dbguide2's Reviews (863)

Never Have I Ever by Karen McManus – Barely 2 stars. Is she just known for plot twists? I liked this but it didn’t grip me and it’s a short story! It should quickly grab my attention. It didn’t give me enough of the characters for me to like/dislike anyone.

Like Before by Maurene Goo – 2 stars. It started off moderately okay and didn’t improve. I didn’t like the characters and found the writing and dialogue to be a bit wooden. It had a cute concept.

Old Rifts and Snowdrifts by Kayla Whaley – 5 stars. This was so super cute! I loved Owen and Eleanor and the story setting as well. Loved seeing the disability rep and the very casualness about it too, you know?
Kiss the Boy by Amanda Joy – 4 stars. This was cute! I don’t know which school would allow boys and girls to sleep next to each other 😅. I’m not really a fan of bets about kissing especially when there seems to be a time limit on the kissing. Not everyone kisses another person in high school –hi! Me for one! So I don’t know, the whole idea of putting pressure on a kiss is a miss for me. But I liked the story enough to go for a 4 star rating.

*Creature Capture by Laura Silverman – 5 stars! I really loved it! So cute and the and the Pokemon Go type app – and I want it now! I really love that there wasn’t a focus on love and relationships.


Shark Bait by Tiffany D. Jackson – 3 stars. It was all over the place. I liked the open ending but that was about it.

A Place to Start by Nina LaCour – 4 stars. This was cute. It was confusing at first because it felt like I was being thrown into the middle with nothing.

When You Bring a Dog to Prom by Anna Meriano – 2 stars. I didn’t like the main character. But then again I also don’t like the trope of ‘in love with best friend’s sibling’. I would’ve actually preferred to read this from a different character’s pov. Probably Dodge, they were my favourite.

Missing by Kathleen Glasgow – 1 star. Between the absolute awful person and friend Dorsey and Kate, the really bad sister – it wasn’t good. I also didn’t like how Kate seemed to act like the grief didn’t affect her sister too, when it totally did. Dorsey wasn’t very kind about the grief either. And also – can we not anymore with the horror stories and abandoned mental hospitals? It felt like they weren’t taking it seriously enough – like they didn’t care enough that there were actual people as patients.

What About Your Friends by Brandy Colbert – 2 stars. For a good part of the story I was confused as to whether they were in high school or college because it felt extremely high school too. Granted, they were only a year out of high school; so I can’t fault them too much for that. I would have enjoyed a take on “I don’t actually want to go to college, let me to do something else”.

*Under Our Masks by Julian Winters – 5 stars. It’s superheroes! Always enjoy Julian’s books! He’s definitely an auto-read author to me and I’m so excited to see him branch out into fantasy work – I know he does love superheroes and I could see that love in the short story.

The Ghost of Goon Creek by Francesca Zappia – 4 stars. This was really cute! I did, however, feel like there wasn’t enough of the characters’ personality to differentiate between the dialogue. But I really liked the concept and it was very cute.

The writing feels very juvenile – not like it’s meant to be an adult book. I don’t like the main character and how she views and talks about everyone. And I think there was a fatphobic comment? Who knows what else there might be?

By the writing was juvenile, I meant there were lines like: So much cursing! So much yelling! And in shouty all-caps.

This book felt more like a nonfiction true crime book/podcast/documentary than an actual thriller. Even though I don’t really read/listen/watch them, I just didn’t get the feeling that this was meant to be a book? Maybe I would’ve liked it more had it been a podcast or a fictional documentary.

Also, as much as I don’t really want to say this – Paul Adams was not an interesting character. It was like waiting paint dry, if I may be so bold as to say.

I felt like this book kept hinting at something supernatural, like the murders or the murderer were something supernatural, but looking at some spoiler reviews tell me that’s not the case. And it just, I don’t know, feels like North tried to push that ‘is it supernatural, is it not?’ angle in a way to keep people reading? If a book is supernatural or includes a supernatural plot/characters – I want to know. I don’t want to ‘keep reading for the suspense’.

Did not finish at 12%

A Harry Potter reference. In a 2021 release. Maybe there’s more. I wouldn’t know. I wanted to like this book. It just, I don’t know, didn’t feel real to me? The characters and plus the tv show factor?

Like it’s apparently very popular but… she’s not popular at school? And I know it’s because she doesn’t want to be, but I don’t know. I kind of expected something like when Mia was revealed to be the Princess of Genovia (in The Princess Diaries) and everyone was suddenly claiming to be her friend to the cameras.

It also features the friends to lovers trope, which is not a favourite trope of mine. I rarely read and enjoy these ones. I think I really need to check to see if the trope is friends to lovers, because I rarely enjoy those.

This was a very quick dnf – I chose to mark it as dnf at four percent… that’s a very quick choice. I didn’t realise this was a spin-off sequel/prequel series to the original Trylle trilogy. It wasn’t really marketed properly.

I’ve only read the first book like years ago, I can’t remember if I liked it or not. The very very little I read of this didn’t really impress me much?
The formatting was a bit off as well. Several times if a book started with the letters f and i (five, first etc) it would disappear. So it wouldn’t say five but ve, not first but rst. I was able to get what the sentence was, but it kept taking me out of the story, which also led to me wanting to dnf.

I was really hoping I’d love this and read it as quickly as everyone else is loving and reading it. Unfortunately, I could quickly tell that this was definitely not the case. Straight from the beginning I didn’t like the writing style. It’s too awkward and Julie uses too many uncontracted sentences (it is on the table instead of it’s on the table).

In my opinion, if you do not contract, you tend to be more formal and uncontracted sentences are more often seen in fantasy novels and less so in young adult novels. I tend to sometimes not contract my sentences, but that’s because I tend to write a bit more formal at times. So therefore, even though I use uncontracted sentences and often did when I was younger, most teenagers do not. It felt weird reading them.

I wanted to be sad and feel the same way Julie did but I couldn’t get past the writing style and feel the same way as everyone else. The transitions from flashbacks to normal was also not written well, in my opinion.