Listened to the audiobook for this one which could explain why I kept being like “WHAT” “HUH” etc and just could not keep track of the plot at times. I might fully be aged out of ya but still! shoutout to my king selwyn kane and his autism rizz

ashley herring blake romances be like
cover: cute, giving y2k romcom but for the queer girlies
inside: sex, depression, sex, depression, sex, depression, sex, happy ending
and i eat it up every single fucking time 😋

also, you cannot convince me that

astrid isn't a lesbian - i know the book settles on "bisexual" but every relationship she's had before jordan (all with men), she's literally been unhappy and just playing a part? like if this was a real person i wouldn't be telling her how to id, but as a character whose backstory you can deliberately write, it really felt like it was leading to "lesbian haunted by comphet"

what can i say that i havent already. slays

I'm sure this was good and I have friends who'd fucking love this but I am stupid and I didn't get it. I think if i re-read it it would be like a 3.5-to-4

alex's 20s-themed murder mystery night was better

i feel weird rating and reviewing 6 hours of someone telling their traumatic life story to me tbh but this is really worth the read imo. check trigger warnings (theres a lot in here, especially eds:

i, someone with what I like to call a "chill" ed that isn't remotely connected to my body image, had to just stop and stare a the wall for a few minutes before i continued reading because of how like. honest but brutal mccurdy was being with her experience?

) first please please please but if you're in a good enough headspace, give it a go!

Slay! At first I was like "oh no they changed things" but like, the girls really deserved things changing for the better. Also, slay way of doing the Jo/Laurie plot? Anyway, it's literally just what is says on the tin, and it's good!

I mean I was definitely entertained but in a trashy-reality-TV way. If I got the threesome I was promised this would be 5 stars, maybe 6.

I'm of two minds about this! Because on one hand, this is a topic that really, REALLY needs exploration and Heng's book is really important in actually opening up the conversation beyond "well, race is a thing invented during the Age of Exploration, """medieval people""" (by this people almost always mean Latin Christian Europeans) were just super antisemitic and islamophobic"! 

But it's still very much a first attempt, you know? Heng's approach of looking at literary sources rather than political or legal ones isn't even bad, but it does hurt your concept when you write "the definitive book on race in the Middle Ages" and the inside is like "well in story a x and y happens, and in story b y happens too, but so does z"... along with how dense some of the chapters were (often with information that was relevant to the source Heng was analyzing, but not race-making itself), this made the book tedious to read. It's definitely a workable jumping off point as well as a good place to mine for sources if you're interested in "x people group in Medieval European literature," but I can't say I wasn't sometimes frustrated with the needlessly wide scope of the analysis.

Speaking of scope: I get that the book is about the European Middle Ages, but there's so much more race-related stuff going on in the Medieval World that would have strengthened the argument, I feel like. Obviously it's good to limit your scholarship to a time and place but if your scope is already going to be wide enough to include 10th century Norse-Indigenous interactions and 14th century Italian-Mongolian interactions under the same umbrella of "European"... well, the only thing connecting those two European groups is the fact that they're both white in modern, American constructions of race. Idk man. Excited for the class discussion.

It's definitely cute! But this is one instance where I think a melodramatic third-act conflict would have actually helped the story instead of hindered it. D'Vaughn and Kris don't really grow to love each other like I prefer my fake dating, and instead are basically instantly into each other - even in the end

Kris reminds D'Vaughn of this when she says "see I wanted you from the start"

and since there's also basically no family drama, the road just like.... feels too smooth for me. Even when the families find out about the reality tv show, there's like, no reaction described except something like "people went wild".  I get the fantasy of everything wanting to be smooth sailing but I'm reading for the DRAMA!!

That's another thing tbh - if I see reality TV show I want reality TV drama, I want complex interpersonal relationships, and I want to be seeing other contestants too!! Like sure not their whole ass stories but a "x got paired with y" at the beginning, and the section starters with instructions for that week could have instead been a group progress meeting where everyone in the show talks about where they're at, and we get the drama of who's being eliminated (maybe with some "D'Vaughn and Kris, you really narrowly avoided elimination" drama early on that gets them to put their head in the game, and around THEN is when they're like hold on wait a minute...)