18soft_green's reviews
660 reviews

I love this book so much! The format is really good for connecting the reader to each different philosopher and Penaluna gives us so much context and the discussions of the views of the women after was also helpful. It's so wonderful to be reminded that even when their lives are erased, women throughout time mattered and influenced the world. 

The acknowledgement of queer women and women of color and Penalune's privilege made me feel safe enough to interact with the book and Penaluna's own perspective. And her own experience with patriarchy and how sneaky it is was so validating. 

I highly recommend this book to everyone. It's so encouraging and refreshing.

Absolute shit. Too many tropes, no heart, characters are insufferable. But that was the trend at the time. 

The magic was an interesting concept and would have been really interesting if Taylor was more invested in world building rather than, the situationship and how perfectly special her MCs were.

I would not recommend this to anyone except as a hate read.

More horny straight shit than plot. The characters have so much potential but then their more horny than character

Pretentious, confusing. I think I’d like it more if I read a hard copy instead of listening so I may try that. It’s beautiful in moments and creatively inspiring. But also annoying in that it changes narratives so often and quickly. But maybe it was building up to something and I just didn’t get there. Also where are the trans characters? 

But mostly I just dislike how obsessed John’s present narrative is with its own grief. It’s not unique or deep and I’ve always hated these types of narratives/characters because to me they feel so privileged and selfish. To be fair though, I think my hatred is at least partially resentment that I didn’t and don’t have the means to be such a fucking self centered deadbeat. Not to say that grief is a privilege, it will find you sometime and ruin your life no matter how good at self sabotaging you are. And mental illness doesn’t give a fuck whether you have the means to deal with it I not but that’s why you fucking cope, find help, and deal with your problems instead of living in them. And I’m not being ableist or cruel, I have several disabilities and a hella lot of queer trauma and I’ve lost everything several times and have been hospitalized, self harm scars, etc… I write poetry about my issues and write stories for fun and to organize my trauma and all that shit… It’s partially just that John’s depression isn’t interesting to read about because it’s not story, it’s static. But I hate it because it loses connection with reality in it’s selfish nostalgia of what was. It dwells on the tragedy of the world instead of doing something. It focuses on peoples hurts instead of who they are. It’s belittling. But again, maybe this changes somewhere farther in the book than I got. I just could tolerate the prose of gentle depression anymore.

Also the style the David and Jonathon story was told in was inconsistent and too vague for my taste.

Maybe I’ll change my mind if I finish the book someday but as of now I would not recommend it to anyone. Even if I think they’d like it, I want fewer books like this.

I finished this book a couple months ago and didn’t write a review because this book is so much. . . I had to process what I had just read. 

I should start off clarifying that I read this and the first book knowing I wouldn’t like them. Once I got into the first book I had a really hard time reading it because it very much isn’t the type of read I enjoy. I don’t think that anyone that does enjoy these books is stupid or bad for enjoying it. Humans have always enjoyed weird, uncomfortable, ugly, bad things because for them they aren’t weird, uncomfortable, ugly, or bad. And when I say bad I don’t mean morally bad, I mean not done well. It’s bad the same way that popcorn, soggy from too much butter, is bad. Someone will definitely like it, and to people that love butter a lot, or didn’t know you could put butter on popcorn it’s transformative.

