books_ergo_sum's Reviews (933)

What a great take on my fav trope: the reformed rake marriage of convenience story! Plus a little runaway bride action? So fun! Dash and Theo were really unique characters. Loved how they were both unlikely intellectuals who had written a book together. And I loved how closely we followed their emotional journey. 

Plus, a friends-with-benefits-also-we’re-married situation between two characters this horny? The steam was steaming! 🔥

Dash wasn’t your standard-issue rake. He wasn’t a seducer, just a hottie who hadn’t bothered to say no to anyone who wanted to be with him. And it created some fun plot drama because, unlike normal rakes who are masters at seducing their wives, Dash didn’t have a clue 😆

The story was hot, funny, and really sweet. With just a little ‘but’—one I’ve been anticipating since I saw who the MCs of book four would be. Because, in book three we saw Dash and Theo meet. I thought their flirtation and Theo’s agreement to tutor him was a natural bridge to the next (hot-for-teacher) book being theirs. But instead, their book was this one, book five. And during the timeline of book four, I think we skipped some of the events I wanted to see of their romance. I wanted the flirtatious tutoring, the way Dash kinda-unconsciously stopped seeing anyone else while he was writing the book with Theo, how he felt when Theo abruptly announced her engagement to someone else, how conflicted Theo felt about said engagement, how seriously Dash considered interrupting her wedding.. you see where I’m going. There were a ton of juicy romance plot events that we were told about after the fact. And I wish we’d seen them firsthand instead.

But the book itself was still a great time! And I can’t wait for the next one in this series.

When I picked this book up, I was still reeling from finishing one of the greatest books I’ve ever read (Flowers from the Storm iykyk), I had about an hour before I wanted to go to sleep, and I was a day away from the pub date of my most anticipated release of the year. So I told myself: don’t overthink it, just read the first book under 200 pages that KU suggests. And that was this book! 😆

On one level, it completely fit the bill: the alien planet adventure + horny fated mate was the completely-different-from-my-last-book mood I was looking for. And the group of human ladies in this series was really unique. They'd all been experimented on by bad aliens until they basically had super powers and, now escaped, they’d been surviving on in the wilderness of an alien planet all on their own for a long time. How cool is that!

That said, I thought this was going to be the first book in a new series, but it was very much a spin-off of another series (my bad). I was a bit lost with all the cameos and references to other books’ plots. And the plot of this one was jumping around so much, I was getting whiplash. Though it was still pretty fun!

Murderbot and ART: Best Friends Foreva 🥰

Excellent character writing, sci-fi worldbuilding, and audiobook. Again!

Also, a low-stakes mystery plot that didn’t completely pique my interest. Again 🤷🏻‍♀️

But, also the possibility of an series-overarching mystery plot that could pique my interest?

These audiobooks are such a good time. I’m trying to fight the urge to save these stories for when I’m really craving the comforting feeling they invoke. I don’t know.. is that actually a good plan? Or only something a book hoarder would do? Asking for a friend.

Turns out this is book is my histrom Holy Grail. 

I don’t even know what do to, now that I’ve read it. Retire from booksta? That’s it, book search over?

What an epic love story! So amazingly and unflinchingly written, and exactly what I want in a romance: a couple who would never be together in a million years, falling in love anyways. In the angstiest way possible. Also, messy characterization that really goes there. Also, that worldbuilding. Also, an immediate, almost stream of consciousness writing style.

Uh oh, I feel a list coming on..
✨ The culture clash! A heroine who was the Quakeriest Quaker that ever Quakered with a duke. And not the “Cool Mom” version of a duke we always get in a histrom—the Yikes version of a sickeningly entitled rakehell duke.
✨ Love how none of these characters’ edges were softened. They all ground against each other in the most entertaining way imaginable—the puritanical Quaker, the egotistical rake, the unscrupulous friends, the overly scrupulous Friends, and the Lady Catherine de Bourg-esque relatives. 
✨The language!!
✨When a (for real) rake becomes absolutely torn up with love for his wife and I’m annihilated by the juicy angst 😭
✨ The themes and motifs! I wish I’d written my thesis on ‘the unlocked door’ in Flowers From the Storm. Or the Heideggerian ‘Dasein’ of these MCs. How about a Foucault’s Madness and Civilization case study? Like these philosophers, this book was getting at some core of The Human Experience™️—and I was living!

The asylum scenes were hard to read—yet I was fascinated by the rawness of this book’s exploration of themes that we’re still grappling with, 30 years after this was published. Because this felt so 1992, in a good way. Rodney King just happened, Silence of the Lambs was a thing, Girl Interrupted was about to be published… revealing the hypocrisy, the inhumanity, even brutality, of systems was a part of the Zeitgeist. And what shocked a reader in 1992 fills a reader in 2023 with a kind of knowing dread… which made this feel even more impactful.

If a philosophy book says, “it is Jane Austen who is perhaps the only counterpart to Hegel in literature,” then it is 100% speaking my language.

How to describe what this book is about.. 😆 It’s an indispensable book if you want to learn about politics, ideology, and human freedom (bad news on that one: you might be less free than you think). To use another Žižek quote: “I already am eating from the trash can all the time—and the name of that trash can is: ideology.” Ultimately, it’s not philosophers like Habermas that have the answers to this problem. For Žižek, we need to look at Hegel, Lacan and Freud, and Althusser. And Marx, you can come too.

I’m personally most passionate about Hegelian philosophy and Žižek highlighted Hegel’s best points imo: a focus on language, the way the earlier sections in a Hegel text are ‘errors’ that are negated yet preserved in later parts, and how philosophy can’t jump right away to Truth (and how too-positivist interpretations of Hegel misunderstand his project).

