In keeping with my spring goal of ReadItAndYeetIt, I found this old gem I've been hauling around since freshman year philosophy (aka spring 09).

Yikes.

It was kind of interesting, in a Socrates-was-probably-the-most-annoying-man-ever kind of way. The bit about the trial kind of felt like watching Bernie Sanders yell at the democratic debates. It's not that he's wrong, but he just expresses himself so poorly that you want to punch him. For Bernie, it's the anger. For Socrates, it's the mind-numbing mental contortions.

The third man was kind of a weird interesting detective novel set in post WWII Vienna. The Fallen Idol was the kind of depressing short story you read in English class in high school and never really get over.

Prudence is adorable. I was mad but kind of satisfied when Conall died so I won't lie, I rolled my eyes a little when he was fine. I was equally horrified and pleased when Ivy became a vampire queen. That was pretty delightful.

I thought this would be a struggle to read because we currently are living in a world locked down by fear of a virus. But I ended up hating this because the two main characters are so stupid that I didn't care about anything they did or felt or experienced.

Spoiler

Rosemary is pathetic, and not in a way that inspires pity, but in a way that makes you want to punch her in the head. Luce is a whiny mopey loser who can't manage anything but dragging her sorry carcass from one underground show to the next. When I realized they were meeting, I rolled my eyes so hard I nearly fell off my couch.

Most of the prose is just yellow ramblings about music and how it's *so important* but nothing actually happens over the course of the whole book. Neither woman actually has a goal or any kind of meaningful plot device, they're both just bobbing on the waters off this shitty world.

This could have been a study of what isolation does to people, or how to find peace in a shitty world, or provided some psychological and emotional insight into a very realistic dystopian. There was almost no world-building (save for a brief mention of the "pox" which of course left our hero Rosemary unscarred in any visible way because she has to be pretty for "reasons") and even less character development.

I think this was supposed to be a call to arms, but instead it was drivel.

Every so often a book comes along and makes you realize that if you meet someone who likes this book, they are instantly on the friendship blacklist because the ideas presented are so terrible/ludicrous/detestable that anyone who supports them must also be at least in part terrible/ludicrous/detestable. This is one of those books. (It joins Red Rising by Pierce Brown and anything by Ayn Rand on my personal blacklist.)

It is honestly almost laughable how immature Thoreau is. It reads like an eight year old boy who is mad at his parents and writes a letter in crayon detailing why he is setting out on his own because he doesn't need parents.

He spends most of the book telling you why his way is the only "good" way to live, going so far as to detail what he spent on every aspect of his woodland existence. He flatly rejects any notion of caring for others or existing for any reason other than to sit in quiet contemplation. I can almost see how this would have been a potential view point for moderately well-off white men in New England at his time, but he doesn't even allow for the existence of families, women, or people of color in his perfect-world scenario.

Each chapter deals with a new aspect of his life in the woods that he is inordinately proud of. None of them are very interesting. I read this because it's a classic and because I wanted to be well-versed in the type of self-centered lunatic to avoid. For me, this is another "classic" that did not age well and it is probably time to let it die. (See also, Gulliver's Travels.)

The civil disobedience essay can be entirely refuted by a line from Men in Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals."

I bought this book five years ago when it was released and I never read it because I was so worried that it would be terrible and Twilight would be ruined for me. I read it at fifteen - that's a heavy amount of nostalgia to potentially infringe on.

All that being said, this was amazing and even better than the original. I loved every minute of it. Beau was just so much nicer than Bella that I relaxed into their romance so quickly, and I loved that the werewolves were women as well.

I liked the idea of this book a lot more than I liked the actual book. A mermaid from the sea and her sister delivered by a stork and their practically-brother found alone on the earth under a tree with a magic birthmark. A girl turning into a mermaid, two sisters who care for each other, witches, a curse, a traveling show, a difficult journey.

But it had no magic, no heart. The ending was pretty touching, but in a year I'll have completely forgotten I ever read this.

Shannon has a tendency to put her characters into so many bad situations so quickly that it starts to get exhausting. This book either needs to be much shorter with less drawn-out action, or much longer and have greater stretches of character development and world-building. (For example, if the voyants are so clear-cut and powerful that they can be categorized and plan a takeover of the government, how is it possible that other countries don't believe voyants exist?) It's a wild story, and most parts are fun to read, but it's definitely exhausting to get through.