gxuosi's Reviews (390)

(it’s really more of a 4.5) i’ve never appreciated how suzanne collins writes the war. it’s never felt like resonates enough with katniss. the reader. anyone. but what i’ve never questioned is how well suzanne wrote katniss as a person; flawed beaten broken and still alive. so many YA dystopian series fail to create a fmc with as much depth as her and i’m so thankful for what suzanne accomplished.

“Yes, there is that dark, terrifying loneliness that scares me, but I am acquainted with fear. If I stay inside it long enough, root my heels in deeper, it doesn’t feel scary anymore. It feels like home.”
to live is to be born, create, die 100 times, and willingly do it again; to find meaning in the random and joy in the endless nothing.

not as good as the first one which was to be expected. the plot felt a bit too familiar to things like “a haunting in venice” or “crimson peak” at times and we spent a great deal of time worrying about things that weren’t the current case. while i did very much care about cecily, she felt like an afterthought that took away from the chance to have a more complex mystery at large. in fact, i’d rather cecily have her own book with a mystery surrounding her new town of residence.

diana's story is uniquely interesting and complex and andrew morton is a great journalist (as well as commentator in documentaries), but it crosses my mind now that i don't think he's a great author. i found the way he wrote this to be often repetitive and packed with names of people who were hardly relevant. it all felt very much like snippet writing, hoping each line would headline a newspaper. this edition was interesting having so much additional text in retrospect considering her death, william's marriage, and harry having just started to date meghan. but i found myself wishing it was even more recent to include the demise of andrew, harry and meghan's marriage, meghan's diana-esque media treatment and her and harry's subsequent joint departure from the RF, the queen's death, and charles's ascension. if a newer edition comes out, i would recommend that one even without having read it.

i did not fuck with this book till the last hundred pages and by christ there was about 20 more characters in this book than there shitting needed to be

"you can learn anything when you have to learn it. you could learn to fly if it meant you would live another day." man i dont even know where to begin. so beautifully written and with so many characters it was shocking how well each character's voice was uniquely defined.

really bummed out by the ending being open to interpretation on what sort of relationship majorie and marcus will have. since there's a physical tenderness and lightning like connection, its unclear to me if its incestuous or not. and they couldn't possibly know, its generations removed. but the reader knows. we have their family tree. the choice to not really hammer-in the nature of their relationship reduced my enjoyment of the finale based on my own reading comfort.

there were 5 stories in this 9 story anthology that really stood out to me but the 4 that i didn’t like so much really dragged; especially considering one i didn’t like was one of the longest in the book and was completely incomprehensible. stand outs for me were “the haunted blizzard,” “revenge,” “utiqtuq,” “sila,” and “the wildest game.”

yeah fuck it that was cute as hell. i wish it was way more drawn out by the passage of time like the source material and i actually was sad at the lack of a mariah but oh well lol

this made slow burn fanfic feel quick. also cannot fathom why we needed a kidnapping arc when we could have just …. not done that.

dnf at 25%. it’s a slow burn to the point that there isn’t even an ember in the fire pit. the dark academia vibes are really just an english boarding school. biggest issue i had was the characterization of the teens. i can understand the plot choice of the unholy girls, rich boys, and cops not caring. but for baz to be happy making jokes about being sherlock, asking to get dinner in town when he’s meant to be looking for elizabeth? if elizabeth is really baz’s pseudo-twin, why doesn’t his sickened agony during class hours carry over to the town visit??? just not worth my time going further with it.