dbguide2's Reviews (863)

 I listen to podcasts so I like them being added in books. Especially when I’m listening to the audiobook – then it’s like a double feature or something 😄. I enjoy them (podcasts being added in) because they introduce another way to approach the plot, maybe introduce a character or two (though they’re more likely to be side or supporting than main character). Plus they’re also a part of the mixed media format and I do love that. I’m glad that I”m getting more into the mystery and thriller genres because they usually tend to have the mixed media format in it.

I had notes all over my Kindle because, as usual, I was making up theories and trying to figure out the mystery before Piper did. I did not figure out the entire mystery, which is interesting because usually I do so it’s good of a book to do that! I can’t figure out if I like it when I figure out the mystery before it’s revealed to us or if the mystery catches me off guard. I think I’m very much 50-50 on this and also I think it depends on the writing and if the plot twist still manages to wow me even if know I’ve guessed it.

I was pleased with the fast pace – I think that’s why I had such an easy time racing through this. I didn’t have to struggle with a slow pace, which meant I wasn’t bored either. Which is exactly what you want with a mystery/thriller book – you want the pacing to be fast or at least medium to keep you interested all the way through.

I liked Piper right from the start. It didn’t take me long to like her tenacity and drive to help. To solve this mystery of this high school girl that while people remembered her; no one wanted to solve her case. To look beyond what clues were already presented and what was really the true. What started out as a school project (the true crime podcast) turned into something much more as she discovered more of the mystery and herself too.

I know we get a glimpse of what she does after she solves the mystery but my hope is that she tackles another unsolved case somewhere in her future. Or that whatever she pursues will be because she’s passionate about it.

I will admit, it took a me a bit to like Jonas. I think it’s because I immediately liked Piper so when he was a bit cold to her at first I was cold to him 😄. But as he started being nicer to Piper then I started to like him more. Like I said, I cared a lot about it so I was defensive about her 😂. 

 I saw that In Nightfall had vampires in it and I was like “right yes, instant add and read right here.” I’ve got those specific tropes and creatures that I’ll read about in any format (film, tv, books) and vampires is certainly high on that list. Yes, mostly due to my Twilight phase but actually I think it’s largely due to watching the Underworld Saga with Kate Beckinsale at a young age 😅. When it comes to vampires vs werewolves I’m very firmly in the vampires camp. Even like with Teen Wolf if they had vampires I would… probably vote for the vampires (sorry!). 

I mean vampires, as a whole, can mostly be seen as morally grey characters. Maybe that’s why I like them so much? They have lower morals, not so worried about consequences, they don’t worry about hurting people like their human counterparts do. 

In Nightfall took what I wanted (that dark, obsessive nature of vampires) and placed it in a familiar setting (small town, a bit of family drama). But it also brought something new to the genre and I liked that. I always enjoy it when a book brings a breath of fresh air to a genre, even if it’s one that I enjoy reading a ton of. 
 

I did have some issues, mainly with the main characters. I found Theo and her brother, Marco to be… plain? I only started to like them at the very end and even then it wasn’t very much. I didn’t like their personalities, their motivations; just sort of them in general? Even when I started to like them at the end; it was sort of begrudgingly. 

I’m big on characters – their stories and development – especially seeing their development throughout the book. Unfortunately I didn’t get that as much as I wanted to while reading this. The book is nearly 400 pages so I should’ve started liking the characters before; but that didn’t really happen. 

Luckily the book was more than its characters and the plot was more interesting so I’m glad my dislike for the characters didn’t mar my experience for the whole book. I liked the way vampires were approached in the book – their oddity and the main character realising something wasn’t exactly right – I can read this or watch this any day. I appreciated how the pacing was just right from Theo seeing the oddities in the town members, trying to figure out what the problem is and then making the plans to deal with the problem. 
 

Other than my character issue, I think why I didn’t rate this higher – even just half a star more) was because I wanted more. Out of the characters, the plot, and the writing. The book is over 350 pages so you’d think I would find the time to like what’s in the book. And I did… but not enough. Yes, I cared about the characters but I wanted to feel like I had to know everything about them. Or that the plot was so good I couldn’t stop reading. I didn’t get all of that – but also I still liked it so I wasn’t too upset as I thought I would have been. 

