This is a great, engaging contemporary YA story. It's funny, it's moving, it grapples with thorny ethical dilemmas and a realistic approach to trauma, and it does it through a Muslim girl's POV.

Content note: the sexual assault isn't graphic, but it is a driving force of the plot.

It's a good readalike for [b:Exit, Pursued by a Bear|25528801|Exit, Pursued by a Bear|E.K. Johnston|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1449491313s/25528801.jpg|45316429]--both books with a strong voice and a girl narrator who values her friendships.

Intriguing and unsettling.

this is.......so Much. Almost 1000 pages. I'm not cut out for this kind of high fantasy shenanigans and I resent having been trapped into reading this series. Anyway it's been such a long journey, and there are just so many characters, that I had to spend like 2 cumulative hours reading various Throne of Glass wiki pages to just comprehend this. I'm sure it would have been a better reading experience if I had re-read the rest of the series before this one but HONESTLY who has that kind of TIME

Anyway I feel like every chapter is like "Oh no, there's an insurmountable difficulty................but wait, we can surmount it with this previously-unusable magic technique/item/person!!!!!" Presumably there was a lot of groundwork laid for this in previous books but as stated before.......who can remember

anyway whew I guess this was a satisfing ending? mostly I feel that a weight has been lifted from me and I am now free from the burden of this series. I mean, I realize that I entered into a relationship with the Thone of Glass series as a consenting adult but...whew.

I think this is a great book for teens (of any gender but especially girls) to read, whether at the library or given to them by a parent/friend/whoever-it's so eye-opening & validating to read so honestly about so many different experiences. For an adult it's still an interesting read but it's mainly intended for, and I think will be best received by, tweens & teens. It's honest about sex, and detailed, but not titilating or erotic.

I LOVED this book. I'm familiar with Guy Branum's work but wasn't really a superfan or anything coming into this, but I was so impressed with how smart and funny and insightful he is. From the subtitle (and from other books I've read) I was a little nervous about this being a deep dive into sitcoms I never watched, but instead it's something much more universal. (While also specifically being a powerful story of growing up a closeted gay teen and later coming out as an adult, and processing the messaging he'd received from pop culture about sexuality.)

It's more melancholy than I'd expected, but it also has plenty of sharply funny lines. Plus, footnote jokes! I love a good footnote joke.

I'm glad I read this but I think in this day and age the story is more valuable as a pop culture touchpoint/archetype/whatever. TBH I think whatever you already know about Jekyll & Hyde is sufficient and unless you are doing an academic deep dive of some sort, you can get by just fine without ever reading this actual book.

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to! (aka it wasn't as scary as I feared it would be, as I am a coward). It was also a lot funnier than I expected.

If you are into this kind of thing you have probably already read this.

I'm not typically interested in Arthurian stuff but I'm trying to complete my readthrough of the works of M.T. Anderson. Sooo I wasn't too surprised to find this super weird and funny (and apparently based on translations from the French that Anderson did himself?? why is he so good at everything??? what's his deal??)

Like everything else he writes I think this is kind of a hard sell to most teens but I think if you can get it into the hands of people who like high fantasy stuff (and obv people who love Arthurian stuff specifically, which I know many do!) this will find some fans.

I just had a really hard time suspending my disbelief over the basic premise of "these medical archives will hire a college dropout as an archivist and we provide an on-site apartment for you to live in and you can only digitize things at NIGHT because those are just the hours okay!" Like...yeah sure that's the setup for a haunted house story or whatever but I feel like the author could have tried a little harder to make that setup make...sense?

Spoiler

and then with the reveal that the museum board was selling old bodies/samples/whatever from former patrons who died in care of the old hospital...like sure yes horrifying but also WHAT WAS ANYONE DOING WITH THOSE? would have loved a panel or something for like...idk were goth kids buying them for decor or what.

Like I get the CORE of it, that the patients who died from horrible medical care/experiments would haunt this old archives, looking for their stories to be told etc..and I think that's a GOOD idea for a story...but then all these extra trappings around it just don't make sense to me and also don't seem necessary??

That said....the artwork is cute and I appreciate the diverse cast and, I guess I appreciate the inclusion of a clinically depressed main character (although I didn't feel like her whole arc was very fleshed out the way it COULD have been)? But rly would only recommend to diehard fans of haunted house type stories.

This was just the blend of nostalgia and criticism that I wanted. I loved revisiting series I loved/forgot about, as well as learning about other series that totally passed me by. I appreciated Moss's mixture of remebering her own faves, observing how they skewed white/abled/straight/upper class/etc, and digging out pioneering books/series that perhaps were less overall popular but were more diverse than Sweet Valley et al.

(I also appreciated her introductory note that she was blending together YA and middle grade series under the grounds that tweens read indiscriminatorily. That was certainly true for me--as a young tween I was definitely grabbing Sunset Island and Sweet Valley High at the same time I was reading BSC books, even though those are NOT aimed at the same age group. I know that was not everyone's experience as a young reader, though!)

The interviews with authors, editors, and even one of the models who posed as Claudia Kishi were great pieces of added information too.