Man not to be a hater but this did not work for me at ALL. All I'll say is that I'm surprised (derogatory) that 1. Jaigirdar was able to make the sinking of the fucking TITANIC feel stakeless, 2. someone with an MA in Postcolonial Studies would write some of these storylines and 3. I didn't enjoy the book, because I really like Jaigirdar's contempo stuff. Kind of an L on my part ig :(

ummm yea i cried like a baby thanks for asking

booooooooooring and the writing style was so fucking annoying that it literally made me miss wtf was going on. should have been about Andres bc everything going on with him was SO much more interesting than the main girl whose name i dont even remember (L for her)

*sam claflin voice* i dont know who i am......... BABY BABY BABY..... do you know who you aaaaare?

it's super cute but didn't hit like other talia hibbert books, not sure if its because it was on audio or took me forever to read or bc it was ya rather than adult or what but like cute overall

i feel like everyone reviewing this is reading a simpler, non-existent version of this book where everything is super black and white and you’re either “tricked” into rooting for the protagonist (who literally shows her true colors asap so like? were you tricked or just bought lies she tells herself) or have to read the whole thing shaking your head to show how you Don’t Approve. “athena liu is clearly r f kuang’s self-insert” literally did we read the same book? yes there are Glimpses but why would she depict herself that way?? this isn’t making sense anymore and also i know im reviewing the reviews more than the book rn but for me a large part of what this book was about is how nuance gets lost in The Discourse, which isn’t to say that the presence of nuance makes everyone “equally bad” or anything but it does complicate the discussion and yet Book Discourse cannot find a way to be more complex than “x bad y good”. and yet that’s a trap im seeing a lot of the reviews fall into??

ok now actually about the book: i flew through it but i also don’t know whether any of this makes sense to someone completely unfamiliar with publishing and book twitter and all - like I have my mom reading Babel rn, if she picks this up after finishing that, girlie will be like whaaat is going on. I don’t think this is a bad thing but for a book kind of stressing the insularity (? i don’t think that’s the word I’m looking for but whatever) of publishing, how it’s its own little world, i think it might be assuming too much prior knowledge from readers. that being said i think when you ARE in the know this works as a really great satire as you watch june just absolutely fucking spiral. can i say it was giving TÁR? like what TÁR is about gender and abuse and exploitation but about race and theft and exploitation. anyway. good book!

if this was on ao3 it would be labelled porn-with-plot. Too long tbh, especially since a lot of what happened ended up being just like... kind of pointless? Like why was Ryan there?

And why did we just throw in a TRAUMATIZING near death experience for Stassie that seemed to disappear a few chapters later?

It was giving very... I wrote and edited this one chapter at a time. That's not a bad thing if that's how I'm consuming the story! And it was good for keeping my attention! But like lets edit a bit more? Anyway I don't think I'll pick up the next one but I WILL be reading if/when my king of autistic rizz Henry gets a book

(Very very minor theatre kid nitpick: How is this college doing Hamilton?? The rights aren't out, and they'd be astronomical if they were. WHY is this college doing hamilton. Why are white-ass Lola and Liv playing the Schuyler sisters??)

since this was so short idk what to say except slay! like to have me crying in such few pages... that's how you know its good

the actual convos had in this book were SO interesting but i couldn't bring myself to give two shits about ka - i feel like the book would have slayed harder without him there, though ig you also need that outsider pov for it to work, so maybe if he was a bit less of a manbaby? also i think reading this during finals also tanked my enjoyment but like L

Would have been 5 stars if we actually got the peg that was promised