Definitely a good read for the depths of winter. Weirdly made me feel nostalgic for my dorm room in Norway when it was light out for like four hours a day. It was depressing as fuck but in a way I could still romanticize somehow. 

Anyway, it’s one of those books where I finish it and feel kinda dumb like not sure if I really got it, but I guess I kinda did? I wonder how much Jansson identifies with the Anna character because I was definitely seeing parallels between the flowery rabbits and the Moomins. Overall I do love weird outcast women in small towns.

The main reason it took me so long to finish this one is because I hate reading large hardcovers. It was definitely ~vibey~ at times and I got pretty sucked into the concept. (Definitely some loopholes though, like you’re telling me all those one night stands she had people didn’t usually shut the door to use the bathroom or something?) I definitely prefer the Shades of Magic series, but this was still good. The pacing of the modern versus historical chapters worked well and I was happy with how it ended.

The pieces just didn’t come together for me. Story felt sparse

I assumed incorrectly that this was gonna be gay, but it was still good. Great colors

Kinda cringe but a good primer if you only want to dedicate 20 minutes of your life to learning about asexuality. Just read Ace by Angela Chen

No clue what’s going on. Probably easier to follow on paper than in audio form

I ran out of listening hours on Spotify with TEN MINUTES left!!!!!!! Luckily I was able to immediately borrow a digital copy on Libby and read the last few pages. Spotify has never burned me that bad omg. Sorry still processing thoughts on the book itself just had to share

Vibrant and beautiful

Woooooow. I don’t know how she even began to plot out the overlapping stories of all of these characters. I think I could have done without the Casey storyline, and sometimes all the little side stories towards the end got to be a bit much, but overall really impressed with how it all came together.

I really liked how most of the siblings did not come out at the end with a romantic partner. I feared they would throw Nina a new love interest at the end. And Jay absolutely needed to be rejected by that girl. He needed to learn that women aren’t his therapists.

Need to read Daisy Jones & Carrie Soto now to tie everything together!

Although I don’t know why the book never mentioned Mick marrying Evelyn Hugo! Too distracting? I think it would have been a cute tie-in.

Had to do some Reddit scouring after finishing this to find a good analysis, and this review sums everything up perfectly: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/156503324?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1

I’m glad I decided to stop doing Ishiguro audiobooks because the whole unreliable narrator thing doesn’t work as well that way. The pacing of this book is a little off for me. It’s quite a slow build until the last fifty pages or so which are…. Pretty nuts! Found myself muttering “what is he doing” to myself a lot. Kind of brilliant character exploration? But I think the first half could have been tightened up quite a bit.

Really interesting to read what others’ Ishiguro rankings are, because a lot of people had this one last but I liked this more than ROTD and APVOH. But maybe I need to give those two a physical reread!

Ishiguro Ranking:
1. Never Let Me Go
2. Klara and the Sun
3. When We Were Orphans
4. A Pale View of Hills
5. Remains of the Day