This book is fucked up. Definitely check the trigger warnings before reading. I can’t reconcile the MMC being a stalker and a vigilante at the same time. they’re complete opposites and him stalking the FMC makes no sense.. instead of meeting her like a normal person, you just decide you’re going to stalk her and she’s going to love it? Right. Also, him not having history with this in any way just makes his character unbelievable. The ending did leave off on a cliffhanger but I’m not really interested in continuing…at least at this moment.
This was soooooooo good!!! Definitely the best memoir I’ve read this year. I loved the comparison of different stories from the Quran and comparing them to how she’s living life as a queer, Muslim immigrant. So well done. I feel like her and I could be friends. I wish her all the best and hope she comes out with more books 🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼
If you didn’t care for the memoir, We’ve Always Been Here, also by a queer Muslim immigrant, you’ll love this one. It’s a much better memoir imo
What an amazing sci-fi trilogy 🥹🥰 I love the “found family” trope, how the AI were the good guys, and just the space opera-ness of this. It was so much fun and Breq is easily one of my favorite non-human-but significant-beings I’ve ever read about!!!
This wasn’t anything new or exciting.. so formulaic and a bit boring. Also the unexpected pregnancy was a major 🙄🙄.
The good things.. -I loved that Cade was a single dad with the cutest son named Luke who I even fell in love with. Luke was the saving grace of this book otherwise I probably would have given it like a 2.75 but they really made him the focal point and I was so happy to see that because that’s exactly how it should be imo. -That Cade was a cowboy but it wasn’t overstated like I feel like it would be in any other cowboy romance.. lmao. - loved Cade’s family. They were all so sweet and loving. Would have loved to see more of them. -This book didn’t feel like its length. Very readable.
The not-so-good things.. The way Cade and Red’s relationship started was a bit ick… The dialogue was… 😬😬😬 Storyline was super predictable Instalove trope (which I despise) even though she tried to make it a slow burn since the book was 400 pages???!!! Don’t even get me started on the ending it like left off in the middle of a scene..so strange.
Despite all that I can see why this series is popular. Will I be reading anymore from this series? Absolutely not.
This book was incredibly moving, devastating and completely reminiscent of world affairs. As the war was brought closer to Eilish’s family, it reminded me more and more of the occupation in Palestine and that the events that take place in this book have happened and are happening in places around the world right now. This is reality, maybe a far off reality to the West, but real nonetheless.
Normally, a book with huge paragraphs and no quotation marks would have been a DNF immediately (sorry not sorry Sally Rooney) but the writing was so poetic and urgent, I couldn’t stop reading. Yes, this took me months to read but it shook me and I had to put it down and read something else at times because it was so intense.
I listened to an interview of Paul Lynch shortly after writing this and watching that solidified Paul as an auto-buy author. He said that the writing structure was intentional and was meant to keep you in the moment and not just sympathize but empathize with Eilish. He also said that this novel explores the complexity of situations like this and make you realize how hard it is to leave everything you know. Once you read this, you will no longer say when asked questions like, “would you have left immediately when the Holocaust happened?” that you would. It’s never as easy it seems trying to escape something that you’re blind to and have very little knowledge about. Paul intended this novel to “decondition” us and I think he did so brilliantly. In addition, it also explores the problem with denial and how it’s useful to have until it’s not and if you deny long enough it ends up making everything worse.
What a fantastic novel. Well done, Paul Lynch 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
This was the most in-depth graphic novel I’ve ever read. Apparently it’s called graphic journalism and it was so cool. Covered a lot of info. I had to take breaks because at times it was so much. It’s from the perspective of a white USA journalist who came to Palestine for two months to document what he saw. He went a really long time ago and it’s so sad to the familiarity between then and now… the occupation hasn’t stopped 😭
Poetic, moving writing connecting music to various events in our history and the authors own personal thoughts on those events and how they relate to him. Not the most interesting collection of essays for me. I couldn’t really relate or connect with everything he was saying about music. I listened to the audiobook and he spoke so fast, it was hard to keep up 😂 (yes, I know I can slow down the speed but if I’m on the normal speed and he sounds like I’m on 2x speed, that’s crazy!!). I still want to check out his other work, The Little Devil in America I believe it’s called. It was a favorite of many book readers I know last year.
This is my first Jennifer McMahon book and second book about demon possession. My first book was The Exorcist and I have to say, I liked this one better. The language in the Exorcist really took me out of it. I would definitely read from Jennifer McMahon again and I’m happy about that because I have another book of her, The Children on the Hill, on my shelves 😁
It is so hard to carry knowledge that only you know and believe when everyone else around you is either influenced by the dark entity you’re trying to banish or is in straight denial and thinks you’re crazy. I really sympathized with our MC, Ali, or Ali Alligator as her mom liked to call her. I do think in the rush of trying to prevent this entity from moving on to someone else, she made some silly choices. But, again, I sympathize because she’s desperate, alone and trying to protect her family against the supernatural. Something that not a lot of people believe in, especially her family. 😔
I think this is definitely more horror than thriller with a twist at the end. This book was nothing ground-breaking but it was fun.