This book got DARK! With pages teeming with very vividly described depictions of violence and torture, I was left pretty unsettled by “Pretty Girls”. I liked our two protagonists, Claire and Lydia. Paul was an actual sociopath, he totally creeped me out!

Super fun beach read! Just the right mixture of romance and plot! This book has a little bit of everything: romance, murder mystery, HGTV reality show drama, home renovations, beach vibes. I liked the romance between Hattie and Mo, I thought they had good chemistry. 

Such a great mystery/thriller! Libby was an amazing protagonist — just the right amount of cynical and jaded. Her feral attitude towards life gave her a really interesting perspective. 

The central mystery was really intriguing! I like that we got to see the events of January 2nd, 1985 from different perspectives, because it was interesting to see how the miscommunication and misinterpretation of the facts led to the murders that night. The mystery element wove together really naturally — I even guessed one of the twists before it happened (that Debby died to get rid of her debts) but there were still elements to that twist that surprised me. 

It was the perfect mixture of dark thriller and adventurous mystery. It was fast-paced, so I sped through it in under a day! Overall, it was a great read!

The perfect thematic mashup of “Beach Read” and “People We Meet On Vacation” whilst simultaneously outshining both books. I really enjoyed reading this book. The tension that arose while Katrina and Nathaniel wrote together was perfection. 

Katrina’s anger over Nathaniel’s confession of love only being able to come out as fiction are understandable, but at the same time I empathized with Nathaniel when he tried to explain to Katrina that even though the genre is fiction, the things that he says in his writing are real. 

WAY darker than I anticipated, but still a well written thriller! I liked the setting: the horribly misogynistic town of Wind Gap, with all of its dark secrets. Gillian Flynn writes about how misogynistic attitudes affect women in different ways in a really compelling manner. One quote I liked especially “Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”

The protagonist, Camille, is super fucked up, but she had a really engaging perspective. Amma was a weird character, and her dialogue wasn’t exactly written the way I would expect a thirteen-year-old to speak. Still, she was an interesting character. I loved the quote that Gillian Flynn used to wrap up her character: “A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort”

I didn’t love how dark this book got, especially regarding the sexualisation of the child characters. 

Fun romance read! I like that it didn't take itself too seriously (the ruined proposal in the epilogue was my favorite part, it was just so endearing). On the other hand, the plot wasn't very exciting. Boring and predictable plotlines (like pretending to date in front of Ethan's ex) were dragged out for half the book, while the plotlines that were exciting (like whether or not Dane was actually cheating) wrapped up within a chapter. Also, Ethan was a SUPER boring MMC. His only personality traits were being stubborn and uptight. I can learn to love with a grumpy MMC, but not when the MMC is also unlikable and boring.

Darby was such a badass! Ashley was such a creepy sociopath that he was legitimately scary! There were a lot of twists that I didn't expect: Ashley being a kidnapper, Sandi being involved in the plot, the reststop name mixup causing the police to go to the wrong place, the cop shooting Darby instead of Ashley. 

This was a pretty good thriller, but the gore was a bit disturbing. I didn't anticipate that there would be actual gruesome torture in this book. Also, I would have liked a bit more to the resolution. Darby literally got her fingers cut off, got shot, and broke her ankle to save Jay, and yet she only gets one line of dialogue after being rescued.

The premise — a dark satire of the world of publishing — is so unique, and the writing is SO ADDICTIVE! Every time I started to get a little bored, June did something even more insane, and I was sucked right back into the story. The plot was super fast paced and the story was so juicy I couldn’t put it down. 

 

The ending was a bit unsatisfying but I guess that’s kind of the point. No matter how ‘cancelled’ June gets, she’s always going to be able to make money off of people’s outrage. The worse her behavior, the more her books sell, so she never really needs to learn her lesson. 

 

June is such a hate-able protagonist, which means that she’s completely perfect for this book. June is completely delusional — it’s so easy for her to believe her own lies and buy into her own hype that she has no issue forgiving herself for any number of sins. June’s a complete hypocrite — everything that she hates about Athena she loves about herself when she steals Athena’s work. Every behavior that made June hate Athena, she begins to emulate as soon as she begins to reach Athena’s level of success. Not to mention the number of racist micro (and macro) aggressions that June never gives a second thought, all while asserting that because she’s done a lot of historical research, she would never need a sensitivity reader. 

 

I like how R. F. Kuang is able to write such nuanced characters. Every character’s motivations are selfish in some way. This is more obvious for some characters (June, Geoff) than others (Athena, Candice), but at the end of the day, every character is motivated by their desire for fame, money, and prestige. 

"When Women Were Dragons" was a good book, but it really wasn't anything super special. There wasn't a lot of plot, so the book just meandered along, which made it kind of boring to read. I liked that dragoning was an extended metaphor for women's liberation. I liked how dragoning meant different things to different women (because women's liberation means different things to different women).

I don't really know what to say about this book that hasn't already been said! It was a very thought-provoking and engaging read, packed to the brim with an intricate magical system, a plot informed by the history and culture of Victorian England, and a pointedly anti-colonialist message at the heart of the story. I really enjoyed reading about linguistics and the history behind linguistics. In particular, I was fascinated by the use of etymology within the magic system. The footnotes were my favorite part to read, as they added a whole separate layer to the story, introducing historical context and character backgrounds.

I was intimidated by this book going into into it (especially after reading similar academia-fantasy novels such as "The Atlas Paradox"), but was it a lot easier to read than I expected. The footnotes, especially, helped to make this book more digestible, as I didn't really have to know much about the historical context going into it.

My only qualm with this book is the characters ended up feeling a little flat to me. There are so many characters in this book, but none of them (except Robin) truly felt fleshed out and two-dimensional.