(*my overall rating is a 4.5)

OMG I LOVED THIS STORY SO MUCH!

ok, ok, let me give you back story.

so a while back i bought this book and them attempted to read it. i made it like 20 pages in and then just decided to stop reading it. later i donated it to my school library. after some persuasion from my friends, i checked it out from the library and read it.

and oh my God was it great.

ugh i just loved everything about this book. so, like most stories, lets start at the beginning.

first up, the tests + the backstory.

ok, the backstory was what bored me half to death. the book goes into great detail about everything (which slowly grew on me but i hated at the beginning) which really annoys me. i also wasn’t a big fan of the whole test taking thing.

but after all the tests passed and they were finally at Mr. Benedict’s place (house? lair? idk) then it started to get good.

i fell in love with all the characters. i loved Reynie a lot. he was such a dorky little brave leader and i loved how sweet and smart he was. sticky was also great. he was needy and adorable and i loved how he always polished his glasses when he got nervous.

kate was definitely my favorite. she just so odd and different that i ended up liking her a lot. the concept of her carrying around a bucket all the time was cool to me as well. and Constance, oh Constance, i hated her at the beginning. slowly, slowly, though, she began to grow on me until i fell in love with her at the end.

the whole mission itself was so cool. the institute and mr. curtain’s plan (the improvement) was all so well thought out. it was super interesting to uncover everything along the way and find out everything. there were so many twists and turns that you don’t expect to happen.

also, now i suddenly want to learn Morse code.

the late night meetings of the Mysterious Benedict Society were probably my favorite part of the whole story. it was just so cool to see them come together and see their minds working.

S.Q the executive also kinda grew on me. i mean i know im not supposed to like him because he’s like a bad guy, but he was just the sweetest dork ever!

i was super happy with the ending and OMG i can’t believe that Constance is three. years. old.

also, im so happy for Milligan and Kate!

this story was just so awesome and well written that id highly, highly recommend!

-rebe✨

(*my overall rating is a 3.0)

ahhh CEO of writing book reviews like a month after i read them.

anywho, The Heartbreakers is a book about a girl who falls in love with the lead singer of a band who she “hates”.

alright, lets start.

so, right of the bat i wasn’t a big fan of our main character, Stella. she was rude and snarky but i kinda...liked that? don’t get me wrong, i love being in love with the main character but sometimes i also like having an unlikeable main character.

Stella’s brother and sister (Cara and Drew) were great as well. i felt the love they had for Stella but i personally think that they were extremely overlooked? they felt more like background characters that only contributed to the main romance. like, Cara’s cancer was the one thing that was used to bring Stella and Oliver together.

in fact, now that i think about it, everything in this story—all the characters, events, etc—were used to either create drama or bring together Oliver and Stella.

like JJ’s sexual jokes were inky there to make Oliver jEaLoUs.

aside from Oliver, i adored the rest of the band members JJ was the cutest and Alec made my heart so soft.

the romantics gestures that Oliver did for Stella were beautiful. i truly think that Oliver was in love in Stella, but i personally don’t think that Stella was in love with Oliver.

sorry not sorry.

oh, and one more thing, how the hell could you be rude enough to straight up tell four musicians who work extremely hard day and night on their music that their band is trash and their music sucks? that’s such an asshole move.

-rebe

(*my overall rating is a 4.8)

the poet x was an amazingly written and amazingly told story about the struggles of falling out of a religion and having family problems.

i personally thought that, since the book was written in slam poetry, it wouldn’t tell the story correctly, or i wouldn’t want to continue with the story, but this was honestly one of my favorite writing styles of all time. i’ve even taken to writing slam poetry of my own.

i am personally a Catholic so reading about Xiomara’s falling out with the church was hard for me to read. but i understand. religion is not for everyone, some people just don’t believe.

i can relate so much with Xiomara’s struggles of growing up, and crushes, and boys and stuff like that. i felt very heard by Xiomara.

the poetry aspect was the best!!!

the only reason this didn’t get a full on five out of five stars was because, although i loved twin’s relationship with his boyfriend, i felt like it was kind of...queerbaiting? it was kind of just a side piece, which i didn’t think it was supposed to be, but it felt like it.

all in all an extremely good story!

