Good visuals, of course, and I loved all the care and skill that went into the design and the worldbuilding - but the characters could've all done with a bit more development.

I really can't say I was disappointed in The Secret History. If you've been following me for some time, you'll know I was absolutely stunned by Tartt's The Goldfinch - so much so that I was eager to read this other famous book she'd written. Surely I would get another masterpiece like The Goldfinch. Well... I didn't. So, The Secret History was a letdown only by The Goldfinch's standards, which are so incredibly high that to apply them to most contemporary novels would be unfair.
On its own, tSH was actually quite good, and I'm glad I read it. It does feel somewhat pretentious but that is the point, and the second half is better than the first. Tartt's descriptive voice here hasn't quite got The Goldfinch's insight and evocativeness but, again, that is an unfairly high standard. Authors expand their craft all the time, and if Donna Tartt wrote a good novel, and then wrote a better one, she is to be commended for outdoing herself.
I suppose my greatest complaint with The Secret History is that it was just not character-driven enough. I've heard it compared to a Greek tragedy, to Crime and Punishment, but in that grand light, it fell somewhat short. None of the characters were good people, and I understand That Is The Point, but they weren't really relatable or sympathetic, so I felt let down. Where was the insight???the ~tragedy of poisoned youth?? What quirks these young people did have felt thrown out at random, and I couldn't remember many of them.
Things do get better around the second half, but I struggled to get invested before that - because I wasn't connected to the characters. Richard, our protagonist, was the blandest of them all. He was literally freezing to death at one point, and I was just like "oh". I liked the twins well enough, but then...well... I won't spoil anything.
In short, The Secret History is a cleverly plotted and paced novel with flawless aesthetic, and I can see how it inspired an entire niche internet culture - but I found it sadly lacking in terms of character development.

The three stories in Lost Girls by Hiroshi Seko allow readers to get inside the heads of two of the most withdrawn characters in Hajime Isayama's hit series Attack on Titan: Annie and Mikasa - and it is beautifully done.
In the first novella, Mikasa, through a dream about an alternate path her relationship with Eren might've taken, comes to a shattering realization which fuels her will to fight.
The second novella follows Annie, as a Military Police officer investigating the disappearance of a missing person in the slums of Wall Sina, keeping up a deft and fascinating interior monologue the whole way.
The two girls interact in the final, titular short story, and their simple but guarded conversation sheds some more light upon who the both of them really are.
I enjoyed this book very much - even more so because I have been a fan lf AoT for years now, and have always Wanted More. Lost Girls did not disappoint. It provides the insight it promises, through engaging, gently-paced narratives with these fascinating characters at their center. The language was slightly weird? but I'm going to chalk that up to a poor translation. (the Japanese language is full of nigh-untranslatable concepts, and as such any English rendering of an originally Japanese text will always sound at least /slightly/ off.)
My favorite story was the one about Annie. Mikasa's entire novella has this bizarre, dreamlike quality which, though entirely appropriate considering the setting, threw me off quite a little. By contrast, 'Wall Sina, Goodbye' displayed a solid, casual everydayness that appealed to me much more, as it gave some insight into Annie's day-to-day life, n element quite lacking from the original source material (she's a secondary character, after all). I loved the worldbuilding - the bar dances, the drugs, the cigarettes and alcohol and decrepit buildings - the overall bleak amd dirty feel of it all. I felt a lot of sympathy for Annie as I read, because her thoughts and attitude just leaped off the page; it is so very true that language is the medium best suited to conveying interiority.
I was choked up with emotion upon turning the last page. Lost Girls is not to be missed.

DNF'ed. I just couldn't take it anymore. The first-person POV only made it more insufferable, because our protagonist is the very epitome of ignorant, stuck-up American touristiness and it is literally cringey to read the way she describes France. Jamie is unlikable, sullen, stuck-up, and cringily dramatic. Valentin was okay but the way Jamie constantly talks about him as a "cUtE fReNcH bOy" verges on fetishising ethnicity and I wasn't able to take him at all seriously because of it, it felt like the author was projecting her own fantasies onto him. We get it, Americans. You're obsessed with France. Please stop. Just STOP.
The writing wasnt good at all, either. My eyes hurt from rolling them so hard. We get STUNNING descriptions like "I freed my toes from their rubber prison cell. I let out a breath of relief as they expanded in the heat." and "when I woke up the next morning, the room hadn't changed at all." Talk about redundant,right? but even so,ohhh no, they couldn't leave it there - they had to add "the room seemed smaller today" NOT TWO PARAGRAPHS LATER, if you'll believe me.
Back to Jamie. She's dull and dramatic and stupid. At one point she wonders "basicness? Is that even a thing in Europe?" I actually felt my face twisting into the