3.5 stars

Full of flawed, foolish people doing flawed, foolish things. I was expecting more of a suspense/thriller type story, whereas I ended up getting more of a family drama. It felt longer than it needed to be. I think I would’ve given the book 4 stars if it hadn’t been about 100 pages too long. That being said, I do think it was well-written and an interesting story.

I’ve seen several reviews say that this felt like Middle Grade instead of YA, and that’s why it doesn’t get as high of a rating. I honestly don’t understand this justification for a low rating, especially since most of the people complaining are fully-grown adult people...reading YA. Now, I’m not saying fully-grown adult people can’t read YA. That would be very hypocritical, considering I AM one. But I do find it strange that someone would knock stars from a rating because the book (in their opinion) skews younger than whatever they think of as ‘Young Adult’. And honestly, there are books labeled YA that have no business being marketed that way, so maybe that’s what they’re basing their opinion on.

Sorry, rant over.

Anyway, I personally enjoyed this book quite a bit. I love what Emily Lloyd Jones is doing in fantasy. Both with this book and also The Hearts We Sold, we’ve got interesting, flawed characters just trying to make their way through life the best they can, to varying degrees of success. I love that this, like THWS, is a stand-alone. Not EVERY fantasy book needs to be part of a 3, 5, 15 book series. It doesn’t have do exist in a universe with 5 other SERIES of books. Sometimes it’s okay to tell a story in less than 350 pages and have a beginning, middle, and end...

Wow, I am snarky today.

I loved the Welsh inspiration behind this story and the infusion of Welsh culture and mythology. This book had atmosphere for DAYS.

I also loved the characters and find it amazing that the author was able to give them such depth in such a short length of time.

One super nit-picky thing...the number of times Ellis says something ‘mildly’. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it, but it happened twice in the same page. I noticed 6 different times where we’re told that he says something ‘mildly’. It got a little annoying.

Other than that, I really enjoyed this book and can’t wait for her next.

I nearly DNF'd (Did Not Finish) this book after the first chapter. I was bored by Augustine's story and the writing wasn't at all compelling. It felt very clinical in a way. There's a lot of exposition without much emotion/development from the character.
Also, Augustine reminded me of Ove from 'A Man Called Ove' in the way that he is this cantankerous, miserable old man that we're supposed to love in spite of his grumpiness, but I found really off-putting. In both cases, we find out that they aren't grumpy because they're old men, but that they've always been anti-social (and in Augustine's case, bordering on sociopathic.) There are passages throughout the book where I was compelled by his story, but then we would learn something about him that just made me dislike him even more than I had before.
I much preferred Sully's story, but she isn't exactly a paragon of humanity either. At least that part of the story had multiple characters, and dialogue.
The twist that they are father and daughter and that the child he finds is a) imaginary, and b) a manifestation of the daughter he never knew was something I'd worked out relatively early on. And honestly, the odds that two of the last people able to communicate with one another via radio in the entire solar system just happen to be long-lost father/daughter is a little ridiculous. It definitely stretches my ability to suspend disbelief.
Also, the fact that we never learn why all communication has ceased is a little annoying. I have to wonder if the author even has an idea as to why. If there was a war or pandemic, it wouldn't make sense for all of the people in the Arctic to be evacuated at the beginning of the book. Evacuated to what? Certain death? And why wouldn't they tell the people working in the Arctic what was going on? Saying that there won't be a return trip isn't an explanation, and it felt like the author had her characters be purposefully vague in a situation where it didn't make sense. If you are someone who needs a story to be wrapped up, skip this one. It's very open-ended and has zero resolution.
All that said, I would LOVE for this to be made into a movie. I actually think it would work far better as a cinematic experience than it did as a literary experience.
At the end of the day, I am glad I continued past the first chapter, but I don't think this book is for everyone.

One last thing, the audiobook for this didn't work for me. The voice actors had good voices, but they were very dry, especially the man narrating Augustine's part. Part of that is to do with the dry writing style, but it felt like he was reading me a text book. I listened to the audiobook while I was doing chores and then switched to the physical copy when I was done and found myself much more engaged by what was going on in the second half of the book. I think if I'd continued with the audiobook, my rating may have been lower. Just goes to show that a bad audiobook can harm a decent book as much as a phenomenal audiobook can boost a mediocre book.

