jbellomy's reviews
469 reviews

so dumb so fun we are SO BACK

i am ill

booooo tomato tomato tomato

YOOOOOOOOOO!!! A BANGER.
KAM RULES. Why isn't everyone talking about this all the time??? 

never been so triggered by a book in my goddamn life

idk if anyone is aware of this but Arthur really snapped with this one

I'm once again asking authors to figure out how "repressed memory" works (or rather, does not work)

The title goes so hard, but as someone in the reviews pointed out, there's no knife. Which is the funniest possible outcome for this silly little paint-by-numbers book that doesn't at all live up to its dopeass title.

was so on board with the disabled mc until

his disability became magical.

Can we not simply have a character with chronic pain? what are we doing here???

Star ratings were not made for books like this. I found it alternatively baffling and gorgeous. My main gripe(?) was the writing style. "Overwritten" doesn't really capture it. Descriptions of the most mundane acts are described in sideways, flowery prose, which is often my jam--it worked for me ~70% of the time--but I could never get a full grasp on what I was looking at, & never felt grounded in the slightest. Probably intentional (given the strange-yet-grounded nature of the magic) but it hampered me in several ways:
- it took a ridiculously long time for me to finish this, even though I mostly enjoyed it, because I only picked it up when I was in the exact right mood
- I have the feeling I missed a lot of romantic build-up. I kept waiting for

Sam's

character to materialize in a way that only really happened for me in the last 40ish pages of the book.
- idk, it just made me feel kind of stupid in a way that was frustrating?
I prefer prose that goes in and out of the slippery, verbose description to provide something solid to hold onto every once in a while. I'm harping on this because it was the one recurring issue that stopped this from becoming a new favorite. Low magic, angst, sweat, blood, academia, ghosts?!?!, GHOSTS AS METAPHOR?!?!?, GHOSTS AS **GAY REPRESSION** METAPHOR?!?!?!?!??! -- come on, that shit's MY shit. There were so many moments, sometimes whole chapters, that worked so so well. At one point I felt like I was on drugs. 
(EDIT: it has just been revealed to me that Mandelo once wrote Kavinsky fic, which is fucking hilarious because initially my review was just going to be "Dream Thieves for 20-something freaks" but that felt too trite.)
Anyway, I'll probably give Mandelo another try, but it might take me a while.