gxuosi's Reviews (390)

“i think i’ll have another one, please,” ohhhh the cusp of childhood and pubescence tied together by the complex emotional foil of an absent mother and a dying grandma. all he really wanted was something he could rely on, a measured experience in counted footsteps that would not change as everything else around him did.

dnf'd at 30%. i just kept trying to push through it, but the reviews for the book and the final book in the trilogy prove that its not worth it. these characters i fell in love with in ACSDAL have died a moral death. rhen is a cruel villain, grey is a broken man with an unexplainable motive, harper has been reduced to fodder to build development for other characters. what happened to disabled strong FMC harper? to loyal to a fault grey? to tormented and full of love rhen? why are noah and jake nothing more than an excuse to tag the book as inclusive/lgbt+? they're not here. harper, jake, and noah are just a noise in the background as rhen becomes his father and grey becomes a warmonger?

if you wanted:
• religious trauma, read “hell followed with us” by andrew joseph white instead.
• allegorically voiceless teenage girl navigating an unjust world, read “the sin eater” by megan campisi instead.
• weird kids doing weird shit, read “miss peregrine's home for peculiar children” by ransom riggs instead.
• an old money cult, read “their vicious games” by joelle wellington instead.
• a fanciful morally gray magic man fucking up everyone’s lives, read “jonathan strange & mr norrell” by susanna clarke instead.

honestly? tacky, unoriginal, nothing i’ve never read before. enjoyed the hell out of it lmfaoooo. downside was the repeated threat of rape but it also sort of made sense for the plot and villain’s motives. also felt like the climatic finale was rushed…. but hey it didn’t end with babies and that’s waaay more than i’m used to getting from an ending.

i love when a girly pop finally lets loose

i love a book about nothing but what was the fucking point? it’s manic pixie dream girl circle jerk except the girl is clearly struggling with mental health or PTSD and yet we never get past the dream girl part of it. where was the nuance????

anisa of the centre (handshake emoji) sean of feed them silence: being deeply unlikable yet compelling characters driven by their desire to achieve greatness coming face to face with the terms of reality in which they are willing to use people as transactional exchanges to meet their ends.

dnf at 30%. at around 20% i noticed i was skim reading. the book's premise is supposed to be about some super scifi fungus, but the infected brother takes a backseat to the NSA agent brother. and i mean BACKSEAT; like paul is in the trunk of a pacifica mini-van while neil goes 20mph in a 70. neil is a shallow, self-entitled dumbass who spends all of his time either complimenting his ingenuity, comparing himself to paul who is now smarter than him due to fungus, or doubting the intelligence of female NSA collaborators more than 10 years his senior. i wanted to care, i wanted to hear about the fungus. but this is just about neil getting to play centerfold in everyone else's lives.

i really enjoyed a few of the stories but overall didn’t enjoy the collection… and i don’t know whose fault it is. after a while the stories all being back to back made them feel formulaic or iterative. they began to be less and less impactful as the book went on because of my continued progressing disinterest.

i really stopped caring around page 120, which sucks considering there’s 385 pages.