Aww, I really enjoyed this! Really sweet, solid, funny contemporary realistic story with enough complexity to feel realistic but without too much angst and drama. I thought it was interesting that Zoe's father clearly had some kind of agoraphobia or severe social anxiety, and Zoe was aware of it but never really named it? Like, they even watched Monk together as a family and Zoe was aware that her dad was like Monk but again, they never discussed it. But I liked that the family worked to accommodate her dad's needs even though Zoe was occasionally frustrated by it.

Bonus: the audiobook is 3 hours, 17 minutes long which makes it perfect for short-ish day trips.

haha WHOOPS I bought this awhile ago because it was on sale for Kindle for 99 cents and I didn't realize that it was book two?? I actually didn't realize it until I came to log it on GoodReads, although I did feel like the book was jumping into the fairy stuff super fast.

Uhh... I liked it anwyay! I think in retrospect I like it more now that I realize it was book 2. I think I will go back and check out book 1.

Short, fast-paced actiony fantasy. WARNING FOR CATS GETTING EATEN BY GOBLINS THO

I actually... kind of loved this?? I totally get why people would hate it--I think a lot of it has to do with how you feel about James Franco in general. Like, I totally understand why people hate his public persona--he's definitely a showy, pretentious, weird, perpetual art school student guy. I think James Franco kind of hates James Franco. But I'm fascinated by that, and I especially love how just... out there he is. Like almost compulsively honest, with these self-conscious little thought spirals.

You can tell a lot of this is pretty autobiographical, and that's part of the appeal, I think, at least for me. I'm definitely fascinated by celebrity culture, and this is an insider's look at it. I also think that James Franco is using this book to work out some issues he has about women? Those were my least favorite parts, but even there, I sort of appreciated his basically transparent self-loathing.

This kind of reminded me of [b:The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made|17404078|The Disaster Artist My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made|Greg Sestero|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1373346749s/17404078.jpg|24240845], which I also loved largely for its behind the scenes look at ~*Hollywood*~.

I would only strongly recommend this to people who already appreciate James Franco's general ethos. OR people who hate James Franco's general ethos and are looking for a spite read.

This was a book where there was a LOT going on (corporate espionage, medical thriller, extreme weather, shark attacks, secret islands) but also still had sort of long stretches that I found very boring? But also note that "survival" is not really my particular jam.

I really liked the diversity and class issues here and I thought those were handled really well. Shy's a good narrator--a smart, observant teenage boy who's thoughtful, but also horny.

I picked this up because I wanted to maybe booktalk it for 7th & 8th graders who love Hunger Games etc, but I think it's a little too ~adult~ in terms of language and death/sex stuff? I mean I think there are definitely individual 7th/8th graders who would dig this but I don't feel comfortable pitching it to an entire class. I think high schoolers looking for a good adventure/survival story should like it a lot.

I totally dug Etta's voice and journey in this. So funny and self-aware... except when she's not.

This is the kind of book that a certain type of terrible person will groan about being "too politically correct," like it's implausible that a black, bisexual person with an eating disorder would possibly exist. And I think Moskowitz does such a great job exploring the intersectionality between all the aspects of Etta's life.

Feels like a good readalike for E. Lockhart.

A lot of frank and positive discussion of sexuality, which is great! But not tween friendly.

Hmm. I definitely appreciated this book--I almost always love painful honesty, and that's pretty much Alison Bechdel's jam. There's a lot of layers here, like there were in [b:Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic|38990|Fun Home A Family Tragicomic|Alison Bechdel|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327652831s/38990.jpg|911368], which I loved. I think..... hmm. Hm. A LOT of this book was rehashing Alison Bechdel's therapy sessions, which does make for an interesting confessional vibe, but which can also get kind of draggy? I had to read this in slow, thoughtful chunks. Worth the effort.

This is the first Elmore Leonard book I've ever read? Adult mystery/Westerns or whatever this is aren't my normal jam, BUT I do love the show Justified so I thought I'd pick this up. I didn't realize that it was #3 in the Raylan series but I felt pretty up to speed from watching the show. Actually, more than up to speed, since elements of this book were turned into episodes of the show, which I'd already seen?

It's rare that I would say this, but I'd definitely recommend just watching the show and not reading the book. Everything comes across so much more clever in the show. The book has a lot more vague racism and sexism. (I'm SO mad about Rachel's sudden "The Help" backstory??? ughhh)

Also, I know this was Elmore Leonard's last book before he died, but it kind of felt like he wrote it all on his death bed and no one edited it. There are some BONKERS sentences in this. Like, for example, "Jackie Nevada had walked out of the police station knowing her best bet was to get out of town. Borrow a backpack and stuff it with T-shirts and shorts; sleep a few hours, put on jeans and hitch a ride to Shelbyville: start out playing Texas hold 'em at the Indian casino with farmers and truck drivers who'd been up all night to build up her stack." WHAT? I need an English teacher to diagram that, please.

Also, this felt more like 3 novellas (or, uh, rough drafts for TV episode scripts) than it did one cohesive novel.

Also did I already say that Raylan came across as way more of a perv in this than he does on the show??? Ughhh.

Honestly this would be a 1-star read for me but it gained an additional 1 star of enjoyment for all the straight-up weird sentences that I sent out to Caroline as I read. I probably emailed her 50 times as I read this. If you are tempted to read this book, let me know, and I will forward you all of those emails. This will be a huge time-saver.

Glenn Greenwald is SO good at writing narrative nonfiction, like, wow. There are a lot of threads here and it's so impressive how well he's able to knit them together into a cohesive portrait of Why Shit In America is Fucked Up. A lot of the material in this book is about things I've already read about (some of it, at least, from shorter articles by Greenwald)--Watergate, Guantanamo, The New Jim Crow, etc--but seeing all those problems and more tied together cohesively is stunning and terrifying.

Highly recommended.

This is a great, brave work of journalism. An important, well-documented story told as a compelling, page-turning narrative. Greenwald especially does a great job of articulating WHY privacy matters, even for people who "have nothing to hide." Highly recommended.

A co-worker was telling me about this book (and HBO series) and I was kind of like, whatever, the Rapture, and then she mentioned the weird cults, and I was like, okay, I'm in.

I enjoyed this well enough. It was a pretty fast read, and predictably I liked the cult parts best.

It's kind of frustrating that if this were sci-fi or fantasy or anything else, there would be some kind of explanation given for the Sudden Disappearance, but since this is ~literary fiction~ it's just a ~metaphor for loss and grief~ and no explanation is given. The genre fiction part of me secretly says: eat a dick, literary fiction.