ellaellaellaetc's Reviews (494)

where do I even start😭😭 this was fine, if this was just a fun demigod diaries-esque lil romp I would have read it, had a lil chuckle, said "aw" a few times and then moved in with my life. this does NOT need to be a trilogy. the stakes have literally never been lower but we get multiple times in the book where percy is like "wow.... I might actually die rn...... probably am....... I wish I could tell annabeth I love her......" wdym???? not you're not??????? in the main series and in other sequels there have been times where percy has been the same amount (or worse) of danger and he's just chillin. the stakes are so so so low in this story which would have been fine if it was a random side quest. turning this into a trilogy means that rick is constantly having to force sections where the audience waits with baited breath like omg is he going to survive when of course he is. he is never in more danger than the other books and it really annoys me that the author keeps pretending that he's about to die like we're going to believe it. it was so anti-climatic!!! like I'm not saying that i wish the stakes were higher, i was really happy reading this as just a chill low stakes story but percy keeps having these moments of clarity where he's like :((((((((((((((((((((((((( I'm about to die :((((((((((((( like wtf you're literally fine dude omg. it's just so unearned. 

this was also just dragged out way too long. ik this was middle grade but omg the text was BIG, this could have been a single book with 3 short quests and there was sooooo much filler and unnecessary scenes. I'm assuming this is so that he can release one book for each of the first 3 seasons of the show, I'm afraid mr riordan is selling out 😭😭😭😭

also the plot. what are you actually on about. this was just the main gang doing the most random stuff for no reason. with all the other quests there was natural and logical progression from one thing to another whereas for this one there was so much logic jumping going from point A to point B. Like I did not understand how they kept deciding what to do next it made no sense! Also Annabeth!!! what do you meannnnn. She's the plan girlie but all her plans only worked because of dumb luck!! Usually she has reasoning for why she does random stuff to beat monsters and stuff but she just kept being like "okay maybe if we do this totally random thing it will work" and then it does??? she's just doing random stuff every single time, not using her knowledge of greek mythology or anything. Also it felt so odd that they kept going to school in between everything. like it was so jarring and especially when the climax of the story is about to happen and then Annabeth just goes "okay good luck percy!" and then goes to school?????????? and then she doesn't show up for the rest of the book part from when they hang out and he recounts what happened at the end of the book??????? what do you mean????????????? 

I think what upsets me the most is that i really saw the potential for a really great story. I felt like I was reading a recap the main plot beats that he was trying to hit but then nothing really was driven home. like a draft where he was constantly writing "note: make this make more sense later" etc. I loved the themes of embracing old age and growing up, especially since the audience for these books are people that are my age and reading this because percy jackson is something that they loved when they were kids. but he just introduced these ideas practically out of nowhere and didn't dissect them! I can really see where he was going but then it just didn't happen. If he had a different editor or maybe wasn't rushed with this story, if he had longer to go through and actually decide where he wanted to take this story and make it make more sense it could have been so great and that upsets me. It was just floundering between wanting to be a small scale fun story while also being something massive and dramatic to follow the previous works. 

Despite all this, I still did really enjoy this book. I love percy's humour and it was so lovely to to see interactions between the OG gang again, it really felt like coming home. I thought that them getting caught in a literal nostalgia trap at the beginning of the story was hilarious and rick riordan is amazing at coming up with fun quirks for all the gods that still manage to seem fresh and original even after 20 years. I hope that when he writes the next ones he understands the place and identity of the novels and is able to give them the justice they deserve because these books and these characters really mean so much to so many people and I want these new ones to be good so badly. Anyway, if you're a fan I recommend reading this anyway just because it really is so much fun being in percy's head again, while I did not really enjoy the plot, at the end of the day we're all reading this book to see our fave characters acting like themselves and being friends and rick definitely gave us that! 

