randi_jo's Reviews (420)

Pretty awesome how a story under 200 pages could encompass the cycle of love, loss, and starting anew.

Also making the rocs be captive animals who will still respond to their natural desires over that of the human training is so good. There's something about breaking the trope of person with mystic/fantastic animal creates an unbreakable bond and live happily ever after that I both love and hurts me right in my girlhood dreams. HAHA

Decided to try reading some new poetry instead of the tried and trues out there but. . . 

Look, I know poetry is subjective and all that, but this really was 110 pages of a lady's jumbled one-liners about being dumped (and solely based on the obsessiveness of the poems and her author bio, whoever dumped her probably made a smart move), with roughly 3 poems that are bluntly about self harm. A good majority of them feel like they had been taken from Instagram mood boards. 

Think I'll cancel my KU Sub for even suggesting it to me, I'm offended the algorithm thinks I'd find this acceptable.

Five stars alone belong to the guy on the cover. Where did Chuck find that?

Anyway, another fun-filled Tingler, and may I say I'm relieved that the hot sauce load wasn't blown into his ass? 10/10 

Honestly an oldie but goodie. Time to reread book two while waiting for the last installment.

Honestly I have very little to say about this one, which is a feat in and of itself.

Basically, make Frankenstein's monster into an American-born Latino person/mixed race white-Latino person and then replace "Mexicans" with "Stitchers" during Trump presidency era (but rename Trump and make him a woman).

That's it. The end. I dunno. The writing is dry, repetitive (exact repetitions of reoccurring events that . . . just don't hit), and the MC feels very ritualistic OCD coded (knocking 3 times, jogging start, repeating himself). Not my fave, even though it properly gives its dues to pan dulce.

I liked this one, but I don't think I liked it as much as I was really hoping to, since I really enjoy Holly Black's work.

The main cons of this book were that it had a very slow start and was difficult to engage with due to the "past" sections carving up any action that happened. The other is the ending cliffhanger

(I hate amnesia tropes)

. But realistically both of these things are typically found in the first book of a series.

There is a lot of potential for action and romance in the next book, so I'll probably pick it up when it comes out. Probably.

I was so, so excited for this and I am so, so let down. I don't know, it had so much potential based on the summary/blurb that I gave it so much benefit of the doubt that by the time I got 60% in I was lying to myself, saying that something was going to happen and when it did, it would be BIG.

I was wrong.

Let's be honest here, this book is not about potentially sentient octopuses/octopi coming to exact revenge on the human race for devastating the ocean's populations via overfishing and dumping waste. I mean the octopi are there and sure, they kill a couple people, but more in the way that you'd kill a coyote that's been hanging around your property for a few days and you own chickens. This book is actually about AI sentience - specifically the first complete AI sentience: Evrim and the musings of the implications of their existence plus

randomly dropping AT THE VERY END OF THE BOOK that they can self replicate, for very little reason imo

. It's actually a big think piece about artificial intelligence and human self-destruction - just throw in some overly smart octopi to make it more appealing, I suppose.

This is also not a thriller. You would need an actual plot for that. There are 3 specific POVs here: Ha the scientist thinking about brains and using octopi as the medium to spout lots of linguistic and sentience related questions to a literal sentient AI; Rustem the hackerman who is tasked to hack into the aforementioned AI by Evil PETA; and Eiko the kidnapped Japanese man forced into illegal slavery aboard an equally illegal AI fishing trawl. All three plots build up slowly seeming to come to a culmination where they all intersect at Con Dao, but guess what? THEY DON'T. The plots never intersect outside of Rustem essentially downloading a message into Evrim's brain! In fact each plot just peters out into nothing! Nothing happens! The scientists

are taken over by a rival company and they say "ok that's cool"

, Rustem says

no to Evil PETA (which we learn NOTHING ABOUT by the way), and chooses to save Evrim from being hacked

, and Eiko

survives the wreck of his captor ship and ends up at a turtle temple where he is like YAY! and that is the EPILOGUE

.

I think I would be less offended if Ray Nayler himself found my email and crafted a unique and heartfelt letter that told me to fuck myself, than I was by that ending.

Anyway, for a think piece, it was decent.

Great prose and engaging. I love that Breitwieser or his girlfriend, his mother, or even father, is never painted in some kind of evil light and rather that they're all a product of their environments, impulses, and surrounded by enablers. A perfect storm.

Also I am somewhat disturbed to learn about the severe lack of security in museums? I've always thought they were all far more sophisticated haha. Not that this has awakened anything in me. Certainly not.  🤥 

RuPaul is one of my favorite TV personalities out there and I was really excited to read this memoir. It focuses less on his life in drag and his drag personality and more on his personal life outside of drag, which I found to be a bit saddening because outside of his childhood and a handful of discordant relationships, it seems he did little outside of work and party/use. Either way it was written wonderfully and was hard to put down. Congrats, on 25+ years sober, sir.

I'm really unsure how I feel about this one. The black-market art crime and antique aspect of it was really interesting. The murder mystery side of it however. . . well, not so much. I don't know, the events of Cairo and Freya's "mysterious" (only because it takes like half the book for her to actually go into a flashback chapter to explain it) past didn't really interest me as much as I feel it would've if there felt like there had been more immediate consequences - and this considering there was a murderer running about the entire book.

Also while I was sympathetic to Freya, I don't really think she had that much development. The fact that at the end of the book she didn't tell her shitty ex-husband to fuck off when he started berating her was like gurl.

For the audiobook, though, I think it made it harder for me to enjoy because it was near impossible to tell when Freya was speaking or having some internal dialogue (of which she has A LOT and FREQUENTLY), so I kept getting confused or surprised when other characters responded/didn't respond to her.