everything about weston becoming real

,especially the first time he shows up being IN IVY’S BED WITH HER,

is giving me very deep ick and i am not putting myself through a whole book of this

im sure this is a wonderful book, but i just really hate when a series switches characters each book especially when i don’t know beforehand. had the same issue with the winters orbit/oceans echo books by everina maxwell.

just not in the headspace to absorb this book rn

i just,,, cannot get into this. my eyes feel like theyre skimming over the pages whenever i open this and i’m so bored and then set it down after five pages to do something else. it’s just not working for me

just not in a place in my life currently where i find this interesting enough to continue. will probably pick up again in a couple of years

im setting myself free of books im not enjoying and it feels so good
•frankly i do not fucking understand why this is called the absinthe underground when they only go there once briefly.
•i was gonna give this book points for vibes but yknow what. no. all the vibes were contained in the absinthe underground bar and they are evidently just never fucking going there again seemingly.
•WHY ARE THERE TWO PERSPECTIVES??? usually with romances im crying out and begging for dual pov but this just did not need it. they’re literally everywhere together describing the same things and esme and sybil’s personalities are bland enough that you could easily switch around whose chapters are whose and it wouldn’t make a single difference.
•this book feels like it has no stakes,

like if their little heist in sybil’s brother’s house is just the precursor for how their trip into fairyland goes, fairyland must have a yearly death count of zero cause THERES ZERO STAKES ITS LIKE A PLAYGROUND BUT YOU COVER EVERYTHING IN BUBBLE WRAP

•usually i adore friends to lovers but this is just all *love interest does a normal thing* *inner thoughts* “ooo i wanna kiss her so bad shes so pretty but idk if she likes me :(” like bro shut up and ask the question YOU BOTH LIKE EACH OTHER FUCKING SUCK IT UP AND TALK ABOUT IT.
i support sapphic rights and sapphic wrongs but not sapphic mehs

look, i might come back to this at some point, but that’s unlikely. i kinda hate this book, it feels like i’m reading something completely different from what everyone else has.
i don’t like the retelling vibes, it just isn’t clicking with me and the main character and love interests being literally named icarus and helios respectively feels like something i would have thought extremely deep at age 13-14 but now that i’m 18 it’s just,,,, a little cringe.
i cant stand the short chapters
this book is actually killing me

ok im loving this book so much and i have a bonkers reason for dnf’ing BUT: pretty sure my little paperback from the library is printed with soy ink (i’m allergic to soy), and it stinks and is making me feel pretty congested and icky. so uhhhhh if you also have a soy allergy and wanna read the paperback of this please beware lmao. im gonna go on webtoon to finish it though cause ITS INCREDIBLY CUTE AND IM SO SAD TO HAVE TO DNF

think this is just not the book for me rn. checked reviews on goodreads and it looks like this prison fight show is like a super popular thing in the world of this novel and audiences love it which like ????? in my heart of hearts i am a rugged optimist and just cannot suspend my disbelief enough to get into this and to be like “yeah the general public in this book would love watching a show where prisoners kill each other!”
very similar to my dnf of tender is the flesh where i was like “people just wouldn’t accept doing this what the fuck”

its killing me that this book is supposedly set in the 2020s, cause — as someone who is roughly the mid-range of gen z, all of my high school years have been in the 2020s — this did NOT feel like it. before learning that i was guessing 90s or 2000s for the time period
so yeah i already wasnt vibing a ton with this book + the time period mismatch feeling keeps jarring me and pulling me out of the story