No book on the Fall could have such poor pacing, lack of plot, and underdeveloped characters unless it was a religious text; and so I have to ruefully accept that I was suckered into reading propaganda. Unfortunately, this book suffered from the same flaw as Paradise Lost: instead of making Lucifer out to be a monster, it made him the most (if not the only) interesting character, and sympathetic to boot.

God basically breaks up with Lucifer for a new love, mankind. And when Lucifer is like Wasn’t I good enough? Aren’t your angels good enough? God ignores his calls until Lucifer decides he could do better on his own. Good for you, Lucifer.

The biggest problem I have is that as soon as Lucifer decides this, he goes crazy. He kills his own pet, he lapses in and out of awareness, insists his pet is alive, forgets that he betrayed God, professes his love for everyone, and basically falls into a spiraling depression. This is not how you build an evil villain. This is how you build a book for How Not To Deal With Mental Health Issues. He is not compelling, scary, or all that powerful – he is pitiable.

I did enjoy all the homosexual undertones from the all-male angel race, though I assume that was unintentional.

So cute my heart melted.

Lorelei's sophomore year of high school is pretty normal -- until she is saved from dying by the angel of death. Jones takes some of the standard elements of young adult novels (hot guy, awkward girl, small best friend gang, instalove) and adds in her signature spin (extra helpings of snark, sarcasm, angelic drama, and a blessed absence of love triangles) to make a story that stands out. Each character is clearly defined, and the revelations keep coming throughout the story so the pace never lags. A fast-paced read.

Three discs in to the audio before I realized I didn't like any of the characters and none of them were going to grow or change.

I couldn't do it. It made no sense. Nothing made any sense. I can't even list all the things I thought were stupid because I would start crying.

Hamilton does a great job of compiling myths from various sources into a series of bite-size stories.

Percy Jackson is an unlucky, often dim-witted sixth grader who finds out that his shortcomings are the fault of his parentage -- he is the son of a mortal woman and a Greek god. He finds himself at a summer camp of other half-bloods, and goes on a quest like the heroes of old. The story is straightforward and overly simple, and the speech patterns are unnatural and forced (a trend that the audiobook version only made more pronounced). My biggest problem was with the logistics -- Ares, for example, has so many offspring at the camp that he must do nothing except impregnate mortal women. The big brush of standard bully traits is applied to so many characters it loses its appeal, and the gods seem like caricatures of themselves. I would have liked to see some variety or some kind of new take on an old tale, but none appeared.

If I hadn't read Slade House (the much shorter companion novel) first, I would have given up on this book after the third change in character with no advance of the plot. Since I already knew the basics of the game, however, I stuck it out, and while this book is full of Mitchell's eclectic storytelling style and remarkable metaphors, it meanders through time much too slowly for such little actual story. It's a great display of Mitchell's linguistic gymnastics, but could have benefited from a great culling of pages.

A love story for books. Packed full of dry humor, literary witticisms, love (both familial and romantic), and charm, it would be easy to dismiss as a forgettable heart-warmer, but Zevin's characters are life-like, broken, and imperfect. Her sweetness (a surly book store owner adopting the toddler abandoned in his store) is spiced with just enough humor (he has to Google how to bathe a toddler without being a pervert) and grief (he is a widower and almost friendless) to make a book that will stick with you long after you have finished.

The nameless main character kills a woman and gets into a car crash, and when he wakes up, instead of being in jail, he is on an island called Ata where the people barely speak and spend their entire lives trying to have better dreams and then acting on those dreams. The Goodreads description lauds it as a feminist scifi novel, but I find it hard to call a book feminist when the male main character rapes the female main character, and then they still fall in love, and I find it hard to call a book scifi when 90% of it takes place on an island with no technology. It was weird, and not very well written, and made little sense, but the worst part was that it committed the cardinal sin of fiction: he woke up, and it was all a dream.