kfalsreads's reviews
281 reviews

I have many thoughts and feelings about this one, so I’ll try to keep it short with just the highlights.

Oh, Sally Rooney!

You know when you’re working out, and you just want to give up but you push through, and afterward, you get that adrenaline rush because you’ve overcome something difficult?

That’s how I felt after reading this book, lol.

This was my first Sally Rooney book and I can absolutely see why she isn’t for everybody. This was a #bookstamademedoit and it proved to be a Herculean task for me. But I’m glad I did it.

I loved the Hulu/BBC show Normal People—which I just watched again—and while I felt I had a sense of Sally’s style, I was a bit unprepared for actually reading her work. She definitely has a unique structure, tone, and flow to her writing that takes some getting used to.

Beautiful World, Where Are You follows the complex relationship of four people—Alice, Eileen, Simon, and Felix—who are still young, but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in.

The POV alternates between the storylines of Alice and Felix and Eileen and Simon, and in between we read emails between best friends Alice and Eileen as they pontificate about life, love, religion, politics, beauty, etc. These email chapters were the hardest for me to get through. Oh, and the fact there were no quotations was a bit annoying.

I thought about bailing on this book multiple times until around Chapter 13 when the relationships started to take shape and piqued my interest enough to stick around. The characters were generally unlikeable and frustrating, but in the end they actually made some progress.

Would I recommend a Sally Rooney book to someone? Not at this point, because her style is so…different. But I haven’t given up on her yet and plan to give her backlist a go before determining if this was a one-off or she’s just not for me.

This book took me completely by surprise to become one of my top reads of the year.

The more I read, the clearer it becomes what sets a book apart for me—by the end I feel an ache in my chest like my heart just grew a size to make room for that particular story and characters. This was one of those books for me.

Written as part-fiction, part-memoir, Helen Hoang takes us on Anna’s journey of finding love—but more importantly, finding mental health clarity after an autism diagnosis, confidence and self-love. This is a very heavy read, but an extremely important one. I learned so much about her particular day-to-day challenges, masking, and autistic burnout. This also covers family dynamics in Asian culture and the physical, mental and emotional tolls of caring for a sick parent at home.

The wonderful light in this story was her relationship with Quan, who now joins Tate from Where the Crawdads Sing as my top romance BFs. Their romance was so beautiful. I loved the compassion and devotion Quan had for her, the ways in which he helped her discover herself, and you could really feel their chemistry. Helen is the Queen of the Kiss as far as I’m concerned!

This is one of those books that feels odd to say I loved because of how heavy some of the themes are in it, so I’ll just say Once There Were Wolves has become one of my top reads of all time.

This is one of those books that is going to nag at me.

First, I want to say this is described on the back as an “endearing and humorous novel,” “joyful and uplifting,” and I couldn’t disagree more. This is not a light, romantic read. *See my note at the bottom.

It kind of reminded me of People We Meet on Vacation where the author uses past and present timelines to build up to the break up and how they deal with being back together after years apart. The difference for me with this one was I never really felt invested in them as a couple. Their chemistry and physical attraction happened really fast, was glossed over—no steam here—and never really grew from there. There was no banter, no common interests, nothing that connected them on a deeper level during their entire relationship. It was pretty tumultuous the whole time and I still wasn’t convinced at the end that they should get back together.

This is a story mostly about toxic relationships and the effect they have on one’s feeling of self-worth. Most of these characters are flawed and the hook for me was seeing how it was going to all play out and how they would overcome them. However, I still kind of felt icky at the end. They all still have A LOT of work to do and the story felt far from resolved.

There was also a twist in here I didn’t expect that wasn’t really necessary to the story involving a character who, also, wasn’t necessary to the story. I’m looking at you Rodney.

I waited at least three months for this book from the library and, boy, was it worth the wait. I loved this story! I loved the slow build of Alex and Poppy’s friendship, their trips, experiences, banter, connection, chemistry and backstories.

This was my first friends to lovers romance and the execution of it will set the standard for similar stories moving forward. I was fully invested and thought the author did a great job of articulating the anxiety and trepidation that comes with the idea of crossing that line with a best friend.

There has been some criticism over what causes the fallout of their relationship but I found it was pretty realistic and I was glad it wasn’t over something random or stupid.

This story and Alex and Poppy hold a special place in my heart and look forward to revisiting their story again in the future.

The Great Pretenders is a great read for fans of historical fiction, family drama, and romance. It covers a lot of issues during the mid-50s: the effect the Second Red Scare had on the studios, people, and pictures in Hollywood; the civil rights movement; inter-racial relationships and sexism.

I really enjoyed this story and the boldness, bravery, and morality of Roxanne’s character. I also appreciated her naïveté and vulnerability. However, it did start off a bit slow for me as the author provided context and backstory for the existing family dynamic and its stature in the industry.

After some quicker, lighter reads this was definitely a change of pace for me. It took me a bit to get into the rhythm of the story, but it was really impactful, especially when thinking about the parallels of what is happening now in the country. I highly recommend this book.

I really wanted to love this one, but it ended up just being a like for me. It weighs on me heavily why a book just didn’t do it for me, and explaining it, spoiler-free, is even harder