A fun thriller.

This started out so strong: Tempest is an orphan, desperately trying to earn the money to revive her drowned sister (a process that only lasts one day, but will be enough time for Tempest to find out why Elysea never told her the truth about how their parents died). Then hijinks ensue! Tempest and Elysea break out of the facility to use Elysea's final 24 hours to find out if their parents are still alive!

And then all the steam runs out and the rest of the book scrapes by on fumes.

There is a forced, awkward romance between Lor and Tempest which surprisingly ends with Lore's death to save Elysea. This isn't a good book at all, but I do respect Scholte's choice not to drag it out into an excruciating love sick trilogy.

A love a multigenerational fuckup, so following both Dana and Ivy's stories was fascinating. Albert has such great prose I found myself stopping to read lines over and just enjoy them. This was spooky and thrilling and more than a bit emotional.

This was cute, and Austen is good at the humorous asides. It felt kind of meandering, and the vast majority of the tension happened in the first third of the book,

when that Asshole Thorpe kept fucking things up for everybody. I really thought he had lied about Isabella to James Morland and she had never betrayed him, but that storyline was never brought up again which really bothered me.

Odell tells you right in the first chapter that she doesn't have a thesis, and she isn't wrong. The entire book (mercifully short, though it still took me nearly two weeks to slog through) bounces from thought to thought without any cohesion. I could almost forgive her this if she weren't so dull. To hear her tell it, her entire life is sitting in parks and birdwatching.

The real issue here is that Odell is so out of touch with a normal person's life that she doesn't even realize how ridiculous she is. Her points are fine, but this book isn't worth your time. Just sit in some grass for five minutes and you'll be happier.

Half hilarious, half reading-through-my-fingers cringe.

Not my usual cup of tea, but I watched the HBO show and wanted to see what this was like. I was genuinely surprised by the depth of each character and how they all felt real. (I saw so much of myself in Madeline I was starting to get uncomfortable.) The audio was great; I loved the Australian accents.

This was so fucking weird but so good.

Pretty sure Sedaris is just a sociopath.