This is the type of sci-fi I like the most –  casual sci-fi with a lot of “Earth inspiration”. I don’t even really care if it didn’t make sense that there was a Jacuzzi in a hotel room on another planet; or if they spoke exactly like people on Earth do – like give me all of that! I think that’s why I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. If someone told me this was like a “casual” sci-fi rather than a hard (to understand) sci-fi I would’ve read it earlier.

I enjoyed the amount of action that the author wrote in the book. It wasn’t too much and it was easy to follow. Easy to follow for here means as much as I do love science fiction (in any format), I often sit there and go “huh?” when I’m reading a sci-fi book. You know those Tiktok videos where it goes something like “And then we traveled to dhdhgjgj and we spoke to wjergjefe” – because it’s making fun of fantasy books with weird/difficult names? That’s me but with sc-fi. I have no issue reading Fantasy and their names, it’s most of what’s in sci-fi that just has me scratching my brain 😂.

I liked Fox Axford basically just from the start. He was snarky and I love snarky characters. I’m guessing Chani Lynn Feener likes writing a lot of snarky/sarcastic characters because they were in her other book I read recently too (Abandoned Things). She writes them well, I must say! I think sometimes you get those characters who are trying too hard to be sarcastic and you can tell when you have a case of that – which isn’t the case here.

Fox was a fun character to get to know. His motivations were clear and he wore his heart on his sleeve – which I liked to see. He knew what he wanted and he just went for it, sometimes recklessly, but passionately either way. I don’t think I can ever get tired of characters who know what they want and make plans to go for it. Okay, maybe if the character is a full villain, then I’m not so happy. Grey villains get a pass, of course 😄.

I think at the very beginning I didn’t really like Jiro Arc and I was glad that that quickly turned around because he was also such a great character. He didn’t show a lot of his personality until you got to know him so I enjoyed getting to know more of him. I liked that he only showed that he, too, could be snarky but only after you got to know him – which is true for a lot of people, actually.

Shilling is another character that pops up and he’s also just a super fun character. I think the author had some fun creating him and writing him. He originally comes off as carefree but he’s revealed to be much more and I ended up enjoying his character more than I thought I would.

The relationship was very cute and just like in Abandoned Things I was grinning a lot because they’re cute, all right? They matched together well and they had a lot of chemistry – which, of course, is always a good thing. I like it when I can tell the author had fun writing characters/their banter and this is definitely one of those cases.

Dawon and Nova were two characters that while I clocked their personality early on I also would’ve liked to know more about them. I liked the easy banter the two of them had with Fox. Sure, Dawon is Fox’s cousin so they already know each other but all three of them had that easy banter between them – something I love to see in books and never get bored of it.

This had enemies to lovers and I grinned at that because I love the trope! Even though it’s much different in contemporary romances since there isn’t the possibility of them actually killing each other (like in fantasies). Well done to Sullivan for the banter as it was well-written and funny to read. Grace and Noah threw around quips like they were made for it. I’m liking the sunshine/grumpy trope more and more! It’s one that works well and works well with other tropes easily.

Grace brought with her Morty and he was a funny side character. He’s like Carl from Up! I liked Grace because she was funny and I like to laugh with the characters. Most of the trilogy I was laughing with and sometimes at the characters. 

Noah was a bit annoying most of the times. He’s arrogant and thinks that with enough money he can get his way. I think the only brother who doesn’t act like that is Chris. Grace deserves a medal for not slapping him (because I would have).

Their romance was cute – just had to focus on that and not his (annoying) personality. I liked the rivalry they had at the beginning and how it slowly turned to romance – as it does so often. I hope that they manage to keep the competitiveness going in their relationship – obviously in healthy ways because it was cute and I think it works well with them. 

 I gave up on this graphic novel pretty quickly after I started. I’d say about 10 pages if not less? I don’t have a clear answer as to why I chose to not finish the graphic novel because to me, everything about it just didn’t work out for me. 

I didn’t like the art. I don’t know if one would call it quirky or anything but I didn’t care for it. I felt the writing was juvenile and the dialogue to be subpar. I disliked both main characters – in fact Kim was a big reason for my dnf. 

I have The Tempest (the original play). I didn’t know anything about the play before I picked up this book – or at least I tried to pick this up. It was just absolutely terrible, all the way through. I’ve read Samantha Cohoe’s other book, A Golden Fury and that was mostly good.