-rebe

(*my overall rating is a 4.0)

i read this book in november so i can barely recall my true feelings after i read this (way to go, rebe). so i’m basically going off of memory.

i thoroughly enjoyed this book! i had to read the first one for school, and our teacher decided to read us the second one when we had extra time in class or when we were working on assignments. it was fun and i had actually enjoyed the story. my teacher got about 340 pages into the book when she stopped reading it to us and the school year ended.

i was in desperate need to read something so i decided to pick up this book and reread everything my teacher read to us while also finishing it.

and i enjoyed it a lot! i love the characters and the descriptive writing. the author really shows us what’s going on around the characters and it explains the feelings and smells and visuals.

i also just love how they switch between the different storylines of each character. i felt like the villain was much more threatening this time around and i feel like the way that the kids defeated him made a lot of sense! you wonder throughout the whole story how they’re going to defeat (what essentially is) a shadow, and in the end it really makes sense!

all in all a great read and i will hopefully continue with the series soon!

-rebe

(*my overall rating is a 3.5)

cinder is a sci-fi story set in the future that is about a half-human half-cyborg girl who lives in new beijing with her two stepsisters and stepmother. she ends up getting “volunteered” to the research of finding a cure to the current plague.

i had heard so so so so much about cinder before i even considered picking it up. i noticed that it regularly showed up in either hauls pr unhauls, but aside from that i never saw anything else about the story. booktubers constantly said the same thing over and over. “i loved this in middle school but my love for it started to dwindle” blah blah blah. all the exact same critique and stuff like that.

so i wasn’t too interested in picking it up until i was so freaking bored that my crap brain couldn’t think straight and i was suddenly buying it from barnes & noble and reading it.

i loved cider when i began it. cinder was (to me, at the time) a super badass character who accepted things as they were and stood up for herself and stuff like that. but i was wrong. cinder is a very bland, very 1-D character who didn’t really do ANYTHING. cinder just...was. she wasn’t unique, or different from anyone else. to me, a rug would have been more interesting.

and can we talk about how cinder’s only personality trait was that she was a cyborg and she was a mechanic? the only other distinguishing trait i can think of is snarky, and still not much of that.

moving on to the other characters, let’s talk about cinder’s family. first, the sisters. pearl and peony. i was able to appreciate the fact that meyer did go off the original story and didn’t make both of cinder’s sisters total bone-heads. peony was a wonderful character. she was sweet but also sassy. she was your typical teenage girl who had big dreams. the thing is that meyer kills off peony so early on in the story that we can’t really be sad about what happened. she dies before, what, page 100? that, to me, is not enough time to truly care for a character. now pearl was bad. she was just the most average bad stepsister i’d ever read. it was so stupid. the stepmom was also just way too typical.

iko was wonderful. for a robot, she was a heck of a lot more interesting than cinder. i also loved prince kai! he was so adorable and definitely one of my new book boyfriends.

the whole plot thing with queen levana was really interesting! i didn’t think that we were gonna get this space plot in the book but it was a pleasant surprise! i still wish that we had gotten to know levana and the story a little more but i guess not. hopefully we get to know more about it in future stories (which we did, but it still confused me).

the plot was the part where most of my issues lied. while i was reading the book, i found the plot very good! i really loved the plot of the mechanic thing and Prince Kai and the plague and all that stuff, but when i actually finished the book i realized that the story was, even if not directly, super similar to the original cinderella tale.

the ending of the story is what really just put the icing on the cake. what even was that ending? poor prince kai, stupid cinder, annoying queen levana! i was just so angry at the ending (i want to add that i was overexaggerating a lot when i finished it. i still dislike the ending but it’s not as bad as i made it seem.) that it made me not want to even touch the second book.

thank God that scarlet (the second book) was much better. i would high recommend scarlet, even if it meant having to get through cinder.

so yeah. that’s my review that took literal months to get written!

-rebe

as of right now, i’ve decided to DNF this book. maybe it’s because i just don’t like witches or the fact that christmas just passed and i was reading a book about witches and blood and shit, but i’m putting it down for now. maybe in the future i’ll pick it back up but for now she’s gonna be sitting on my shelf.

