this memoir was, at times, silly and, at others, deeply relatable. it’s filled with wonderful streams of thought, drawings of the things that kept the author sane on her solo cross-country road trip, and the usual prose that accompanies a major break-up. she takes a lot of tangents throughout the book that i didn’t always want to sit through, and sometimes she veered into that repetitive style of writing that’s become kind of cliche, which i wasn’t a huge fan of. this also wasn’t a memoir or an essay collection in the classical sense. it’s more like a travel guide, a checklist, a what’s in my bag, a sketchbook, and a diary rolled into one. safe to say, i enjoyed my time reading this. didn’t regret it at all.

The more I read this, the better it got. Especially those last like 100-150 pages—absolutely buckwild. Sazed and Spook are everything to me.

this was such an enlightening read and if i had a physical copy it would be tabbed and highlighted to hell and back

hit the worst slump of my life halfway through this BUT WE MADE IT!! somehow even better than the first and god, kaz and inej really are the blueprint. and even though i’ve read it now, i will still live my life as if matthias never died bc wtf

“To give my confessions nobility, now I think of myself as biographer, archivist, witness, doing the important work. Who else will remember? Who else will make it good, make it beautiful, make sense of it all?”

Heard that this was a fictionalized account of a real life town that succumbed to mass hysteria because of bread (?) and was immediately intirigued. Intriguing is the least I could say about this novel. It was hypnotizing, homoerotic, fiendish in its prose, and absolutely baffling from start to finish. A fever dream of daily life and dynamics. The whole book I was wondering when the other shoe was going to drop and then oh…there it was, in all it’s gore and glory. Loved it.

Juniper Hayward was an exhausting, horrible voice to read, but my god, did R.F. Kuang write her well. This was such a biting glimpse at the book industry, and an even more scathing treatise on white women and tears. The ending was masterful, and I’m never going to think of a Very Berry Hibiscus Refresher in the same way ever again.