ellaellaellaetc's Reviews (494)

 well! put of everything I could say about this book, the title is very accurate. the women definitely do talk. like that's literally all that this book was. very very bold of the author is write a book called women talking and then have a male narrator:/// i was very unimpressed by this book. if y'all criticise sally roomey för preaching her ideology through her characters conversations with each other you haven't seen anything yet. this was less preaching and more just 200 pages of women discussing their views on religion and justice and I'm turn showing the read different people's views??? idk. while I understand the need for this story (especially because it was written as a response to true events) I was extremely bored by it and this was one of the least compelling books I've read in a while. also the random romance that wasn't romance throughout the whole thing with August and ona did not contribute at all and was frustrating to read about, as if you're gonna have a man be the narrator and have him talk about how great ona is and how he wants to marry her or whatever. boring! 

 oh word???????? i was low-key planning on giving this book 5 stars but then I read some reviews and they all made some good points lol. i actually started reading this book last year after I told my dad that I was enjoying my economics classes at uni, I had to stop about a quarter of the way in though because reading was meant to be my chill time and then I was spending my chill study breaks reading more about my course material😭😭 I'm so glad I picked it up again cause this was extremely extremely interesting and I highly encourage you to pick this up particularly if you don't usually read nonfiction but you enjoy niche informative podcasts. i agree with what a lot of reviews said in that this book wasn't really about economics and that it was about applying statistical analysis creatively to situations that seem straight forward. this gave me such a different perspective of correlation vs causation (a deeper look) and low-key the main theme of this book was: literally nothing effects your life other than your social class/family wealth growing up, everything else is just chance which is so slay🤪🤪 i think the authors did an excellent job of making interesting claims and connections and then breaking them down and explaining them in a really accessible way and really encourages out of the box and critical thinking. this was published quite a while ago and it's really interesting to see some of his predictions play out (eg. some of the most popular future baby names actually kind of fit! and it will be very interesting with the overturning of roe v wade on the crime rate in the US in 15 years, quite upsetting, however.) this was a very enjoyable read and these authors worked very well together (despite them putting each other on pedestals and there was never a single bit of criticism on the theories that wasn't added in as a like "look at the haters💅💅" type of way) and this is definitely going to be a book that sticks with me for a while!

 guys.......🤭🤭🤭🤭🤭 this was actually not okay I loved this. okay okay okay so many many thoughts. bad stuff first. this is very clearly the authors first book, while I loved the messages in this book, they were not subtle at all and at first I was like oh maybe this is just geared towards a younger audience and then the characters started fucking non-stop like 20% of the way into this book so I was like okay this book is for adults. speaking of i did not realise how much smut there would be in this book, I assumed it would be a cute romance with like a few scenes at the end at least based on the cute cover but oh my🤭🤭 this had me blushing and I have been revitalised from my smut trauma from chloe brown.
also there were just way too many characters in this to follow on omg. i really liked the device of them having to do speed dating icebreaker (get it????) games at the start so that Anastasia (and in turn the audience) could get to know the hockey team. but despite this, most of the side characters that weren't aaron, lola or henry were low-key the same person in my head the whole time. also this is not the books fault but the main character is called Anastasia but people call her stassie but when I listened to the audiobook it sounded like stasi and I had to read a book in high school called stasiland which I literally hated and sometimes hearing her nickname made me think of that book, bummer.
okay onto things that I loved. this felt so real to me!!! this was a very unconventional romance book in terms of plot structure, a lot of people take issue with this but I really liked that they got together quite early on and did the whole fwb thing that turned into something more and that the characters (let's not kid ourselves Anastasia) were/was so good and communicating!!! nothing going under the radar everything is laid out on the table which I love. i thought I saw where this book was going a few times and I was surprised each time, there were lots of moments where a lot of authors would have copped out and did a cheap 3rd act break up or not give Aaron any nuance or add a stupid miscommunication bit and have a dumb fight or make Ryan a dick and I'm so glad that the author did not do this!!

(I feel like they broke Ryan and Olivia up so that he can have his own stand alone cause these books are going to be a series, I NEED a Ryan spin off) 

  also the smut🤤🤤 slay. 
this book really exceeded my expectations cause I was just looking for a fun romance and I got so much more, I can see the markings of a new favourite romance author coming my way, she just needs a bit more refinement, I'm so excited to read what hannah grace does next! also i read this book with a friend (more like she finished it in one or two days and then I updated her on my progress) which definitely enhanced the experience, I'm definitely going to start doing this more often because being able to scream about this book in real time with someone who is going through the exact same thing was literally magical. also in this book Anastasia reads the kiss quotient (which she doesn't mention by name but omg I recognised it from a mile away and I love that added detail cause I literally also love that book 😭😭 SLAY SLAY SLAY 

 so first when I was reading this I was like oh this is a little boring but maybe there will be an interesting message to it and then past the 50% mark it go so much worse, not only was it more boring, but it made less sense and the message was terrible/didn't make sense with the story? this wasn't an actively bad book but it was so forgettable and just so mid 

