shoutout emily henry for not publishing this in summer 2022 because i think i would have killed myself if i read this then /pos

still love komi but the sexualization of high schoolers and overall weird stuff that are just Manga Genre Conventions is getting too much for me to keep tolerating it :c and like i get that the romance is also a genre convention and its like sweet and all that the guy's can understand her with just her nonverbal communication but i do NOT want them together hes SO bland GET AWAY FROM HER!!

ok so its that thing where i like the premise and i looooove komi as a character and the way oda depicts her inner thoughts & nonverbal communication but i just cant get on board with a lot of the other wacky stuff going on like... DOOOOONT CARE, i get that its meant to be over exaggerated for humor but i do not care!!!!!!!!! it feels like watching a mediocre high school production for your kid who you love (komi)

this is cute and i love komi she’s literally soo me but there isn’t much going on yet and also idk if i’ll be able to withstand the like…….. occasional weird vaguely sexual jokes in this that a lot of anime/manga just like always tends to have. im gonna read the next one tho bc komi is so slay and real

Obviously not the same genre of gay as me but like gay loneliness. Yea.

Though a lot of questionable stuff throughout and like sure… you can argue about whether x and y is problematic but I don’t know if that wasn’t The Point

DAMN now I'm really excited to direct Macbeth AND super inspired

fun! but what sounds like a 5-star concept gets hella bogged down in the execution - people said this book was WEIRD, and like yea sure it was quirky, but weird?? we definitely could have gotten weirder with it. it was about as weird as teenage-girlhood is, which IS weird, but if you tell me its a weird book im expecting it to get SUUUUUPER weird

i think my biggest problem with it was the ending, which (super spoilers)

both kinda de-weirds the whole thing and takes out any tension that WAS building up to the championship game. like i guess all these characters just girlbossed their way into happy 2019 endings, which good for them i guess, but i don't care like that. i wanted to know if they were gonna do a human sacrifice like the ouija board asked them to. and the ending being like "guys it was in us all along, we didn't win all those games because we were doing magic, we won because we believed in ourselves, and me losing the championship for us proves it was all us!" FUUUUCK THAT i WISH you guys were getting possessed rather than it being like "magical realism that ended up being the characters speaking in metaphor or hyperbole" and i wish i saw the fucking anguish of losing after these girls did every fucked up thing to win instead of reading about the climax of the fucking book THROUGH 30-YEARS-AGO-FLASHBACK!!

anyway if you do read it i think just skip the last chapter and imagine it ends on a cliffhanger. 

i also can't believe only

2

/11 of this WOMENS FIELD HOCKEY TEAM turned out to be queer... statistically it should have been at least 5.

finally, my last qualm: this book is set in 1989. besties reading this will know im obsessed with a certain movie that came out in 1989. WERE THE DANVERS VARSITY FIELD HOCKEY TEAM LUCKY ENOUGH TO SEE BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE IN THEATERS???

like a 3.75! i had some problems here and there (like how dramatic the 3rd act conflict felt compared to the tone of the rest of the book, and also how

the driver who fucking DIED for Eddy to live never got a name like he was just "the Chinese driver" in narration and because of how little book there was left Eddy's reaction felt like "damn thats sad........ anyway time to get married :D"

, and also Rhine's general possessiveness but like that's just a trope in historical romance at this point and I know other people are into it so like.. shrug) but otherwise it was a good romance set in a time period i dont usually read from and with really unique and interesting stakes!!

You know those rare books that are both a 5 star and a 1 star read at the same time??? This is that because like thematically its so good! Like if you've seen the movie, you know!! But it's also a 1 star because most of the time its either slightly boring (a kind of boring that i do tend to like, but still, a lot of mundane stuff and a LOT of brand names) or HORRIFYING (which youd think would be a good thing for a horror thriller but after the 10th scene of torturing women in increasingly uh.......... creative? ways it just became so overwhelming) and like overall i don't think i could say i enjoyed the reading experience at all, even tho i'm glad i did give it a go

I need like 20 more books of Vera Wong solving mysteries and worming her way into young people's lives only for them to realize the made them tangibly better and happier and they love her so much