What a great book! This is probably my favorite middle grade novel ever (not that I read too many of them, admittedly), and I have a feeling it might be a very long time before another story comes along to knock it off the pedestal. Whyyyyy did I keep delaying reading it for so long???

I absolutely loved the descriptions of the haunted house and the whole concept of getting benevolently haunted by a deceased loved one who just wants you to be true to yourself and figure yourself out. It was so clever how the author took some of the popular ghost story tropes that are normally staples of horror and made them heartwarming instead. There's a lot to be said about the poignant depiction of grief, and not just Bug's, but also his Mom's. Around the middle of the book, there's a beautiful scene where Bug's Mom tells him about the five stages of grief. He starts naming them one by one, asking if she's on this stage or that, and she deflects and redirects the conversation just before he reaches depression. That was truly heart-clenching to read. I also loved that the grief, while very real, never felt too heavy somehow. Instead, there was always a kind of bright hope tinting it, an underlying understanding that Bug's uncle would want his family members to move on and thrive in his absence, and so that's what they're trying their best to do.

Bug was such a relatable character who constantly made me think back to when I was his age and to the experiences I had, especially with figuring out my gender. I never got that "Oh, that's my gender moment"—I stayed forever in the "shapeless squishy humanoid" spot and I'm very comfortable here at this point—but like, the dysphoria, the constant trying to fit into what a person of your assigned gender is probably supposed to be and never getting it despite all the effort while your friends just effortlessly *are*? All of this felt so viscerally relatable and made me feel so seen. It's such a pity I can't travel back in time and hand my pre-teen self this book, it would have made a world of difference to them. Oh, and also, Bug's habit of narrating his life as if it were a story to make it more livable, and how he let go of that habit once he became comfortable in his own skin? I thought I was the only one who constantly did that!

There's perhaps one tiny hiccup I had while reading, and it's an arguable one. On one hand, from the structural standpoint, the last few chapters felt kinda... drawn out? Tacked on? BUT! I wouldn't trade those several chapters FOR THE WORLD. They're THE BEST. They're basically just a string of coming-out scenes, and each of them is 100% transphobia-free and full of acceptance and validation. Each of them made me tear up in earnest, and I hate that there was that little voice at the dark, hurt back of my mind whispering that this was getting unrealistic, because nope. This can't be unrealistic. This should be the only acceptable version of reality, and I believe that one day, we'll all live in it and that books like this will help make it happen. Seriously, it was amazing to see so much acceptance, and to realize that none of the interpersonal problems Bug faced were in any way connected to his gender. Here, coming out as trans isn't seen as a problem by a single person. If anything, it's a solution.

So who cares about structural hiccups? The entire book is awesome.

This comic made me tear up quite a few times—in a very good way. It's just so heartwarming and affirming and full of empathy. Even more so, perhaps, than the excellent first installment. Or maybe I just felt that way because the POV shifted from Wisteria to Cecily and with it, the focus shifted to a slightly more adult mindset. Whatever the case, this reminded me of Becky Chambers's works with all the coziness and the kindness and trying to make sense of the messy, complicated, wonderful human experience.

Wisteria, despite no longer being the POV character, is still very much present in the story and displaying so much growth. She's sassier and more sociable. She's making new friends and crashing parties. In the four months that passed between seasons, she made a regrettable mistake involving dating the local apothecary. She's also still very emotional and full of self-doubt and struggling with fabric-based spells, and none of that makes her growth any less visible.

Cecily is a wonderful narrator, and I so much related to her struggle with showing vulnerability. It was lovely to see the backstory about Lachlan and her family and her past, and I absolutely adored the whole plot thread about her relationship with Jo. It's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, for unrelated reasons: how maybe sometimes the point isn't to solve problems but to live through them, and this storyline drives that idea home beautifully. Yeah. Maybe sometimes, that's exactly the point.

I'd be remiss not to mention Amal's storyline, too—it's beautiful and bittersweet and exactly what it should be, and I loved seeing what it meant for Cecily and how it made her grow and open up. That last chapter where this thread got to the conclusion was especially well done, with next to no dialogue and the art doing all the work. The facial expressions, the colors, the lighting—it was so easy to imagine the conversation without reading it. Honestly, the art here overall is just amazing, with such beautiful colors and such clever framing and all the diversity in faces and body shapes. Simply 10/10.

