essjay's Reviews (635)

 

I already know I love Sayaka Murata, so I did not need to know anything about this book before requesting it. And not knowing anything about it had me saying "hahahahahahahaha, what the fuuuuuuuuck" under my breath repeatedly. Delightfully weird and horrifying, idk how else to describe it. 

I L O V E D the art in this, and the friendship is so good. 

It's almost funny that when I originally read this, the concept of

UltraWord™

was new and horrifying, and now so many aspects of it are real life. 

Didn't care for the art so much and didn't feel like renewing when my library loan was due. 

I just love the messy-ass women Anna Dorn writes about so much. 

I am not necessarily the target audience for this series. I don't usually rate romance novels OR epic fantasy super highly. But these books are so compulsively readable. I kept scoffing and huffing about stupid shit that was happening, but I still struggled to put it down.  

The battle scenes were not my favourite, and I do wish they'd been pared down a bit. Also, goddamn there are so many characters to keep track of. 

I'm never going to re-read these (I didn't even look up recaps before starting this one), but I'll continue to read them as they come out. 

The stories I ended up enjoying the most were those that I think incorporated the stated theme of the anthology the best. Didn't even realize that until I was tallying my ratings for averages. And even then, the "lower" rated stories still never dipped below 3s, which I always count as a win in a collection. 

Stories rated 4¾+:

I needed something fluffy and kind of dumb today. This was that. 

I was hooked almost immediately, then considered DNFing. Then got hooked again, and then again considered DNFing. All of this occurred within the first half hour of starting.  Once I hit my stride, I was in for the ride, but the beginning is kind of uneven.

The end was not really all that surprising (although I also didn't find the end of Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh all that surprising either, and seem to be in the minority there), but was still incredibly effective. 

3.8 on the rubric, rounding up. 

Well, goddamn.

You know how sometimes you read something that feels like all of your Special Interests have been plucked right from your skull and placed lovingly on a page for you to marvel over? Once Was Willem ended up being like that for me. 

Faerie/folktales and fables? ✔️

Zombies (kinda)? ✔️

Úlfhéðinn? ✔️

Biblically accurate angels and nephilim? ✔️✔️✔️

And then another thing at about the halfway point that made me shout "HOLY SHIT, IT'S A [REDACTED]!" that I'm not going to spoil for you bc it made me so fucking happy to realize and I want you to have that realization, too. 

The way this story was written is probably not going to be for everyone. I started out keeping track of all the archaic words I had to look up, but eventually gave up and relied on context cues so I wouldn't have to stop reading. But some people are going to LOVE it, and I can't wait to talk to them about it.