Based on the page count and how the first couple of chapters just flew by, I expected this to be a quick read. I didn't account for how heavy it would be, though. 

Just as the blurb says, this is a story of a young girl becoming a gymnast under the Soviet Union which follows her from the frozen city of Norilsk to the training camp on Ozero Krugloye to Olympics and beyond. We also get chapters from her father, a longtime believer in the Soviet way of life who's growing slowly, reluctantly disillusioned; her elderly next-door neighbor and childhood babysitter, a gulag survivor who's still grappling with everything she'd had to go through; and, sometimes, flashbacks from her mother, a former ballerina and a passionate free thinker who, one day, had walked out of everyone's life and disappeared. That last mystery is in big part what holds the book together and what kept me turning pages even when the story grew too hard to bear. The way it plays out is something I'd love to talk about, but it's also a huge spoiler, so I'll just say I was both disappointed and satisfied in absolutely equal measure.

All the POV characters and then some have that MC energy—the book could easily be about anyone in the main cast, twisted just a bit differently. While I read about their tribulations, each of those characters felt so alive on the page. And yet, curiously, as I look back at the book, I don't recall the characters as fully realized fictional people. Each of them spends the story super stuck in a particular conflict, in the consequences of a specific choice. Everything they are revolves around it, and it's honestly super fitting for this book, because much as it is about gymnastics, it is even more so about the dystopian life in USSR, and it's portraying the experience with grueling honesty. I was born mere years before the collapse of the Soviets and raised by people who spent their entire life there, and the shadow of that miserable great country that everybody missed and no one had anything truly good to say about has hung above me my whole life. A bone-chillingly sad history, and the saddest part of it is that the world never truly learned from it. 

As a whole, this is a story about surviving in a system that decides everything for you and constantly gaslights you. Does it still matter you love something if you're told to love it? If what you believe in turns out to be a lie, at what point do you realize you've been lying to yourself and how do you live with it? What choices can you make when everything's been decided for you? Can you say no while you still care, and what happens when you stop? There are definitely right and wrong answers here, I feel, but there are no easy ones, and it's especially not easy to tell ones from others. 

The vibes here are scary thick and the writing is engrossing. I did sometimes feel taken out of the story by stuff like, when it's assumed that all the characters are speaking Russian anyway, random insertions of Russian words that have full equivalents in English. Like, why use "dochka" when it's literally just "daughter?" Also, I feel I've given up on authors who don't come from Post-Soviet countries ever figuring out how patronimics work. Clearly, this is arcane knowledge that you either grow up with or never grasp by the will of divine powers.

I’ve learned time and again that one’s survival hinges on placating the monster when you cannot slay it.

An interesting reimagining of Jane Eyre that sticks close enough to the original to be recognizable, yet also veers far enough away to tell a new story. Obviously, the biggest difference is that it involves a romance between Jane and Bertha Mason who are both Black here, and Edward Rochester is very explicitly the villain (and a particularly vile one at that). The story takes place in an alternate history setting where there's a Queen Amelia on the British throne and it looks like women, people of color, and queer people might fare differently compared to the real world at the same time. Unfortunately, the author offers next to no details about all that, so it remains unclear how out of the ordinary some of Jane's and Bertha's circumstances, plans for the future, etc are. I would've liked to know a bit more about the world outside of Thornfield—not just the two heroines' personal memories focused on their loved ones and personal emotional experiences, but something more... objective? Concrete? I'm not sure what the right word here is, but I'd just like to get a better sense of the large-scale setting.

The small-scale setting, on the other hand, is where the author has done a great job. This version of Thornfield is appropriately gothic, gloomy, desolate, and very much in need of burning down. That oppressive atmosphere never goes away and colors all the experiences and interactions the characters have. It provides an appropriate backdrop for the themes of domestic abuse, domestic violence, and gaslighting the book is so ripe with. Speaking of that: I'm generally satisfied with how these themes were handled, although I didn't anticipate just how heavy some of the instances would hit—it was a slower read for me than I expected because I had to take mental health breaks. This is one of those situations where I just want to loudly remind the trad publishers that NA is a thing, because this is definitely a NA book in terms of how the subject matter is handled (and honestly, also in terms of the characters' age and just about everything else), not YA, even though that's of course how it's billed.

The characters feel pretty far divorced from their namesakes from the original novel, but they're all pretty interesting and fill their parts well. Normally, I prefer villains who are more complex and have some compelling reasons for what makes them this way, but in this case, well, sometimes evil is just evil, and here, it works. As for the protagonists, Jane frustrated me sometimes with just how rash she was—she kept reminding herself about the importance of caution and thinking her actions through, but she seldom practiced what she preached for more than ten minutes at a time. I kind of liked how it upped the stakes, making every complication she faced the consequence of her on actions and making me worry all the time if she would even pull through, but my, was she a nerve-wrecking protagonist to follow.

