This was just so brilliantly crafted, it was amazing to see how many threads Aaron had laid out in book one that pulled together here to make a tapestry. It's the rare series that grows this organically from book to book. Love.

This has strangely become the year of doors for me.

Ten Thousand Doors of January.
The Starless Sea.
Every Heart a Doorway.
Exit West.

Maybe my hopes were too high; I have a fancy for doors these days, and I loved How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

But this book fell flat for me. It had so many lovely, highlight-able lines, but I thought Saeed was a boring nostalgic sad-sack and I thought Nadia was an uppity idealistic weirdo. I also thought the doors came in too late to the story. I was grounded in a world where Saeed and Nadia were the romantic heroes but then it suddenly became a story of the immigrant experience. Neither would have been a problem, but the two stories didn't blend well.

Irritating, vapid, pointless.

This was so bad I feel like I was pranked.

A brief, spastically illustrated volume that presents John Waters' recent commencement speech at RISD. It's cute and moderately inspirational, but mostly trite.

This book starts with two 15 year old protagonists who meet at summer camp, then follows their lives as they grow up as pen pals and reconnect in college. It starts out as an innocent romance, becomes a tragedy so sad I couldn't stop crying, then pulls a 180 and turns into nonstop graphic sex scenes, and then ends with a gruesome cliffhanger. Wilder's writing is compulsively highlight-able, yet her inability to settle on a genre makes this book more uncomfortable than enjoyable.

Juliet is a sassy, laugh out loud funny, and likable heroine. This story covers her failed romance with her schoolgirl crush, pledging her sorority, and studying and working and surviving freshman year of college. It's a sweet story and a feel good read. It's a little disjointed, there isn't so much a plot as are counting of stories, but it's so cute it's forgivable.