jarshi's Reviews (189)

Wasn’t the cleanest or the most organized thing ever but it was pretty okay.

Maybe I empathize with David because I’m also an emotionally constipated queer person with intimacy issues and have a weird, stilted relationship with my parent where I despair at the idea of one day becoming them.

When Giovanni was screaming shit like, “You physically can’t even make yourself love someone. It’s not that you won’t. It’s that you can’t!” I sat back and was like, “Oh, true!”

Where do I even start? What do I even say? Millennial cringe wrapped up in a shaky urban fantasy concept that pales in comparison to the book everyone is so adamant about pitting it against.

That was mean. Let me try again.

This book did not need romance. How hard do I need to stress that? Maybe I just hate straight people and can’t stand to see them happy, I don’t know, but there was zero chemistry between Mika and Jamie and then they’re fucking in Mika’s childhood bedroom like 100 pages later. And it comes out of nowhere??? Lord be my strength. I don’t care how many times other characters tell me a male character is attractive. If you have done no work to convince me of that through the writing, I DO NOT believe you. All of the time wasted on cute little moments with the MC and her love interest could’ve been allotted to developing other characters.

Speaking of other characters, listen, if I put a gun to your head, could you name the three child characters by name, state their ages, and the defining aspects of each of their personalities? Yeah, I didn’t think so. And multiple times I had to put the book down because I kept thinking, “A kid would not say that…” I don’t understand how they were the focal point for the entire plot, yet received so little attention. It was sad.

I still don’t know what role Lucie, Ken, and Ian played in this story. I guess I’ll never know.

I feel like this book really suffered from a bunch of people online trying to compare it to another novel with a similar premise (I will not name that novel here, but iykyk). All that did was highlight how this book lacks the emotional meat it desperately needed. Also, please stop recommending hetero romance novels as “acceptable” and unproblematic alternatives to queer ones.

I took off one star for that, “We are all made of stardust,” quote alone because I physically recoiled.

I always appreciate Becky Chamber’s way with dialogue and characters, but I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I thought I would. I don’t know why.

I feel so many things about this series and I don’t even know how to put them into words.

I just… how very satisfying it is to be able to see how Le Guin matured as a writer throughout this series. Her author’s note at the end punched me in the fucking gut.

Sometimes a family is an ex-priestess who desires to understand her place in existence, an ex-archmage who has lost his powers and seeks to come into his own as a man, and a child wronged at almost every turn who wants nothing more than a home to belong to and a family to love her. And that can be something so personal. 

| You see what an inferiority complex, paranoia, and the complete audacity does to a bitch? Don’t be a hater.

Chapter 7 was a fucking call out BYE!

| It was pretty touch and go for me like halfway through this joint, but I think it ended in a way that’s made me curious enough to see how this story pans out.