(*my overall rating is a 3.0)

looking for alaska reminds me of a movie with a bad plot, bad characters, and bad development but it seems to be made up with one of the best endings you'll ever see in your life and some philosophical dialogue.

i was already wary when going into the story. i'd heard just about 100 book youtubers say something along the lines of, "i liked it a lot when i was in middle school but now that i'm re-reading it i'm not a fan." it appears that as you get older the story becomes more...meaningless? bad? i don't know. i don't want to sound pretentious, but i do think that i have a more...adult kind of taste, so i was going into this with very little expectations.

i was ready to come out of this book with a one star rating in mind and a lot of bad things to say about it but, surprisingly, i actually kind of liked it.

well, more like i enjoyed about half of it.

the book is split into two parts; the before and the after. the before follows miles as he goes off to a new boarding school to make his life better(?). then the after which follows miles after (spoilers!) his beloved crush dakota dies in a tragic car accident.

i'm just gonna say it now, the before part is the equivalent to crying in a dumpster while a homeless man curses your entire family and the after part is the equivalent to reading a book that is posed as the bible, and you almost believed it.

now, i'll explain myself in a second, but before i do, i want to say this: this was my first john green book and to be honest, it has convinced me that maybe his other books aren't that bad.

the before section of the book is filled with underage smoking, drinking, and sexual scenes that kind of made me want to throw up. the characters were clearly written as misunderstood kids whose only solace was smoking as many drugs as possible. dakota drank as if she had just gotten divorced with her husband of one year, and god if i can even remember anyone other than miles, dakota, and the colonel.

the sexual parts of the book, while keeping it mild and short, each and every scene was unnecessarily awkward and, quite frankly, literally embarrassing to read. the before part of the book is aggravating to read. dakota is such a pick-me girl it hurts and you can clearly tell that miles is being gaslighted into believing that this group of people are the cool ones, when in reality they're future high-school has-beens just waiting to happen.

the after part is beautiful because it has such wonderful writing, it shows how miles is torn apart on the inside and the outside because of a love that really never was. in the after part, it shows miles slowly coming to the conclusion that yes, he was being gaslighted and manipulated by his friends.

all in all, i wouldn't necessarily recommend the book. if you want to read it, go for it. if you don't want to read it, leave it on the shelf and opt to read something better--and maybe longer (another criticsm, the book was way too short).

this has been another shitty review. hope you enjoy this extremely late review.

- rebe

*(overall rating is 4.0)

to be honest, when i read the prologue for this book and the last sentence was, "the boy i love", i found myself internally groaning. i had just finished up a romance and was in the mood for some fantasy (which is a rare occurrence), so imagine my surprise when i read that (also, not to mention that fantasy usually has the shittiest romances). but, elizabeth lim surprised me with her writing in the best way possible.

lets start with the writing: absolutely gorgeous. i adore the detailed and descriptive way that elizabeth lim weaved middle eastern and east asian culture into the story. you could tell that she enjoyed it a ton. the stories and lingo and even the description of the food and clothing that everyone wore was great.

the characters were all so well-written. i loved maia with a burning passion--she was sassy yet sweet and i feel like she kept her character consistent while also developing her throughout the story. baba and keton (even finlei and her other brother who, at the moment, i can't remember his name) were all such great and well written characters. i loved edan more than i would have expected.

what i do want to day is, i disliked how elizabeth lim wrote some of the "villain" characters, because it's so clear that she wrote them to be villains. lady sarnai and the emperor had no purpose aside from being villains, so they were written as overly cold and "power-hungry" characters.

i will say, though, i was pleasantly surprised with the romance. i was really dreading having to read some annoying romance in a high fantasy book, but i feel like it was a very likeable romance, with loads of chemistry, and it didn't make the characters stray away from the storyline/their quest.

all in all, a very good book. not sure if i'll read the second one, but only time will tell!

-rebe

*3.5

as someone who dislikes Lana Del Rey, i have to admit that her songwriting and her poetry is really good. i think it was a really beautiful and flowery poetry collection, but some of the poems just didn't make sense. overall it was a good poetry book, read it if you want, but it's not the best one i've ever read.

PROS:

• well built and executed characters!

• lived and I mean loved the writing style

• i really enjoyed the pacing

• THE PLOT

• THE COVER?! 😘


CONS:

• wasn’t happy with the ending... :(