Way too short; if my library didn't have this I never would have paid for it. It was a nicely thematic introduction to the shadow creatures, but would have served better as a prequel chapter.

Conceptually this book is both cool and unique: it takes pages directly from the notes of Marilyn herself and publishes them to give the reader insight into her life. In practice this book is boring and pointless. There just aren't that many note pages to look at so the text is beefed up with a few typed letters, some biographical information from the editors, and a slew of photos of Marilyn reading books.

The issue is that her notes are nonsensical 99% of the time. They're like a combination of random musings, stoner thoughts, and memories with no cohesion because the notes that were chosen were from her personal notebooks over the span of an unknown number of years because she didn't put dates on anything.

I would recommend it for perusal to a serious Marilyn fan, but for most people this can be skipped.

A charming story about running away from home, art, measly allowances, secrets, and mysterious old ladies.

I liked the mythology of this book a lot, and it had really great potential. Unfortunately, it was boring 75% of the time and interesting 25% of the time. I liked getting insight into an afterlife that isn't common in fiction, but this is the kind of book I'll forget I read entirely in a month.

Spoiler

The foreshadowing was garbage. She would do something dumb (which there was a lot of)
and then follow it up with "I wish I had known then what I know now" or something equally insipid that would have an unfulfilling conclusion every damn time. Even worse, it ruined the suspense because you knew nothing bad was going to happen to her.

I also hated that this whole adventure started because she fell in love at first sight with Tian Bai,
and then when she gets everything she wants, she leaves it for a guy who spent most of the book annoying her and threatening to leave her behind.

I read this because the movie was so moving and I wanted to learn more about the king and Lionel Logue. Unfortunately, the movie covers all the good bits, so this is just the same information as the movie with a lot of stuff about World War II, so unless you are a huge WWII buff I would just watch the movie and call it a day.

A book about believing in signs and not giving up on your dreams. Would recommend to religious types.

I'll tell you a secret: I was going to give up on this book at 34% because I picked it up to read about Egypt and no one had made it to Egypt yet, but when I flipped to the ending I found a gunfight and thought it might be worth reading for. Spoiler alert: It was not worth reading.

This book is just so impossibly dull. There is no suspense, no real intrigue. The characters are all dumb as dishwater. So disappointing.

Books narrated by dead characters are totally in my wheelhouse, but this book fell flat for me. It was a whole lot of build up to find out how Ren died, which could have been interesting but her life was so normal and boring that I stopped caring about her pretty early on. I stuck around for the mystery but it was a pretty mundane resolution and the ending was cringeworthy-sappy (and this is coming from someone who cried like a baby over Me Before You. I liked the excessive British slang. Overall this book felt like a rushed rough draft.