❤️ Sidenote for my romance reading peeps: I absolutely loved Žižek’s comparison between Jane Austen and Hegel and it made me realize that my favourite romance novels all contain the same thing: a Hegelian moment of misrecognition. That is, a romance that contains just as much personal growth as interpersonal connection between the MCs because of their co-constitutive identities. Because enemies to lovers, opposites attract, culture clash, etc. says just as much about how the characters perceives themselves as it does about how they perceive each other. And that’s why the swooniest romance plots have the most compelling character arcs 🥰

That said, I love me some strong thesis statements, which I didn’t always get in this book. Also it contained less of the jokes, anecdotes, and informal writing style of Žižek’s later works—yet I found it drier without being necessarily clearer, which was meh.

This novella was so exactly checking all my boxes that I was convinced it was going to screw something up. I kept thinking: ‘is this going to be… everything I want? In one book??’

Yes, yes it was:
✨ a hot vampire hero, a neurodivergent heroine (who was 30 and not in a ‘I’m a spinster’ way, just in a ‘I’m a woman’ way—love that)
✨ the world-building was Greek-ish gods plus Miss Havisham’s house in Great Expectations… I can’t explain it any better than that. It was like Hercules but make it spooky and vampires
✨ it was hotter than I expected?
✨ when the hero says “May I write to you?” —SWOON
✨ this romance had so many obstacles against it that by about 30% in, I’d convinced myself there was no way this book had an HEA (worry not, it does have an HEA 🥰)
✨ oh, and this whole delight of a fantasy romance was less than 200 pages, on KU.

It’s technically book 1.5 in the Crowns of Nyaxia series but it feels like a standalone. If you want to dip your toe into this author’s style of fantasy romance, this is a great place to start!

Well this was a surprisingly delightful (also murder-y) novella 🥰

The characterization of Murderbot was everything—this cynical yet lovable, misanthropic but protective, non-human but deeply human SecUnit. Really, truly excellent character writing!

And the sci-fi setting was so immersive. I loved the way the futuristic stuff (mentally accessing a feed channel or directly comm-ing people in a dialogue, for example) opened up all these possibilities for storytelling. Or even the way Murderbot would watch its interactions with others through nearby security cameras instead of its own eyes (an analogy for neurodivergent peeps who struggle with eye contact perhaps?)—what a cool idea! I just kept pausing the book and reflecting on how uniquely this story was being told, because of the technology present in this world.

I’m really torn between a four and a five star rating here. It was only missing one factor that I look for in a five star read: unputdownableness (in my world, that’s a word). Dangerous stuff was happening but Murderbot was so detached and chill about it that the book overall felt chill too? The mystery never made me sweat and maybe I wanted this book to stress me out more 😅

I highly recommend the audiobook!

Who doesn’t love an assassin falling for her target story? And this was an especially delicious one—a human assassin nun (monk? cult person?) whose service to her deity involved un-alive-ing peeps. Oh, and she was blind (think Lady Justice). And her target was a military general vampire, in an army of vampires.

Love a badass heroine, love morally grey characters, love an MC with a secret identity, and I super duper loved the POV of a character who didn’t see the world with her eyes—instead she described everything in terms of their metaphysical threads. Very cool!

A teeny ‘but’—I like single POV stories.. with one very specific exception: when the non-POV character is the clammed-up silent type plus their character growth and/or romantic feelings are an important part of the story. I get why some people could love this—it definitely gives the love interest a huge dose of mystique. But for me, it taps into the worst parts of my overthinking personality (aka I spend too much mental energy parsing their one-word statements for subtext). I need that dual-POV. For my own sanity.

Still, a very entertaining stand-alone novel in this amazing series.

I always enjoy a little Risdaverse series novella. They’re cute, they’re weird, and they always take such a close and immediate approach to the emotions of the story.

I really enjoyed the slow acts of service plus gift giving love language courtship that went on in this book. It was so dang heartwarming!

But.. hear me out: I wish this had been a slow burn novel 😅 It was novella sized (with the frequency of smüt we typically get in this series), but we had a “Six Months Later..” time jump during the part where these two MCs were hanging out almost daily but taking it slow. Which means we skipped over so much flirty-flirty times, my favourite part!

Still super cute, though!

When the baddy of the last book becomes the love interest of this book and it’s so amaze-balls that it starts it’s own spin-off series? Yes. Directly into my veins, please.

These. Freaking. Characters. 

The way that this author writes aliens has ruined me for all other alien romances. These guys are ALIENS. And this author never lets you forget it—no, that’s not true, she lets you forget it and then she smacks you across the face with how completely weird these aliens are. Their minds just work in completely different ways and it puts me on the edge of my seat. 

And this alien hero was just.. ugh 🥹🥹🥹 He was kinda a baddy? But such a goody? Definitely some intense assassin/stalker vibes but also so sweet? It’s hard to explain, you just have to read it! 😅

And then our heroine felt so real I feel like I know her—I’ve now mentally added her to the irl members of my acquaintance. Yes, the concept of her character was cool (she spoke Jamaican Patois and braiding hair fulfilled her both socially and creatively). But.. how can I explain? She wasn’t a one-note character—she wasn’t even a few-notes character. She was a fully realized person… it was kinda spooky tbh.

And these two were so compatible. So many little things about their personalities, lived experience, and interactions were plugging into each other. And my heart was exploding 🥰

I’m so excited for this spin-off of the main series!