At the risk of being mauled by the fierce defenders of this book...I didn't really like this. I wanted to. I don't read books I don't think I'm going to like, and the fact that this is considered a children's classic and I hadn't already read it felt like something that needed to be amended.

I decided to listen to this on audiobook yesterday so I could also do some housework. First of all, Hope Davis does a phenomenal job with this audiobook. She gives each of the characters distinct voices, and I never had trouble figuring out who was speaking in a given scene. If I was just rating the audiobook for its quality in production and voice acting, I'd give it a 4 or 5. If you do want to pick this book up, I highly recommend the audiobook.

That being said, the audiobook also highlights some of the issues I had with this book, specifically the writing and dialogue. There is a lot of repetition in this book of words and phrases that are vague. It, evil, thing, darkness, dark thing, etc. were repeated ad nauseum with little description to accompany them. There's a scene at the end

where Meg just repeats to her brother variations of 'I love you' for several minutes that reminded me of the scene in Singin' in the Rain where Gene Kelly's character makes up his own dialogue and just repeats, "I love you, I love you, I LOVE YOU!" over and over again and is ridiculed for it. This was just as cringy.

It's also true that by the end of this very short book I was just ready for it to end, so my patience was close to zero with the soft, vague language.

It's too bad, because I enjoyed the beginning of the book well enough. I was interested in what was going on with these characters, and liked the idea of them going off to find their father. But I didn't end up liking the characters. Charles Wallace, who apparently is everyone's fave, is annoying and it feels like he's just there as a contrivance to keep what little plot there actually is in this book moving along. The other characters also lacked depth and I had a difficult time connecting with any of them or caring about their journey.

As other critical reviews have stated, there are some pretty blatant anti-Communist rhetoric shoved into this book, which I suppose isn't surprising considering the time in which this book was written, but I feel like it didn't need to be so obvious. It felt like she wanted to hit the reader over the head with the message that Communism=bad. We get it, okay. We get it.

I won't be continuing with the series.

TW:

Sexual assault (not graphic, mostly alluded to); fat-phobic comments)

I am so bummed about this book. I have had such good luck with Book of the Month books for the most part, and this one sounded amazing. Cassie, the protagonist, is a female firefighter, a relatively rare occurrence and something I was really intrigued by. I don't think I've ever read another book with a firefighter as a main character. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to the potential I felt like it had in the beginning.

First of all, Cassie is really hard to root for. Along with being a firefighter, she is also a paramedic, and she loves her job. She's also very good at her job, something that we are told and shown over and over (and over and over) again. Everything that Cassie does, she excels at. Pullups? She can do 20, which is, according to Cassie, "a lot, even for a guy." Basketball? She can out-shoot any man on the court. Keeping calm in a crisis? She keeps her head even when grown men collapse weeping at her feet(okay, that last part is a little exaggerated, but not by much). The point is, she's perfect at everything. Everything...except being a girl! She's just not into hair and fashion and makeup and all those "girly" things. Need someone to jump into burning room full of orphans and save every last one? Cassie's your girl. Just don't ask her to toast you a bagel, because she's such a terrible cook! Get it, everybody? We're subverting gender stereotypes here!!
In reality, all this accomplishes is to induce a lot of eye rolling from me. She's not just good at her job. She's better than every other person (man) she works with, even the ones who have been doing it for decades longer than her. She's got the not-like-other-girls thing down pat. All the way down to some 'real love doesn't exist' nonsense that she insists upon throughout most of the book.
There's an obligatory makeover scene that Cassie insists is not actually a makeover scene:

It's important to note that this was not a makeover moment like some teen movie where the homely girl becomes a swan. I wasn't homely before this moment, and I wouldn't be homely later, when I clamped myself back into my oxen-harness sports bra and Dickies utility pants. This wasn't a better version of me I was seeing the the mirror--just a different one. It was like I was meeting an unknown part of myself for the first time. The flouncy part.

So she tells us it's NOT like a scene from a teen movie, but then she is completely unrecognizable later on to people who met her all dressed up. It's just so tropey and juvenile.

