brittbat's reviews
1059 reviews

I eagerly looked forward to reading Dirty, and at first it satisfied all my hopes. Humor, characters with fun chemistry, drama, and great sex scenes. But I knocked stars off because the entire book takes place over the course of twelve days. That short time frame seriously impairs my ability to get invested in the supposed heartache and to believe in the happily ever after. Still fun, but not all it could have been. Not all the crazy worked for me.

Diverting and slightly disturbing, this novel captures the egotism, casual cruelty, and selfishness of adolescence. I'm glad that it's short, because spending any more time with Cecile would have become exhausting. Recommended to me by my friend Caleb.

I expected to topple head-over-heels for this book, but I never quite got my footing. I feel like there is so much going on that I half-grasped. I want to read more, both to discover just what in the world(s) is going on, and because I suspect that I will like this series more with time. Recommended to me by my friend Jessica!

Saving Montgomery Sole by Mariko Tamaki was one of those books that I just had to grab. I judge by cover, and I judge hard, and this one caught my eye immediately with the ways it flouts YA conventions. Model wearing a pretty dress? Giant typography over a photo, revealing nothing of the plot? Nah, this one is all bold watercolor and a girl wearing overalls, arms flung to the sky like she’s commanding an army or something. I wanted to know who that girl was and what she was about.

Full review at Belle Biblio.

The first of what will be many books on the American Revolution that I read because of Hamilton rekindling my middle school obsession with this period in history. Breen examines the role that "middling sorts" played leading up to and during the Revolution. Primarily, they got really angry, really religious, and really motivated, and they spent a lot of time terrorizing Tory sympathizers. Fun! Things I found especially interesting: lots of colonial publishers were women; public opinion was often ahead of the Founding Fathers; people thought the British had destroyed Boston and lost their collective shit; a guy who was not Benjamin Franklin (Goddard) had the idea for a colonial postal service independent of the British-run one that already existed, but it didn't work out and Franklin was given administration of the postal service after.

I don't plan to review this because it's much more appropriate and productive to use it as a shut-up-and-listen experience. I'm glad I finally got around to this one; I should have sooner.

Overall, this is a novel that doesn't quite live up to its premise or to the expectations I had for it. Plotwise, it's an okay urban fantasy, but certain aspects do not hold up well under scrutiny. Other readers have responded to it far more positively than I did, so maybe I'm just picky, but it wasn't quite my drink of choice.

Full review at Belle Biblio.

So many feels, at times way too many. Full review to come!