The series is on an indefinite hiatus right now, but I really hope that maybe someday, we'll see a Book III. This is truly a world I want to keep immersing myself in.

Well. Wow. I guess there is a first time for everything: I've encountered a Casey McQuiston book that I didn't really like. And it's such a damn pity, because I've been looking forward to reading it for so long, and by all intents and purposes, this should have been the book for me. I mean, a small town of doom that the MC is looking to escape, except this close to graduation she starts getting tangled up in stuff here more than ever? Religious trauma? A messy queer cast? Academic rivals to lovers? A mystery with a treasure hunt for answers set up by the missing person herself? All of this is my jam. I expected to love all of this. And yet, the book and I, we've never quite clicked.

I think the problem here is that, just like RWRB and One Last Stop, this is a highly character-driven novel (also my jam nearly 100% of the time). Except, unlike with RWRB and One Last Stop, this time I just didn't connect with the main character at all. Chloe was just so unlikable, and not in a fun way. So for a big part of the way, I kept pushing through just because I was curious about the resolution to the central mystery, and also because there were other characters who truly shined for me whenever they showed up on page. Georgia and Rory absolutely captured my heart, and while Smith took a bit of time to grow on me, I became a big fan of his eventually. (I do keep wanting to call him Finn in my head, though. Honestly, if anyone tries to tell me this entire novel isn't rooted in Faberry fanfiction, I'll just laugh—I've sunk too many hours of my life down the Glee tag on AO3 to buy that).

But, well, Chloe... I don't know, I just didn't like it in her head, nor did I find her interesting. There's that one scene about two thirds into the story where she's talking to her Moms and explaining to them what it's like to be her, and that was the one instance where I found her compelling and sympathetic... or rather, the her she was describing. Because I didn't quite feel like the things she was talking about and the things that I witnessed from reading an entire book from her perspective were the same. Similar, yes, but not identical. I think I would have enjoyed her entire story much more if what I was shown matched what I was told in that scene.

That said, there's a lot of cool stuff packed here. A lot of cool characters, too—maybe even too many. I kept wishing for multiple POVs, not just small snippets from other characters' schoolwork drafts, notes, and such. It would have been so cool to see Georgia's, Rory's, Smith's, Benjy's perspectives on some of the events—and Shara's, too, especially closer to the end.

A really fun read! It did require a bit of suspension of disbelief; I really fail to see why Pepper's mom made it Pepper's job to handle her company's Twitter when the fast food chain is doing so well. There has got to be an SMM manager on the in-house marketing team, or alternatively, handling the company's social network accounts can be outsourced to a digital marketing agency. You don't just put all of this on your teenage daughter who is busy with her highly competitive academic environment and being an athlete on the side! Honestly, this situation feels so implausible to me that I kept stumbling over every Twitter-related scene. I guess I'm not good enough at this suspension of disbelief business, and it did detract from my enjoyment a little.

Other than this detail, though? I loved it. Pepper and Jack had amazing chemistry, and it was fun to see them interact on three different levels: as themselves over school business, as close anonymous friends on the anonymous app Jack designed, and of course on Twitter, hidden behind their respective business accounts. It was like watching three different relationships unfold, except it was one relationship, and I feel the author handled all these layers marvelously.

I also loved everything that surrounded the main characters. They definitely didn't exist in vacuum, they had full lives, and following those lives was really fun. I particularly enjoyed seeing both of their relationships with their families, especially Pepper's loving struggles with her Mom and Jack grappling with being in his twin brother's shadow while unequivocally seeing Ethan as the person he's closest to.  Honestly, I know want more books with twins in vaguely similar situations! All the school and sports-related storylines were also engrossing, in particular Pepper's rivals-to-friends thing with Pooja. There was plenty of great banter throughout, too. It was also nice to see casual inclusion of queer characters.

Oh, and one more thing I'd be remiss to mention: all the foodie descriptions and the baking! Pepper's monster cakes sound kinda scary. I genuinely approve. 

All in all, this just might be one of my favorite reads of the month—I just wish the starting situation on Pepper's end wasn't so hard for me to buy into. That's what I get for working on the periphery of digital marketing, I guess!

