coolfoolmoon's Reviews (357)

Maybe the real immortality was the deaths we made along the way ❌️❌️❌️

Beautiful GORGEOUS art. So much life, so much character! And the story is great too but I really fawned over the art, the colors, the perspectives, etc.

Very cute! You'll notice some of the background colors are some of the pride flags! Happy month!

Did I have a good time? One could say that. Is it a good book? If you'e delusional sure.

There's so much going on here. First of all, love me a book with a map. Love me a book with extreme worldbuilding. Did it get a laugh or two out of me? Sure, sure. Where do I even begin with its flaws though? White people love to do this thing where they reinvent racism for robots instead of acknowledging the real world racism that exists. They think "Oh if bigoted bad humans had another thing to hate they would just move on to the other thing." That's not and has never been true. White people also love to do this thing where they reinvent eugenics. They're obsessed with it. These two critiques could be unnecessary, if they weren't a flaw of the writing / author. Dystopia & satirical media that critiques the future or the present day as a sort of cautionary tale by highlighting who we are and who we could be to extremes CAN be good, but white people have such a tendency to miss the mark. And you can see their own biases and flaws in the examples I just gave, but somehow they can't. And, if it really was that white people WERE saying "Eugenics bad, bigotry bad" why do they do it exactly the same way at every opportunity they get? So you're telling the same story over and over and it's like, okay, either your message is you want the people reading this to think it's bad, which they don't because they've seen the story be told the same way so many time they actually think this must be good therefore they believe it, OR, the more realistic option, you actually deep down believe it yourself and don't even realize it.

I liked the footnotes and extra details. But then it got to be too much. Then I realize, oh, this book is set 60 years in the future. I can suspend my disbelief but when you start annoying me with other shit it gets unsuspended. Re-enrolled, if you will. Also, the main character is 16??? Whole time until that point I thought he was in his mid-20s. Ew! 

I wanted to rate this higher but as I got further and further into the end I just got more annoyed,

to the point where when the president is giving the speech about how the masses have to be controlled and that's just the "natural order" of the world, I out loud yelled "this shit again?!" at the park and a few heads turned.

Even my three star rating is generous. For how much it annoyed me I wanted to give it 2.75! You'll never be Dimension 20's A Starstruck Odyssey!!!

Poems that rhyme! Poems that rhyme! Finally finally after all this time! Poems that sometimes approximately rhyme!

Poems are as cheery and chipper as you would expect seeing the title, but not many of them took my breath away. And only like 3 of them had rhymes!

Indeed a very short introduction. Still for a moment I thought I should be taking notes. So much history I wasn't aware of. I appreciate the neutral perspective because of that.

First time I've listened to a book on 3x speed. The writing isn't bad, but I'm just not a fan of crime books. I'm not a fan of true crime in general. The book takes place in about two weeks and yet still feels slow, probably because of descriptions of things like "I get up ready for the day, I brush my hair thinking about who the murderer could be, I get in my car to drive to a person who might be the murderer," and so on. Just not very exciting, but that seems to be all crime books. But I didn't hate the book so I rated higher to account for my bias.

As fiction my rating would be much lower, but as nonfiction it's like well this is someone's real life story that really happened to them, and it's not like he's a bad storyteller, but if it were fiction it wouldn't be very good. There's no paragraph separations which really would've helped the tone of the stories being told. It's also listed as LGBTQ, but the overwhelming majority of the story is his childhood. That's part of the queer experience too of course but as a Black queer person I would argue this story is more about the struggles of Black life coming out of the South. He even spends a chapter or two denying his queerness. Also, the book is a lot more about his mom as the title shows. But I'm just being nitpicky now.

The writing is a little cringe, but only in the way that it dates the comic. Like, in 10 years people are gonna read it and be like "oh that was written by a millenial between 2015 and 2019." Obviously you can't make everything timeless but you can at least try. And especially with the ending,

it's very much of the time to write "every villain has a story and even the worse villain just needs a friend to be better" which is a great lesson for kids but it shouldn't be the brown girl's job to save the white boy.

Love the art. And it made me giggle here and there.

Usually in my notes I mark poems that I think are good enough for a reread or that I would add to my collection and I didn't do that for a single one of these, which is part of why the rating is so low. I don't really have anything more to say about that.