books_ergo_sum's Reviews (933)

Oh shiiiiit.

[read in chronological order (book 1, 4, 5, 7, 2, 3...) not publication order]

Tall, dark, dumb, and horny. Could all the side characters hear them ‘sneaking off’ to bang in the other room? You bet. Did they care? Nope, too horny to care.

[read in chronological order (book 1, 4, 5, 7, 2, 3...) not publication order]

Points for a tatted cage fighter heroine who works out (can’t relate but also; hot) but minus points for our only alien hero with no “This is the skin of a killer, Bella” vibes.

[read in chronological order (book 1, 4, 5, 7, 2, 3...) not publication order]

This book was a blast:
✨ touch her and 💀(RIP all the peeps who touched her)
✨ if villain, why hot?
✨ fated mates
✨ no one is TSTL yet you spend the whole book fearing for their lives
✨ a hint of “This is the skin of a killer, Bella.”

There were two things I particularly vibed with with the sci-fi world building:
🪐 there was something very 2025 zeitgeist-y (despite the 2016 pub date) about how cynical this series was about technology and capitalism (we were neither techno-optimistic nor techno-dystopian about these spacefaring future humans)
🪐 normally, I avoid ‘elite soldier’ MMCs like the plague (speaking of propaganda I’m not falling for)—but these alien guys all had such a War Is A Racket (1935 book/speech criticizing what would become known as the military industrial complex) by Smedley Butler feel to them that I was into it

[read in chronological order (book 1, 4, 5, 7, 2, 3...) not publication order]

An unpopular opinion, maybe?

Because the two most-cited reasons for a low review of this book? Literally my two favourite parts 😆
👍 how DUMB this heroine was (she was even dumber in this one, for story reasons, so I loved it even more)
👍 how More Is More chaos the plot was (it makes me feel like I’m watching The Princess Bride mixed with one of the more unhinged seasons of Vampire Diaries—which is so entertaining to me)

But it did something that is Right To Jail, Right Away (imo).

That is, it took a story that’s been single POV for two books so far (from a FMC so dumb she’s basically an unreliable narrator—loved that) and ADDED POVS! 😤

Believe it or not, jail.

It breaks the rules. It reminds me I’m reading a story and the author can do whatever they want. And it removed my favourite part of this reading experience: trying to figure out what the heck is going on with such a limited (and dumb—have I mentioned she’s an idiot?) perspective. I was ready to flex all my ‘reading between the lines’ muscles as all this chaos came to a third-book close. But instead we’d just… switch to a POV that knew the answer and they’d just explain it. 

Booooo.

Also, don’t think I didn’t notice that some major characters weren’t mentioned in this book and had zero closure for their story arcs? They better get their own books because, nah uh.

This book is a whistleblower’s description of how:
👉 governments increasingly off-load public services and responsibilities onto tech companies
+
👉 tech companies being “less regulated than the average cup of coffee,” not to mention being some of the most opaque and least accountable companies in the world
=
bye, bye democracy

Tech companies undermine the fabric of democratic society: freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, transparency, and free expression. They’re opaque, monopolistic, and increasingly, they’ve taken on governmental roles and the fourth estate. Yet, with zero accountability to the public plus a secretive, authoritarian vibe in general.

I think there were two reasons why this book was so successful:

⭐️ One, Schaake is not a lefty Luddite (as much as I love lefty Luddites). She’s a pro-tech elected member of Dutch parliament for the D66 (Democraten 66) party, aka THE centrist party, from 2009-2019 and international org person since then. So like, she genuinely wants to make tech companies and markets work… and she was just like, no this ain’t it. At all.

⭐️ And two, this book is hella thorough. She goes through EVERYTHING—
Social media? Fail.
Data protection? Fail.
Outsourcing government functions to ClearView AI, Palantir, etc? Oof, such a fail.
Building data centres? Fail.
Crypto? Fail.
Anything to do with AI? ENORMOUS FAIL.

