nadia's Reviews (587)

Was hoping for something with a bit more of a narrative, but really it was a series of case studies, essentially, of each book Toni Morrison edited. Given this, I couldn't really retain information and felt like I was learning more about each author and their work than Morrison as an editor, though I did get a good sense of that. I got bored now and again. I enjoyed when bits of correspondence was shared, especially when there was a lil' drama.

Given the things I struggled with during this Beloved reread — the timeline, what was actually happening/what we were meant to think was happening at any given time, etc., — I can see why I struggled with my first reread of this over a decade ago. However, I did manage to follow the story here and the writing, as always with Morrison, was fantastic. I think the number of times I was confused or had to reread passages and figure out whose perspective we were reading from doesn't do this book favours in terms of my Morrison rankings:


1. Song of Solomon
2. Sula
3. Tar Baby
4. The Bluest Eye
5. Beloved

This was way too basic for me. It's a good book for somebody who has no clue about data and how it's collected and used, or how to use data to protect themselves, improve their lives, or advance their careers or companies. I enjoyed the variety of anecdotes though!

My rating is mainly because I was never fully bored and there were times when the audio format really shone for this. However, by the end, I'm left not sure of exactly what happened and why (maybe that's intentional and the main focus was atmosphere and mystery..), and I had a hard time distinguishing between the characters — a few reviews have mentioned that that's because of the lack of different accents on the part of the narrator — and their motivations...the ending and wrap-up left me wanting.

I only own this audiobook because Libro.fm did a 10,000 copy giveaway on Zora Neale Hurston’s birthday in 2021. This isn't typically the sort of book I'd go for on audio, but I'm sooo glad I got this one. Ruby Dee's narration is excellent. I can see a lot of people in their reviews complaining about reading the dialect, but I didn't have that issue.

I was sucked into the characters and their story and there were some great dramatic moments.

I really really liked this book. There was a period of time where I thought it'd get the same or a higher rating than Station Eleven (4.5), but it fizzled out a bit towards the end for me. It kinda went down a magic realism (?) route —

Not the "Jonathan in prison" parts, I thought that worked really well

— and I'm not sure how I felt about that...it kinda took me out of the world that I'd been immersed in. And it also seemed to drag a little. Overall, I loved the writing style, the jumping around in time, the structure, the different POVs, narration styles, etc...and I'm a sucker for financial fraud storylines. 😅

This books mainly wins points because I remained intrigued the whole way through, despite me feeling like parts of this really dragged. I think that may have been that I trusted Collins to land the character evolution of the MC and explain how we got to where we were in the main trilogy...

We didn't really get that. The character development felt rushed and the central romance just wasn't believable to me. To me, huge leaps and bounds were taken to the end and I was left confused and ultimately disappointed.

Maybe my 3 is too generous...but below 3 feels too harsh given I kept eagerly turning the pages...but maybe that's the main trilogy, which I'd only just finished, still working its magic... 🤷🏾‍♀️

This book wasn't for me. I don't read blurbs or reviews beforehand so I had no clue what I was expecting, but this kind of horror just does nothing for me on audio (or anywhere frankly). While I appreciated the overall concept and thought there were some clever elements to it, I spent a lot of it thinking "why am I listening to this?" or "ewww". To that end, it was incredibly repetitive. I did like how they took advantage of the audio format with multiple narrators later on, giving it an immersive feel.

This book was a lot of fun! It had me chuckling at points throughout and I was never bored. I enjoyed the narrator's voice (I read the book digitally, so I don't mean the literal out-loud voice) and there were some real tense scenes as well. I was so intrigued by the mystery. However, it was really tricky to keep track of all of the characters and why they were doing what they were doing and how this whole thing here started, etc., etc.,..but I had fun and got the general gist, so that counts for a lot! The book was really easy to get through.