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rhodochrosite) wrote2023-03-17 06:38 pm
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books i read in 2023 q1
usually i do a yearly books review because my ass is not reading but my ass actually is reading these days since i don’t have to do 34857394859385934853 pages of academic reading anymore. i never said it was good though. but here is a roundup of everything i’ve read this year so far, will probably contain spoilers, also i typed this out into an email draft at work so apologies for any strange autocaps:
the thousand eyes - a. k. larkwood
this is the sequel to the unspoken name (reviewed <here>), which i enjoyed, and i also enjoyed this book, but not as much. really liked the pre-timeskip part where tal and csorwe and shuthmili were in their startup entrepreneur coworkers with/without benefits era, didn’t really enjoy the rest. respect to op for realising partway through that she only wants to write fucked up adults and contriving plot points to allow her to age her young adult cast up into their 40s though. unfortunately this resulted in pacing problems that were even worse than they were in the first book, in that the story then came off as an uneven montage of several books’ worth of plot. i also wasn’t super taken by the somewhat formulaic high fantasy space opera style worldbuilding ala star wars but if everything was snakes, but i do like snakes, and I do also like it when deities have mortal hosts.
i couldn’t stand the new kid character but luckily the original cast is charming and funny enough to make up for literally everything else. naturally tal stole the show once again. it’s a little bit, nepotism hire second son with inferiority complex who hides his vulnerable heart with biting sarcasm and standoffishness? groundbreaking. but just trust me bro tal is difference and it’s because of the painful bitter self-awareness approaching the end x inability to let go of his heart or stop believing. I guess it’s “good” that tal finally truly escaped the literal snake habitat that is sethennai but I didn’t actually want him to… I hate it when powerful omniscient gaslighting mentors fall out of power and favour… anyway very excited that I got to pop my tal + shuthmili two guys who know the same third guy better except the third guy is shuthmili’s girlfriend and tal’s best frenemyrival bottles And They Were Coworkers.
it must be said that shuthmili was more interesting to me as indoctrinated military academy prodigy maiden than she is in this book when she’s developing her own sense of self and life goals after eloping with csorwe, and I think the first timeskip made it even more difficult to cross the emotional bridge to shuthmili the seemingly-devoted loyal henchman of the snake goddess that bodysnatched csorwe. i think shuthmili’s repression4repression jockmaiden romance with csorwe was cute but not really that appealing to me since it’s mostly just comfortable realtruelove with no tension. enjoyed the gift of the magi style tradeoff where shuthmili basically killed herself to bring csorwe back to life by sacrificing her existence to become the mortal avatar of her patron goddess in order to gain enough power to kill the goddess in csorwe’s body. i do kind of wish op hadn’t backtracked on this, because the part where csorwe was living with zinandour puppeteering shuthmili’s body was pretty much the most compelling part of the post-timeskip story, and I also really liked the power dynamics contract relationship between shuthmili and zinandour, bodysharing is so good you guys… i wish we could have had a me my girlfriend and the amoral primordial goddess that lives in her brain endgame. 7/10.
fave lines (multiple, because the rest of this post is going to be quite barren of quotes due to the extreme floppage of everything else i’ve been reading):
The School of Aptitude hadn’t trained Shuthmili for war, which meant that everything she knew about violence she had invented for herself.
//
“Csorwe wouldn’t want you to be executed—screw you, of course she would, she’d love it, how do you know?”
//
Will you remember me? I hope you might, if only as a speck of dust in your eye.
The goddess showed her a picture or a memory—bright sunshine through blossoms, pink and white, familiar-unfamiliar all over again. Petals falling in the courtyard of the Qanwa townhouse.
