Dialogue and steamy scenes were too cringe. Very graphic sex scenes normally don’t bother me, but these were too much. Then there was the unbearable tensions between the sisters. Most of the characters are horrible to each other. If Rome really fell in love at first sight with the Janelle, where is their tension now that he gets his chance? She thought he hated her, but there’s no thought given to his sudden interest now? So much potential for great longing flushed away in favor for petty group drama.

I love the writing style and atmosphere but I’m not connecting with the plot. Library loan was due before I finished, maybe I’ll come back to it if it calls to me.

These were sweet and interesting stories, but I didn’t finish it before the library loan was due and I’m not in the mood for short stories right now. Hopefully I’ll come back to it in the future.

A friend lent me a copy, but before I started reading I looked up Christy Lefteri. Not only has she been silent on Palestine, even silent on recent Israeli attacks on Syria, but she is also Tweeting transphobic garbage. I’ll stick to reading books about Syria by Syrian authors who stand against oppression and don’t attack marginalized communities. 

I might come back to this, but my library hold ran out and I haven’t asked for it again yet…
I was struggling with some parts of the writing. Some scenes are so vivid, but others I was confused by. For example, at the start, how did her brother learn that her father was drowning? How is it possible they got to him while he was still at sea if he was out there for less than 10 minutes?

Then I also found dialogue (or lack-there-of) awkward. “We shimmy out of the crawl space and tear down another path, accidentally slamming into a pair of curious divîners. One drops his bottle of rum... I scoop the bottle off the ground and scan the streets for my missing ingredient. There. It’s only a few meters from the girl’s head. “Grab the torch!”… we take off running.” So, she steals his bottle of rum (dropped on the ground after being slammed into, but we’re supposed to assume it’s unbroken?) and then runs off without anything said to or by either divîner they just knocked into and then stole from? This felt very awkward to me, and distracted me from the world.

Just wasn’t clicking with the world.

Everything I read so far in this book points to abolition, so it caused too much cognitive dissonance to hear the author train cops individually and seemingly expect systemic results from that. I would love to read more about generational trauma, but this is not the book for me.

Library loan ran out. An interesting beginning, I hope I can return to it when I have more time. 

Wasn’t in the mood. A slow,  repetitive start to the romance. Maybe I’ll come back to it later… 

Couldn’t get past how Eurocentric this was, especially how Pollen described indigenous people as “indians” without any distinction of tribe, and worse, the way he at once claimed that Johnny Appleseed fought them but “Indians” held Johnny Appleseed in high regard as a “medicine man”  and said he “moved between worlds… red world and white.” There were other issues I had, but that line was the last straw.