I enjoyed this! I'm really only familiar with Domino from the Deadpool movie, so I didn't know most of her side characters here. But I liked that at its core it was a book about female friendship! And Gail Simone, per usj, delivers on snappy dialogue.

I'm sure this was perfectly cromulent for beginning readers but for a (not 2 brag) accomplished adult reader encountering this for the first time.......not a lot to offer.

http://www.frowl.org/worstbestsellers/episode-128-pickle-puss-polk-street-school/

ok. ok. I love a dance movie/book, so when I skimmed the description on NetGalley, my brain understood "French ballet boarding school" and downloaded it immediately.

This was...fine. I liked the ballet stuff, though there's not much here that's groundbreaking if you've ever seen/read any other dance movie/book. Eating disorders? Sexually charged dance partners? Gross ouchy feet? You don't say. But that stuff is all done well, if you're into that kind of thing, which I am.

A linguistic pet peeve: this is set in France, the characters (except one) are French, they're presumably speaking French all the time but we're reading the dialogue translated because, you know, that's how books work. Except sometimes a random French word is thrown in the dialogue. So what's that, like, double-French?? (SOMETIMES this is for a specific phrase with the purpose of translating the difference between that and a similar English idiom, which makes sense for the American character, but sometimes it's just like bonjour or whatever, and like, why.)

But HERE'S THE SPOILER I WANT TO DIG INTO:

Spoiler

OK so Kate, the slutty American ballerina, gets pregnant, because of course, so she goes to the pharmacist to get a pregnancy test, and the pharmacist also gives her a morning after pill but it doesn't work because she lied and it's been way more than 72 hours, which, OK, I buy that a panicked teen might try that, whatever. But then the pharmacist is like "anyway if that doesn't work talk to the beekeeper" and she's like OK and THEIR BALLET BOARDING SCHOOL ALSO HAS A BEEHIVE AND BEEKEPER ON STAFF and I guess the beekeeper is a retired OB/GYN who just has beekeeping as a hobby?? and they have an actual nurse and everything on staff, and anyway the beekeeper helps her with herbal abortion rememedies.

This book is contemporary!!!! They have like, cell phones and the morning after pill and everything!! The beekeeper thing is so weird that I'm like, is this magical realism??? But everything else seems...not that???? Is the beekeeper literal?

IF YOU HAVE READ THIS PLEASE TALK TO ME ABOUT THE BEEKEEPER.

:O

http://www.frowl.org/worstbestsellers/episode-21-city-of-bones/

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OK, so teens LOVE these books and people my age HATE Cassandra Clare for being a cyberbully. I didn't love it, but I also can't bring myself to hate Clare for being a cyberbully, because who among us has not cyberbullied??? Be honest. OK, maybe YOU haven't, but I have definitely been a dick to people on the internet.

I'm about to be a dick on the internet right now, actually.

Anyway, I get why teens like this book. It's like... clever-ISH. All the snark might seem funny & original if you hadn't already spent decades consuming similar media. If you HAVE, it's kind of stale. The boys sound cute. It has ~*edgy openly gay characters*~ (take that, Twilight!)

Everything about it seems like she's kind of regurgitating tropes from different fantasy/horror books/TV shows. It's not terrible, but it's also not very fresh or compelling. Certainly not enough to get me to pick up the next FIVE books in this series.

Anyway, this is not the WORST teen bestseller I've ever read. But it's not the best, and definitely not good enough for me to recommend this to adults.

Spoiler

My favorite part was the SURPRISE INCEST because haha, what?! But even that is not particularly fresh. It just feels like she read a lot of VC Andrews growing up. Which I would bet you $5 she did.

DNF

This was billed as "Fast and the Furious in Space!" and I was like, RAD. But a) For me, action/racing scenes are way more compelling in movies, and also when The Rock is in them? and b) I got about 10 chapters in and this just felt like a very cynical mashup of Things That Are Popular. It's a dystopia, where corporations are in charge! And corporations give you tattoos if you race cars for them! And the tattoo is of a cool lion that's on fire! And there's a love triangle between childhood best friend who got hot and a SECRET PRINCE.

Anyway, like I said, I DNF'd so maybe by the end all these tropes are inverted! But I got other shit to read.

Teens who are real into cars and/or are slightly less jaded toward YA tropes might enjoy this. "Fast and Furious in Space" is an admittedly great hook. (Although! From that I thought they would be racing spaceships but actually they are just like, fancy cars? That they race on the ground? Of another planet? And it's the most important sport in the universe? For some reason?)

I liked the character dynamics, and I think teens particularly will appreciate the nuanced approach to gender and sexuality--there's explicitly bi witches, there's married lesbian witches, there's a trans witch, etc, and I loved that!

However the witch stuff fell a bit flat for me--the worldbuilding definitely felt like an afterthought to the character development, which can be OK but like........for my money you can almost never have too much witch stuff! And that lack made the witch stuff part of the mystery...underwhelming. Also--and perhaps this is just because of where I live--I felt like the book didn't use its Salem, MA setting to its fullest advantage. For the most part this could have taken place in any suburb.

Still, the characters and the romance were great, and readers who are less passionate about witch stuff than I am will enjoy it.

I think this book was my favorite of the series, due to its low concentration of Edward Cullen. It turns out Meyer can write interesting characters; it's just that she has chosen not to make them her protagonists.

--

9/28 note from a re-read via audiobook: the audio narrator pronounces both "Jacob" and "Bella" very oddly.

http://www.frowl.org/worstbestsellers/episode-31-new-moon/

This was so weird and funny, honestly every book should do a murder version of itself

And Chuck Bass should always have a monogrammed eyepatch

I got about 1/3rd into this and insisted that my coworker tell me if the cat dies!!!!!!

Spoiler

the cat does not die but whew there are some perilous situations

anyway WHEW this is a gripping read. Difficult, emotionally speaking (and not only for cat-related reasons), but gripping. A lot of content warnings here, but in the right hands/setting could be great for a class on fairy tales/gender/etc.

Spoiler

but also like yo at the end of the day, the king fucked that dragon's armpit wound though
like wow though

This is so important but also so fun! A great mix of voices (intersectional along all lines) and, for me, a mix of some familiar faves and new authors to look out for.

This is aimed at teens and I think will be great for them, regardless of if they're super woke capital-feminist teens or if they're new to the idea of feminism. The scrapbook-style format makes it not too intimidating to read. BUT I don't think the appeal here is limited to teens; adults, even those of us who are pretty well-read on ~feminism~ can find something new here too.