A cute, fluffy, funny book. Morgan is a pretty typical sophomore: average looking, nice parents, dating the boy next door, gets good grades. She's realistic (when she tells people about her psychic visions about their futures, she doesn't sugarcoat), kind (she spends most of her summer wages on clothing for a boy she barely knows so kids don't pick on him), and hilariously focused on her grades (she loses it when she is late to class and her teacher gives her a tardy slip). I happily followed along with her on her character arc.

I really liked the upending of the standard trope: in this book, her super hot boyfriend finds out he is a changeling and begins to turn into a fairy, and Morgan is trying to find a way to save him. But when the human who was supposed to be her boy-next-door if the fairies hadn't interfered comes back, things get . . . complicated.

The plot relied a little too much on fate and not enough on the characters being badass, but overall I liked it.

This had a lot of elements of an adult book

Spoiler

(Casual sex, abortion, loss of fingers due to frostbite instead of everything ending perfectly, death of a main character offscreen, love interest has a child already)

but all the immaturity one would expect of a young adult character. Fire is immature to the point of making me roll my eyes as she whines about everything. "I'm too pretty, I don't want to read minds, I don't want to control people, blah blah blah."

I thought the tie-in that made it clear it was pre-Graceling was interesting, but I wish it had contributed more to the plotline. Nothing happens for the majority of the book except for Fire realizing she needs to actually use her powers.

It was never clear what, exactly, a monster was. She has to be human because she can breed with humans, but for some reason there are also monster bugs and monster birds and they all want to eat each other, Fire included.

Very little about this world made sense. It was too different, both world-wise and plot-wise, from Graceling to make me accept it as a companion.

This book grabbed me by the lapels (okay, okay, I was wearing a hoodie at the time, it's called poetic license) from the first sentence and didn't let go until after I had finished it. Those first moments of the story as Kathryn swims up from the depths of sleep to a knock at her door from the man who has come to tell her that her husband, a pilot, has died in a plane crash are impeccable and engaging, and as the story unfolds this feeling only grows. Marvelous.

I can't stop reading girl detective books.

The first half of this book was a solid 2 stars, and the second half was a sold 4 stars, so I've settled on 3.

I went into this expecting it to be the Martian. It is not the Martian. That would be fine, but Weir spends a lot of time also expecting this book to be the Martian. We are both wrong. The first half stumbles; he tries to make Jazz as self-sufficient as Mark Watney, but there are too many people involved in this small town on the moon to make it work. Her humor is too crass for a girl growing up Muslim in a small Saudi community, even if it is on the moon in the future. She is not a very believable female character, but she seems like she will be fun, so I stuck around.

At about 60% the actual plot begins, and this is where Weir's writing shines. We start to bounce along at a furious pace as Jazz and her Scooby gang build a plan to stop the moon from becoming just another cartel-run city. The stakes are high and keep getting high, as Weir is wont to do, and it's thrilling. I loved the ending.

This beautiful and incredibly well-crafted novel does an amazing job of describing human interaction in its most basic of forms. Like a color wheel that shows primary colors and blends into a wheel of secondary colors, To The Lighthouse shows first the delicate interactions of the Ramsay family and then focuses on their friends during one summer day in Scotland. Woolf has a remarkable insight into the human spirit. This is the kind of novel you will think about long after it is finished.

A series of essays that attempt to be insightful and humorous but are mostly boring or outdatedly offensive (the book was written in 2009 but the author slams her late father for using a "femmie" lotion after he does the dishes, for example).

This is a book about a near catastrophically absurd human who has some really rather good advice about things like life and feminism and pubic hair. Kind of a cross between essays on various topics and a memoir since she starts with her youth and ends in the present day, it is both heartfelt and hilarious. I highly recommend the audiobook because Moran’s narration is delightful.

Seven-year-old Elsa's grandmother, the one who introduced her to the magical kingdom of Miamas where she travels every night in her dreams, has died of cancer. Now Elsa must complete one last quest (for she is a knight of Miamas) for her grandmother by delivering letters in a scavenger hunt -- when she delivers one letter, she finds another.

This book tries very hard. It often fails. There are big things, such as how it tries very hard to be an omniscient third person narrator while also trying to get inside Elsa's head. There are little things, such as how Elsa's "secret language" with her grandmother is actually a real language: but when she finds out that Miamas is a word from that language that means "I love you" she doesn't know the definition?? This makes no sense. This is a pretty basic phrase, one that her grandmother surely would have said often.

The constant repetion of phrases is aggravating because it feels like Backman got really proud of a handful of sentences and then decided to use them over and over. At her grandmother's funeral, seven-year-old Elsa thinks to herself that the worst part of death is that it leaves those behind feeling like they don't want to live. Setting aside the fact that this is pretty hard to believe coming from a seven-year-old, she promptly finds herself in a dangerous situation and repeats the same sentence. This happens over and over and instead of being charming, it is jarring.

It also makes me crazy that there is a dog living in an apartment all alone and you never actually find out who the owner is. Is it supposed to be the grandmother? Why wouldn't she just let him live in her apartment????

None of the characters are likable except the grandmother, and she is dead.