i’m glad so many people love this book and found it impactful, but it’s just very much not for me. mystery is very much my least favorite genre, but i’d hoped from the synopsis that i’d like this one since it’s queer. but i’m having an extremely difficult time feeling that much sympathy for ike and buddy lee and their big revenge arc, and just looking at reviews i don’t think this will get to a point where i like it.

i wanted so badly to like this, but (at least to me) it was extremely uninteresting. + the language and honestly just everything felt very weird when the first section of the book is set in 1997. why is Grace wearing petticoats???

i think this book is a lovely resource, but for me (i’ve known i’m ace for several years at this point), it’s just repeating things i already know.

life is simply too short to read a book you don’t like for fun

dnf’ed @ 77% (i think)
look, i started out really enjoying this book. some of my ancestors were sephardic jews who had to leave spain in the inquisition, so, yknow, i was extremely excited to see a book in this setting and time period? but the pace was incredibly slow and eventually i just couldn’t stay invested at all anymore. everything felt deathly boring. makes me really sad, i fully believed this would be a 5 star book for me :/

kinda hated this, checked reviews and yeah it looks like i wouldn’t get anything out of trying to continue this. frustrating dialogue and just very scattered overall.

dnf’ed @ 64%
god it sucks to have a book you’ve been wanting to read for nearly two years fall so unbearably flat.
i was so hyped to start this, but honestly it is a dull, medieval-set fantasy like so many others
i do not care about any of the characters, but the disability rep was my favorite aspect of this. made me happy

the board games in this are just fundamentally incredibly confusing and i genuinely do not understand. why was louisiana veda so popular when her games can basically fucking kill people????? when there’s rumors of straight up torture at her factory??? why are so many people enchanted by her still??? also HOW THE FUCK DO THE GAMES WORK???? why are they this interactive?? how does that work?? also frankly who on earth would play a game where the instruction guide is the length of a novel, and how would that game get so popular that crowds are scrambling to buy it??? why do these teenagers love louisiana veda so much when she kinda just seems like a terrible girlboss ceo??? none of this makes any sense at all and i really really dislike it. dnf’ed at 45%.

this is such a cool concept, but honestly bees & wasps are my worst non-existential fear and i can already tell i will not be able to handle this one

life is too short to push myself through books im not liking, and i think that me and cozy fantasy just do not mix. we’re like water and oil.
ive realized while attempting to read some cozy fantasy this year, that cozy fantasy is exactly what i dislike when i watch a tv series: filler that takes up time until the main plot (not to say filler is bad! audiences need time to vibe with characters! im just much more a main-plot, get-on-with-the-adventure kind of guy).
this is to say, me and cozy fantasy: a bit of a failed venture.