jamgrl's reviews
180 reviews

This was excellent!

What a unique first contact story! 

Aliens have invaded Earth— but only the Virgin Islands. The aliens look like humans— but they are much more powerful. They say they are only staying temporarily and peacefully. Issue is, they have short fuses.

This book is super interesting and unique. It weaves together the stories of islanders going through interpersonal issues while also dealing with the political realities of their time- aliens. The book is not just about aliens, they are just another layer to these people’s lives, hiding in the background, and yet they are an inescapable force on the island. 

The book switches perspectives quite a lot, but it wasn’t too hard to follow who everyone is. The mystery of the aliens unfolds around and 
between the character’s personal dramasfalling in and out of love, making hard choices about when to follow dreams, inter-generational familial conflict. Not to mention how filled it is with Virgin Island culture from an author from the Virgin Islands!

The audiobook has stellar performances from the narrators. (Sometimes they can get whispery, so not every location is ideal for listening.)


(I also liked No Gods, No Monsters by the same author, but I must admit I liked this one better 🫣.)

{{Warning: there is a lot of violence, some fairly graphic, and character death}}

Another one knocked out of the park; I am not at all surprised and I am excited for Book 3!!! {If you haven’t checked out The Broken Earth trilogy yet, CHECK IT OUT!!}

So, I enjoyed this book- it was silly and fun and pretty much what I expected in terms of level of romcom cliche- but I also was kind of cringing at parts of it, particularly related to several “romantic” gestures from our male lead, Nathan. Maybe I read this too soon after watching You season 1 😂. I just kept thinking about how creepy some of his behavior was (paying Brie’s lease without her knowledge or consent, buying her apartment building, keeping a box of her stuff). Also, the absurd wealth was a turnoff for me. I think I would have liked this more if it were a college romance; the football-ballerina stuff was cute, and Nathan’s teammates were super fun, but I didn’t like the way money was handled (it’s tried to be waved away by Brie having always struggled with money and Nathan feeling guilty about his privilege- but that doesn’t change the fact that he keeps buying a ludicrous amount of ludicrously expensive dresses??). ON THE OTHER HAND- Nathan deals with panic attacks throughout this book and I did like the way this/mental health was handled. That was a cool thing to pull in that didn’t feel ham fisted in. I went back and forth over whether I liked this book and I think ultimately it was an okay book with some fun and good parts and some not great reproductions of bad cliches.

I kind of loved this book? I picked it up totally randomly, mostly because it was super short, and then my biggest complaint became that it wasn’t long enough!


Some mild spoilers ahead

It hits a lot of normal romance cliches except on top of that we are getting to know a specific queer/lesbian community and we have a character discovering and exploring her sexuality- not just her attraction, but sexual pleasure (there’s a sex shop visit??). 

The characters both have interesting self explorations about their own sexualities or genders and what is super interesting is that by the end of the book, we don’t get labels for either of them. That’s really cool; I really respect the choice to skip the labels, they are them and that’s what matters- this is emphasized pretty strongly in the book and it is definitely not a case of shying away from queerness.

Overall, a fun, sweet, and thoughtful book.

Pedro Mairal is an Argentinian author who won a Spanish literary award, el Premio Tigre Juan, for this book. Pretty cool for a book I picked up based on spine thickness and knowing nothing about! I wasn’t sure if I would like this book since cheating is a central theme of the book (this is not a spoiler, it’s pretty clear in the summary) but I really liked it. It is a thoughtful analysis of marriage and co-parenting and love and desire and financial struggle and class expectations. It also contains surprises! It is very poetic in style, which was challenging for me at times, not gonna lie, but there was plenty of dialogue easy for me to follow- this was a good stretch for my Spanish reading comprehension ☺️.

I adore these little novellas! 

If you haven’t heard of them, they take place in an alternate east Asia full of magic and legendary stories. Our main character is a young cleric whose job it is to record stories for their abbey’s historical archives (with the help of their talking bird companion who has photographic memory). They travel and meet people and hear their stories, so as a reader, you follow both the real time story and the stories being told. The stories are adventurous and exciting and the real time gives this sense of sitting together with people which is very slice of life (though they have obstacles and events of their own).

This one I felt leaned the most into the story telling idea of these books, with the characters telling multiple stories while on a journey together. It was a very comforting read, even if violence was a central theme 😂. It felt very much about catching moments in people’s lives and snapshots of who they are and people sharing time together and forming community for a short period. Like the temporary friends you make at weddings or on trips who you know you’ll never see again. I don’t know, I just really liked it! 

Each novella is stand alone!