The romance had some cute moments, but it suffered from so many ridiculous tropes and contrivances that I just didn't connect with them. First of all, this book is one big pile of insta-love. They see each other, they fall for each other. Then there is the contrivance that keeps them from dating and her pretty much ignoring him for the majority of the book. They both work as firefighters, you see, and it is Against The Rules for them to date. Not an actual, written rule or part of their contracts or anything. It's just some unspoken rule that exists to keep these two apart for...reasons? I just didn't feel the connection between them, and didn't understand why they liked each other beyond the love-at-first-sight.

I also wanted more from her relationship with her mother. When her mother reaches out to her and asks her to come help her through an illness, Cassie begrudgingly agrees, and only because she is on the verge of losing her job if she doesn't relocate. She and her mother haven't been close since her mother left the family on Cassie's 16th birthday, the same night a Very Bad Thing happened between her and an older boy at her school.
Cassie spends the first half of the book ignoring and resenting her mother (which I can understand. The idea that a mother would leave her daughter and husband on her daughter's birthday is awful, and this book tries to soften it up in a way that was totally unsuccessful for me. I'm sorry, but she sabotaged her relationship with her daughter for a man. It doesn't matter that the man was ill. They shouldn't have been together in the first place. And don't even get me started on the mother claiming that she 'never cheated' just because there wasn't any kissing or sleeping together. The mother was a cheater, plain and simple. She left her husband and daughter to be with another man. THAT IS CHEATING.
Aaaaaaanyway...She spends the first half holding a grudge against her mother, and on a dime their relationship changes and it's like all is forgotten. There's some schmaltzy passages on forgiveness that just don't cut it for me. Don't get me wrong, I wanted Cassie and her mother to work through their past and become close, but it didn't feel like an organic shift in their relationship to bring them closer. It felt very plot contrived.

My biggest issue with this book is that I don't understand the author's intention. We are told in the beginning of the book that male firefighters are a bunch of sexist pigs who will never accept her, what with her long hair, boobs, and emotions. She is told by her captain (who is herself female) that the only chance she has to succeed is to make them 'less aware' that she is a girl. Among the list of demands she give Cassie are:
Don't wear makeup, perfume, or lady-scented deoderant
Don't paint your nails
Don't wear jewelry
Cut your hair, or keep it back. Don't take it down or shake it or play with it. EVER
Don't giggle
Don't laugh too loud
Don't touch anybody for any reason
Don't carry a purse
Don't use the upper registers of your voice, but don't allow too much vocal fry either.
Don't sing, EVER
If you make eye contact, make it straight on, like a predator.
Don't ever admit when you don't understand. Figure it out, LIKE A MAN
If you get an injury, ignore it. Pain is for the weak.
Don't get offended by anything they (the men) might say or do.
Don't be girly
Don't talk too much
Don't have feelings

There are more, but this review is already ridiculously long.

So yeah, we're told basically that these guys are all douchebags stuck in the 1950s. And when she first meets them, there is a transition because their firehouse has never had a female firefighter. They don't have a ladies or gender-neutral bathroom. There's no place for her to sleep in the bunkhouse. The men refrain from telling dirty jokes and swearing when she's around. Oh, the humanity.
But for the most part, they aren't bad people. The author throws in sexist things here and there just to show how unenlightened these men are compared to her station back home, but really, they don't seem that different. They both employ mostly men, they both like to play practical jokes on one another, but at the end of the day, they are filled with people who are there for one another.
With the exception, of course, of the one person who hates that Cassie is there and starts stalking her. Because this book didn't have enough flipping subplots...lets add one more. Yes, one of the firefighters Cassie works with begins to stalk her and harass her for a really stupid reason. This leads to the really stupid conclusion of the book, which couldn't have been any more far-fetched and melodramatic if it had been a Hallmark movie. I won't get into specifics, but just know that Cassie is perfect and the smartest person in the room and everyone else dims in comparison.

There's one more thing that bugged me, but I couldn't fit it into another part of the review. There is a character Cassie works with at the firehouse named Tom McElroy (not that you need to remember his name, because he's never mentioned again, except as 'the fat one').

When she is describing the men, she says, "Down in Texas, everybody had been robust and tan. Here, they looked like ashtrays. And one, McElroy, was fat. Much fatter than in his photo. Genuinely fat. Heart-attack fat."

You know what, fuck that. Fuck this book for that line alone. If I hadn't been on a camping trip with nothing else to read I would've DNF'd this. As it is, I don't see myself picking up another one of this author's books in the future. What a waste of a beautiful cover.

