I am done following book recommendations from reddit and booktok. I hate not finishing books so I finished this.
"dark" romance? no, this wasn't dark. this was just a bunch of violence mixed in with a bunch of sex. no emotional complexity, no interiority, just brute violence and then "a happy ending."

too much of "it's terrible" rather than making me feel oh, that's terrible. hyper self-aware narration, which I generally do not enjoy.

It was hard for me to stay focused in the first half; the second flowed much better. It's a good book? Hard to say. Hard to connect to the characters as most of them are offered in superlative terms. When everything is super-unique, the uniqueness loses its value. I think I would have enjoyed the plot if it were written differently, though that would not then be The Night Circus.

sweet and sad and hopeful.

the wisdom here is true, though the language feels dates in terms of sexuality, gender, ableism. it is also too long a book, and better digested one chapter at a time, with breaks in between, instead of attempting to read it continuously till the end.

the bits that land really LAND.