madeline's reviews
776 reviews

Shara Wheeler kissed Chloe Green at prom last night. And then Shara Wheeler disappeared. Perfect Shara Wheeler, daughter of the principal of their ultra-conservative Christian high school, neck and neck competitor with Chloe for valedictorian, haver of flawless hair and neatly glossed lips Shara Wheeler. And Chloe'll be damned if she lets her get away with it.

I love Casey McQuiston - I think they're one of a very few writers who can pull off third person present, their books are always full of unique and interesting characters, and they never fail to make me full body sob like a baby. IKSW just... didn't get there for me. 

McQuiston's writing usually feels really propulsive and charged, thanks to the tense. We still get the gorgeous, gorgeous prose we're accustomed to, but the book lacks the same energy as their previous work. And to be honest, I was more interested in Chloe's friend group than in Chloe or Shara or Chloe and Shara - I would have preferred to read about literally anyone else in this orbit than these two.

I really, really struggle with books where we see characters making bad decisions against all logic, and that's what happens here. I want to be clear that this is personal preference and not a failing of the book. It's so, so important to see imperfect queer people on the page, because that's how people are! Imperfect! And it's particularly important in the context of what this book is attempting to do for its YA audience. It just hurts my heart. Chloe and Shara keep picking options destined to hurt people, and in my opinion, Shara just isn't fully redeemed. Thus, the emotional payout isn't there for me, because I found it tough to root for Chloe and Shara, separately or together. 

There's a lot to delight in about this book: a full cast of nuanced, diverse, queer teens discovering who and how they are, some really great points about the Phantom of the Opera (he <i>does</i> have Christine's career goals in mind, Chloe is totally right), and a really thoughtful understanding of the complexities of growing up religious in the South. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Thank you St. Martin's and NetGalley for the ARC!

What an absolutely delicious summer read, full of references to NYC's celebrity con artists and literary drama.

Lora Ricci is an NYU dropout and aspiring author interning at ELLE Magazine and avoiding telling her parents she won't be returning to her hard-won university spot this fall. At ELLE, she meets Cat Wolff, an editor and ingenue who has some kind of magnetic energy. Before she knows it, Lora is Cat's ghostwriter, living and working in her suite at the Plaza for nothing more than a promise and room service. But there's more to Cat than meets the eye, and someone's desperate to prove that. Told through diary entries, emails, DMs, and more, this is the perfect beach read that's guaranteed to throw you for a loop.

I love other people's drama; call it schadenfreude or nosiness, I'm desperate to know what's going on, particularly in worlds that I orbit as a satellite and never as a participant - namely, literary drama. This book is such a delightful mashup of so many recent pop culture dramedies: Anna Delvey, Cat Person, Bad Art Friend, Caroline Calloway, and more. Lora is a sweet girl from Nowhere, Pennsylvania who gets wrapped up into more than is dreamt of in her philosophy and suffers for it, and you can't help but to hang onto every word she writes into her diary.

This is such a fantastic beach read, light enough to pick up and put down, but intriguing enough to suck you in every time. Read with a glass of champagne or a good cocktail at hand, and be ready to want to shake Lora by her shoulders as though you're her older sister.

Thank you William Morrow and NetGalley for the ARC!

y'all, this book was boring. BORING. and the premise was a rescue from an icy crevasse in a blizzard! it should not have been boring! the most attractive part of it was when the hero offers to help the heroine with her taxes.

we get the ali hazelwood checklist here:
- tiny heroine (who i think is meant to be average height this time, at least, but is still dwarfed by her...)
- enormous hero who is inexplicably strong and also very frowny
- every in the heroine's field minus the hero is an Awful Man (i hate that ali's got me out here defending men, i really do)
- a ridiculous misunderstanding that could have been cleared up with 30 seconds of asking around

and as an added bonus, the first chapter is just how hannah got into science and then into grad school. i understand why ali includes this - it's meant to show how isolated hannah has always felt, how her family has ostracized her and how she thinks she can only depend on herself and that's why she ~doesn't date~. but it's just boring, and it would have worked much better in a full-length novel where it could have been worked in over time instead of infodumped on me as i drove to the grocery.

whatever. at this point, all my critiques of the earlier novellas in this series still stand. i think people are going to get very burned out on ali hazelwood unless the book she publishes after LOTB is, like, entirely different.

