The blurb of this book makes it seem so dramatic and important. The actual novel feels much smaller, with low stakes and calm feelings. The big conflict of this book is trying to perform a musical in the face of financial and legal challenges. There's also some subplots about some kidnappings and hostage situations, but those take a backseat to the musical.

The novel has many excerpt from two in-world documents: the lyrics of the musical, and the history book that the musical is based on. This takes up a lot of the page time, and I don't think it improved the book. It interrupted the story, and was boring.

However, this book was easy to read, and kept me engaged. I was excited to see how the musical would go on opening night, and the steps leading up to that. It had some cool moments, and made me laugh. But, in the end, not much happens in this book. It's setting up things for the next book, but not actually having those pieces do important things now. It touches on a lot of interesting themes, but doesn't explore them.

Thanks to Netgalley and Tor Books for a copy of this book for review. All opinions are my own.

Yes, I'm giving this 2 stars. Yes, I'm surprised and disappointed. There's some secret of writing hidden here for whoever can figure out why it's so boring.

Fans of Spinning Sliver might like this. It has a similar feel.

This is a fast-paced Sci-fromance novel. We follow two professional athletes that are partners in a high-danger race/fighting ring. It's YA in an accessible but not annoying way, and I would easily recommend it broadly.

What this book does best is in its setting. It really sets the mood with its planet full of deadly storms, and every scene where the characters were out there had real gravitas. I felt the danger and the excitement. This book also nails the pacing in the competition plot. I was very invested in how our protagonists would place in every round, and it kept me enthusiastically reading.

I also especially loved our protagonist Ezren, who was passionate about the race and the planet, and was given really strong motivations that helped me cheer for her.

It's a little disappointing that this book that is marketed as "slow burn" takes very little time to explore the yearning of the characters, and has the first kiss before even halfway through the book. It's a fine romance, but not quite one that will sweep you off your feet.

Thanks to Netgalley and Whimsical Publishing for a copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Very cute and touching. Lovely even for someone with no nostalgia for Anne of Green Gables (me).

Very dense and bloated historical fiction. I can't get through it. There were some really good flashes of character relationship building, but it wasn't enough to get me through the hundreds of pages of irrelevant filler. DNF @ 72%. I so wish I could have loved this book.

I don't object to the politics in this book. I do object to the fact that the many pages of Trying to Make a Political Point in this book are boring, lacking stakes, and don't tie in well with the rest of the plot. Every few pages there's a surprise paragraph about the 2020 USA election, or covid lockdown protocols. It rarely works well with the rest of the book, and feels out of place. This feels less like a story, and more like the author had many rants and emotions during 2020 that she wanted to share with a weak framing device.

The one Very-2020 part of this book that I feel DID WORK is the ruminations on isolation. This ties in with one of the major conflicts of the book; the protagonist is cut off from her friends and adrift from regular life. I just wish the other points of this book also tied in with the plot and internal conflict.

Thanks to Netgalley and Dutton Books for Young Readers for a copy to review. All opinions are my own.

This is one of the most engrossing and intense books I've ever read. It's not a thriller, and it only has a smidge of horror. But it also had me on the edge of my seat for a scene of our protagonist getting out of a car -- twice!
(I think the first exiting-a-car scene is my favorite moment of the book.)

This is the story of Effy, an architecture student in 1930's fantasy Wales. She is under intense pressure from her all-male classmates, and so it's a dream come true when she gets to escape to a remote project. She goes into the countryside to design a renovation of the manor of her FAVORITE AUTHOR OF ALL TIME. Effy is obsessed with the novel Angharad, a tale of a woman fighting the Fairy King. It's Effy's favorite because she hallucinates the Fairy King stalking her, and the novel is the only thing that makes her feel sane. However, the manor house is not the escape she wanted, as a rival student also has a project there, and the Fairy King lurks close in the wild cliffs.

It's a coming of age story. It's hauntingly gothic. It's a romance. It's a book that is playing with what fantasy stories mean, in a very metatextual way. Sometimes it feels like realistic dark academia, sometimes urban fantasy with a side of horror. It's YA, in a way that is accessible without ever being annoyingly teenagerish.

I love it. I'm obsessed with this beautiful novel. It's so emotional and raw and poetic and mysterious.

Thanks to Netgalley and HarperTeen for a copy of this book to review. All opinions are my own.

Merged review:

This is one of the most engrossing and intense books I've ever read. It's not a thriller, and it only has a smidge of horror. But it also had me on the edge of my seat for a scene of our protagonist getting out of a car -- twice!
(I think the first exiting-a-car scene is my favorite moment of the book.)

This is the story of Effy, an architecture student in 1930's fantasy Wales. She is under intense pressure from her all-male classmates, and so it's a dream come true when she gets to escape to a remote project. She goes into the countryside to design a renovation of the manor of her FAVORITE AUTHOR OF ALL TIME. Effy is obsessed with the novel Angharad, a tale of a woman fighting the Fairy King. It's Effy's favorite because she hallucinates the Fairy King stalking her, and the novel is the only thing that makes her feel sane. However, the manor house is not the escape she wanted, as a rival student also has a project there, and the Fairy King lurks close in the wild cliffs.

It's a coming of age story. It's hauntingly gothic. It's a romance. It's a book that is playing with what fantasy stories mean, in a very metatextual way. Sometimes it feels like realistic dark academia, sometimes urban fantasy with a side of horror. It's YA, in a way that is accessible without ever being annoyingly teenagerish.

I love it. I'm obsessed with this beautiful novel. It's so emotional and raw and poetic and mysterious.

Thanks to Netgalley and HarperTeen for a copy of this book to review. All opinions are my own.

This is one of those Katherine Center's that is very feely, made me cry, and had a good romance. On the Rom-com spectrum, it's much closer to a drama than a comedy. It was heart wrenching, but never made me laugh.

This book is so bingeable! I read this so fast in a day. I was so invested in how everything would turn out (mostly the movie script that they were writing, and the character of of Charlie). It's primarily about the joy of writing, caretaking of your family, and letting people in despite past relationship trauma.

The audiobook performance is average. Not annoying or bad in any way, not it didn't blow me away.

Thanks to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for a copy to review. All opinions are my own.

The way this had all of the same plot beats and twists as book 1??? Greatly lessened the impact because I felt like I knew where it was going, and how far the authors were willing to go.

This is a sci-fi mystery novel. The sci-fi dystopian elements are great, but the mystery elements fall flat. I think a big reason for that is the perspective. Our narrator is an omniscient AI security system. This, practically, means that our narrator knows everything but annoyingly will not reveal anything the whole book.
In practice, we are often in an effective limited-3rd person point of view of other characters. I did enjoy following our detective, Emory. However, her perspective was also poorly utilized. She's always finding clues, but those clues are never connected to anything else. It feels more like a book that it made out of a list of suspicious blood stains instead of a real investigation. There's a lot of clues and moving parts to the story, and I wasn't able to feel grounded in the tale or follow where the clues were leading.

I was going to give this book 3 stars, but as I think about it more, it has dropped to 2 stars. Mostly this is because of the large amount of plot holes, and people's motives not matching their actions. Once I finished the book and got through all of the reveals, I was only disappointed. I had my theories of who the murderer was, and I was wrong. Honestly, my theories feel like they fit better to the clues and characters, and the actual answer is full of plot holes and ridiculous contortions of logic.

Thanks to Netgalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for a copy of this book to review. All opinions are my own.