I also want to say that I love romance and fantasy, but I haven’t found many romance books that I love. I don’t know what it is (that’s a lie, I can point to all the things I dislike) but when the plot or main focus is on the romance, especially when it’s hetero romance, I get the ick. I find it cringey, stupid, cliche, lazy, and unrelatable. I should note that I am on the aro+ace spectrum so many of the things (like getting turned on because someone is attractive and talking to you) that are relatable to allo people are just awkward and cringey to me. BUT! BUT I don’t think that means the slop being served up as sexy and romantic is actually good and just not to my taste. I think that when you are a good storyteller your readers, from all sexualities will enjoy your stories because the whole point in writing stories is to captivate the audience. I say this because there are romances that I have enjoyed and seen others find books outside their preferred genre that they greatly enjoyed. Every once in a while there is a book from a genre you generally dislike but you find wildly good, like so good that you’re obsessed with it. Sure, many people just aren’t going to like certain things. But there’s a difference between reading a book that just isn’t your genre and reading a book that’s just the stalest slice of white bread served on a gold platter. (The gold platter in this analogy is the story concept) I have read many books that were good - good descriptions, complex characters, consistent world building, smooth pacing, solid ending - that I just didn’t like. This book is not one of them. Again, people that enjoy this series are not stupid, ignorant, or purely horny fake readers. I have read and enjoyed some truly diabolical fanfics because they relax me. We all deserve our heaps of garbage as long as it doesn’t poison our neighbors and helps us get through the day (week, month, year etc).

Some people don’t know this but SJM is a really bad writer, on a grammatical, sentence structural, and prose level. If she wrote a college essay her professor would ask her to stay behind after the lecture so they can schedule a meeting. If she were in a writing class and it was time to review her paper, the first minutes of the class discussion would be silent as her classmates were trying to find ways to tell her that rewording the same sentiment ten times does not a emotional scene make. Or a romantic one. Using prose to write an emotional scene is like, top tier writing choice and in prose repetition is a powerful element. Like if our mc is falling from a great height and the author says, “they fall down down down.” It’s good pacing because falling from a great height takes time and “down down down” takes us with the character physically as the character falls and emotionally as they prepare for the pain of landing. But describing how scared the character is for two pages does the opposite. It should not take two pages of shuddering breaths and whipping hair etc etc etc for the character to land or be caught. SJM pauses her story so she can show us how many words she can dress up prettily and incorrectly. Prose often breaks sentence structure rules because prose uses rhythm to communicate feeling. SJM is bad at building up the emotion to transfer a reader from the story’s reality to the character’s emotional response. So the huge emotional claims and discoveries that the characters go through do not fucking matter. Feyra’s feelings do not change her situation and they definitely don’t make sense because SJM did not give Feyra a solid enough personality or backstory to support her feelings. So often I’d come to a part of the story where Feyra used her emotional logic to understand the physical setting or other people’s situations. It was confusing because I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to be understand this moment as a major fuck up on Feyra’s part or a character growth moment. Because SJM doesn’t show the difference between emotional intelligence, trauma responses, or the surrounding world. 

Feyra is as stupid as ever. Writing her inner thought life does not make her philosophical or emotionally intelligent and telling the reader how fucking great Rhysand is does not make him great and him not physically forcing her to do what he wants does not make him an ally to women. It makes him barely standard. Most men can’t force a woman to talk to them even when they are sexy af because women have separate bodies that they can use to walk away, fight back, and communicate with. Men are often stupid and abusive enough that women often extract themselves subtly but they are still separate beings that can and often do make their own choices whether men like it or not. Rhysand acknowledging that it would be incredibly inappropriate to force Feyra to join his war is like. .  . yay he’s not going to kidnap her. .  . yay he’s not abusive. Even if he did try to force her, Feyre could still fight back so it’s not like his decision on whether to force her or not would actually change her decision. (Except it would because SJM would write it so Feyre wouldn’t have enough Will to be anything other than grumpily malleable to whichever sexy man she’s supposed to be weak for). Like a guy not abusing women doesn’t make him great and him agreeing that women should not be abused even when it makes his life inconvenient is not exciting. And him being a good guy outside of that still does not entitle him to a woman’s attention. He should not touch her suggestively without her explicit consent even when he means her no harm because her body is not his. Lower back touching is fucking gross when the toucher doesn’t have permission to touch the touchee. Face touching is borderline inappropriate. Even when the toucher is attractive.

Rhysand and Feyra’s mating relationship was incredibly heteronormative and adding brutality and women’s objection to the mix did not make it better.

The fight scene was awesome.