//
The future was as open and as unreadable as the black void ahead of him. When he had been very young and the whole world had hummed with possibility, this had been a good feeling.
foul lady fortune - chloe gong
this whole series is plagued by the problem of banger premises and super mid execution. like you are literally a book about a repressed superpowered assassin who swore off love after her first love manipulated her into betraying her family leading to their deaths and then left her to die too who now has to go undercover as married with a charming playboy honeypot spy with his own tortured past (and superpowers) AND their siblings are not only both on the enemy side but also in a relationship so they’re basically inlaws AND they have cool and desirable secret agent aliases. this is literally an ashbait bingo card blackout.
unfortunately I could not get into the romance at all because everyone in these books is soooooooo fucking incompetent my god!!!!!!!!!! the narration goes on and on about how they’re all like the best agents in the field and super highranker slayers but when you look at what they’re actually doing they instantly proceed to fail basic tasks like not discussing their real identities and super top secret plans just out in the open in front of everyone and their dog even though it was made very clear from the start that the stakes were skyhigh and they would get killed if their covers were blown. absolutely zero regard for opsec in this house. the sheer number of times rosalind assumed nobody would be able to understand her just bc she was speaking/writing in a different language was astonishing. basically the entire cast is useless except for phoebe and alisa.
speaking of, i was hoping phoebe/alisa would become real in the text but alisa is literally asexual aromantic [smashes phone] so no endgame yuri. oliver/celia was fine. Actually I think I liked them better than orion/rosalind, even. I like it when people believe in something as opposed to nothing.
it was absolutely insufferable how many times pinyin would be dropped into dialogue, it was really giving all according to keikaku (t/n keikaku means plan) or the way mid 2000s anime fic would put random japanese words in the middle of sentences. Sometimes the pinyin wouldn’t even be translated, which didn’t affect my comprehension but presumably would leave non-mandarin understanding readers clueless, though on the other hand maybe that’s praxis or whatever. It wouldn’t even be for words that couldn’t be translated adequately due to special nuances of meaning or whatever it would just be normal ass words like guniang or something. like… this did not need to be in pinyin. this is not good communityship but you know how some asian diaspora are just so Fucking annoying, that’s the vibe.
but even annoyingness aside it doesn’t even make sense from a storytelling perspective because having pinyin words in the dialogue would imply that the rest of the dialogue was in english not in mandarin, but they are literally chinese people in china?? the default assumption should be that anytime the dialogue is written in english, they’re really speaking in mandarin, but obviously the book isn’t written in mandarin because it’s for an english-speaking audience so it’s ‘translated’ to english in that way. The characters are generally multilingual but if they’re speaking in another language (like English or French or whatever) I’d expect that to be explicitly mentioned, and then whatever dialogue follows I’ll assume is ‘translated’ (or not translated) from that language. so why would english, as an assumed translation of mandarin, and pinyin be mixed in the same dialogue?? literally bugged me the whole way through. also op clearly wanted to provide a range of #representation but seemed to kinda struggle with doing that in a historical setting, it would be like jarringly modern passage from social justice 101 textbook copy pasted in the middle of 1920s speech patterns and narration. feeling like that needed a bit more editing attention in particular.
finally I would like to complain about the prose style which was also extremely annoying to me because it felt like op was trying very hard to write Beautiful Imagery and Deep Metaphors but didn’t really have the skill to pull it off so it ended up just being a lot of pretentious and self-satisfied waffling about nothing in particular. I am very sensitive about this because it is something that I am quite critical about in my own writing so I will be throwing those stones from my glass house thank you. I think this was most egregious in the… outsider pov..? sections focusing on the city. though sometimes it worked and I felt something for orion/rosalind! i’m extremely easy to please when it comes to tropey ya romance so this should not be a high bar. a lot of my frustration with this book must be stemming from the expectations I had based on the description on paper vs the mediocre quality of the writing and storytelling.
I’ll still tune in for the sequel I guess, mostly because I want to see phoebe seducing rosalind away from orion as part of the ongoing younger hong sibs bisexual terrorism partner stealing and because phoebe dark horse winning the battle of the jaemins is so funny. i do love GIRL ENEMY ASSASSIN RIVALS. also unrelated to anything i was so convinced this book was called foul lady fair and i was earnestly discussing it with mich on call one day and after a while she was like Are you calling it the wrong name on purpose or did you genuinely believe that’s what it’s called? and that was when i discovered i didn’t even know the name of this book. 3/10.
fave line: Orion put a finger under her chin, tipping her face up to him. “I am forgiven?”