I stumbled upon this book pretty much accidentally, and I'm happy to report that it was a happy accident! This is pretty much everything I want to see in YA: a heartfelt story of coming of age, self-discovery, and finding a direction in the world. I loved the strong 1990s vibe and all the mentions of books and music, especially that listening to Nirvana scene near the beginning. It really transported me to the time when I was roughly the characters' age, listening to those very same songs and being absolutely damn haunted by the chorus of Lithium.

Rainey is a wonderfully compelling and complex characters with so many tangles in her life. I loved seeing her relationship with her family develop over the course of the book, and I empathized with her feeling stuck between the past her parents were determined to hold on to and trying to figure out what kind of future she wanted to have. Most of all, I loved seeing her developing relationship with music—because the way it's portrayed here, it truly is a relationship of its own. I love reading stories that focus on young artists and the way they figure out what their art means for them, and this novel truly delivered.

An enjoyable conclusion to an emotional tale. I liked the dynamic between Jem and Cador a lot here. The combination of guilt from one side and betrayed feelings from the other was emotionally wrangling in the best way, the groveling remained just shy from over the top, and I especially appreciated how all the hot scenes played into the relationship development. I'm a sucker for long journeys of trust restoration full of "yeah, I have feelings, but that doesn't change anything" moments, and this book absolutely delivered.

The political plot, though, was somewhat underwhelming—or rather not the plot itself, but how it was delivered. Perhaps it was because the book had a strong "second half of the same story" feel to me rather than a sequel. I kind of expected the pacing of non-romance events to be much faster, but instead at the beginning it's rather slow and meandering, only truly picking up around the middle and then snowballing in the last part of the book. It was also kinda weird that so many events hinged on the party getting split and half the characters just wondering elsewhere doing whatever while the two main characters sorted out their feelings.

Despite that, I did very much enjoy all the reveals, I liked seeing Cador as the fish out of water for once, I found the worldbuilding consistently fun, and the romance—the main thing I came here for—was even better than in the first book. So all in all, a great read.

Sometimes I get curious about all the ways Russia is portrayed in the West, both because I like finding the occasional source in English that I can recommend to English-speaking friends and because I find it tragically and inexplicably hilarious how often the country is misunderstood. It's like people in the West fluctuate constantly between "They're probably just like us, except they act differently for some reason?" and "They're not at all like us, we will never understand them, the Russian soul is as mysterious as the poets say." This book in particular wasn't too bad at the beginning. I felt like a lot of nuance was spotted and acknowledged, albeit often in a cursory way where it wouldn't hurt to dig into it deeply. Very often the author kind of... failed to explicitly connect the dots while getting those dots right. So when you're already familiar with the subject of post-Soviet Russia, the portrayal here feels rather accurate, but I'm not sure if it would feel the same way to someone who doesn't have the inside knowledge of living in that society. I was really surprised at how much the author condensed. Come on, you have the entire book ahead of you! If you want to portray that "long hangover," why move through things so quickly?

Then about one third in, the book stopped being about Russia and started being about the early phase of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War (the events of 2014), and that was when things got messy. I wouldn't call the author a Russia apologist by far; he is very clear on who started the war, etc. He also spells out the ideological reasons of it quite clearly: the attempts to restore the Empire, the fact that Ukraine taking a different path from Russia is unacceptable to Russia's leadership and why, etc. But then he keeps focusing on Ukraine, and... ugh. He clearly tries to be objective! But he doesn't quite succeed. He kind of continues looking at Ukraine through the Russian lens, failing to grasp that the society and culture of Ukraine is very distinct, has its own set of distinct nuance, and is in fact not "just like Russia, but pro-European, and there are those evil nationalists lurking in dark places, too." While the author does include depictions of interviews with Ukrainian people, whenever the people he talks to say things that fall completely outside the scope of the Russian lens, the author in his commentary tries to shove those things back into that narrative and to examine them solely in that context.