Also: damn my favorite side character for turning out to be a baddy right when I started trusted them. I should have known!

It's curious how each individual aspect of this book is pretty much exactly up my alley, but the whole they form left me vaguely unsatisfied. The beginning hooked me pretty hard: a classic in media res opening that felt like starting a new tv show with the first episode of season two; a soul-sucking, body-snatching demon trying to figure out who betrayed him and where his companions went; a few cool subversions of minor fantasy tropes along the way; evocative descriptions; immersive vibes. For the first quarter of the book or so, I genuinely enjoyed how the flashback storyline intermeshed with the plot in the present time. There were plenty of interesting, fleshed out characters with a complex web of relationships between them and smart, quippy moments of dialogue.

However, the deeper I went into the story, the harder it was to sustain that immersion. The world continued to be interesting and cleverly built. The characters remained complex and compelling, in theory. In practice, I was finding harder and harder to connect to them, possibly because of the two different arcs (the past and the present) running alongside each other. I kept waiting for certain gaps between the two storylines to be filled, but they never quite went there, and there were a couple of plot threads that felt practically abandoned, even though technically, the events that needed to happen to wrap them up did happen. The emotional payoff, however, just wasn't present, as if something important was missing each time between the set-up and the conclusion.

Upon some thinking, I suspect that part of my dissatisfaction comes from not forming expectations correctly. I'm not even sure what I expected, exactly, but I just thought I'd be more engaged with Kai in the present storyline. But for the most part in the present, he's the sort of character who's already peaked and now is figuring out where to get the will to go on. It doesn't help that the present-time plot is fairly straightforward to the point that it's barely enough to sustain a novel. The depth comes from the various side characters who, by virtue of being side characters, don't get to take the center stage, and from the storyline that unfolds in the flashbacks—and has the ingrained flaw of the reader knowing how it ends before it even begins. 

This is definitely the kind of story that's focused on the journey above the destination, and I'm normally all for it. But the further I read, the more disconnected I felt from that journey, and I still struggle to formulate why. So far, my best guess is that the things that would hook me the most into the characters' stories and inner worlds were glossed over or kept silent. There were some moments that really stuck with me: Ziede and Kai's moment of "how it started, how it's going" reminiscence, or that instance when Kai heard of how his relationship with Bashasa was perceived from the outside and reflected on how it truly was in that regard, or Kai's interaction with his mother. All of those exchanges were ripe with emotional weight and history that I longed to see the story properly delve into. Instead, those things that would have truly hooked me were stuck existing between the lines. In general, I just think that for my taste, too much was missing/assumed about the character and relationship development. 

I did enjoy a lot of narrative threads here, and even more so the worldbuilding. In particular, I loved the themes of what happens to the world after it gets saved/rebuilt, the post-revolution instability, and the anti-imperial ideas. I also, being me, wholeheartedly appreciated how queernormative this setting is, and I found Wells's take on demons super refreshing. While the magic system and some other aspects of the worldbuilding had me confused for a long time, I felt like the key points came together quite naturally by the end and I definitely prefer this sort of organic immersion to infodumps. And I'll be definitely thinking more about the dual narrative structure here and all the ways it did and didn't work for me in the coming days.

A quick, comforting read, and generally one of those "warm blanket in book form" stories. One of the leads, on top of being in a bad place emotionally, suffers a bad fall and has to navigate taking care of his many pets with limited mobility. The other loves animals and happily volunteers to walk them, but crippling social anxiety makes human interaction very hard for him. Gradually, the two build a connection that is fulfilling and uplifting to them both. 

I felt the depiction of anxiety here was really well done. My own social anxiety has never been as extreme as Simon's, but there were so many aspects of his condition that felt super relatable, from his feelings and thoughts on his anxiety to small details like the side effects from his medication. Also, all the pets! Such a great part of the book. So many of them, and each had a floofy personality of their own! I also appreciated that Jack wasn't strictly a dog person or cat person and kept his house full of animal friends of both kinds. Another big relatability factor here! 

There were a bunch of minor hiccups for me here, such as a bunch of scenes dragging a bit and losing direction and the relationship development significantly picking up way sooner than I expected. I also couldn't always reconcile the way Jack acted around Simon with how he was with his brother or on his own. I choose to believe that Simon brought up the best in him, but I would've liked to see him carry some of that best over into his other relationships more prominently. You know, just to avoid that lingering alternate interpretation that he's presenting a front to Simon that might crumble eventually.

Overall though, it was a much smoother read than Roan Parrish's books usually are for me, and I practically inhaled the books with no real breaks. I was really craving something romantic and healing-focused, and this was exactly that story.