“Well,” Rosalind said. “You hardly give me a choice with such sincerity.”
these violent delights + our violent ends – chloe gong
even more aggressively mid than foul lady fortune, which at least had the somewhat redeeming factor of having like five separate guys reminding me of jaemins I have enjoyed before, one of whom even had the epithet The Killer. these books were so nothing I don’t really have anything to say except that the final boss villains in both books were obvious and extremely unthreatening, and also the parasite zombie ant body horror stuff was so disgusting to me in a landmines way. which is a personal problem, sure, but the descriptions made them sound really stupid looking and not scary at all. Was not impressed. It actually pisses me off that dimitri was the final final boss villain after being mostly a nonentity the entire way through and then doing basically nothing, having his plan foiled with no real believable tension, and then dying. like this is offensive to me as a villain enjoyer, can we get some compelling and slayful evil guys in here.
it’s really sad to me that I felt nothing about roma/juliette because iiii fucking love nominal enemies to lovers to real actual enemies due to real or perceived betrayal to reluctant coworkers who are exes inexorably still drawn to each other to worse enemies due to further perceived betrayals that were actually lies to protect the other to lovers again. HOW DO YOU FUMBLE A BAG LIKE THAT. orion/rosalind started hitting for me more towards the second half of flf but roma/juliette just never did anything for me… I simply didn’t buy the starcrossed double betrayal anguish. I suspect part of the problem is that the majority of their bitter history occurs precanon and they both came off weirdly disconnected from it even though it's supposed to be such a visceral and immediate emotional presence, which must be a skill issue thing. It is definitely possible to write compelling exes with loaded but initially unclear history!!!
I was so bored I ended up vaguely tinhetting marshall/celia who genuinely had the most compelling dynamic out of everyone off their two paragraphs of interaction, which entailed a chance meeting while both undercover for their respective enemy sides and celia noting how strange it was that marshall seemed to communicate via flirting with no real intent behind it, which made me be like Hey just like . also i guess marshall/benedikt was ok. the other part that was good (relatively speaking) was the 2 sentences of lang siscon towards the end of the second book. it had basically zero buildup or presence but I’m not going to say no. also the apparently reasonably fraught nature of celia and rosalind’s relationship in these books esp since celia is juliette’s loyal henchman while rosalind is more resentful of juliette due to personality clash makes their almost total lack of complex or tension in flf rather puzzling like they seem to be on good tems despite nominally being on enemy sides and they regularly write to each other and are just like… normal. which is so boring!!! especially when orion and oliver get to be sofuckingcomplicated. justice for fucked up sisters ):
anyway these books were better as backstory references in flf than as stories in their own right, I think that maybe I am just not one of god’s historical / fantasy-historical enjoyers. 2/10.
fave line: Where else could Rosalind even go? What else could Kathleen do except walk the city and hope that some invisible string was pulling her to her sister?
love on the brain + the love hypothesis – ali hazelwood
idk i was curious about the reylo books so I read them on a whim and they were pretty bad as I expected but they were like soothingly brainsmoothening which is basically what I want out of the books I read (I am not interested in having thoughts or rotations when I read books, I wish to be head empty) until i was jumpscared by the smut which was extremely bad. Like some of the worst porn I’ve read in my life and let me assure you I have toiled in the deepest pits of the a/b/o mines out of sag moon monkey brain desperation for 1s and 0s. also not sure how to describe the general tone and humour style other than like… millennial. I don’t even necessarily mean this derogatorily it’s kinda fascinating to me actually because I don’t typically read adult modern romance novels and probably will not do so again, unless I get bored and desire brainsmoothening again.
in combination with the chloe gong books and this one little mermaid ya adaptation I read a few years ago I have to say that I am seriously unimpressed and disappointed with the literary offerings presently available for het enemies to lovers (I know it can be done well!!! night world executed it perfectly several different ways!!! but there’s only so many times I can reread the same few books!!!) and also that I am verging on becoming heterophobic, which is heartbreaking to me as a fervent het rights activist. like what happened to all our beautiful het lovehate stories?????? sometimes I don’t want to watch anime to get my fix. if anyone knows any books with a good het enemies to lovers storyline in which they have legitimate ideological clashes and try to kill each other and are not just operating under a simple misunderstanding please let me know ): 1/10 because I was nonetheless mildly entertained/sedated which is what i was aiming for.
