booksny's Reviews (332)

For a story that's meant to be set in the future, this feels very much like it was from a very boring, very irritating past. Somehow, the book managed to make a cat reek of toxic masculinity. The conversation was highly repetitive; you could make a drinking game out of every time someone said "your partner?" when they saw the cat, or when the cat gave people a "sparkle with the ol' Betsy". Cat did nothing of real action; just spent a lot of time mouthing off and giving long irrelevant info dumps about the world. 

As described, it's a collection of Thunberg's speeches between 2018 and 2020. Interesting to see how her speaking style has changed over time and with different audiences; interesting as well to see the bits which have stayed consistently the same from start to end.

I liked the premise and some parts of the plot, but unfortunately a lot of the other elements rubbed me wrong. I was not invested in the main character, as it felt like she had a low level of emotional awareness and high levels of judgement. Her love interests often treated her with a mixture of overprotectiveness (which wasn't warranted) and distrust (which was warranted, given her tendency to accept very little help but need rescuing at every turn). She was constantly either getting injured or recovering from injury, as fighting was not one of her advantages but her impulse to resolve issues independently led her into many situations which would have benefited from someone with better fighting/subterfuge skills resolving them. Her main strengths were her natural ability to repel magic, and how she had friends who would provide her with deux ex machina support - their ability to anticipate when they should swoop in without anyone telling them to was very impressive. The depiction of native Americans was very tricky, and the police force seemed to pretty much be a one-man army whose main interest was to protect the heroine rather than doing any actual police work. 

A good read. Focused on American data and systems but reckon it's applicable worldwide 

Decent read but it was a plot without payoff and characters with far less meaningful growth compared to the first book,  as it's setting up the scene for the third book

A sweet collection of uplifting comics

I struggled with the wording - Poe's always quite verbose, but this felt exceptionally so. The spooky atmosphere is lovely; the main character is unsympathetic, alternating between putting his previous wife on a pedestal and loathing his next wife for being a different woman. 

Some good bits in this book - enjoyed the read! Would have appreciated some detail on neurodivergence, as some of the emotionally immature symptoms described sounded like they could also be ascribed to not being neurotypical. I'm also not sure around some of the correlations made on things like "emotionally mature people are enjoyable to be around". I feel like enjoyability is a highly subjective and personal thing, and some people may find an emotional mature person less enjoyable to be around than an emotionally immature one if they have more in common with the latter on passions, personalities, values, etc. Furthermore, I was a bit taken aback at the contrasting language used for internalizers vs externalizers - the former was treated far more kindly than the latter

Really enjoyed this. Some deux ex machina moments (when Tanaquil is rescued at just the right moment) but overall an amazingly beautiful setting, lovely plot and characters