If there's one thing a One Piece flashback is gonna do, it's making you cry.

The flaw with reading the series through the omnibus volumes is that things start to feel repetitive after a while. And while I do appreciate the social commentary that Oda is trying to make, certain aspects of the plot make it feel clumsy.

I think this is the end of the road for me and Beth O'Leary, which is a shame given that I enjoyed her earlier stuff so well. But I absolutely hated her last book and this one was just meh- I was not invested in any of the characters or the romance(s) at all. If anything I was mildly irritated.

I haven't read the original The Three Musketeers, but I still really enjoyed how the author executed the premise of the original protagonist's daughter navigates being a secret Musketeer while having a chronic illness. While everything wraps up in a satisfactory way, I can also see this being a strong start to a series. 

The story was just fine, the character's backstories felt info-dumpy and their development felt unearned. Also towards the end the overall tone became a little too cheesy for me.

A really truthful but also beautiful look at some the harsh things in life that people have to go through as they grow up. I really appreciated how topics such as grief, bullying, and assault were mentioned and portrayed to various extents in a realistic but also empathetic light. It was heartbreaking to read at times, but I am glad I read it and I think I will be thinking about this book for a long time. 

This ended up being pretty underwhelming. I wish the story had leaned into the sitcom-y, comedy-of-errors shenanigans instead of speeding through so we could get to the romance. It felt like the main characters were suddenly disproportionately sentimental about each other. Then, once they got together the author rushed to the ending instead of exploring further the dynamic between the two main characters as a couple. If anything, reading this book made me reflect on how society makes us think that a woman and a man feeling positively towards each other must mean they need to get into a romantic relationship. But when it comes me enjoying a romance in a novel, I need to be convinced that there's something more to why a couple gets together than the fact that they don't hate each other. Honestly, Frederick and Cassie were more convincing as friends than romantic partners to me- which is fine, except that meant this just does not work for me as a story in the romance genre.

Overall Average Rating: 3.99/5 stars

Individual Ratings:
Phantoms of the Midway by Seanan McGuire: 3/5 stars
The Justified by Ann Leckie: 3/5 stars
Fisher-Bird by T. Kingfisher: 4/5 stars
A Brief Lesson in Native American Astronomy by Rebecca Roanhorse: 3.5/5 stars
Bridge of Cows by JY Yang: 4.5/5 stars
Labbatu Takes Command of the Flagship Heaven Dwells Within by Arkady Martine: 4/5 stars
Wild to Covet by Sarah Gailey: 5/5 stars

¡Cuidado! ¡Que Viene El Coco! by Carlos Hernandez: 5/5 stars
He Fell Howling by Stephen Graham Jones: 4/5 stars
Curses Like Words, Like Feathers, Like Stories by Kat Howard: 4/5 stars
Across the River by Leah Cypress: 4.5/stars
Sisyphus in Elysium by Jeffrey Ford: 4.25/5 stars
Kali_Na by Indrapramit Das: 4/5 stars
Live Stream by Alyssa Wong: 3.5/5 stars
Close Enough for Jazz by John Chu: 3/5 stars
Buried Deep by Naomi Novik: 4.5/5 stars
The Things Eric Eats Before He Eats Himself by Carmen Maria Machado: 3/5 stars
Florilegia; or, Some Lies About Flowers by Amal El-Mohtar: 5/5 stars