Chekhov said, "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

Well I waited until page 244 for the gun to even got cocked, and by the end of the 357 page book, the gun never went off.

I settled in for what the cover promised me -- a story about two sisters, once inseparable and now unable to be in the same room as each other after the car crash that neither of them remembers being in. What I got was a mess of unrealistic characters and flowery prose that was meant to disguise 244 pages of navel gazing before the "thriller" aspects began, and a conclusion that nearly made me chuck the book off my balcony because it was so unrelated to every page before and so unbearably frustrating. I think I have to give up on my hope that Oliver would write another book as stunning as Before I Fall.

So much potential, wasted.

Kass Morgan asked me to believe a lot of dumb things during this book. Things like in a society that lives in a spaceship orbiting earth because the planet was destroyed during a nuclear disaster, these people managed to continue building cool technology like eyeball data chips that work like smartphones, but aren't smart enough to know how much food and oxygen it takes to keep a city alive. She asked me to believe that multiple women and men in this story were killed or almost killed for having a baby when the limit is one baby per family, despite the fact that this would shrink the population to an unsurvivable amount. She asked me to believe that some parts of the ship had unlimited access to water, but other parts only got water for one hour a week, as if the ship was designed to continue modern classist lifestyles. She asked me to believe that despite their constant communication future tech, the only music these people ever listened to was once a year when ancient earth instruments were taken out of storage and played.

And I can forgive a lot. I can forgive the love triangle even though Wells is as shitty a human as Bellamy. I can believe that Clarke forgave Wells for one betrayal, and I can believe that Glass is dating a boy as stupid as she is -- but I cannot believe that a society advanced enough to destroy the planet and prepared enough to build this ship was so ill-prepared. The politics of the ship are those I would expect from a seventh grade fiction writing workshop. I'm left with the impression that Morgan didn't think this story through at all. How are the politicians elected? If babies are worth murdering the parents, why isn't there an effective birth control? Why are there still WASPs and underprivileged people?

Even the cliffhanger ending wasn't enough to make me read the next one.

Lex is in the middle of a revolution, and it's hard to tell whether she's really one of the good guys when her sympathies lie with the other side and her uncle Mort doesn't trust her enough to tell her most of the truth. In this book there are new reapers and new betrayals but the same delightful Driggs and awe-inspiring Mort and wonderful world-building. And it all makes for a fascinating, terrifying, hilarious, devastating story.

I read this book twice in high school, and I keep coming back to it. This time Liebling and I read it together because we constantly discuss religion in terms of the abstract and this book has such a wonderful take on what religion means to people.

I love this book. It's a little sexist and very simple, no zany plot twists and confusing plot lines. It is just a boy, and his friends, and a struggle for faith that results in his invention of a religion that worships water towers. And his joke becomes something more, something bigger, but his snarky humor keeps the story grounded. Highly recommend.

Poorly designed book of nursery rhymes. It's difficult to tell which verses go together and which dont, and the art is amateurish.

A neat little picturebook in English and French.

I think that the romance between Claire and Jamie is one of the best I've ever read, and I love the historical detail that Gabaldon adds in to every scene because it truly makes me feel as if I am there, and I love that I cry and beg and desperately wish for things right along with Claire. But I truly hate how damned long this book was. It was a beautiful, masterfully written love letter to history, but it's going to be a while before I can pick up the third with any kind of joy.

A really boring story about Rayna being a selfish bitch and bullying other people, all under the guise of going on dates.