books_ergo_sum's Reviews (933)

Do you ever read a book and you’re like, “Loved it. But I have no clue who I’d recommend it to?” lol

Here’s my thesis: my love for this (highly unusual) fantasy romance involved two kinds of nostalgia—
✨ old school historical romance nostalgia
✨ 90s era high fantasy nostalgia

Because it had a ton of bodice ripper stuff:
✨ think, secret identity princess in an arranged marriage to the enemy king where she has to produce an heir in a year or he’ll kill her (lol) with some dub con added in for effect 😬

And it had some Wheel of Time-feeling stuff:
✨ think, magical sword only to be wielded by the prophesied hero on an epic battle field plus inherited magical abilities and a plucky sidekick.

But this was published in 2014 and it was pure camp:
✨ for the romance—our heroine was giving Cinderella, our hero was giving Beast, his ‘inner wolf’ recognized her as his mate, and their ‘passion’ was so old school it made me laugh
✨ and that fantasy world building had to be a bit tongue-in-cheek. Cheeseball names abounded (his name was Wynter and he was the Winter King), people were talking to animals, the pirate people fought with tridents, the winter people had battle ice trolls, and characters were magically saved from death every few pages 😆

It satisfied my craving to be the adult version of the kid at the beginning of The Princess Bride movie, being told a story. Especially the audiobook, with its vaguely Russian accents.

A hot tentacle monster bodyguard on the bottom of Lake Superior? As someone with thalassophobia who grew up on one of the Great Lakes—I felt this premise in my bones 😅

If you want unhinged sexy times, this is your book. A D/s dynamic plus tentacles, weird peen, dirty talk, breeding kink, and even a hint of CNC (she was saying “no” but not their safe word on purpose and… some other stuff 😅).

I’m usually all for the unhinged spice. But unfortunately, by the time the romance plot (and the sexy times) got going, a bunch of pet peeves had taken me out of the story:
▪️ the bodyguard romance wasn’t bodyguard-ing. I wanted lots of interaction but these two spent a chunk of time avoiding each other. So this was more instalove than I like my bodyguard roms to be
▪️ when characters are bored, I’m bored. And the characters were so bored for the first half of the book that they were having boredom-induced mental breakdowns. So, same
▪️ I wanted more atmosphere. This book took place almost completely underwater. Like, in scuba gear. But it felt so normal that I kept forgetting they were even in the lake at all
▪️ I couldn’t figure out the story’s mood. It was half very serious (lots of danger, lots of trauma) and half super campy (they needed to bone to live, for example)—and I never quite got my bearings
▪️ was the plot disjointed? Or did I just ‘temporarily DNF’ this too many times? 😅

But but but—if you ignore all those little things, it was both kink-tacular and sweet. Which is a great quality, so I get why this has received so much love. I’m still intrigued by this author and I feel like October is great time to read more from her.

The tropes in here? Holy moly, angsty and messy.

I typically love these tropes. They're nuts. We had some that I won’t mention because they aren’t in the synopsis but as for the others—we had:
▪️ an accidental ‘ruination’
▪️ a marriage of convenience (with tons of ‘they live together and hate each other’)
▪️ a hero with alcoholism (even drunk at the wedding)
▪️ a rake (even after they’re married 👀)
▪️ an OM who broke off his engagement to the heroine
▪️ Daddy issues (him), mommy issues (also him)

Plus the ones I’m leaving out? Hoo boy.

Right now, this novella seems to have two types of reviews: 1) “what a ride—five stars,” and 2) “I hate one or more or these tropes, no no no no—DNF.”

Which, is fair 😆 But I have a different take: I love these tropes. I just think that this novella was too short to do them justice.

Things changed too fast. The rake reformation, the addiction recovery, and their hate to love romance arc all happened too suddenly to feel genuine or secure (because if they changed that easily, what’s to stop them changing back?). They kept having these ‘why am I suddenly acting like this?’ moments that character-breakingly became their new personalities. I like when a story digs a big hole for an MC, but I want to see them climb out. In this one, it felt like we teleported out more than anything and I specifically disliked that.

Ilan Pappé is the Jewish Israeli historian who wrote The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, about the 1948 Nakba.

And this book, The Biggest Prison on Earth, is its sequel; explaining the detailed history of the Israel’s treatment of the occupied Palestinian territories in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza from the 1950s until now.

And it was a lot. Holy crap.

To put it simply, Pappé demonstrated how the Israeli government’s motivation has been to a) annex as much Palestinian (and neighbouring) territory as possible—without b) having to incorporate the millions of Palestinian Arabs living there as full Israeli citizens. Through different occupation strategies; plus ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or a mixture of both.

What complicates this explanation, and why this book is SO DENSE 😅 is that each area has a unique history of occupation. But also, each area involves an ‘internal’ discussion about how best to conquer, occupy, manage, and annex it—along with an ‘external’ discussion meant to justify that occupation.

Or, what Pappé describes as, “marketing the policies in one way, while carrying them out in exactly the opposite way.”

Pappé has a particular style. A very measured, no stone left unturned, let the facts speak for themselves style. More than that, he’d rather quote the letters, meeting minutes, and speeches of Israeli officials themselves than paraphrase things in his own words. And the result is… freaking overwhelming tbh.

But I think this book’s detailed-ness is its strength. And it has made me appreciate why there are no neat-and-tidy infographics or lectures that easily explain how exactly the different territories are being occupied and how we got here.

