"The secret to life is (insert drumroll) . . . there is no secret. Life itself is meaningless. It is up to you to create meaning in your life."

This was a really fun book, and I liked that she tried to make each card applicable to life. (Though a milk bath sounds disgusting, and air drying after one instead of rinsing off is even more so.) I liked the recipes for the first major arcana cards, that was a fun way to connect ideas to the cards.

This book was a serious nail-biter. All of the characters were so complex and dark, and I hated all of them, but was compelled to know what happened and what was at stake. The pieces of the puzzle are released at an excellent pace, enough to keep you interested without letting any of the slower parts drag on too long.

My biggest problem was how unrealistic it felt. I can't believe that Aubrey and Lena would just be able to sense each other and know from a single moment of eye contact that they were both in love with the same boy. There were also a lot of moments of "she must have read my mind because she said what I was thinking" that felt pretty tired.

Spoiler

I also found the ending for Aubrey impossible to believe. There is no way she didn't put pictures of them together on her blog or Facebook or have them on her phone. They also could have easily proved she never got on the plane to England with the fake tickets Charlie planted.

Overall great choice if you are looking for a international-travel filled thriller with interesting characters.

Hoover writes beautiful sentences about believable, realistic characters. But this novel has every cliche in the book, well, in this book. There were so many flaws in the characters and decisions of both characters that even though I knew Owen was supposed to be the protagonist, I couldn't bring myself to trust him. Even after finding out his secret (spoiler alert: it's totally innocuous) in the very last pages of the story, I had spent so long being afraid of him that after finding out how he knew Auburn I was just pissed off at him for being a liar for no reason. Would recommend to readers looking for a realistic fiction story that doesn't take place in high school who are highly forgiving of lying male love interests.

This is a super fun and sexy new adult romance: it has all the drama of a young adult book but the characters are in grad school, so their issues are more adult and self-focused (as opposed to parent-discipline or school problems) and they have actual relationship history and better friends. Candy is a grad school TA by day and a self-published romance writer by night, but her life gets complicated when she falls for a new guy. I loved this story because it was light and fun but the characters were still believable and lovable -- I don't know who I liked more, Candice's roommate or her love interest! Highly recommend if you want a romance that will make you laugh and swoon.

This is not a romance: the girl will meet the guy, maybe the wrong guy, maybe not even a guy at all, but maybe she isn't just a girl either. Maybe she is a girl from Bulgaria coming to Princeton for college, but maybe she is coming for another reason entirely and maybe the guy knows more than he knows he does.

Zourkova has written a bewitching and suspenseful tale that I would recommend to fans of mythology and thrillers looking for a story woven with music and college and bad relationships. Unfortunately, that was the one thing that kept pulling me out of the world of this book and back into head-shaking reality: Rhys is a completely unforgivable villain and the fact that Thea stays with him again and again and goes with him whenever he wants is so ridiculous and out of sync with her character's every other action that I lost faith in the entire situation. He does nothing to earn her trust yet she goes back to him again and again, and through the whole book I am never convinced that she loves him, or he loves her, or that she actually wants to be in the same room with him. I found their "sex" scene to be unconsensual, and Thea's lack of internals about the whole situation made me uncomfortable. Could she really not see what a horrible person he was? Did she not see anything wrong with his behavior? I would have given it five stars if any second of their scenes had made any sense. I loved the history and the mythology and Jake, and pretty much everything else about this story.

If I had read this book in college I think it would have loved it. Helbig's humor/self-help blend is pretty entertaining. I liked her bizarre mnemonics and goofy thoughts. But as a 27-year-old whose life is going pretty well, I mostly found this book stressful. Every single one of her anecdotes about failing at being an adult made me cringe. The advice parts were solid, and I would definitely recommend this to college freshman or maybe recent grads who can't figure their shit out.

Beautiful art, and I loved that each card had a little story to help make sense of the meaning in a memorable way.

Chock-full of absurd Wilde one-liners, but disappointingly sexist. The plot doesn't hold up well to modern standards.