The Ilona Andrews team always craft a complex mystery with remarkable world building. I found the first chapter and this one to be a bit too wordy and full of set up but eventually got into it. Still though with these covers - they’re embarrassing (I usually check these out from the library instead of on my Kindle) especially when the mystery is good and the romance is so secondary to the plot.

This is an intense read; both graphic and very funny. It makes you uncomfortable in a way that sympathizes you to the main character’s choices. I often read books that fall in or intersect with the romance genre and thus include a couple of sex(y) scenes, including relatively frequent LGBTQA relationships, but never have I read a novel that so unapologetically rejects flowery similes for private parts. No “pearled” nipples or “the heart of my heat” here. She calls it like she sees it and the outcome is a honest look at the act of sex, humans, obsession, and comfort zones.

3.5 | It’s been at least a year since I read volume one but I slipped right back in. Faith is irreverent, relatable but cool, and the narrative blocks are charming. My only complaint is the heavy handed nerdom pandering. From her Boba Fett alarm clock to the Penny! Penny! Penny! shirt it felt too... it’s trying very hard. I did love the signing booth “cameos” at the con though. Look forward to volume 3 tomorrow.

I forgot these came out in 2016; that first issue in this volume reminding us to vote next week

Cool look on a magic-fearing London. Quick fun reads, though not the deepest material. The budding romance is slllooowwww to non-existent but sweet. Mysteries are pretty good.

These are fun and I enjoy the mysteries, but the will-they-won’t-they is exhausting and lost my interest. Also the whole trope of her being a hot girl who doesn’t realize she’s hot is boring as hell. Done with the series.

"There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix before Christ, every few hundred years he build a pyre and burnt himself up, he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over, and it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation" (Bradbury 162)

This is one of those American classics I swore I had *probably* read in high school lit, but after listening for a hour, I knew I hadn’t. It’s classic dystopian science fiction and every other page is a remarkable quote or takeaway. Tim Robbins narration was intense, rapid, and moving.

Only complaint was towards the end, with the men and their books. Not a female “book” or author among them. Oh, literature of the 50’s.