skudiklier's Reviews (647)

I'm worried I'm too emotionally invested at the moment to be writing this review; I don't know how to write about how this book made me feel without writing about the ending. I'll spoiler warning it at the end here, but just know that all spoilers in it are very vague.

Overall I liked this book. I knew absolutely nothing about it going in--not the premise, not the genre, nothing. I picked it solely based on the cover. Throughout the first half of it I just felt a sort of rising tension, as I waited for the shoe to drop. This book was well-written and while the ending devastated me, I don't think it should have been changed. 

This book makes me want to read more by this author, because I really liked how well it showed tiny social things that feel hard to capture/explain but can make a real impact on how a situation feels or a relationship progresses. Small things that Jean worries over momentarily, that just felt really well-done. 

Honestly the ending just is so sad. I wasn't prepared. I wish I'd paid more attention to the dates so that I could have seen it coming. It makes sense as a story but I'm just too close to these characters right now, I feel too sad for them. It made it so I couldn't give this book five stars.

I didn't know almost anything about this book going in, and wow was I pleasantly surprised by the whole thing. I read almost the entire book in one sitting, because I couldn't put it down. The romance was perfect, and also it was weirdly and unintentionally relevant for me, as someone who just moved to Portland less than two months ago. I loved the bi rep, the anxiety rep, the demi rep, the nonbinary rep, the way they try (and fail) to not fall victim to unnecessary miscommunication as horribly as the straights always do in romances. (Also is it just me or is Ellie also autistic??? I both have anxiety and am autistic so sometimes it's hard for me to tell what social anxiety things are related to which haha. But idk she felt extremely autistic to me and I'm gonna say I also loved the (maybe unintentional) autistic rep as well.) This was a perfect book to start the year with, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a lovely queer holiday romance.

Edit to add: I actually kind of forgot what The Charm Offensive was about, and now that I went back to look at my (5 star) review for that book, I'm even more convinced that Alison Cochrun is one of my new favorite romance authors. In both books, I was super sucked in and read them basically in one sitting. But even better, in both books I felt like even the parts of romances that I don't like (e.g., when they have a fight and break up near the end, usually over some miscommunication) were handled much better in these books than in most romance novels. Like, Cochrun clearly puts a lot of effort into making sure the relationships are as healthy and realistic as possible, while still giving us all the normal pieces of a romance and keeping the drama amped up. I'm just so impressed! And I can't wait for Cochrun's next book.

I really liked this! Not gonna lie, I didn't realize how ~spicy~ it would be, but I'm not complaining. I liked how the author didn't just rush through things with easy solutions that we so often allow in romance novels, and instead made things as healthy and realistic as possible. I'll definitely be reading the next one in the series! 

I found this very engaging, and for the most part really enjoyed it. There were one or two small things I would have liked from it, but really overall I would definitely recommend this book. I couldn't put it down. 

I didn't like this as much as The Kiss Quotient, but I still definitely liked it! I appreciate having another autistic main character, especially one whose autism manifests in different ways than the main character in the first book. 

I really liked this! I was super invested in what happened to the characters, and the art was gorgeous. 

I really enjoyed this collection. What I knew about these women going in varied a lot, but all of the essays were thought-provoking and engaging. I also really liked Haynes's writing style, and the funny asides sprinkled in. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone interested in Greek mythology. 

Honestly I just couldn't get into it. The writing isn't my style, as it felt like it couldn't quite decide how close it was to the characters' experiences. After that I decided to read the reviews to decide if it was worth it, and it just doesn't seem like a book worth putting my time into. I didn't hate it, I just wasn't into it. 

I read this book in a very weird way, where at first I read a physical copy with my partner, and then I read some of it out loud to him, and then we ended up getting the audiobook so we could listen to that while I read the physical copy along with it (and paused it a LOT to fill in gaps to my partner). I have a lot of complaints about the audiobook, but I know I'm reviewing the print version, so I'll put that at the end. 

For the book itself: I loved it! I loved the first one, and I was excited to get to read the sequel. I'm not a sciencey person in general but I found this really entertaining and readable and fascinating. I'd definitely recommend it. 

For the audiobook specifically: I read the physical book along with the audiobook version, so I was very aware of all the decisions they made. I completely understand that this is a challenging book to translate to audio, and I actually myself read some of it out loud to someone who couldn't see it, so I was very ready to empathize with how hard this is. But I just ended up being so frustrated by the decisions made here (no idea whether they were made by Wil Wheaton or someone else, but I'm assuming it's a combination).

First, they completely ignored and left out most of the illustrations. For the ones that were just illustrating the text, that makes sense. But some of them were more text-based, had jokes, and/or were even necessary/relevant to understanding the text that came after. I was so surprised by some of the ones they just completely left out. On top of that, they *did* read aloud some of them, and it just felt so arbitrary. (To add insult to injury, they also described one illustration that was definitely unnecessary and not text-based, seemingly just because Wil Wheaton especially enjoyed it.)

Leaving out so much of what makes the book entertaining (and even understandable at times) is unacceptable in my opinion. I was reading this along with someone else who couldn't see the book, and I paused the audiobook every 15-60 seconds or so to describe what the audiobook either skipped over or made unclear.

Now, again, I'm not saying this is an easy job or that there's clearly one perfect solution. With all the footnotes and illustrations, there's no way to do it without at least some remaining issues. I fully appreciate this, but it honestly feels like they didn't even try with some of this book. So much of it was left out, and so many decisions were made that I felt were completely wrong. I know that the audiobook would be a different experience from reading the print book no matter what, but this was a whole other level that was very frustrating to experience.