I totally didn't expect this DNF, I'll be honest. I mean, a gothic sapphic dark academia novel that is a story within a story within a story? It sounded so good! But whenever I sit down to get through another few pages, I just feel bored out of my skull. I appreciate how voicey the narrator is, but it just feels like the narrator is trying to hard and deliberately packing everything into as many smart, culture-savvy words as possible, to the point that the original thought gets lost. Also, it's been over 100 pages and nothing happened. I've been waiting for the plot to begin for so long I forget what the plot is supposed to be.

It's a pity, because I've heard great things about the book and was excited to read it, but. Sorry, I give up.

It's still early in the year, but I've got the feeling this is going to be my favorite book of 2024. This story just hit all the right notes for me. It's a perfect blend of so many of the tropes I adore: friends to lovers, roommates to lovers, workplace romance, mutual pining. The execution of the mix was so well done, too: the way their emotional proximity kept growing, how the closer they got the more they felt they had to hide while getting more and more open with each other. How they see certain things about each other so clearly, almost more so than they see certain things about themselves, but get hopelessly tangled with others until they get just the right nudge. How they both make each other not only happier, but better.

The characters are so alive on the page—not just Andy and Nick, but everyone who surrounds them. There was that cool feeling that the main leads were carving this bubble for themselves that was just for them two in many ways, but they wouldn't be able to do it if they weren't surrounded by other people along the way. People like Emily and her friends, but also people like Andy's father or Nick's big complicated family, despite the tumultuous relationships they had, and people like their coworkers, and all the other queer people in New York whose lives touched those only tangentially—through glances exchanged in the streets or articles in the newspapers. I'm an absolute sucker for deeply character-driven stories like this, and so many of Andy's and Nick's experiences and feelings resonated with me so much, too. From Andy's very obvious ADHD to Nick's struggled habit of concealing big parts of his identity, there was always something that made me go, "Yeah, been there."

There was also this very clear sense of place and historical period that I enjoyed a lot. So many scenes and locations were so vividly depicted that I almost felt I was watching a movie, and I'm not a super visual reader. Due to the realities of that time, there is a strong impact of period-appropriate homophobia, but in spite of it, there's a lot of queer joy and thriving to offset the angst, even if it has to happen under wraps. Especially since the wraps are coming down, what with all those small subplots about the articles or the increasing number of queer books reviewed by Nick's colleague—some of them even non-tragic.

If I had to nitpick, I could perhaps note how there were a few instances of the prose not being quite clear, or how maybe in a few places the intersections of character arcs and external plot evens could be tightened up. But I'm not in the mood to nitpick at all—I just loved the entire experience.  Honestly, I could go on and on about so many aspects of the story because it gave me All The Feels. Ultimately, it's a beautiful slice of life with so much heart, and I think I'll re-read it someday, even though there are so many books and so little time.

The one thing I appreciated a lot about the book is the writing. It just flows so smoothly that I couldn't help but keep turning pages despite not being super invested in either the plot or the characters. I can't think of many lines that made me slow down and ponder them for a moment, but it also never became monotonous, and the pacing escalated steadily while maintaining stakes that, while being high enough, weren't *too* high. I fell like this is a very good style for a MG book.

Now, for the thing I loved even more, and honestly almost the whole reason for my rating: the worldbuilding! I absolutely adored this mixture of Korean myth and space opera tropes, and all the wonderful exciting aspects of this world, from space pirates to ghost planets. It's a setting I'd love to visit, to set a TTRPG campaign in, and to read more books about, though I wish they could be more mature stories. Simply because there are so many cool things here that I feel could be explored deeper if we weren't just seeing them through the MG lens. I'd really enjoy seeing this 'verse through the eyes of some adult characters. Meanwhile, daydreaming it is!

As for the plot and the characterization, I'm afraid that's where I felt let down. Perhaps part of it is just that I'm not much of an MG reader, but there were definitely some MG books I've enjoyed in the past that didn't feel so... shallow? The aspects of the plot that helped showcase the worldbuilding were kind of exciting, but only because I enjoyed the setting so much. And Min seemed, at the surface, like the kind of a character I would enjoy following: someone tricky and inventive, relying a lot on her shapeshifting ability, trying to figure out her identity while constantly stuck impersonating someone else. A lovable rogue of sorts. But alas, she thoroughly lacked the "lovable" part for me. Despite being sometimes praised for her wit, she mostly got ahead on sheer luck and coincidence, and for someone whose arc was supposedly focused on figuring herself out, there was next to no self-reflection. 

This book was a great reminder to venture outside my comfort genres more. Because I absolutely don't do that enough, but so often when I do, I end up really loving the experience—just like this time.

