I mean...I'm a Marvel stan. So, it's not like I was ever going to hate this book.

A lot of the plot was just kind of the first Thor movie but like...better? Loki does some thoughtless idiotry, so Odin sends him to Earth in punishment under the guise of a mission. Once there, Loki meets an Earthling scientist who humbles Loki and teaches him some life lessons. Except it's better, because it's set in Victorian London, and there's an actual plot where Loki has to solve some murders and have a big climactic fight ON A TRAIN.

My biggest gripe is the pacing. The first third of this book basically functions as a prologue which is just...entirely too long for a prologue.

I'm not sure what I expected after my ambivalence with regards to the movie but... this was worse, to be honest. Why:

- Uncomfy age gap where Carol literally refers to Therese as a child
- Weird persistent hatred of department store workers, including a woman who is only ever nice to Therese but is constantly belittled by both the character and the narrative
- Entirely too much time spent discussing money for a story that includes no plot points involving money
- Cheating (even in a crumbling marriage, still bad)
- Richard?? Deeply baffling character who was just incredibly annoying
- Somehow incredibly boring despite having the most melodramatic main character of all time

Whew, this was long and sciency and honestly surprisingly readable.

Watney was sarcastic and quipy enough that it's hard not to enjoy him as a character, and the plot had enough action that it was hard to be bored. And luckily, I am a fan of science (I'm an astronautical engineering major and it was so fun to see how much of this stuff actually is stuff I've been learning at school).

If you like the movie the book is...almost exactly the same but longer and sciencier and sans the ridiculous Iron Man flying sequence! Yay!

This was really cute and fun but I found myself wishing it felt a little more grounded? The characters just jumped from adventure to adventure at an incredibly fast pace and I still don't know all of their names. It needed some downtime between the fantasy elements to get to know the characters a little better and help slow down the pacing a little bit.

This was the sort of book that I never really felt like I was truly understanding. Maybe there was something deeper I wasn't getting and maybe it was just an odd book and I genuinely have no idea which of the two it was. But it was cute and short. So.

There are a couple reasons I struggled with this book.

First and most importantly, I found the incessant fat-shaming of our main character pretty triggering, especially since she was a size 8. I don’t understand why Chao felt the need to include that kind of detail and while I understand why she included the comments from her mother, Mei herself made some remarks, which bothered me a lot.

Secondly, there’s nothing really new about this book. And while that’s not necessarily bad, I just read When a Dimple Met Rishi, which features a lot of the same tropes and, in my opinion, did it better. So I wasn’t really enjoying this book too much because it felt like I’d just read the same kind of story.

Overall, this book is mostly fine. Because of my life experience and the books I’ve read recently, though, I personally didn’t like it.