I learned a lot about the Qu'ran from listening to this book, and I liked the chapters that connected to the stories from the Qu'ran. I had a hard time with the non-linear storytelling (which is usually a problem with listening to audiobooks for me), but that's not a dealbreaker. This book is well-written, deeply personal, and is a prime example of the theme, "there is no one way to be queer." It's always hard to read stories that are so different from your own and trying to find ways to connect with the story, so sometimes I felt like I had to push myself to keep going, but I am glad Lamya was brave and given the opportunity to share her story. 

This book was so sweet, and I feel like it perfectly encapsulated the excitement of teenage first love. I had all the warm, fuzzy feelings while reading this. 

Part One and the last six chapters were great. 4 stars.
Chapters 37-60 though... very meh. 2 stars. 
Seems only fair to meet in the middle at 3.
I am just extremely uninterested in Violet and Xaden's relationship, and Violet through most of this book is not a great character in general. 
I am still interested in this story because the world is interesting, but I hope Violet grows up and matures before the next book.

I will preface this review by saying that I am not the target audience for this book. First and foremost, I am a very casual k-pop fan (like I know less than 15 k-pop songs and have no major attachments to any particular bands), so I didn't know much about the culture around k-pop groups and idols and felt out of my depth a bit. Second, I'm 26 now and going through a bit of a mid-20s crisis, so it was hard for me to connect back with high school seniors. 

That being said, if I was a high schooler who was even moderately more interested in k-pop, I would have been OBSESSED with this book. I hope this does numbers on YA BookTok/Bookstagram because it's a cute, fluffy romance, perfect for summer reading by the beach. 

I did find Lulu (FMC) to be a little bit lacking in personality, but in a way that it reminds me of self-insert fanfiction- many girls could read this and feel like they see themselves in Lulu. The only real character growth came from Kite (MMC), and everyone else sort of stayed the same. I wish that at least Lulu could have had more development, even something as silly as adding a Korean minor in college.

Overall, a fun, short read, and it fulfilled one of my reading challenge prompts (a book about K-Pop). 

I know that not much is known about the poet Sappho, and we have to piece together the story of her life from the small clips of her work that we have and references to her in other works. However, for a figure who wrote thousands of lines of poetry about love (and significant portions of that being understood as wlw poetry), Erica Jong made the interesting decision to focus her love story primarily on her first love, the father of her only child, Alcaeus. There are certainly references to her loving several people, men and women, but I have a hard time believing that someone who is a disciple of Aphrodite spends decades of her life pining for the love of the first man she ever loved. It's giving third-wave feminism written by a cishet white woman. I think I was hoping for something a little more similar to Song of Achilles, but alas. 

This slice-of-life/speculative fiction looks at what it would be like to live, work, date, and manage relationships with family during a new American Civil War. The questions at the heart of this book feel like questions we ask ourselves today even without an active civil war in our country; how can we live amid so much political turmoil, and how do we reconcile our relationships with people we love (especially family), when we so strongly disagree about the way things should be? 
Even though I'm in my mid-twenties, it was so refreshing to read a book where a majority of the cast is middle-aged or older. Fans of NYT's Modern Love, Grace and Frankie, or alternating between swiping on Hinge and doom-scrolling will enjoy this book.