It was interesting to hear all this from such an insider. She was the tech-portfolio person in parliament, heading up all the tech related committees, meeting with officials all over Europe, the White House, and tech company boardrooms.

So why the 4 stars? Wellll, did I say that her centrism was a major part of the book’s success? It was also why I can’t give it 5 stars. The “liberal world order”? She’s a big fan. And she called it the “Israel-Hamas war”—you know what I mean?

Still, I recommend this one. Also, as someone who lives in the Netherlands, I’m so grateful for all the work she’s done. We have SO MUCH more protection from tech companies than other countries do (the US especially). And topic is so important right now.

Hm.

On the one hand, this biography of Marie Skłodowska Curie was good. I learned a lot about turn of the 19th century science, the very cool group of ladies in STEM educated in the Curie lab, and—my favourite detail—that Marie was not only Polish (I’d thought she was French?!) but also kind of a Polish Nationalist nut and I loved that for her.

There was one detail I didn’t love: that this book told me she wanted to be called Marie Skłodowska Curie (aka she kept her Polish last name) and yet the book almost exclusively referred to her as Marie Curie? That felt weird.

And maybe I don’t like biographies? They have a kind of ‘neither here nor there’ quality, for me:
▪️ they’re neither memoirs—they don’t have the personal insight into their thoughts and motivations;
▪️ nor are they historical nonfiction—they don’t have the zoomed-out, ‘stopping to tell me why a moment is significant’ information, a big thesis, and explanatory power

… so I just got the feeling that every scene in this biography was probably cooler and more significant than it appeared in the book. Either because personal motivations were out of frame or because this event or discovery was more significant than this biography was pausing to explain to me.

So it was just a meh reading experience, overall.

Well if this wasn’t a lovely backlist gem. I love this author’s two main series (Virgin Warriors of Kar’Kal and Deviant Warriors of Kar’Kal).

And this book was a similarly cute and swoony alien romance. Fated mates, secret identity, a no nonsense heroine, and a down bad alien hero.

Plus, it delivered on two very specific things my mood reader picker was looking for:
💛 a book where he just stares at her, constantly. Intense gazes for days
💛 a book where the black cat heroine and the prince in disguise bang (this is thanks to The Apothecary Diaries—seriously! are Maomao and Jinshi ever going to bang?!? I’m 14 volumes in 😆)

Crossing my fingers that this becomes its own series!

Against decolonisation? Aren’t we supposed to be pro-decolonisation??

This book humbled me. It made me realize that, though I’ve read books *about* African scholarship, I am seriously ignorant when it comes to African scholarship itself.

Táíwò’s book was against ‘decolonisation philosophy’ and ‘decolonisation literature’—which seek to cleanse African scholarship of its colonial influences. But decolonisation philosophy also targets people I (naïvely?) considered decolonial thinkers—like Aimé Césaire, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon 😮 Because they’re rooted in European philosophy and they write in colonial languages.

The main focus of Táíwò’s critique was Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu and Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—

[pause: the fact that I didn’t know who Wiredu was and yet he’s considered the greatest 20th century African philosopher]

And Táíwò’s critique was basically that decolonisation philosophy—rather than deconstructing the colonizer / colonized dichotomy to liberate African scholarship—reinforces and fixes the dichotomy; permanently oppresses; and denies the ownership claim Africans have on ‘Western philosophy,’ modernity, and truth.

I’m so new to this debate. But Táíwò compared his arguments to the relationship between feminism and philosophy—and THAT I’m very familiar with. On a personal note: my academic focus is female-centred classical philosophy and I get two kinds of responses: a) “you can’t do truly radical feminism within classical philosophy,” (from my feminist readers—analogous, for Táíwò, to decolonisation philosophers)** or b) “you can’t do good classical philosophy with all this woman stuff” (from my [male] philosophy readers—analogous to philosophers who completely ignore African scholarship).

A very eye-opening philosophy book for me, overall.

** you haven’t lived until someone’s said your mind was “colonized by the phallus.”