purplepenning's Reviews (1.72k)

This was just not my cup of caffè.

Two privileged sybarites, both misunderstood and misunderstanding, accidentally reunite on the world's most incidentally but deeply bisexual tour of France and Italian on which they out-Bourdain everyone, experience everything and everyone, and discuss very specific food and wines very specifically. I gave up trying to look it all up because it was already taking me forever to get through the book and glazing over the barrage of epicurean terms took me out of the story less than doing the research required to get an inkling of the items discussed. A little art and architecture and Volkswagen mechanics and POP culture references are thrown in as well — these god-touched hedonists have mastered so many interests by their late 20s! —but the writing is good on a sentence level so it's not all entirely unbearable. 

I mean, I don't hate Theo or Kit. I found them to be an odd mix of endearing and insufferable. But I'm glad they have each other and their full-bodied delight in tasting the world. I'm just so glad my brief vacation with them is over. 

One Last Stop continues to be my favorite Casey Mcquiston book — I genuinely loved that one — which is a minority opinion, so as always, your mileage may vary here. 

Science-fantasy academia with a little bit of hope punk? I understand the comparisons to Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Fairies, but don't be drawn in by the House in the Cerulean Sea comparison (or A Marvelous Light, really). This is a quiet, scholarly-toned epistolary that lets small measures of mystery and taut adventure seep in around the margins before finally being awash with other worldly mystique.

It's a little slow for my tastes (and I wish I would have realized that it wasn't a standalone before I started it) but I'm glad I stuck with it. The writing is excellent and the characters finally won me over (despite my annoyance at the excessive self-deprecation in the majority of the letters!). 

Oof. I'm going to need a beat to process this one. My initial response is: 👏👏👏 I'm so glad this book exists and I can see how it might work especially well for teenagers. But it's doing just a few too many things at once for my tastes.