I need to address Feyra’s mental health journey because it was vomit worthy. First off, I am right because not only do I have trauma but I have some of the worst and because of it I have mental illnesses that I’ve been dealing with for more than a decade. That said, every one responds differently to trauma and recovery looks different for everyone. There are still some very common symptoms and coping mechanisms that survivors tend to have. Feyra’s trauma responses weren’t wrong but her recovery was and her inner monologue. A handsome kind guy treating you right does not erase bone deep trauma. They can make it easier to recover but they can not make it disappear. I would have liked to see Feyra’s recovery take much longer and have scenes with the panic, dissociation, and apathy that often follows an episode or trigger. And then the following anger. But the trauma  and recovery was not important to the story for SJM so she couldn’t be realistic with it. Instead of lying about representation it would have been better for SJM to just not have that plot point at all. Romance and trauma recovery do not mix when the story is more about falling in love with sexy men than it is about trauma.

Feyra should have been made smarter. Her relationship with Rhysand would be like 5x more interesting and angsty if she wasn’t such a fucking preteen. Feyra is meant to be a strong woman. Instead she’s so stupid and horny and emotional that she can’t think without her love interest guiding her thought by thought. So she most definitely can’t make good decisions about sex or men. 

The last 3-4 chapters were the stupidest shit I read in the entirety of the two books. I feel like I lost a part of my soul with the high lady reveal and Feyra’s last chapter because it was so fucking white feminist and toxic masculinity fetishistic. It was basically like reading, “I love that my man is on the raw meat diet because that means that he is the most alpha and could throw me across the room but he doesn’t because he loves me so much. We love each other so much we can read each others minds and he said that to him, I'm even more important than his guy friends because I’m just that smart and tough.” It feels like it was written by a 13 year old. Toxic pairings can be really interesting because they actually have relatable mental issues. This is not that though. 

Hideously straight

I just didn’t like the way the story is written and couldn’t get behind some of the romantic plots. The character arcs were too predictable and like the author was short cutting the characters’ potential by putting them in romantic and/or sexual relationships instead of giving them a whole personality and story. Which is not to say that the characters can’t have both a whole personhood and a romantic subplot but I feel that in this story the romantic subplot was supposed to be the backbones of their self realization which, to me, is boring and uncreative and cheapens the whole of it.

What also bothers me is that the story has the discretion of a semi truck. Instead of showing that Jun is a tyrant or that the group is a found family or that Michael is charismatic it’s said. The reason that telling instead of showing is bad is because it’s much less believable and interesting even if there is some written evidence that the claims are true.

Overall I feel like the story can be interesting to those that pay less attention to detail or aren’t bothered by the things I am. I think it will be a favorite of many readers but I’m just not one of them.

I have to be honest. I set out knowing I’d hate this book. This shit just isn’t for me. But with how popular it is and how much I talked about it in passing, I had to actually know if what I wanted to say was true or not. As it turned out, I actually hate this book more than I thought I would. And maybe hate isn’t even the right word. I hated reading it, I don’t hate that it exists. It’s like eating something you’re mildly allergic to and don’t even enjoy. Just eating it to be polite.

Because I am a hater, I gotta say what I think of ACOTAR in detail.

It’s badly written. In more ways than I thought it could be. Sara J Mass uses way too many words. There are full paragraphs when she could much more concisely use one sentence to communicate the feeling or revelation. For example, Feyra’s inner monologue might go on and on about how Tamlin is a moody bitch that she does not understand when it’d better to just say that. But even that would be unnecessary because SJM already wrote several scenes showing us that Tamlin is a moody bitch. It would have made more sense to just show Feyra being captivated by Tamlin’s moody bitchiness. Most stories do this because it’s entertaining, informative, and efficient.

This leads right into my next point: SJM writes as if her readers are forgetful imbeciles. She writes down points she already made earlier like they’re revelations never mentioned in the story before. They are not observations that Feyra has in context or Feyre connecting dots because Feyre already did that except doing it two times is not enough, it has to be shocking the third time around too. They are literal thoughts that Feyra had cognitively, repeated after observing or hearing, being stated again as if they are news.