fave line: n/a
chain of thorns – cassandra clare
I literally forgot I even read this while I was compiling this post and got shocked to see it in my google play library as I was scrolling back to look at my highlights in other books, which gives a pretty good indication of my feelings about this book. Actually it doesn’t because I was actively mad about the relentless grace mistreatment and erasure and misery and punishment from every single character except one who then promptly died and even the narrative itself generally, so mad in fact that I wiped the events from my memory and I don’t wish to go into it now because I’m getting pressed again just thinking about it. 0/10.
fave line: n/a Every tongue that rises against grace blackthorn shall fall!!!!!!!
keys to the kingdom series – garth nix
felt like rereading one of my childhood fave series so I did and it was good and I enjoyed it :) I love garth nix’s storytelling, he always has the coolest worldbuilding ideas like lmaoooooo not WILLS AND ESTATES LAW being the inspiration for the magic system. I don’t think I knew what a will or a trustee was at the time that I first read these books but now it’s literally my job lol. i love an elaborate magic system with lots of finicky parts and cool themed weapons/instruments to direct the magic and I also love BUREAUCRACY and JURISDICTIONAL TENSIONS and AMBIGUOUS BRITISHNESS which these books are full of so I am very happy. separately i love that the taller and more beautiful you are the more evil you are.
this was probably baby’s first isekai now that I think about it except it went from standard reluctant hero chosen one shounen power fantasy to increasingly terrorful self-sacrifice ship of theseus narrative where the more magic arthur uses the more he loses his Human Mortality and irreversibly turns into a house denizen, which is firstly fucked up in the frog in boiling pot style personality erosion into the hair-trigger temper god complex exhibited by house denizens, which he’s horrified by every time he catches himself, but also deeply sad because the only way Arthur can save the human world and his loved ones is by using magic, but the more magic he uses the further away he moves from his loved ones, not just in temperament but also because house denizens are toxic to mortals and he will literally kill his family if he has prolonged contact with them. So every time he uses magic he has to make the deliberate and painful choice to do so, knowing the gradual corrosive transformation it is enacting upon him and knowing that he has no other option. and then Arthur realises too late he has become the unwitting vessel of god’s decision to annihilate the universe altogether, thus rendering all his efforts and sacrifices up to this point totally futile ): literally the way this series is narutaru for kids… my god. at least he’s able to remake part of the previous universe.
the main problem with these books is that introducing a new villain and their associated henchmen and domains every book unfortunately doesn’t leave a lot of room to develop the secondary cast, so a lot of the character and worldbuilding lore is only vaguely hinted at and the payoff isn’t really satisfying when arthur battles the villain of the book, but also I’m pretty sure the target audience is middleschoolers so I won’t be too critical lol. Wednesday and Thursday are probably my favourites out of the books bc Wednesday is soooooo fucking sad and sort of a turning point where Arthur accepts his fate/responsibility but also realises concretely that even with his new superpowers he can’t save everyone, as the culmination of an unease that started from when he promised to de-frankenstein Tuesday’s henchmen and restore them to their original selves but they were killed before he could fulfil his promise. MY POOR WEDNESDAYYYY she really genuinely tried to be faithful to her duty and she was rewarded for it with betrayal and then death. I like Thursday because it’s about Arthur going to military academy and getting his memory wiped and it taught me the word ‘epaulette’ when I was a kid and probably in hindsight instilled my obsession with military regalia aesthetics. I’m also pretty sure that these books subconsciously implanted a love for henchmen in me that would not be fully realised until I watched tenipuri in 2020. anyway 9/10 these books still slap.
fave line: ‘Repair their memories and give back all their happinesses—’ He paused for the briefest instant, wondering whether that was all they needed, but in that same moment knew that it was not. He would not himself be content to have only his happy memories. ‘—and all their sorrows. Thank you.’
omniscient reader’s viewpoint – sing-shong
finally after 500 people on my tl all started reading orv independently of each other I have also decided to start orv as my light bedtime reading. I’m not that far in since it’s a massive undertaking but if I’d known it was a postapoc death games story I would have started it sooner!! I put it off for like a year because I was worried that it would be good and I would have to invest time and energy into it and I don’t really have it in me to main anything new that I don’t already like. so far I’m feeling Just Like 7 Seeds Summer A Arc… alice in borderland made me remember I love death games soooo much, they are the perfect combination of crime procedural x survival show x military academy to me. my fave rn is jung heewon though I have recently met the fabled and long-awaited han sooyoung who was my preselected onepick and she slays and I’m so excited to get to know her better. and I really love the constellation Live Fujo Reactions mechanic in particular. more thoughts to come in the future no doubt.
