handove's Reviews (147)

twelfth night modern retelling but olivia/viola endgame god this is everything i've ever wanted

that said. i do think this dragged a little in the middle and it ended up sitting on the backburner for a solid month (sorry 😭). short fun chapters to make you through it. i also think it would've benefitted from a little more closure but it was a good book overall, rec if you like messy protagonists in ya lol

the way this book keeps you engaged is that it always ends a section slyly referring to another event or incident which it then expands upon, which worked, but also made it feel like a very drawn-out dialogue. i was confused in the beginning but ishiguro did a good job at building up the details throughout so when the reveals came i wasn't surprised. overall, a little boring. didn't really love any of the characters and there wasn't the closure i wished for but well done.

reread april 2025
okay well i stand on most of what i said in my initial review (including what i said about ronan in this book specifically) but i am so relentlessly endeared by anything they do this is like. soup

first read feb 2025
girl this was ass

plot was meh but it raised some interesting questions. fleshed out the characters a lot more than aart through changing povs.
adored miranda and maya's povs. i am too woke for andy.

this was cool, i was engaged the whole way and i don't rly think it dulled at any point. april's pov was a bit weirdly written at some points but those were easily ignored

okay this was so cute. i am on a lesbians in space kick and this was so lovely and a pleasure to read. there's some plot, some romance (which is more in the second half), some mystery and an ominous pov for a while. so. read it. and thank me

ouch!

i've seen people complaining about not enough explanation being given to the worldbuilding but honestly i thought it was quite good :) at least i understood most of what was going on. kai, ziede & tahren are close to my heart and the mixing of the two timelines was nice (i did get confused at some points, which might've been intended lol)

overall i'm v excited for book 2!

thinking it's appropriate to blurb this with 'comfort woman' considering that this is a fucking space opera and the character in question has blond hair and blue eyes is certainly a Choice! call me sensitive but with the historical basis of that term, japan's continued attempts to erase that and other atrocities from that time period from its history, and the love interest literally being japanese (though one of the 'good' ones, and her heritage isn't expanded upon) it's really just insane levels of audacity

besides that. it suffered from a lot of typical first person YA issues, especially with the pov switches - i ended up not interested in either of the narratives and it sounded very impersonal at times. 

linden a. lewis we gotta have a chat

this was okay, overall. it really fluctuated in certain departments (pacing, quality of writing, character work) but i liked sylah & found the tournament plot engaging. 

br w/ evan, pathetic as it was