One of my biggest gripes with this book is that SJM does not foreshadow, she straight up lies to the readers or doesn’t give substantial evidence so she pull off her “plot twists”. The heart of stone, the blight, Nesta, it’s all bullshit. Of course the plot twist is twisty when there was no reason for the reader to think anything else. SJM, seemingly, did not plan out the story sufficiently by any means if she relies on such obvious and cumbersome methods.

The characters are just names being thrown around and at best vague concepts. It’s difficult for me to believe that Mass ever truly liked the story with how flimsy everything about it is. Out of all the characters I liked the villain and Lucian best. Amarantha because she was funny sometimes and Lucian because he’s the most consistent and least annoying. The way Feyra responds to traumatic shit and the way she remembers traumatic shit is so bizarre. She acts as if she’s bitter but then a moment later narrates that she’s used to being treated badly so it doesn’t affect her. She’s inconsistent. With every single new event she is “moved to her very core”. Even when she’s depressed she’s longwinded and dramatic. Every chance SJM has to make Feyra relatable she squanders by making her obtuse and pathetic. Not pathetic as in defeated and lost but pathetic as in the worst. It’s like her character is played by a bad actress despite this being a book. I can feel her performing what she thinks should be the right emotion despite having never actually seen a real person feel anything ever. On top of that, Feyra is stupid. It’s not her fault, Mass just wrote the story so badly that it was impossible not to make the pov character look and sound stupid. At no point in the story were she and Tamlin interesting together. All their interactions felt as if they had the impression that the other had at one point been in the same room they were currently in and was responding to what they thought the other might say. Their hot moments felt like the come socks forgotten under a teen’s bed or lukewarm oatmeal. Rhysand makes no sense. He’s creepy. The way he’s presented makes him feel like the result of a lesbian middle schooler trying to imagine what a hot guy would be like for an English paper.

Why does SJM write the story as if fairies SHOULD hold human morals? It’s not like it’s written as if fairies are different creatures with different cultures and belief but rather, as I’d they consistently choose to be cruel despite knowing that they shouldn’t but SJM simultaneously wrote that fairies DO have different customs and traditions but the reasoning feels like it’s more because they’re human plus hot and scary, not entirely different creatures. Also the set up is disgustingly classist for no reason at all. And let me be clear, the story is classist against the common fae. The story frames it like, “ew, not the peasant fae, they’re smelly and savage.” The story frames it like the common fae SHOULD be treated poorly.

And my personal, biggest problem with the book is how unnaturally, and forcefully cis gendered and heterosexual it is. It is *humidly* straight! It’s not just in its characters being cishet, it’s in the way it’s set up, the tones it takes, the pacing, the word choices. The gender dynamics are suffocating with how “beastly” Tamlin and Rhysand are and how reliant and vulnerable and unwilling Feyra is. Rhysand, with his dark clothing and jewelry gives off faint queer vibes but those are instantly crushed with how he corners and feeds off Feyre’s fear and anger. And then there is the disgusting male/female language all the goddamn time; it is painful to read. I get that Feyra is looking at the fae as different creatures that don’t conform to human gender norms but they do and throughout the whole book Feyra is interacting with them so why??? And even if the fae did only recognize themselves as their sex wouldn’t they have their own language for that? The way that the book referred to everyone by their sex made them feel like something being consumed or used, not like characters. On top of that the way each “male” fae was described, including if not especially the love interest, gave them an undertone of sexual violence. I think this was intentional because in our culture sexual violence is framed as salacious more often than not. But for me, it was unpleasant.

I’d never recommend this to someone. Not because I don’t think anyone would enjoy it or I don’t want people to enjoy it but because I don’t think it serves it’s purpose.

Disappointing. I thought it would be darker and gayer and the sex would be more exciting. It’s just not written for a queer audience. I hate Danny. Wyn had potential but the angst just never comes full circle. The only reason he is the mysterious bitter creature he is is because he’s lonely and alien. No complex past, no trauma, no deep dark secrets.

It’s well written despite being boring. And the fight scene was fun.

Wouldn’t recommend.