I guess in a way, this is a nice way to show how a lot of the "good Russians" view the conflict: "Yes, Russia is the one who started it and war is bad, but look, Ukraine made mistakes that looked so and so from Russia's POV"—which does give extra insight into the "mysterious modern Russian soul." And I guess the war Russia wages against Ukraine is indeed the peak example/result of that titular Long Hangover. But all in all, it feels like the title of the book is misleading in relation to its content, and it only does a good job of doing what it says it set out to do if you're already familiar with the subject—and by that point, you really don't need this book to explain things to you.

This was a difficult book to read—not because of how it was written, but because of the subject matter. The author, I feel, does a very good job in delivering huge blocks of information concisely, switching back and forth between more of a bird's eye view on all the big processes that happened in post-war Europe and a focus on individual person-sized tragedies. Underneath the gruesome descriptions of all the awful ways people were awful to each other, there's this undercurrent of empathy that made reading about all that more bearable.

The book is packed with interesting and important (and also terrible) facts; some of them were familiar to me, though more in the WW2 context than in that of the immediate aftermath, others were new information. There's a lot of digging into the reasons behind the social processes depicted here—not just in terms of matching consequences to past events, but also in terms of enormous collective trauma that people all over the continent were trying to cope with. Even though these 500 pages cover numerous events and countries all over Europe, the people never become just a statistic. Oh, an speaking of all those events and countries—I appreciate how smooth the transitions between separate blocks of information were, and how clear the connections were made between the events that on the surface seemed almost completely separate.

All and all, I found this a great, though-provoking foray both into the aftermath of WW2 and the premise of the Cold War. It constantly made me think of how a lot of the events depicted here still echo through the modern history of Europe, some louder than the others. Maybe one day, those echoes will quiet down. I don't expect to live to see it, though. After all, today, right now there is once again a war going on in the middle of Europe—as usual. The one big war that spun the entirety of Europe may have ended over 80 years ago, but that doesn't mean there ever was an equally continent-wide peace for more than a few years at a time.

PS: One thing that slightly irritated me was how the names of all the Ukrainian and some of the Baltic geographical locations were transliterated from Russian, not from the native languages of these countries. These former Soviet republics are otherwise very clearly acknowledged as independent nations that were under Communist occupation for an unfortunately long while; wouldn't it be best to transliterate from their own languages? That's a minor gripe, though, all things considered.

Um. Okay. Wow. I guess I'm SO not the audience of this book??? Because I've seen so many glowing reviews praising the writing and thecharacters, and I don't want to yuck on anyone's yum, but I just didn't see it. The writing was ridiculously melodramatic in the cheesiest way possible and full of telling instead of showing.  There's not a single realistic line of dialogue. The main characters had exactly two personality traits each (Polly: "in love with Rune," "manic pixie dream girl"; Rune: "in love with Poppy," "brooding anger issues"). All the other characters around them felt made of cardboard and the adults in their lives kept making weird decisions. Not a single person was even trying to acknowledge the fact that this Big Pure Love was more like codependency and habit turned obsession. 

Out of all the books I've read about terminal illness, I swear this was the least emotionally affecting. Probably because by the time the Big Sad Reveal came, I was already spite-reading and looking up from the page every few paragraphs simply to roll my eyes. I only finished it because it was for a book swap challenge and I wanted to get through it as fast as possible.

I... honestly don't know what else to say. Oops?

This book is pretty much "Jurassic Park, but make it D&D," and I'm absolutely digging the concept. It's fun and fast-paced, so it felt to me a lot shorter than it actually was. This is both a pro and a con in my book: on one hand, a quick, exciting read like this was exactly what I needed, but on the other hand, I think slowing down occasionally would have lent the story more depth.

Even so, this was fun! There are so many cool geeky references here—the story feels like a love letter to geek culture, really. In a way, it made me feel very seen. Also, the very concept of a military sci-fi following all the high fantasy tropes reminded me of a longterm TTRPG campaign I was once in, so that was a cool extra layer for me.

I admit the only character I connected to was Addie, but since she's the protagonist and the narrator, that felt like enough. The way she co-existed with her trauma and coped through games made her very relatable to me. Again though, I kinda wish the pace was slower at times, specifically when there was a focus on Addie's health involved—I feel that a subject like this deserves to be explored in a less shallow way. 

So I guess in the end, my feelings are somewhat mixed, but I also had A LOT of fun with this little story, so I choose to err on the side of the positives. :)