competencefantasy's Reviews (912)

First thing you need to know is there's an emphasis on gothic. The first half of the novel reads like gothic greatest hits, and then it coalesces into something like Fall of the House of Usher by way of Jeff Vandermeer. It also explored the haunted house as a metaphor for generational evil and the difficulties of leaving an abusive family with the kind of metaphor and imagery over preaching attitude that I personally read horror to find. Also, it wound me up to finish this at night. It might not be keep the light on for you, but I don't plan on sleeping just yet.

Warnings for rape incest eugenics grossness and a bunch of other stuff.

I really would like to hear what someone with personalities that completely fragment thinks of this. One moment I feel like it's so on it's almost obvious. The next I'm mad at it for describing something a certain way. The next I'm highlighting half the book. The one thing I will say is as a fantasy book it's not much. This is more a specific concept sketch.

This is a solid entry. It brings up things in a fantasy that I am used to needing to go to contemporary for, which is much appreciated. My favorite aspects were the community themes. However, and this might just be my own genre preferences, I found that having a single teenaged protagonist limited the development of the community theme. I would have liked more there.

Wow this is really amazing. I thought I knew where the premise was going, that I would end with something overly artsy and form experimental but that was not the case at all.The prose was much easier to get through than I expected. It is short, but I think it needs that. I recommend also listening to the song.

I read this after seeing the film and was disappointed to find out how much of what I liked in the movie did not come from the book. Queen Clarisse is underdeveloped and awful, possibly due to the dad still being alive as the sympathetic royal character. The drama with the classmates and boys is drawn out and exhausting. But what I most don't understand is why Mia started from a level of knowledge that would make any reasonable person suspicious about what was going on, but then still tried to play the princess thing as a suprise. Come on she knew a tiny country where her grandma had a chateaux had a ruling family with her surname and yet she was shocked?

This is an intensely problematic book. But intensely problematic books with binary gender magic systems and unsettling sexual politics that I read in high school seem to be my thing lately. Just sitting back and bathing in all the trauma. It takes work to find ptsd depictions that still feel unrealistically exaggerates nowadays ok? I didn't reevaulate my old rating one way or the other on this reread btw

Typical cat who stuff. Rich people in upstate somewhere hanging out and doing philanthropy. Everything feels pleasant to read. I guess there was a mystery in there somewhere. And cats.

This is the first romance novel I have loved. At one point, I put it down for a week because I couldn't bear too see these two brilliant teddy bears come to any grief. Seriously I love this. Is there more of this? Please?

This one has the most moving plot compared to the rest so far in the series. It returns to a spot where a previous book left off and makes progress. While it did damage some of the ambigious earlier ending in previous book, I appreciated seeing the various characters again enough to overlook a little inconsistency with what I was expecting. It didn't have to do as much worldbuilding either. Overall though, I'm just really glad there are more of these.