simonlorden's Reviews (1.38k)

A really cute story about two schoolkids who become friends through a third person sending them letters. It starts with a pretty dark scenario, where a girl stands up for another girl being bullied, and then gets excluded from the class. I love the cat and the school witch.

I liked the concept at the beginning, but I guess I expected something more exciting, or juicier secrets. There's a love triangle, then two men try to frame each other for the same crime.

 

Volt benne egy érdekes csavar, de a végén nem teljesen értettem a logikát. 

Cute, but kinda too short to make you care about the characters. I liked that Mycena made natural prosthetics for other people. Mycena and her chevalier also had a kind of Gideon-Harrow dynamic with all the colorful insults.

 

Egy rövid, creepy novella. Nincs sok mondanivalóm róla, olyan közepes volt. 

I received an ARC from the author through NetGalley, and this is my voluntary and honest review.

I was immediately drawn in by that beautiful cover. The soft colors, the visibly nonbinary character, the cat?? It's beautiful, and the title itself is very soft too. This is overall a feel-good queer romantic story with an (almost) entirely queer cast, so I think that cover suits it very much.

You might find the book a bit frustrating to read if you're older than 16, though. Sophia is SUCH a teenager, sometimes in an awkward way. Most of her personality is being trans and being a girl, which happens when you've just recently come out and still figuring out your identity. She says dumb things, she curses for no reason, she thinks sexist gender roles are okay as long as she's the girl in the equation, etc.

Moreover, the random emojis in the text and the little explanations about slurs and pronouns quite literally brought me out of the story. A lot of this book makes more sense if you're reading it as a journal Sophia is writing, but that doesn't quite fit either, because the present-time narration of daily events doesn't match the journal style. So, it's definitely unconventional.

The half dozen author notes at both the beginning and the end felt a bit excessive, too. Overall, this felt as much like an education booklet/Trans 101 than a romantic story.

I have many feelings!! This was a long journey, and took me like a month to read this one book, mostly because my brain kept rejecting the magic wordbuilding somehow and I still don't fully understand everything. But the characters were A+. They've come so far. El and Orion are two weird cursed kids who find each other and also others and they are great.

Also, congratulations Galadriel Higgins on the bisexuality.

Deleting my original review because I was feeling emotional when I wrote it and I think it ended up being insensitive. Basically, the main character of this book is Jewish (that word isn't used because fantasy world, but it's quite obvious) and she faces very significant antisemitism in the book. I don't think this was handled badly, but it caught me off guard because I was expecting a completely different vibe, and the treatment of Lorelei's people made the book way darker than I was prepared for. If I had read it while knowing what to expect, it probably would have been 5 stars. Maybe I'll reread it one day.

It's really fun to see the usual characters in Japanese attire and environment. Geralt's personality is spot-on, and yet still different. And I was so happy when I found out what he's looking for.

 The pop-up images are really cool. The "birdlike" ones on the last pages are my favorite.