I love...everything about this book!

For all that I claim to be a high minded academic, I consider romance novels to be a difficult to match pleasure. And for all that I protest against the modernist (and onward) need to categorize and rank fiction by how "good" it is (with good meaning that other modernist and onward writers/critics/academics consider it to be good), I still have to work to leave out the word trashy.

That being said, this is a trashy romance novel in the most fun sense. It delivers exactly as promised, only sent me to Wikipedia once to check if Jeffries was making stuff up or showing off her research (this is a good thing) and the whole bundle was enjoyable.
There is what to be said about a book that delivers exactly what you expect and which you can enjoy watching things unfold as they should.

Also, there was beer. And research, but seriously, research into beer.

This novel did a pretty good job pretending to be a Victorian novel, if the Victorians actually wrote about all the things they refused to write about. Waters has a nice feel for era and even though the style still feels more 21st century than 19th, that's not a bad thing.
The plot itself was delightful and intricate enough to be a Dickens novel. I'm not sure where it falls when it comes to my own personal standards of improbable gratuitousness (the sex itself was well done and...touching, let's say, but there were other moments when I couldn't tell if elements felt out of place or not).
I'm not sure why I only liked this book 3 stars worth, but while I enjoyed it and finished it fairly quickly, it took a very long time for it to become compelling. I think my biggest problem was that everyone with any power was completely horrible and it was depressing in a way that made me just want to walk away from the book and the world it created. I'm not bothered by people doing terrible things because they thought they were right (which happens throughout history) but so many people in this book just felt psychopathic in their inability to see pain in others and it was unpleasant.
Which is not to say that I won't read other works by Waters, she's a talented writer and, when I'm not feeling repelled by the characters, she tells a sweet love story. But I'm hoping that the malaise of evilness is confined to this book alone.

This is not an easy book to rate, given that it's partially a guide to understanding data visualization and partially an enthralling coffee-table-esque tome (that still needed to be carried to and from coffee shops so I could read it).
Lima writes in an engaging manner and his work in explicating what visualizations should do and are good for is well done. I could almost wish for a bit more text, actually, some of his thoughts and interpretations of the many visualizations within. Seeing him "read" them would have made a very good primer to data visualization even better.

This was a solidly not-bad book, one that I think lost a bit from being read on an iPad (I started on a Kindle, but the images proved too difficult to see properly), but also that didn't have much to lose to begin with.
The use of the photographs was a nice conceit, but it remained a conceit the entire time, never truly reaching levels of being either interesting or compelling. They just kinda were (and I admit, I was far more interested in their true provenance than in the explanation the book provides).
Still, it was a decent YA novel, with a relatable protagonist who, thankfully, never does anything stupid merely to advance the plot, and a cast of supporting characters who, despite being peculiar, are quite standard (especially in the British Orphanage genre).
The best part of the book is how it recreates the moment of growing up and realizing that your childhood heroes are deeply flawed, but then lets you escape from a world where said hero is possibly psychotic and probably a philanderer into one where he is forever a hero. There's something...not escapist, but reassuringly fantastic about this sort of story--that the magic doesn't HAVE to die.
Overall, though, I was mostly underwhelmed by this book. It was definitely better than meh, but I feel like it had so much more potential, but never really did anything.

This was another one of those "Well, the NYTimes liked it" reads. As a story, with plot and semi-believable occurrences (and I say this as an AVID reader of speculate fiction), I was unimpressed. Wolitzer handles the idea of a "spell" sloppily and, as silly as this sounds in a book about Lysistrata, the ending is a bit too deus ex machina.

This book shines (and I can only assume was favorably reviewed) for two reasons. The first is its talented, warm sympathetic portrayal of its characters. There are no villains in this book, only people and the silly things they do that help and hurt and heal one another. In that sense, it verges on beautiful.

The second reason is that "The Uncoupling" actually looks at what it means to be a woman and a sexual being and a bunch of different types of sexual beings without stigmatizing those who enjoy sex, who thrive on it, who are unimpressed by it - the entire gamut of female sexual experience is embraced. For all the rest of the book's faults (including the ending, which was far too pat with far too little effort), it was worth reading just for this.

A really cute little book. Reading the book as a memoir of growing up in Graduate school, I can definitely relate to some of what he is speaking about, though I found it a bit too preachy and pat to really get into the book.
In terms of his views on Austen...well, preachy and pat goes for that as well. I think that, in the interest of making it about his life, he sacrifices some of Austen's nuances.
Also, I disagree with his assessment of both Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, though that was just me.
The memoir was a bit too didactic and the criticism was a bit too unaware of its own provenance. He was writing as if Austen speaks in the same voice to everyone, while the book is, in the end, about Austen spoke to him.

To give this book credit it is better and certainly more coherent than its predecessor. Still, I can't say that I'm particularly enamored of any of the characters, especially Reason.

I want to find out more about magic, though, since the premise of the trilogy has been interesting enough to keep me reading thus far.