As you might have seen I read this book while sitting next to my sister as they also read the book. We stopped after every chapter to discuss and we had so much fun sharing our live reactions, it was like watching a tv show or movie with someone! Reading is usually an activity I do by myself and especially with this account and sharing my love for reading with my friends I've been able to experience and talk about books with people way more which is just such a lovely activity. I first read percy jackson on recommendation from my friend in 2015 and then I loved it so much that I forced jacinta to read it straight after me. jacinta and I have shared our love for media many times after this (jacinta forced me to watch voltron lmao and then I forced them to read/watch anne of green gables/anne with an e, they forced me to watch julie and the phantoms and then i forced them to read six of crows and i am also the reason jacinta knows far too much about taylor swift). but Percy Jackson is where all of this started!!!!!!! Sharing books I love with other people and sharing excitement is such one of favourite things ever I am literally the opposite of a gatekeeper. If i like something you're definitely going to know about it and I love it when people share the media that makes them excited with me. So this experience was definitely enhanced so much by being able to share this with jacinta so thank you for that cinty <3 This is definitely going to drum up hype for the show and I'm so so excited for dec 20!!!!!. 3.25 stars 

okay okay!!! I liked it!!! this is not what I expected from this at all but I ended up really loving this!! I can't really express what I liked about it but I did😭😭 I don't tend to like books about war/set during wars but I think especially this is based on the author's actual experience I ended up really connecting with this book. it was an extremely depressing but very real look at humanity but we really need these works of fiction in the world ! i understand why this is a classic and studied so much. also thank you to my amazing friend thomas for letting me borrow his copy!! he tabbed it for me (yellow is funny parts, green for important details, purple for deaths etc.) and he also underlined words that he didn't know the meaning for and wrote the definitions on the side😭😭😭 that was very very helpful thank you thomas 😭😭❤️also I think the taylor swift song I will connect this book to is so it goes... iykyk 4.5 stars 

interesting, this is going on my slowly growing list of books about very intense queer and/or queer coded codependent and extremely toxic friendships/relationships! fun! i thought this was fine but by the end I was a bit sick of it, I think the act of her literally forgetting what happened on the night of the shooting and then randomly remembering at the end was a little cheap and unbelievable and I feel like she could have achieved the same effect by just not revealing what actually happened at the end??? I think the character of jack also was just way too perfect and itmade him not feel like a real character, I get that we're seeing the story through remy's eyes but still. despite me not really loving it as a mystery novel, I thought this was a magnificent breakdown of a toxic friendships, you see the entire friendship from the moment they meet until the end over the course of a year and it is really believable. Elise is never super cartoonishly which is what I was afraid would happen tbh. I really felt for Remy and I empathised a lot with Elise even though she was so insane lmao and I think the book did a really good job showing how it wasn't Remy's fault but it also how Elise acted this way because she was failed so many times. anyway. 3.5 stars

 wow! I'm honestly floored. I don't think I would have picked this up if my dad hadn't bought it for himself on kindle and off-handedly mentioned that it was good (we share an account so I have access to all his books). I walked into this not expecting much but I learnt a lot and this had a lot of heart! it was totally different to what I was expecting and offered so more much empathy than what I have grown to expect from non-fiction. This is a truly outstanding book and I have no notes. please pick this up! 5 stars. 

oh emily henry. I loved beach read. I went full body insane over book lovers. I felt repulsed and disgusted by you and me on vacation. I was worried about happy place because I had a "completely love it or completely hate it" relationship with miss henry but I ended up just feeling meh about happy place and I didn't particularly care for it. It just felt like the whole book was meandering and didn't really have a solid plot and the characters did not feel very real to me (which we established as very important!!). 

I didn't really get the feeling that harriet and wyn had been together for like 8 years or however long it had been, it felt more to me that it was only one year-ish and I think that removed the gravity of the situation. I also found the friends to be annoying (particularly sabrina and parth) and I fear that I am now seeing emily henry for what she is. a millennial white lady😭😭 in the past she has had criticism for having a lack of diversity which I can understand but also I didn't really care about. sometimes white people just wanna write about white people and at this point in my life I'd prefer they do that instead of forcefully adding random characters or colour/LGBT+ people in an obvious attempt to seem more diverse. it's hard because there isn't really a solution to the problem cause if someone course corrects I'm like damn it's so obvious but if someone doesn't change then it's like wow they didn't even listen 🙄🙄 so they literally can't win in my eyes. idk I don't wanna see emily henry unpack immigrant family generational trauma or shit like that in her romance novels lmao but I also can't help but roll my eyes when she's like, "here's kimmy! my strong black lesbian woman best friend character!" like okay whatever 🙄🙄🙄 