I have been reading up a storm over the past few days!!! i loved the concept of this book slightly more than I liked the execution. this is basically a book about a girl named Molly who, whenever she bleeds, a clone of hers forms and the clone tried to kill her. that's so intriguing!!!!!! i really liked molly's character and her relationship with her parents and I like how you learn about mollys world by her own curiosity. however, (idk if this was just me being a bit dumb and maybe even reading too quick) but I felt like a lot of this book didn't explain itself well, I couldn't picture what was happening a lot of the time and I didn't understand a few vital points of the book when they were first explained if that makes sense, I liked the story but I feel like further editing would have made it easier to understand (or maybe that was me being silly and losing my reading comprehension) despite this, i loved it!! apparently there's a sequel but it doesn't have the best reviews (not bad but people seem to like the first one a lot better) and this also works as a stand alone so I'm not going to read the sequel 

 i finally completed the emily henry trifecta!!! and........ i was not impressed :( literally nothing makes me more sad to announce this guys). i LOVE emily henry but this did not do it for me. tbh I did not see the need for these two to be together. i didn't like the whole "it's always been you" thing that miss henry has for all of her books but I didn't like it in this one because he was in many relationships and just liked her the whole time. i was rooting for these two to be FRIENDS again and I didn't buy that they loved each other this whole time. also i didn't like most of the humour in this book, it felt like it was trying way too hard to be funny and it didn't land for most of the time and just felt very millennial funny (derogatory). regardless, i am still so so so excited for happy place, her new novel that comes out in a few months and I still have high hopes, I'm more disappointed in myself that I didn't enjoy this 

 finally read a romance that I enjoyed this year!!! I'm such a romance girlie and it has been genuinely upsetting to me that I haven't even finished any of the other romance books I tried this year. however this was not without it's issues. the whole book felt like the set up to the actual story if that makes sense, this made their actual relationship seem rushed because it never felt like we were IN the story, it always felt like the beginning if that makes sense. the sex scenes were also... not to my taste, the excessive talking from redford (also why would you name him redford😭😭) was so so cringe to me and I did not enjoy these scenes. I also found this to be quite predictable which isn't always a bad thing especially for romance but I felt like I knew every single thing that was going to happen in this book.

after there was the list I was like oh okay, so they're gonna go camping together and they're gonna have sex for the first time in the tent, there's going to be an epilogue of them going travelling together (and as soon as red mentioned new york i was like the epilogue is going to them travelling to new york together) and the third act conflict is going to be a misunderstanding about the "meaningless sex" part of the of the list. like it's fine that I knew that but the author could have added SOMETHING interesting or some sort of curve ball/twist but alas :/ 

anyway, while there were lots of aspects that I didn't personally enjoy I still had fun with this and it's a solid read if you like romance! (and very wordy sex scenes lmao) 

 've finished all of the book in my siblings roald dahl collection! (other than the witches because I got traumatized by it in year 1 when we read it as a class and we had to stop reading cause I was so scared) I'm not really into ww2 books but this was different because it was an actual account! i really appreciated how he drew so much attention to the fact that there was so much pointless death and this was just such a causally sad book. i was originally planning on comparing it to boy (which is his autobiography but his life from like 5-18) but they're just so wildly different and I'm glad he separated them into different books. this was also odd to read as at the start of the book he was working for shell in africa and I didn't know how to feel about him morally there, anyway 

 i had no idea that this like 30 page short story by sally rooney existed so when I saw it at readings for $12 I thought wow I don't wanna pay for that so I just stood in readings and read the whole thing and then didn't buy it❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥 I don't think that this was anything special, if you like sally rooney you'll probably enjoy it but I think this would have had to be a full length novel for me to have actually connected to the main character and the story like miss rooney wanted me to and I'm not going to remember or be thinking about this book a lot down the line. still glad I read it though!! 

 i really liked the concept for this short story collection (every story is about someone called sarah) the first 4 stories were good however it felt like every single one of them could have happened to one person in a single full length novel if that makes sense, that didn't mean that I didn't like them though. for the rest of them, they were just so weird but like in a way that I understand the point of most of the stories, like yes I love weird shit happening but WHY. this felt like when you watch a weird art film and everyone is like wow that was so powerful and meant so much and you're just sitting there like 😮☝️😐✊ cause you did NOT feel what everyone else thought and were just confused about the point