the thousand eyes - a. k. larkwood
this is the sequel to the unspoken name (reviewed <here>), which i enjoyed, and i also enjoyed this book, but not as much. really liked the pre-timeskip part where tal and csorwe and shuthmili were in their startup entrepreneur coworkers with/without benefits era, didn’t really enjoy the rest. respect to op for realising partway through that she only wants to write fucked up adults and contriving plot points to allow her to age her young adult cast up into their 40s though. unfortunately this resulted in pacing problems that were even worse than they were in the first book, in that the story then came off as an uneven montage of several books’ worth of plot. i also wasn’t super taken by the somewhat formulaic high fantasy space opera style worldbuilding ala star wars but if everything was snakes, but i do like snakes, and I do also like it when deities have mortal hosts.
i couldn’t stand the new kid character but luckily the original cast is charming and funny enough to make up for literally everything else. naturally tal stole the show once again. it’s a little bit, nepotism hire second son with inferiority complex who hides his vulnerable heart with biting sarcasm and standoffishness? groundbreaking. but just trust me bro tal is difference and it’s because of the painful bitter self-awareness approaching the end x inability to let go of his heart or stop believing. I guess it’s “good” that tal finally truly escaped the literal snake habitat that is sethennai but I didn’t actually want him to… I hate it when powerful omniscient gaslighting mentors fall out of power and favour… anyway very excited that I got to pop my tal + shuthmili two guys who know the same third guy better except the third guy is shuthmili’s girlfriend and tal’s best frenemyrival bottles And They Were Coworkers.
it must be said that shuthmili was more interesting to me as indoctrinated military academy prodigy maiden than she is in this book when she’s developing her own sense of self and life goals after eloping with csorwe, and I think the first timeskip made it even more difficult to cross the emotional bridge to shuthmili the seemingly-devoted loyal henchman of the snake goddess that bodysnatched csorwe. i think shuthmili’s repression4repression jockmaiden romance with csorwe was cute but not really that appealing to me since it’s mostly just comfortable realtruelove with no tension. enjoyed the gift of the magi style tradeoff where shuthmili basically killed herself to bring csorwe back to life by sacrificing her existence to become the mortal avatar of her patron goddess in order to gain enough power to kill the goddess in csorwe’s body. i do kind of wish op hadn’t backtracked on this, because the part where csorwe was living with zinandour puppeteering shuthmili’s body was pretty much the most compelling part of the post-timeskip story, and I also really liked the power dynamics contract relationship between shuthmili and zinandour, bodysharing is so good you guys… i wish we could have had a me my girlfriend and the amoral primordial goddess that lives in her brain endgame. 7/10.
fave lines (multiple, because the rest of this post is going to be quite barren of quotes due to the extreme floppage of everything else i’ve been reading):
The School of Aptitude hadn’t trained Shuthmili for war, which meant that everything she knew about violence she had invented for herself.
//
“Csorwe wouldn’t want you to be executed—screw you, of course she would, she’d love it, how do you know?”
//
Will you remember me? I hope you might, if only as a speck of dust in your eye.
The goddess showed her a picture or a memory—bright sunshine through blossoms, pink and white, familiar-unfamiliar all over again. Petals falling in the courtyard of the Qanwa townhouse.
//
The future was as open and as unreadable as the black void ahead of him. When he had been very young and the whole world had hummed with possibility, this had been a good feeling.
foul lady fortune - chloe gong
this whole series is plagued by the problem of banger premises and super mid execution. like you are literally a book about a repressed superpowered assassin who swore off love after her first love manipulated her into betraying her family leading to their deaths and then left her to die too who now has to go undercover as married with a charming playboy honeypot spy with his own tortured past (and superpowers) AND their siblings are not only both on the enemy side but also in a relationship so they’re basically inlaws AND they have cool and desirable secret agent aliases. this is literally an ashbait bingo card blackout.
