This was a very good book, to the point where it was so well-crafted and smugly clever that it failed utterly to be anything approaching enjoyable. It was brilliant and absurd and made me think about dreams, but it felt like a fucking chore to actually read. It reads like China Mieville without any of the absurdist glee.

Atmospheric and heart-wrenchingly sad in the most old-fashioned way possible. Why does anyone ever go to New England?

Egads, this was boring. No plot, no character development, and the big "battle" had no lead up and was dull as dishwater. I just don't get why Tamora Pierce is so popular.

I'm all hollow inside. Gemma dying, Ubie being an angel, Rocket meeting his grandson and then passing through Charley. . . goddamn. I love Garrett and Osh forever. And I loved that Charley and Reyes had such literally hot sex that they turned part of the Sahara to glass. Good job, team.

It's honestly impressive how Hawley managed to make a book about a plane crash boring as hell. Gave up around 30%.

Clearly, this book has never seen an editor. Frenetic, ludicrous writing with an idiotic ending.

Spoiler

The bulk of the book is a novel that Caroline writes as a fictionalized version of her real life where she pretends to forget the fact that she murdered her sister, framed her ex-fiancee, adopted her child, and then pretended it was her own kid so that she could find a widower with a daughter the same age so that she could pretend she had twins. The memory lapse is never explained, so the entire thing feels unrealistic at best and genuinely stupid at worst.

A retelling of Beauty and the Beast that lacks any kind of tension and just kind of hobbles along from chapter to chapter. There were like 80 storylines, none of which were interesting. When Tate got attacked not once, but twice, for literally no reason by the other stupid high school kid I thought my eyes were going to roll right out of my head.