shane_the_reading_rat's Reviews (1.21k)

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

this book deals with some topics i have an extremely difficult time reading about but i’m so happy i was able to push through cause this was absolutely incredible 

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”

im glad that this exists (always wanna support books about fellow trans guys) but there were sadly a lot of things i disliked about it.
i was much more interested in asher’s life outside of the midnight circus than in it (everything about the catholic school and moira and kaycee was amazing and i loved those sections). sadly apollo didn’t have much of a personality (neither did seb!! made me especially sad about seb cause he was first introduced and i thought maybe he would be a love interest but then absolutely nothing was done with him :( ).
i also think it would’ve worked better for me if the midnight circus weren’t real, and were just in asher’s dreams (there was also very little description of it other than the same things over and over about kids, rides, and popcorn).
so yeah basically: wanted it to lean much more into the contemporary

well i thought i’d like this but didn’t expect to love it quite as much as i do
this isn’t much of a “haunted house” or “haunted town” story (despite the abundant number of ghosts), moreso about being haunted by Trauma™️ (which is definitely the type of haunted house story that i like most often).
im not frightened by books easily but this was one that really unsettled me (i love that there was no attempt to explain why the Velkwood Vicinity exists).
also the writing was gorgeous and i will leave some of my favorite quotes here to attempt to convince you to read this because it is incredible and i adore it and can’t stop thinking about it (this book feels like yeule’s cover of anthems for a seventeen year-old girl. which is pretty much my favorite cover song ever and one of my favorite songs ever. you would not believe how often in my daily life i find myself absentmindedly whisper- singing the lyrics “park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me”. its too often).

“Most people don’t know what this is like. They don’t know how it feels to know you’ll never go home again.”

“Because we all know somebody like that, the ones that never escape their hometown, never escape the past.”

“”You’ll be my ghost now.” I smile at her, my heart hurting so much I can barely breathe. “And you’ll be mine””.

probably won’t read the sequel cause i am extremely attached to kiem and jainan and found out a few minutes ago that the sequel isn’t about them

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

sweet book of stories about a holiday i didn’t know much at all about previously!!