This is essentially a mockumentary in book form. You know all those special features about bands with cult following that used to be legendary, with all the members gathering round to tell stories of their glory days? Exactly like that, except it's a novel and the band is fictional. At times, though, it barely felt like fiction, because the vibes were captured so well. I'm not a big fan of the 1970s music scene in terms of lifestyle and... shall we say, aesthetic, tbh. I mean, I have playlists chock-full of Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac and whatnot, but that whole sex, drugs & rock-n-roll  vibe isn't my thing. But I used to be in a relationship with someone who was a big fan and wished they'd been born a few decades earlier to witness that scene first-hand, so I kind of got well-versed in it by osmosis. And reading this book really brought me back to all the conversations we used to have about it half my life ago, to the point that I kept wanting to turn around and ask, "Hey, have you read this? What do you think about that one part?" even though that someone hasn't been by my side for ages.

I really loved that "mockumentary" format because of the extra distance it gave the characters when they relived past experiences. Some storylines, like the early parts of Billy and Camilla's marriage, would've had a very different effect of me if they played out "in real time," but with Billy describing his experiences with addiction and rock-n-roll scene as a whole through a more mature lens, never shying away from responsibility for the choices he'd made, gave me more sympathy for him. It made me actually enjoy the bits that would've been frustrating otherwise.

My favorite aspect of the book was how it tackled the subject of joint creativity, and shared creative control, and how creative bonds affect people's emotions and feelings. The entire Aurora section that focused on all the work they put into making their hit album was a big hit for me. There was so much feeling there, and a lot of thoughts on creativity that I found highly relatable despite not being a musician. And the narrative was constructed masterfully. There was, for example, the part where one of the members was feeling left out, and his parts of the interview started fading into the background until he sprung up with some really strong "left out" feelings, and I was like, "Oh shit, how did I completely forget about this character? I liked this character!" 

By the end of the book, some story threads did get a bit melodramatic, but I found that forgivable due to how poignant the prose still was and how fleshed out the characters felt throughout their tribulations. That goes for all of them, but my favorites are all the women in the story—Daisy and Camilla and Karen and Simone—and the tapestry of relationships between them. Some of the scenes focused on each of them legit made me tear up.

Definitely bumping up Taylor Jenkins Reid's other books on my TBR!

I really enjoyed how this story was just the right balance of cozy and creepy. Here we have a town on the edge of the woods with local traditions built around the presence of a horned monster in the forest, except no one really believes in the monster anymore; a young town outcast/hermit living on the very edge of the woods with his dog and his vegetable garden; and of course, one day the hermit gets a bit lost among the trees and finds out that the monster is in fact real. What follows is a short and sweet cottagecore tale that involves walks in the woods, baking, gardening, and growing pumpkins despite the neighbor's objections.

Styx, the monster, also hits that balance very well. On one hand, he is super sweet and considerate with Ellis. On the other hand, he's also very much a primal force of nature with a possessive streak. The relationship was fun to follow for the most part, although there was an aspect to it that didn't feel balanced to me at all. I'm not sure if this is one of my trademark "I'm too ace for this shit" moments, or if it was indeed not clear at times whether the romance was heading in a "first and foremost, the man and the monster are going to get to know each other, slowly dispensing the awkwardness" direction or in a "don't trust the first chapter, this is actually erotica" one. Not saying allosexual people can't think about sex and feelings at the same time or anything, but I think that probably "at the same time" is key. Meanwhile, Ellis was kind of swinging between "the monster is a person and I want to get to know that person" and "the one interesting thing about the monster is his dick and I'm going to think of nothing but his dick" :D

All in all, I really liked the vibes here and might pick up the full-length novels from this series sometime.

Frequently, my first reaction to reading a novella is along the lines of, "I wish it was a full novel." With this one, weirdly enough, I kind of wish it was a short story. Or a collection of loosely related short stories, maybe—just short snippets of the characters' lives, allowing the reader to be the one to imagine how much time may have passed in between them and what might have happened.

To elaborate, there are a lot of scenes or scene sequences that were really beautiful and kind of stood on their own. I would absolutely dig them as shorts/flash fics! But the transition between them weren't always smooth, and the fact that the romance leads go literally from "you burned my home down you villain" to "this is one true love" in the space of less than 24 hours gives it such a rushed feeling. I'm not much of an insta-love person in general, but today I learned that combined with my favorite enemies to lovers trope it just doesn't work for me at all. 

Would I mind a more thorough, slower development, if this was a full novel? Absolutely not! But the writing is so beautiful and effective on that small-scale scene level, sooo... Shorts. Give me a series of tiny shorts with fog of ambiguity between them instead of transitions. Yes, I'm surprised by this conclusion, too. :D

Anyway, the writing was absolutely lovely, the Brocéliande Forest came alive on the page, and I enjoyed the druid and witchcraft lore. I also feel the sapphic and genderfluid rep was well done.