great for pretending you're listening to stanley tucci talk to you like a friend over wine and cheese (I had cider and ritz crackers but it's the spirit of the thing)

basically every reason I love superman in one comic. THE origin story for him as far as I'm concerned. mark waid is good at this who knew

This is like the equivalent of shoving entire handfuls of cotton candy into my mouth all at once and finding some pop rocks near the bottom, but that's okay. I had a good time with this one! Admittedly I'm a sucker for these tropes to begin with, so your enjoyment may entirely depend on how much you like friends to lovers with a dash of second chance (and I love those tropes very much, so I was immediately on board.) 

Loses a star because of my dislike of third act breakups and I felt it was a liiiiiittle too similar to the end of the last Emily Henry book I read

julia quinn said they're going to fall in love over a medical emergency i said oh i'm sure (like i don't eat it up every time)

I think this book had a lot of interesting things to say about race, performative activism, and transactional relationships that I enjoyed reading about and want to take away, but I couldn't find myself really getting into it fully. It just felt so clunky at times that I struggled through sections, and I ended up turning the audiobook speed faster than I normally would just to get through it. I think it's intentional that the only characters you really end up liking by the end are Emira and her friends, but that just kind of made it more of a dragged-out slog. I'm glad I read it, probably won't revisit it. 

The problem with reading so much European history for fun (especially all the myth debunking) is I can tell when things have been pumped up for the purpose of extra salaciousness. And I can tell with this one. It is told in a fun way, though, I will give it that.

Also the last 2% of this book is so smug I half wanted to DNF at 98% done. 

I've been waiting for this book for quite some time - I've been watching John and Hank on-and-off for over a decade now, and John's obsession with tuberculosis has been the most animated I've seen him maybe... ever, and that's saying a lot. And wow, what a fascinating, emotional, deeply frustrating read. I don't think I've ever been this mad reading a book in quite some time.

The audiobook really enhances it. You can hear John's frustration in every sentence grappling with the reality of TB in the modern era, as much as his retelling of its history is engaging and funny.  The wonderful thing about the Green brothers is how good they are at humanizing the world and that serves just as much to make this book more beautiful and so much more infuriating at the lack of empathy and the immense amount of red tape and financial barriers that surrounds what should be a clear-cut issue like people's lives. But at the end of the day with the Greens, it always comes back to hope that there are other people who care and are trying.

I've seen criticism of this book that it's a little too shallow and doesn't really go in depth, and while I do agree with that (it's not a full 5 stars for this reason), I do think that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not always John's story to tell, but he can point you to people who can. There are some great recommendations in the postscript I mean to track down for myself.