unfortunately I could not get into the romance at all because everyone in these books is soooooooo fucking incompetent my god!!!!!!!!!! the narration goes on and on about how they’re all like the best agents in the field and super highranker slayers but when you look at what they’re actually doing they instantly proceed to fail basic tasks like not discussing their real identities and super top secret plans just out in the open in front of everyone and their dog even though it was made very clear from the start that the stakes were skyhigh and they would get killed if their covers were blown. absolutely zero regard for opsec in this house. the sheer number of times rosalind assumed nobody would be able to understand her just bc she was speaking/writing in a different language was astonishing. basically the entire cast is useless except for phoebe and alisa.
speaking of, i was hoping phoebe/alisa would become real in the text but alisa is literally asexual aromantic [smashes phone] so no endgame yuri. oliver/celia was fine. Actually I think I liked them better than orion/rosalind, even. I like it when people believe in something as opposed to nothing.
it was absolutely insufferable how many times pinyin would be dropped into dialogue, it was really giving all according to keikaku (t/n keikaku means plan) or the way mid 2000s anime fic would put random japanese words in the middle of sentences. Sometimes the pinyin wouldn’t even be translated, which didn’t affect my comprehension but presumably would leave non-mandarin understanding readers clueless, though on the other hand maybe that’s praxis or whatever. It wouldn’t even be for words that couldn’t be translated adequately due to special nuances of meaning or whatever it would just be normal ass words like guniang or something. like… this did not need to be in pinyin. this is not good communityship but you know how some asian diaspora are just so Fucking annoying, that’s the vibe.
but even annoyingness aside it doesn’t even make sense from a storytelling perspective because having pinyin words in the dialogue would imply that the rest of the dialogue was in english not in mandarin, but they are literally chinese people in china?? the default assumption should be that anytime the dialogue is written in english, they’re really speaking in mandarin, but obviously the book isn’t written in mandarin because it’s for an english-speaking audience so it’s ‘translated’ to english in that way. The characters are generally multilingual but if they’re speaking in another language (like English or French or whatever) I’d expect that to be explicitly mentioned, and then whatever dialogue follows I’ll assume is ‘translated’ (or not translated) from that language. so why would english, as an assumed translation of mandarin, and pinyin be mixed in the same dialogue?? literally bugged me the whole way through. also op clearly wanted to provide a range of #representation but seemed to kinda struggle with doing that in a historical setting, it would be like jarringly modern passage from social justice 101 textbook copy pasted in the middle of 1920s speech patterns and narration. feeling like that needed a bit more editing attention in particular.
finally I would like to complain about the prose style which was also extremely annoying to me because it felt like op was trying very hard to write Beautiful Imagery and Deep Metaphors but didn’t really have the skill to pull it off so it ended up just being a lot of pretentious and self-satisfied waffling about nothing in particular. I am very sensitive about this because it is something that I am quite critical about in my own writing so I will be throwing those stones from my glass house thank you. I think this was most egregious in the… outsider pov..? sections focusing on the city. though sometimes it worked and I felt something for orion/rosalind! i’m extremely easy to please when it comes to tropey ya romance so this should not be a high bar. a lot of my frustration with this book must be stemming from the expectations I had based on the description on paper vs the mediocre quality of the writing and storytelling.
I’ll still tune in for the sequel I guess, mostly because I want to see phoebe seducing rosalind away from orion as part of the ongoing younger hong sibs bisexual terrorism partner stealing and because phoebe dark horse winning the battle of the jaemins is so funny. i do love GIRL ENEMY ASSASSIN RIVALS. also unrelated to anything i was so convinced this book was called foul lady fair and i was earnestly discussing it with mich on call one day and after a while she was like Are you calling it the wrong name on purpose or did you genuinely believe that’s what it’s called? and that was when i discovered i didn’t even know the name of this book. 3/10.
fave line: Orion put a finger under her chin, tipping her face up to him. “I am forgiven?”
“Well,” Rosalind said. “You hardly give me a choice with such sincerity.”
