essjay's Reviews (635)

I read this book A LOT in elementary and junior high. Glad to see that it mostly holds up. 

Well, this was a godsdamned delight. 

"I see the city and I call it a grave."

I love when I have absolutely no idea where a story is going, and that's what happened here. 

I don't even know how to rate this. According to my rubric, its score is 2.9, but a 3 seems too high and 2.75 almost seems too low?  It accomplished what it set out to do, but the editing was distractingly poor. 

Lots of word salad sentences like that. The catalogue that was supposed to be dELiA*s was renamed dARiA*s, which was fine (and kind of funny), but then it was called dELiA*s in the middle of the book, then back to the other name.  At one point, our MC receives a nasty scratch, but then two pages later her best friend is the one with the scratch, and she received it from someone who wasn't even present at the time? 

A lot of instances like that, which made the book hard to follow bc I kept hyperfixating on the shit that was wrong or made no sense. 

Will probably read the next book in the series to see if the editing was an author issue or an editor issue before deciding on a rating. 

Like with all the others, this is compulsively readable and nearly impossible to put down. I had to make myself stop reading a few times to not leave my Buddy Reader in the dust (which I still failed at, and I'm sorry about that). 

HOWEVER. The pacing was definitely weird. I'm constantly distracted trying to figure out howtf the various maps of Panem work with the way things are described in the book. Some things just don't make a whole lot of sense if you give them literally any thought at all. I know, I know, this is a YA series and it's not that deep, but...

I've read this multiple times and yet somehow the resolution is always a welcome surprise. 

I don't really read blurbs or marketing before choosing what to read anymore, I've found that I get greater enjoyment if I enter a book without any preconceived notions. So the central conceit of When We Were Real (which is explicitly laid out in the jacket copy) came as a complete surprise to me. 

Me: Oh, this kinda has Ubik vibes. 

Character in the book: [explicitly mentions Ubik]

Me: Welp, there you go. 

This was absolutely delightful, and I will probably be reading it again before too much longer. 

I guess I liked this more than the first one, surprisingly? Didn't think I cared about Kris much after TNBK, but I read about his issues with his mom at the exact time my own mom was sending me extremely similar texts and so that bit hit me p hard. [shrug]

I almost dropped this during the first chapter bc I could not hang with how overly descriptive everything was, but I'm glad I gave it a chance. 

Literally none of the "twists" were very surprising, but I still had a lot of fun with it (and didn't cry but got a lump in my throat a few times). 

Fully half of these stories were 5/5, which...never fuckin happens, man. 

I read this aloud to my 14y/o (as soon as I heard there was a Weird/Horror NMH inspired anthology, I told them about it and they said "welp, that's what we're reading next!"), and they made me highlight something in almost every story. 

Our lowest rating was 4/5, the average was 4.77. Might come back to bump this up to 5.