I love this author’s novellas so much. They’re just.. punchy. They feel unputdownable because the pacing is so good. These characters were likable and it zipped along.

Childhood friends to lovers. She was a hellion, he was a rakish grump. She chased him. It was fun!

I actually credit this book, which I read in one sitting on August 1st, with how great of a reading month August ended up being. So, major win.

Though, I don’t think I love that ‘next generation’ feeling as much as other people do. Both the MC’s parents were OG couples in this series (my two favourite couples as well) and I thought the parents were in this book too much. I know I’m so in the minority here. Rationally, I understand wanting to see your old favs as side characters but idk. It makes me feel too conscious that I’m reading a book, if that makes any sense.

This was… oddly hot lol

Yes, he was a snake. Yes, his peen was literally rearranging her insides. Yes, he said stuff like: “I’d fucking stalk her and scare everyone else away until she finally agreed to be with me” (literally quote from the book 🤣) when he feared she didn’t love him back.

But what made it so hot was its secret sauce (and not *that* secret sauce… although it did have a lot of that)—

The secret sauce was its mixture of bodyguard romance and primal kink 👀

Because he was guarding her around the clock, moving from safe house to safe house, and fighting bad guys. But his snake brain also wanted to chase her, catch her, bite her, squeeze her, and F her into the next century. And… ngl, the combo was…

Something about the ‘would literally die for her’ allowed us to really push the envelope with the predatory ‘kinda wants to kill her’ thing.

Who knew this was such a winning trope combo? I’m going to need some more recs, if you have any.

If only I wasn’t so allergic to heist-y plots. This was very loosely heist-adjacent if you squinted but it was enough for me to zone out at moments. But that’s very much a me-thing. And I can’t be too mad at it because watching them work together was cute for the romance.

I read this for a mixed race/biracial author prompt for The Diverse Baseline challenge. And the Métis stuff in here was great.

(Métis is a Canadian word for someone with mixed Indigenous and European ancestry with a deep history, particularly in the prairies.)

In fact, his insight into Métis identity is so compelling that, irl, this author went from being a high school drop out homeless man to a professor at York University publishing important papers on Métis history and culture.

But—holy crap—it was the homelessness part of this memoire that wrecked me. Maybe even radicalized me?

As I was reading this, homeless encampments were being broken up in some major American cities and there were a lot of stories about ‘good’ homeless people—people with no criminal records who were on the streets because of medical debt, impossible rent prices, or low wages.

But this memoire was about a ‘bad’ homeless guy. And I dare you to try and not care about his story.

There were so many parts that struck me.
▪️ how his downfall began when he was just a baby, maybe even before he was born
▪️ how many different people have to refuse to support you to even end up homeless in the first place
▪️ how many people take advantage of homelessness (from petty criminals to legitimate day-labourer businesses to predators)
▪️ how help with ‘strings attached’ ties you up in knots

And then, just personally, there was a part of the story where he lived at a shelter in Ottawa during the same years that I worked beside it at a Tim Hortons while I was in university (he wrote its official name Shephards of Good Hope, we called it Sheps). Do you know how scared I was of that place? My weekend shifts started at 3am! To read how he was a bit scared of it too (even after decades of homelessness), yet it was also a much needed refuge… broke my damn heart.

I highly recommend this memoire.

Why have I been edging Kathleen Ayers books?? I read a bunch of her books last year, gave them all five stars, thought ‘this has been too good to be true’, and chickened out about reading more of them (why am I like this??).

Until this delicious novella.

We had:
✨ an impoverished rakish duke
✨ an experienced spinster heiress
✨ childhood enemies to lovers
✨ house party drama-lama

But the best part: the way secrets were plotted out in this story. I NEEDED TO KNOW how the reveals were going to go down. And it made this book unputdownable.

With a title like White Poverty, I didn’t expect the author to be a Black pastor and a fairly famous activist and NAACP board member. But that was kind of the point.

This book made three arguments:
▪️ most poor Americans are white, by a lot
▪️ race and racism play a central role in American poverty—by making white poor people think they have more in common with their white wealthy exploiters than with their fellow POC poor people, politicians are able to push policies that hurt all poor people (poor white people included)
▪️ poor people of all races must work together to fight inequality (with examples from his own work in white communities with the NAACP)

This book was Christian socialism, Civil Rights movement revivalism, plus the argument that poverty trends in the US have got to change. Love all that.

43% of Americans are ‘poor’—which, seriously, wtf?? You guys are the only wealthy country to have a stat even close to that. And you’re not just a wealthy country, you’re ✨the wealthiest✨ country in the world. Sooo, you’re massively F-ing it up. Just saying.

The only thing that kept this book from being perfect was its moderation. Barber pushes boundaries with his activism, but not so much so that he doesn’t regularly get invited to the White House and I feel like we could have gone further.

I really enjoyed these two characters. Love a half-Chinese, self-made histrom hero and a smart, scheme-y aristocratic heroine. There were a bunch of swoony lines of dialogue, some forehead touches, and I enjoyed the flow of this novella.

That said, it just happened to have a few of my pet peeves:
▪️ some ‘I love you too much to be with you’ meets stubborn feelings-denial (my least favourite combo holding a couple apart)
▪️ a second chance romance with no on-page first chance (this one was particularly sparse with the first chance descriptions and I felt more cheated than usual)
▪️ what we lacked in romance plot, we made up for in mystery subplot (not a trade I enjoy)

But still, I really enjoyed the writing. And I’m intrigued to try more by this author.