- yes i picked this quote because it reminded me of
these violent delights + our violent ends – chloe gong
even more aggressively mid than foul lady fortune, which at least had the somewhat redeeming factor of having like five separate guys reminding me of jaemins I have enjoyed before, one of whom even had the epithet The Killer. these books were so nothing I don’t really have anything to say except that the final boss villains in both books were obvious and extremely unthreatening, and also the parasite zombie ant body horror stuff was so disgusting to me in a landmines way. which is a personal problem, sure, but the descriptions made them sound really stupid looking and not scary at all. Was not impressed. It actually pisses me off that dimitri was the final final boss villain after being mostly a nonentity the entire way through and then doing basically nothing, having his plan foiled with no real believable tension, and then dying. like this is offensive to me as a villain enjoyer, can we get some compelling and slayful evil guys in here.
it’s really sad to me that I felt nothing about roma/juliette because iiii fucking love nominal enemies to lovers to real actual enemies due to real or perceived betrayal to reluctant coworkers who are exes inexorably still drawn to each other to worse enemies due to further perceived betrayals that were actually lies to protect the other to lovers again. HOW DO YOU FUMBLE A BAG LIKE THAT. orion/rosalind started hitting for me more towards the second half of flf but roma/juliette just never did anything for me… I simply didn’t buy the starcrossed double betrayal anguish. I suspect part of the problem is that the majority of their bitter history occurs precanon and they both came off weirdly disconnected from it even though it's supposed to be such a visceral and immediate emotional presence, which must be a skill issue thing. It is definitely possible to write compelling exes with loaded but initially unclear history!!!
I was so bored I ended up vaguely tinhetting marshall/celia who genuinely had the most compelling dynamic out of everyone off their two paragraphs of interaction, which entailed a chance meeting while both undercover for their respective enemy sides and celia noting how strange it was that marshall seemed to communicate via flirting with no real intent behind it, which made me be like Hey just like . also i guess marshall/benedikt was ok. the other part that was good (relatively speaking) was the 2 sentences of lang siscon towards the end of the second book. it had basically zero buildup or presence but I’m not going to say no. also the apparently reasonably fraught nature of celia and rosalind’s relationship in these books esp since celia is juliette’s loyal henchman while rosalind is more resentful of juliette due to personality clash makes their almost total lack of complex or tension in flf rather puzzling like they seem to be on good tems despite nominally being on enemy sides and they regularly write to each other and are just like… normal. which is so boring!!! especially when orion and oliver get to be sofuckingcomplicated. justice for fucked up sisters ):
anyway these books were better as backstory references in flf than as stories in their own right, I think that maybe I am just not one of god’s historical / fantasy-historical enjoyers. 2/10.
fave line: Where else could Rosalind even go? What else could Kathleen do except walk the city and hope that some invisible string was pulling her to her sister?
love on the brain + the love hypothesis – ali hazelwood
idk i was curious about the reylo books so I read them on a whim and they were pretty bad as I expected but they were like soothingly brainsmoothening which is basically what I want out of the books I read (I am not interested in having thoughts or rotations when I read books, I wish to be head empty) until i was jumpscared by the smut which was extremely bad. Like some of the worst porn I’ve read in my life and let me assure you I have toiled in the deepest pits of the a/b/o mines out of sag moon monkey brain desperation for 1s and 0s. also not sure how to describe the general tone and humour style other than like… millennial. I don’t even necessarily mean this derogatorily it’s kinda fascinating to me actually because I don’t typically read adult modern romance novels and probably will not do so again, unless I get bored and desire brainsmoothening again.
in combination with the chloe gong books and this one little mermaid ya adaptation I read a few years ago I have to say that I am seriously unimpressed and disappointed with the literary offerings presently available for het enemies to lovers (I know it can be done well!!! night world executed it perfectly several different ways!!! but there’s only so many times I can reread the same few books!!!) and also that I am verging on becoming heterophobic, which is heartbreaking to me as a fervent het rights activist. like what happened to all our beautiful het lovehate stories?????? sometimes I don’t want to watch anime to get my fix. if anyone knows any books with a good het enemies to lovers storyline in which they have legitimate ideological clashes and try to kill each other and are not just operating under a simple misunderstanding please let me know ): 1/10 because I was nonetheless mildly entertained/sedated which is what i was aiming for.
fave line: n/a
chain of thorns – cassandra clare
I literally forgot I even read this while I was compiling this post and got shocked to see it in my google play library as I was scrolling back to look at my highlights in other books, which gives a pretty good indication of my feelings about this book. Actually it doesn’t because I was actively mad about the relentless grace mistreatment and erasure and misery and punishment from every single character except one who then promptly died and even the narrative itself generally, so mad in fact that I wiped the events from my memory and I don’t wish to go into it now because I’m getting pressed again just thinking about it. 0/10.