It’s said to be set on an island in the 1920s – I took that to be a big, big lie because nothing in the book read that way. I would believe it more if you told me it was set in the late 2020s and the main character just lived on the island, away from social media and wifi. It honestly would’ve been more maybe more interesting if it was a modern retelling.

I could not tell you a SINGLE thing about the main character- in fact, I had to literally scroll to find her name in the arc because it’s a first person POV. Sometimes that POV works. Most times it’s difficult to write it in a way where it sounds good. This was most certainly not the case here. And me not remembering her name should definitely tell you something. 

All the characters felt very one-dimensional and very forgetful. I could not tell you a single fact about them – barely even their names. And I read 45% of this – I should remember something without looking at my notes or rereading some pages.

There was sort of a love triangle going on. Mae, Miles, and this 25 year old guy (who are both part of the family) whose name I don’t remember. Mae is like super in love with Miles, even though she only sees him like once or something a year. And he’s rude to everyone Mae included – which is a trope I really dislike. And the other love interest is 25… while she’s 18 at the start of the book. No thank you to either of them. Send them both to the no-no zone on the island, faraway from this EIGHTEEN year old girl who barely knows anyone other than this super rich family. 

I knew this had mixed reviews going in so I wasn’t really surprised when I found that I was on the “not liking it side”. What I didn’t know was how much on that side I was. I only read until about 30% when I finally couldn’t take it anymore and called it quits. I also ranted to a friend about it – which is always fun to do. I understood absolutely nothing of this book. There was no character motivation for anyone, no one had any personality. I couldn’t see anyone improving at all which is also why I chose not to carry on. I can’t stand reading a book if there’s no character development of any type.

There’s also nothing in this book that made sense. Eleanor hasn’t seen or heard from/spoken to her family in eight years but she’s just gonna magically go back home because she had an incident at the school. Then she complains about how her family’s treating her – like yeah that’ll happen when you never see each other but also then she keeps trying to play by their rules, tries to placate them. Why do all of that when they make it perfectly clear that they don’t like you?

Absolutely NO ONE in the book is interesting or redeemable and I would rather jump off a cliff than be in the same room as ANY of them. Eleanor’s mom was the only remotely interesting character and all we know is that she’s in a bathtub. I don’t think we’re even told what type of supernatural creature she is – which is a shame because then I would be a bit more interested.

I found it very funny (in a bad way that made me not like her – Eleanor – even further) is that Eleanor’s grandmother dies, right? And in a really terrible written way too. And she tells her not to invite anyone who isn’t family to the house. So, of course… what Eleanor does next is that she invites basically the entire town to the funeral. At the house that the grandmother doesn’t want any non-family members to be there. Admittedly, I didn’t read far enough to get to the actual funeral, but I knew it from others’ reviews. 

I found it hilarious that Luma, her older sister (about 20 or so reviews have said), was her older sister because I first thought she was about 12/13 – because she acted like that age. I have no idea if she ever went to school with other kids and thus got that type of interaction. I’m not so bothered by characters acting younger or older than they really are but there’s a difference between that and me thinking that a 20 year old was 13.

I think the absolute WORST character is Arthur. He’s said to be middle-aged, bald, and I don’t even know if he’s actually conventionally attractive (not that that’s all important) but literally EVERYONE in the family – from the grandparents to the TEENAGERS – Eleanor whom is said to be 16?? – is utterly infatuated with him. There’s a huge spoiler about him that I won’t say here but uhh he is not what he appears – either at face value or chronologically and that’s all I’ll say. Every time I had to see him on the page I wanted to physically recoil because he was the absolute worst.

I mentioned Luma not acting like her age and Rhys also never acted like his age? He’s in college so I’m guessing about 20. I could not for the life of me imagine he’s that age. Everyone acted like he was this amazing person and super super cool guy and you have me in the corner there’s me in the corner side-eyeing this entire family because why on earth would you want to give a lot of responsibilities to THIS guy – it made entirely no sense whatsoever. 

The bit of the plot I experienced was… well, quite an experience! I don’t think even if I liked the characters I could stomach the plot, or vice versa. Honestly I’m amazed that I managed to get to 30% and kept wanting to read other books in January. And that, my friends, is why it’s totally okay to marks books you aren’t enjoying as “will/did not finish”.