shane_the_reading_rat's Reviews (1.21k)

i may change the rating in a few days to a 5, cause god this was incredible but i’m just not quite sure yet if it’s five stars for me or not. i’m a sucker for friendship stories, and this was an absolutely incredible one.

this is genuinely an awesome novella (im also very biased towards fantasy that feels like fairytales or fables and Lies of the Ajungo has enormous fable energy). very excited to read the rest of the trilogy :D also just for your information this also has Avatar: The Last Airbender energy, in my personal opinion

i am bewildered???????
this was getting interesting but ended very suddenly. this probably won’t stick with me long at all, characters weren’t around long enough to become very memorable and the horror wasn’t scary enough to be remembered. i love if we were villains with my entire being but :/ maybe graveyard shift will grow on me but i don’t think it will. genuinely what the fuck was that ending im so confused, why did it just end there???

i don't know if it's all the hype around this that ruined it for me, but i just really didn't find this as insightful/impactful as a lot of other people did. it feels disjointed, with plotlines and sections in general that never really get finished (

what happened between Cyrus and his AA sponsor??? why do the scenes in Cyrus's mind between famous figures just kinda pop up randomly???

).  also, i don't know how many people will agree with me on this but

i think it would be a more impactful story if Orkideh and Roya had not been revealed to be the same person. them being the same brings in so many more questions of logistically how Roya got away with using Leila's identity. how did she get to the US? how did Leila's husband never find out, since it says in the book that he has essentially an alert for if Leila's documents are used? legally, does Orkideh still use the name Leila??? so many questions are brought in that for me it just made the story make a lot less sense.

all in all, a decent litfic but did not live up to the hype.

incredibly sweet graphic novel with very lovable characters and disability rep that (imo) was done incredibly well. i didn’t find the manga sections that were spliced in very interesting at all, but that may just be a me thing.

entertaining on the surface, but when you think about it for more than a few seconds you’re like “huh. that actually wasn’t that good”.
THE GOOD: some of the antics were pretty hilarious and while the focus on rainbow capitalism was enormous, i didn’t mind how it was treated (as cringe as it usually is, rainbow capitalism can actually do good things sometimes)
THE BAD: it’s mentioned over and over how diverse the Santas at Winter Wonderland are (different religions and races)/how there are several places of worship for various religions, but that’s never really shown except for 1 singular Black santa and

gay santas getting introduced at the very end

??? really unfortunate, it would’ve been great to actually see that rather than be told how diverse it is while never seeing examples.
i thought it was frankly incredibly mean how Aaron treated Casey. i could handle it until the

trapping Casey in the storage shed

section and there i was just like “oh my god Aaron is a terrible person”. + i thought Kris’s whole game with the other teens at WW was kinda ick.
all in all, very rainbow capitalism, but still fun unless you think about it too much

pretty dry in places, but this book made me want to delete my spotify account. so it did a good job

i’ve had this one out for a while from the library, and am super glad I finally got to it.
 the only thing i would have really wanted from this is an epilogue— what happens to Libertad?? does she go to the US or decide to stay in Honduras?? it’s left quite open ended which personally didn’t really work

this was an incredibly beautiful book. magical realism isn’t always my thing, but i liked it a lot in this (+ all the studio ghibli references were amazing). i would touch on the politics in this book, but i think i’m just very much not educated enough on recent Syrian history to be able to understand fully. but just on a literary level, this is amazing.

(ALL THE CASTLE IN THE SKY REFERENCES i love Castle in the Sky, one of my favorite ghibli movies, it’s so underrated)

this is awesome!!! i love fairy tales!!! not much else to say i just really love this. fuck morgan though he’s awful