shane_the_reading_rat's Reviews (1.21k)

aside from the recipes in this book seeming delicious, this was a fantastic memoir. i’m amazed by how Chantha persevered through incredibly horrific events. read this !!!

this duology rocks honestly. Lure of Their Graves does drag at points (particularly around 50-70%), but before and after that was awesome. i am disappointed that the suitors got tossed to the wayside towards the end in favor of finishing up the Alexey plotline (i need more Yullyan moments!!! they’re my favorite character in the series). however,

Alexey’s death scene/final interaction with Dimitri

was done perfectly and i genuinely can’t imagine how it could have been done better. fuck Alexey, he’s very fascinating but i hate him.

this was really, really good. so compelling that i read it in a single day. the writing style is very choppy and a bit difficult to follow, but i think that is a problem with the translation.

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.

i can definitely see the appeal of this, but did not feel the appeal myself. the characters were all quirky to the point of being often annoying (i liked Felix, Cassidy, and Wynton, hated Sandro. sorry but he got on my nerves. no more talking dogs on my watch). also I KNOW that

Cassidy and Wynton are not technically related

but it felt too incest-y ngl! i was uncomfortable!

i particularly recommend this as an audiobook, that’s how i read this and it was really enjoyable in that format (also just a great book all around). i really liked Elsa’s criticisms of Netflix’s Daredevil, as someone who has watched parts of Daredevil and loved it, i’m glad to learn of all the inaccuracies surrounding blindness in it (i genuinely did not know how many things were wrong in that show before listening to this book).

the different chapters of this book were extremely hit-or-miss for me (god, i had no interest in the chapter ‘cash’). interesting enough, but i probably would have been better off going and listening to a couple of Tina Horn’s podcast episodes.

i think the main reason i read this so quickly was because i went through quite the long power outage and didn’t have much else to do, but i really liked this. i haven’t read much older disability literature at all, and i thought this was a pretty approachable start. it’s sad to see how some issues Eli Clare talks about still persist now (main example i’m thinking of while writing this is how disabled people are often not considered to be able to be sexual, but i’m sure there are others that have faded from my mind).

i’ve seen this compared to 2 of my favorite fantasy books ever (Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries and Someone You Can Build a Nest In), but sadly i ended up not liking this much.
on the positive side, this incorporates a lot of Arthurian myth/medieval-era Britain/folklore of that era, and that’s stuff i love to see used in stories. the beginning of this book when Jenny was waxing poetic about her pond was delightful.
the negative: every conflict felt like it was resolved much too quickly,

except for the really annoying third-act-breakup-esque time where Jenny, a thousand-year-old lake monster, and Temperance, a wife and mother,

act like two petty children towards each other for what feels like several chapters. that especially got old fast.

not sure where to go to hunt the Big Magic Boar? no problem, the fairy queen of the hunt will drop by for a picnic (then barely show up ever again) and explain to you every single detail of where to go and when to catch it. a bit of moral conflict between characters over whether it is okay to kill an endangered unicorn for its horn?? never fear, an elderly unicorn will conveniently come and die in your lap, fading completely away except for the horn.

the immediate solutions for nearly every situation got quite frustrating, it never felt like the characters actually struggled much at all in their quest.

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