3.5 Stars
I did enjoy this book quite a bit, but parts of it felt a little surface-level to me. I wish the scenes in the past had been more fleshed out. I didn't understand why each of the siblings was so obsessed with Dylan. I mean, he seemed like a nice enough guy, I suppose, but I didn't really feel like I knew him at all. Same goes for Quinn's relationship with her siblings before

Dylan's accident.

There are a couple of moments that show their closeness with one another, but not as much as I would've liked. It made the scenes in the present a little lackluster for me as far as those relationships went.

That being said, I loved her relationship with her grandmother, and I also liked her friends quite a bit. The romance was cute, but not a driving force of the story, so I think that even people who don't like romance could enjoy it.

There did seem to be a couple hints of magical realism in this book: the sea monster, the blueberry bushes that produce fruit year-round...but for the most part this was a straight-up contemporary. Honestly, the blueberry thing just felt a little out of place.

I'd definitely be interested in checking out more from this author in the future.

I've read this book several times in the past. I hadn't read it for a few years, but I'm re-reading all my Nora Roberts books this year, and it was this series turn.
This may have been the first Nora Roberts book I ever read. I don't recall exactly, but it was definitely among the first. I loved this series, and this book got a full five stars for me at the point that I rated it on GR.

That being said, at this point in my life, my feelings on this book have definitely changed. There are things about the romance that just aren't the best, and at the end of the day I wasn't compelled to pick this up and continue with it. I would have a good time while I was reading it, but when I set it down I didn't really think about it.

I am going to continue with the series, because as I said, that's a goal of mine for 2019, but there are definitely other series I prefer to this one.

I put off reading this book for quite awhile after I read and thoroughly disliked The Hating Game. The books aren't by the same authors, but the premise is similar for each book: hate to love office romance with two characters who constantly sabotage each other in order to keep their jobs.
I'm not sure why it didn't work for me in The Hating Game (which is definitely a minority opinion) but absolutely did work in this book. Whatever the reason, I ended up thoroughly enjoying this story.

I really like that we see these characters interact before their rivalry begins. Maybe that is he reason I prefer it. We see the potential there for fun and laughs and sexy times. And even when they're in the middle of their little war, it's full of relatively harmless pranks instead of a lot of hurtful verbal jabs. We see that both of these characters feel conflicted about what they're doing, even as they continually one-up the other. And I like that they don't wait the entire length of the book to get out of their own way and talk to each other. As childish as some of their antics become, it never gets to a point where I thought that they were past the point of no return. Their banter is great, and I love that once they figure out how to work together, they have each other's backs.

I think this book also tackled the issue of sexism in the workplace in a way that felt real and relatable. I know many women, myself included, have worked in professional environments with men just like Brad. I can only imagine it being exacerbated in the entertainment industry.

I liked that both Evie and Carter had strong friendship groups, and those characters had unique and layered personalities. It just made everything seem that much more authentic.

I've enjoyed most of the other books I've read by Christina Lauren, but this one has got to be among my favorites. I flew through it and now want to read all the adult romance.

I think the only thing keeping this from being a full five stars is the fact that it was nearly 600 pages and I'm not sure it needed to be that long. Although saying that, I enjoyed every second of the book.

I read this book in one day, and have zero regrets about it. I was completely sucked in from page one. I haven't read Les Miserables (aside from the first 150 mind-numbing pages. I really want to go back to it someday, but I think I'll listen to it on audio, and there is no chance I re-read the portion I already read.) but I do know the foundation of the story and have seen the movie adaptations, so I know the main cast of characters. I enjoyed picking out the nods to the source material. Les Miserables in space makes so much sense to me, I'm surprised it hasn't been done before (although, it probably has and I just don't know about it.) I thought the authors did a nice job staying true to the source material while creating a wholly unique and interesting world.

This first book is absolutely a foundational book. I don't say that as a criticism, just a statement of fact. We are introduced to the characters, the world(s), the social structure, and the political intrigue. I really enjoyed all of those aspects, but if you are someone who needs a lot of action in your YA sci-fi, I could see how this might not quite fit for you. I do think that subsequent books will be more plot-driven, as this book did begin to ramp up in the last third or so.

As I previously stated, I can see people being put off by the length of this book, but I would urge you if you're at all intrigued to pick it up and try a couple of chapters, because this book flies by.