anyway, apart from that, I thought this book was fine and I really resonated with harriet's struggles (was a bit too real tbh😳🥹) but I simultaneously thought that the friendships were too much in the spotlight and the book should have focused more on the relationship but I also wish that the friendship between the main three girls was the focus of the story and the relationship was the sideplot. usually emily henry blends the side plots and relationship drama really well however I think that with this one, neither the relationships nor the side plots were done well and I think I would have liked the book better if the book put less focus on one and instead we got a deeper look at the friendships/relationship instead of being relatively surface level for both. definitely going to read funny story (her next book) once it comes out but if I don't love it I think I'm gonna stop autoreading miss henry cause that'll mean more misses than hits which feels more significant when the hits were the first ones I read😅😅😅 anyway, 2.75 stars

miss armfield you've done it again!! i tend to not enjoy short story collections because I need a bit more time to invest myself in the story but I decided to read this because I recently read julia armfield's debut novel our wives under the sea and it was stunning! the writing in this was just as I expected, so intelligently and visually written and never felt forced. my favourite story was the first one and like all short story collections, there were some duds. the first couple were definitely the best. i found this to be very similar in tone and writing style to nightbitch by rachel yoder except this one's writing is a bit more accessible and because it's shorter stories it doesn't drag as much as nightbitch. I wouldn't recommend this if you don't like magical realism or stories that don't really flesh out the world you're in, julia armfield writes for vibes and not plot so make sure you go in with the right expectations (the expectation that the weird and very strange stuff happening will not be explained, you just have to go along with it to enjoy). i do think I enjoyed our wives under the sea a bit more though so I would recommend reading that first if you're thinking of getting into julia armfield! 4.25 stars

miss tjr what are we gonna do with you😭😭 I haven't really enjoyed her past couple works :///////// this makes me upset because I want to love it really do but like it's not really doing it for me anymore. I'll just say that the author is really lucky that I love watching tennis and find it very very exciting to read about, I loved all the strategy talks and wow when they were at the slams/at training I really felt that energy!!! i however definitely wouldn't have gotten as into it if I wasn't already super excited about tennis lmao but she was able to get me quite invested! however I feel like tjr's books (I've read seven husbands, daisy jones, one true loves, malibu rising and now carrie soto - read in that order) all have a very similar tone and overall storyline of people growing up and rising to fame in difficult situations that gets stale now that I've read it 4/5 times like she's just telling the same story over and over again and I'm getting bored. I found the plot to be quite predictable and I didn't really like many of the plot choices/relationships between characters in this book.

i don't think bo should have been a big character, I understand why he needed to be there but I hated that this book had romance in it it took away from the story idc what the author was trying to say about her finding peace or trusting people or whatever. I also don't like that the dad died, I don't really think it served it's purpose that well and when he died I literally rolled my eyes even though I loved his character, I was just like ugh fr? we're doing THAT?

the agent character was so forced, I hate when these books shove in a random strong poc woman character to be a friend for the main character but like lowkey nothing really happens lmao. idk the message of this book just felt kind of hollow but I will give credit where credit is due and she was really able to capture the energy and get me invested during the matches. if anyone has read other books that include tennis please comment below I want more!!! 2.5 stars

idk man the first one was more exciting and I didn't even like that one that much. I think I'd rather watch the movies cause at least ben barnes is there🤤🤤 a lot of the exciting stuff in this story was told in flashbacks or was a bit anti-climatic and damn the allegory for religion is such so so strong and really rubbed me the wrong way, idk man😅😅😅 2.5 stars 

I think this is another right book right time situations!! the humour in this book is very observational (I thought the humour was very similar to a sit-com and I found out halfway through reading that the author was a writer for schitt's creek, lmao). anyway, I loved the humour and just how real this character felt. I could relate to her on a lot of levels and see her going through everything was wildly entertaining as well as heartfelt. this is also a book where the setting is very present and it was really fun to read about toronto when I was just there a few months ago!! I recognised a lot of the places/areas/streets she was talking about! I think this will fall flat for a lot of people but it really worked for me! 4.25 stars