man i have had such bad luck with horror recently, cause i can already tell i’ll hate this. it’s very much a shock value horror book (particularly sexual shock value, judging by what i’ve read of it and reviews i’ve now checked), and shock value/splatterpunk is very very very not for me. glad i gave this a chance at least.

the topic and discussion within this book, is absolutely important, but the writing is so dry that i will not force myself to go any further with it.

not a bad book at all, but for my reading tastes, it is much too abstract

just too slow-paced and quiet for me. long sections where the characters wax poetic with no breaks and POVs are switched so rarely that it’s difficult to remember what has happened the last time [insert character]’s POV was shown. not a bad book, but i am not enjoying it.

i think mona awad is just not an author who’s writing i will ever really enjoy.
i love the premise of this — very similar to Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang, which i adored — but Rouge just didn’t grab me. everything is vague, i do not care at all about the MC, and life is too short to force myself through a book i dislike when i am trying to read it for pleasure

i’ve tried so hard with this, but it’s just not happening. the writing style is quite difficult to comprehend (at least for me personally) and every single event within this book feels like it takes a thousand years to finish (especially every fight scene. every fight scene takes a horrific amount of time to finish. not horrific as in the horror genre, horrific as in “the length of time is horrifying”). not going to push myself to finish the final 40%.

my impression that this would be a trans T&T&T was wrong :/
nothing happens in this book (at least to the point where i dnf’ed, 31%) and i would be fine with that except that the characters weren’t compelling at all. i do not care about their storylines. this book does not need as many pages as it has.

deeply not vibing with the insta-lust of Anahrod and Ris, + the storyline is so chaotic and all-over-the-place that i genuinely cannot follow it

dnf’ed after the author disclosed that she used to write for the Epoch Times. that’s an extremely conservative, right-wing newspaper (i know this because my parents are very conservative and right wing and have read it for many years). Epoch Times themselves have massive ties to Falun Gong. i was getting those vibes from this book  before that info was disclosed, and frankly i don’t trust someone who used to write for Epoch Times.

i can already tell that this formatting (no quotation marks for sentences) is just not going to work well for me, + i never handle massive amounts of characters being introduced at once well. pretty sad about this, i’ve had this one on hold for weeks and anticipated it a lot :(