God I can't believe I'm really going to finish this series. These really are so bad. The conversations are wooden, the plot is nonsensical, and yet again the main fight happens and there is two hours of boringboringboring left in the audio. Sadly, all the other audiobooks I want are on hold so this is what I'm doing.

This was SO UNBELIEVABLY BAD. I just cannot. A whole three books about Lena and Ethan's "love" and then the whole final book is Ethan being dead and not even being near her. Oh. OK.

This book was useless, nothing happened. And they set a new record; the only interesting fight happened FOUR HOURS BEFORE THE END OF THE AUDIOBOOK.

A horror show. I regret ever starting this series.

A good re-read on audio because this is just really, much too damn long. Should have been half the length, but it's still a fun one.

In the acknowledgments, Johnson writes of her interviewees "They did not know what I would end up writing."

Unfortunately, neither did Johnson.

This big did not age well; a huge portion of the book is devoted to the app Second Life, which I can't say I knew anyone who used it back in 2010 when this book came out, let alone now. Also, lots of LGBTQ language is out of date.

I read this while studying for my MLIS and thought it might give me some nostalgia, but it was meandering and dull. Definitely will be donating this one.

I'll admit I barely remember the first book in this series, but my review was high and I wrote that I loved Morgan.

Either I have become seethingly cynical (likely) or Neill lost her touch (possible) because every scene with Morgan made me dislike him more. And don't even get me started on the Ethan scenes -- when Merit tells him no and he pushes her into the bookshelves and kisses her anyway, my stomach literally turned over and I almost didn't finish the book.

This is a gross alpha male story pretending to be a romance, and it's not for me.

This is a character study dressed up like a murder mystery. Loved it.

Spoiler

I LOVED that everyone had a reason to hate Will by the end; it was so cleverly done that as each realization occurred I just kept getting more thrilled. I kept wondering why he didn't have his own chapters, but when he finally did get one you just knew it was the nail in his coffin. I feel bad for Johnno, but really happy that Aoife got away with it, and that everyone else can rest easy. My headcanon is that Aoife has an incredibly successful business on the island and Olivia goes to work for her.

I just can't enjoy a story where a man falls immediately in love with a woman who doesn't care about her appearance, and the author consistently portrays other women as less-than because they do care about theirs. You can show me Rhona is troublesome without pointing out that she is wearing high heels in every goddamn scene.

Also, when Anna finds out

Spoiler

that Connal is actually a screenwriter and loses her shit, I was done with this book. She saw a few lines of a screenplay and immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was his pen name? She is buckets of crazy, and any reasonable person would run the other way. I know it was true in the context of this story, but that's just lazy writing on the author's part.

I skimmed a bit more, realized it all continued to suck, and read the ending, which also, unsurprisingly, sucked.

A cute little Sherlock Holmes-esque middle grade fantasy.

A perfect book to connect more deeply with your yoga practice. I'm going to be sharing parts of this in my classes for a long time to come!