sarahxify's Reviews (703)

I enjoyed reading this, it's well-written and moves along quite speedily. I did find a lot of the plot points quite confusing though, and struggled to follow how the ghosts in this story fitted in with the main body of the text. 

For fans of Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 

Really really liked this on the reread, and full of admiration for Lynn Flewelling for her incredible representation of queer characterse in these books. 

It was fun to read the ideas of the artist Piranesi brought to life and I thought this was well-written and intriguing. I thought the tie-in to the modern era kind of spoiled it though, I found it to be a little rough and would have vastly preferred it without this tie-in, or with a more lyrical writing style to mesh them together a bit more seamlessly. 

For fans of The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward. 

 The first installment of the Rain Wild Chronicles. This started off a lot more slowly than the Liveship Traders series, which had me hooked from the first chapter. This one took me actually about 200 pages to settle into. I don't particularly like the dragons' perspective and I find it a little more boring to get through when you're not reading from the perspective of one of Hobb's amazing characters.

Having said that, once we got through the information about what is going on with the dragons and what the situation is at the Cursed Shores (catching up from where we left off in Liveship), I really enjoyed this book. Hobb has done it once again with a whole host of amazing new characters that I totally feel for. 

Earthlings follows Natsuki, a girl who has strong beliefs that she is an alien, and has been sent to earth. This belief starts when she is a small child, and continues throughout her whole life. She struggles to fit in and sees a lot of societal norms, such as marriage and having children, to be ways in which the human race has been brainwashed. 

There are a lot of dark themes in this book, and I recommend going in with caution if you are a more sensitive reader, particularly regarding themes of child sexual abuse. 

I talk about this book in episode 44 of the Bookcast Club podcast. Episode link: 
https://www.thebookcastclub.com/podcast/episode/4ab9bc62/44-recent-favourite-author-discoveries

This is a sensitive and simply-told story about a group of Asian Ugandans, who are forced to flee Uganda in the 1970s during Idi Amin's rule. This was quite a quiet novel but left a big impact on me. Highly recommend. 

For fans of Yumna Kassab's The House of Youssef and Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires. 

Enjoyed this a lot more on the second read!