skudiklier's Reviews (647)

I've already read and reviewed ABFE in general on the hardcover edition, but this was my first time listening to the audiobook. I think it was excellent, and love all the small things they did to make it a great performance. They were never distracting, and only added to the story. 

My full review is copied below in case anyone wants it:

I am reeling from this book. It's wild and big and weird and fascinating and I'm probably going to think about it for a long long time. It's somehow both very different from the first book, and also about the same core issues--just like, more fleshed out. What you get when you take those thoughts further. I will never not be in awe of Hank and these books.

Edit: After I wrote this review, I talked about the book with a friend and realized I had some problems with its resolution. So for the last two years I've been very sure that while I liked this book and series a lot, I liked the first book better. But I just finished my first reread of the book, and have some thoughts. I think it's just that there's one specific thing I find dissatisfying about the resolution, and aside from that I think this book is amazing. ABFE has a lot of things I find really useful and interesting, and I'm glad I reread it so I could appreciate it more. I like that these concepts are more fleshed out in this book than in the first one, and I think Hank really got where he was trying to go. 

Aghh, wow. Becky Chambers is without a doubt one of my favorite authors, and every book I read of hers just confirms it more. This book was soft, and lovely, and thoughtful, and when I finished it I just let out a huge sigh. It made me feel emotionally raw in the best way. I really hope she writes more in this series. I could spend so much time with these characters and not get tired of them. 

Okay, so, I only read this because my sister forced me to. It was more entertaining than I expected, as in like, I was interested and wanted to keep reading and stuff. It was really bad but in a funny way, and also not quite as bad as I thought it would be. I still don't think I want to read the other ones but I'm more open to the idea than I was before I read this one. 

I almost never DNF books, but I just couldn't get into this. I didn't hate it or anything; I just don't want to read it anymore. 

This book was so good, and I was really pulled into it the whole time. I love the characters and how complexly the adults around Lily are shown. For a lot of this book it didn't even feel like historical fiction, though that aspect of it was done really well, as far as I can tell. I'm glad I finally read this, as it's been on my tbr forever. 

I absolutely could not put this book down.

This is the best combination of so many types of genres and stories; it's got supernatural abilities, and romance, and class struggles, and heists, and so much heart. It's such a page turner that I read almost the entire thing today--I just needed to find out what happened.

This is such an amazing YA debut and I can't wait to read Ann Liang's future work. Thank you to Netgalley and Inkyard Press for the chance to read and review this ARC. 

Oh, wow, this was so good. I'll admit that it took me a while to get into it; every chapter being seemingly unrelated at first made it hard for me to keep up momentum with the book, and I read the first half really slowly. But by the end the connections were becoming more clear and I was more engaged with each chapter. By the end I absolutely loved this. It's such a well-crafted story, with so many different types of people from different times and places. I love how complicated and real it felt, and I also loved the way it was written. 

Okay so I just read this book in one sitting (ebook--my phone is at 3%) and I couldn't put it down. I had so many other things I planned to do and I'm about to go to bed late but arg I just haven't been pulled into a story like this in too long. 

Even the parts of romance novels I usually don't like (i.e., the part where they always leave each other over some stupid miscommunication) were better in this one than they usually. The problems seemed real and not forced, and the characters tried their best to say how they really felt, pretty much all the time. I loved this book and I love all the queer representation too. I relate to it in so many ways, and it made my heart ache.

As a fan of Hannah McGregor's podcasts and various other works, this has been one of my most anticipated books of the year. I'm happy to say that it did not disappoint; McGregor offers nuanced and thoughtful analysis of feminism, podcasting, storytelling, and meaning-making. I love how she combines theory with stories from her own life to create something both unique and incredibly tangled in the feminist texts that came before it.

The essays in this book made me reflect on my own position as someone who grew up as a white girl who loved to read, as well as a queer trans adult who has both gravitated towards and away from academia, depending on how you look at it. Any time I thought McGregor might be oversimplifying or sugarcoating something in this book, she brought it back to a more nuanced approach and ended somewhere much closer to what I would consider the truth. I learned a lot from this book, and I appreciate it so much as a model of what we can do when we both lean into our own stories and recognize the limitations and dangers within that practice. This is a book about making meaning together through a feminist framework, and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone.

Thank you to Netgalley and Wilfrid Laurier University Press for the chance to read and review this ARC.