The chapter where Persephone finally admitted what happened (her rape) to Eros was SO EMOTIONAL 😭 I live for the Persephone/Eros friendship but at what cost?

I feel so bad for Minthe. Her self-sabotaging actions are so obvious but no one is there to help her realize that her actions are self-sabotaging. 

The cliffhanger ending is SENDING ME. The combination of the line “it is natural for a King to be curious about his future Queen” plus the image of Queen Persephone on the screens is IMMACULATE!

Turned my brain off and now I’m really vibing with this story. Hecate is my new favorite character! 

Beautiful artwork with an interesting story! I love the set up for the romance between Hades and Persephone and I can’t wait to see the slow burn! 

There’s something deeply weird about the character of Persephone in this story. I get that not every female character is going to fall into the “strong female lead” archetype? but Persephone couldn’t be giving stronger “born sexy yesterday” vibes if she tried. Would it have killed the author to make her even five years older? I can understand making her character tiny and naive and clueless and sheltered and inexperienced but I do not understand why she had to be NINETEEN YEARS OLD.

Anyways, I could continue to critically think and analyze what I’m reading but I think instead I’m just going to turn my brain off and enjoy the rest of this!

Definitely a flop compared to the first two books in the series. I honestly didn’t like Sloane or Jasper — neither of them had any kind of charm on their own, and even when they were together they didn’t have much chemistry. They were both fairly passive protagonists for most of the book which made the experience of reading their story pretty boring. The circumstances keeping them apart were just kind of dumb (and by circumstances, I mean the stupid things that Jasper said and did), so it wasn’t particularly satisfying when they finally got together. 

This book wasn’t really a hockey romance and it wasn’t really a cowboy romance. The fact that Jasper plays professional hockey and grew up on a ranch are both about as important to the plot as the color of his hair.

Speaking of the plot… what was the plot? I thought that Beau’s disappearance would be of a source of conflict in the story, but it was resolved in a very anticlimactic manner. The actual conflict came from Sloane’s father, a character who was so cartoonishly villainous that it was hard to take him seriously. This is a real quote spoken by Sloane’s father:

“Sloane, move aside like a good girl. This doesn’t concern you. We’ll have plenty to discuss once I have taken the trash out.”

I can believe that Sloane’s father is a classist and misogynistic asshole who cares more about making money than his daughter happiness. What I can’t believe is that it took Sloane TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS and hearing her father tell her to be a “good girl” to realize this. 

Other things I didn’t like about this book: Sloane dancing for Jasper after he told her about his traumatic childhood — extremely weird and painfully cringeworthy. The cowboy hat as a metaphor for his childhood trauma — laughably stupid.

The smut is top tier though, so I guess it was worth the read.

First of all, to state the obvious, this book is absolutely gorgeous! It has the prettiest cover I've ever seen. The writing was gorgeous as well. Every page was filled with an intense attention to detail, which made it feel like every moment of every character's life mattered. It reminded me of that quote from Ladybird: "Maybe they are the same thing. Love and attention."

The primary message of "Hello Beautiful" was about love: love is quiet but love is loud, love is angry but love is kind, love betrays but love forgives, love is lost but love is found, love is grand gestures but love is every tiny act of kindness, love is painful but love is healing, love is knowing yourself and letting others know you. The characters felt so vivid and their love felt so real.

My favorite moments were those between Sylvie and William. Their love felt the most real to me out of all of the characters. Their falling in love reminded me so much of the idea of "the mortifying ordeal of being known". Sylvie and William knew each other, in a way that no one else knew them, so they couldn't help but fall in love with each other. Their love story started so tumultuously, and yet they were soft to each other (for each other) for every moment of their time spent together. 

The ending was SO CUTE AND ROMANTIC. Like this quote: “Maybe I am heartless after all, because the beautiful girl with the copper hair grinning back at me right now is the one who stole it.” ADORABLE!

My main complaint is that there isn't really any plot outside of the will-they-won't-they of Cade and Willa, which means that when their relationship development hits the slow burn the whole plot gets REALLY SLOW in the middle. Willa was a little manic-pixie at the beginning for my taste, but she mellowed out over the course of the book.

The birthday party sex scene was INSANE. Talk about escalating quickly, we went from zero to panties in the mouth in like two sentences.

Rich mommy drama goes HARD! I loved the three main characters: Madeline, Celeste, and Jane. They all had very distinct and endearing personalities, and their friendship was very meaningful to me. I loved the drama at Pirriwee Public School - the excerpts of the parent's testimony was really interesting to read, especially when it conflicted with what we saw first-hand from Madeline, Celeste, or Jane's perspective. I liked the mix of thriller and interpersonal drama. Knowing that the story ended with someone's death, that knowledge gave the interpersonal drama much higher stakes. 

I loved the three main characters, but moreover, I loved that each of their stories told a different lesson about our relationships with the people around us: Madeline's story told forgiveness, Jane's story told moving past trauma, and Celeste's story told knowing when to leave.

“Flawless” was the Chestnut Springs book I was least looking forward to reading. Based on the descriptions of all of the books, “Flawless” appeared to have the most basic and predictable tropes of all of the books in the series. However, I still really enjoyed this book, which makes me really excited for the rest of the series. Rhett and Summer were interesting characters with interesting flaws. Plus, I am OBSESSED with the body shot scene. 

I will never emotionally recover from that cliffhanger. How am I supposed to make it until the next book when we don’t even have a release date yet 😭😭😭

I LOVED THIS BOOK SO MUCH! Violet and Xaden were perfect (even when they argued they were perfect). I loved all the side characters, but Sloane and Ridoc were my favorite. Cat and Mira really grew on me, too. 

The plot was overwhelming in the best way. I feel like every other sentence was a clue or a moment of foreshadowing and it all came together in the best way possible!

My only complaint is that the beginning took a while to pick up speed. I wouldn't usually make this complaint, but given that there isn't a time jump between the ending of Fourth Wing and the beginning of Iron Flame, I would have expected the pacing to be a little faster at the start.

I had to read this book for a class, which historically leads me to absolutely hate a book. In this case, I didn't totally hate it, but I still have some issues with this book. Right off the bat, it's a non-fiction book about a topic that I'm not particularly interested in, so I definitely started this book on the wrong foot. 

My main issue is the way that the results of certain scientific experiments were presented as being factual evidence for proving causation when really all that scientific experiment proved was correlation. In particular, when the author was trying to establish a link between antibiotic use in early childhood and the development of autism, the evidence was very weak, and yet it was still presented as a reasonable conclusion to draw, that antibiotic use increases the chances of developing autism. Additionally,  the author posited many different hypotheses throughout the book, and many of these hypotheses were underdeveloped and underexplored.