mother and then that causing a big conflict that they could have resolved by just telling the other person they overheard and asking what they meant. And they don't EVER talk about it! The queen eventually just gets over what she heard (even though it was taken out of context) and the king never finds out if the queen meant what she said either, she just eventually goes and rescues him from the doctor and he never brings up what he overheard.

I think the Lady Danbury chapters were my favorite, they had a good balance of humor and gravity. I liked the chapters from the perspective of the attendants for the King and Queen

and their little romance

I wish there had been more for them, though. I listened to this on audiobook and I thought the narration was good, but I did speed it up (1.25 I think). I have not watched the corresponding Netflix show yet, I wanted to read the novelization first, but I will say that the intros to the chapters that were like "[Character name][place][time]" reminded me of the headings of scenes in a script.