essjay's Reviews (635)

I feel like this is either going to really really work for you, or it really really will not. I loved it (and the audiobook narrator was fantastic). 

This was certainly a book that I read. I wish I had not listened to the audiobook, bc the narrator kept pronouncing things wrong (moped, cicada, Des Moines), but the story itself was just kind of weird.  Again, might have liked it better if not for the narrator doing annoying voices for the children, who had a LOT of dialogue.  

My least favourite things about cozy mysteries are usually the lack of swearing, and the fact that frequently the love interest is some form of law enforcement. The PBG series has neither of these problems, and this entry delves into why the latter is so problematic. 


I'll never be a fan of the first person present tense narrative, and I do feel like some social activism topics get covered in a sort of hand-holdy way that I find off-putting. BUT this one is definitely my favourite of the series so far, and I'll continue to read them as they come out. 

For the first half, I thought this was going to be one of my favourite reads of the year. Then it just kind of fizzled out. I liked it better when it was just

the story of the friend of a Companion after having been left behind. I didn’t need or want Harper to save the Universe, just let her be fucking ordinary and stranded in the 70s.

After a second read, I'm bumping this up to five stars. Possibly my favourite release of the year. 

I would have kept reading for much longer and been perfectly happy to do so. 

This is not the sort of thing I typically enjoy a whole lot (more romance-y than I would usually choose for a slice of life kind of narrative), but I found myself completely captivated the entire time. Despite the entire premise being based on the romantic entanglements of Hestia, it felt more grounded in reality than these books tend to be. I have a feeling that groundedness is going to turn off the people looking for a more stereotypical love-during-the-slow-apocalypse novel, but I really hope this book finds an audience that connects to it like I did. 

This felt like two separate books, and idk why it was combined into one when they both suffered for it. The editing was terrible (so many weird line breaks where it looks like something was cut out and then not fixed, weird punctuation regarding the way quotation marks work, italicized parts indicating mental speech carrying over into the actions). There was a natural stopping point a little over halfway through, and it would have been a decent book if it had ended there.