fave line: n/a Every tongue that rises against grace blackthorn shall fall!!!!!!!
keys to the kingdom series – garth nix
felt like rereading one of my childhood fave series so I did and it was good and I enjoyed it :) I love garth nix’s storytelling, he always has the coolest worldbuilding ideas like lmaoooooo not WILLS AND ESTATES LAW being the inspiration for the magic system. I don’t think I knew what a will or a trustee was at the time that I first read these books but now it’s literally my job lol. i love an elaborate magic system with lots of finicky parts and cool themed weapons/instruments to direct the magic and I also love BUREAUCRACY and JURISDICTIONAL TENSIONS and AMBIGUOUS BRITISHNESS which these books are full of so I am very happy. separately i love that the taller and more beautiful you are the more evil you are.
this was probably baby’s first isekai now that I think about it except it went from standard reluctant hero chosen one shounen power fantasy to increasingly terrorful self-sacrifice ship of theseus narrative where the more magic arthur uses the more he loses his Human Mortality and irreversibly turns into a house denizen, which is firstly fucked up in the frog in boiling pot style personality erosion into the hair-trigger temper god complex exhibited by house denizens, which he’s horrified by every time he catches himself, but also deeply sad because the only way Arthur can save the human world and his loved ones is by using magic, but the more magic he uses the further away he moves from his loved ones, not just in temperament but also because house denizens are toxic to mortals and he will literally kill his family if he has prolonged contact with them. So every time he uses magic he has to make the deliberate and painful choice to do so, knowing the gradual corrosive transformation it is enacting upon him and knowing that he has no other option. and then Arthur realises too late he has become the unwitting vessel of god’s decision to annihilate the universe altogether, thus rendering all his efforts and sacrifices up to this point totally futile ): literally the way this series is narutaru for kids… my god. at least he’s able to remake part of the previous universe.
the main problem with these books is that introducing a new villain and their associated henchmen and domains every book unfortunately doesn’t leave a lot of room to develop the secondary cast, so a lot of the character and worldbuilding lore is only vaguely hinted at and the payoff isn’t really satisfying when arthur battles the villain of the book, but also I’m pretty sure the target audience is middleschoolers so I won’t be too critical lol. Wednesday and Thursday are probably my favourites out of the books bc Wednesday is soooooo fucking sad and sort of a turning point where Arthur accepts his fate/responsibility but also realises concretely that even with his new superpowers he can’t save everyone, as the culmination of an unease that started from when he promised to de-frankenstein Tuesday’s henchmen and restore them to their original selves but they were killed before he could fulfil his promise. MY POOR WEDNESDAYYYY she really genuinely tried to be faithful to her duty and she was rewarded for it with betrayal and then death. I like Thursday because it’s about Arthur going to military academy and getting his memory wiped and it taught me the word ‘epaulette’ when I was a kid and probably in hindsight instilled my obsession with military regalia aesthetics. I’m also pretty sure that these books subconsciously implanted a love for henchmen in me that would not be fully realised until I watched tenipuri in 2020. anyway 9/10 these books still slap.
fave line: ‘Repair their memories and give back all their happinesses—’ He paused for the briefest instant, wondering whether that was all they needed, but in that same moment knew that it was not. He would not himself be content to have only his happy memories. ‘—and all their sorrows. Thank you.’
- lines that stuck with me for 15 years *salute emoji*
omniscient reader’s viewpoint – sing-shong
finally after 500 people on my tl all started reading orv independently of each other I have also decided to start orv as my light bedtime reading. I’m not that far in since it’s a massive undertaking but if I’d known it was a postapoc death games story I would have started it sooner!! I put it off for like a year because I was worried that it would be good and I would have to invest time and energy into it and I don’t really have it in me to main anything new that I don’t already like. so far I’m feeling Just Like 7 Seeds Summer A Arc… alice in borderland made me remember I love death games soooo much, they are the perfect combination of crime procedural x survival show x military academy to me. my fave rn is jung heewon though I have recently met the fabled and long-awaited han sooyoung who was my preselected onepick and she slays and I’m so excited to get to know her better. and I really love the constellation Live Fujo Reactions mechanic in particular. more thoughts to come in the future no doubt.
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