jessdrafahl's Reviews (154)

Really liked the plot, setting, and characters, but just a few things really spoiled the book for me. First, some of the actions of the characters were just off-putting. I know the dog thing was meant to be cute, but I truly don't understand how I'm supposed to support a character who literally stole a dog from someone? And hid the dog when she realized that it had an owner? That's just weird. I also really didn't vibe with Jake.

And the story never actually explains why he up and left Sadie? There was no reason for that...

And then...Ta-Da! It's another story where

the main female character has to give up her powers.

I hate that trope so much, it took off a full star. Otherwise, I really enjoyed the story and the writing. The recipes between the chapters were really cute and I'd like to try one sometime.

Of all the "From A Certain Point of Views," I think that this was my favorite. It felt so much more connected to the expanded universe compared to the other two, and the contradictions in this were lessened to a noticeable degree. My two favorite stories in this collection were coincidentally back to back, but "The Veteran" by Adam Lance Garcia and "Brotherhood" by Mike Chen were exceptional stories.

Had a lot of potential, yet lived up to none of it

The good: I like the way that Rey was written here. Her disposition and internal monologue made sense: she’s a scrapper who has been thrown into a galactic conflict within a day - of course she doesn’t care about the Force or the Jedi. I liked that aspect of her character and I think it would have been so much more interesting had the story focused more on that. 

The bad: the writing here is dry. There’s nothing much here that you haven’t already seen in the movies. Even then, there’s no excitement in the writing. The scenes skip to and fro without much thought. I found it really hard to get invested in anything when it didn’t feel like the author cared much, either. 

Ward manages to go beyond just history and poetry - he details the human experience in the most visceral, personal way. This collection highlights his own history, biracialism, AAVE, racism, language, Code Switching…it’s got it all. This collection is raw and cuts deep.