I have never read a Holly Black book and I'm not really one for fantasy, so I went into this book with low expectations of it working for me. I loved every second of it. Do I think I fully understood the magic system (something about shadows? and blood? and trauma?)? No. Did I have a great time? Yes.

There are aspects of this story that don't really feel - ahem - fleshed out to me, which makes me feel like this is the start of a series even if there's nothing to really confirm that. If it is, it's a 5 star read for sure. If it's a standalone, it's a 3.5 I'm rounding up to 4.

Thank you Tor and NetGalley for the ARC!

i think i've probably read too much oral history theory for this book to work for me, but i also didn't care about a single character, so there's that too.

These essays are deeply personal and well-structured, but can get repetitive. Really, my issue was the voice - it's the kind of poppy, buzzy, Millennial narration that works well for a Buzzfeed "Here Are The Top Ten Cat-Celebrity Comparisons You Need to See" style article, but it's a voice that is a - already coming out of fashion and definitely easy to ID as millennial and b - becomes more and more irritating as you read. 

Thank you Atria and NetGalley for the ARC!

Nothing about this should have worked for me - from the selfish, self-sabotaging heroine to the purely sunshine hero - but here I am, full body sobbing two hours past my bedtime on a Sunday over a Christmas novel I read getting my first sunburn of the year. This book is laugh-out-loud funny and break-your-heart emotional and while I'm not sure I'd want Hall as a book boyfriend, I think we could all use a little more of him in our everyday lives.

Thank you Penguin and NetGalley for the ARC!

CWs:

unsupportive family, emotional abuse remembered on the page

This book is not a romance!

Joseph Carter stands three women up on Valentine's Day: Siobhan, his breakfast date and occasional hookup; Miranda at lunch, a woman who may or may not be his girlfriend; and Jane in the evening, a friend whom he promised he'd pretend to be her boyfriend for. Over the course of twelve months, each woman unpacks who Joseph Carter is, both to them and as a person, and makes a decision about what kind of future they can see with him.

I love Beth O'Leary, and she's really being done dirty by her marketing team. I don't think her last book was a romance, and this certainly is not, although it's being marketed as a rom-com. It's neither a rom nor a com! Folks are going to be mislead. But it is a good book, and one that puts an incredibly unique spin on its premise.

I'm grateful I knew going in that it wasn't a romance, because I would have spent a lot of the book much more confused than I was, which was the normal level of confusion you're supposed to feel as you're putting the pieces of the story together. If nothing else, this is a masterclass in slowly untwisting a very twisty plot.

I'd probably comp this to a book like The Dinner List or In Five Years, books that have a romantic subplot but are probably not genre romances. I liked it - not as much as I've liked some of her other books, if only because it was sad - and I'm going to be careful who I rec it to.

Thank you Berkley and NetGalley for the ARC!

CWs:

death of a narrative character, narrative character recounts a miscarriage, pregnancy scare, loss of a parent, workplace sexual harassment, parent with dementia, alcohol use.

fun, frothy, light, not sure the math always mathed, but pretty good!!

Someday I will finish a book by Katherine Center and not be crying like a baby at the end; today was not that day.

Hannah Brooks is a certified bad-ass, but you'd never know that: her job as a protection agent means she's an expert in staying in the background (until she needs to kill you with a wine opener, of course). But after a devastating breakup comes on the heels of the death of her mother, her boss is reassigning her from the glamorous international details to something a little closer to home. Reclusive Hollywood hero Jack Stapleton is emerging from a self-imposed break from the spotlight to spend time with his ailing mother and to make his last contracted movie. The studio is worried that his 50-something corgi-breeding stalker will catch wind of this and escalate past simply knitting photorealistic sweaters of his face, so Hannah steps onto the scene to act as his bodyguard - and act like his girlfriend. Everything's fine, as long as she doesn't get attached. And she's a professional - she can handle that, right?

Every time I open a Katherine Center novel, I know I'm in for a good time. I'm going to laugh, I'm going to cry, I'm going to thoroughly enjoy myself. Center's heroines are competence porn to the nth degree, eminently capable and sometimes drifting into Mary Jane category but just so, so wonderful, and Hannah is no exception. And look, this book has everything: bodyguard heroine! Sunshine hero! Fake dating! Forced proximity! Only one bed! A piggyback ride because you're wearing the wrong shoes!

There's something about the way Center lets her über-capable heroines fall in love, too, that is so perfect. They don't fight it, but more sink into the inevitability of it: of feelings, of love, of the knowledge that this could end in pain for them. And so of course, there's angst, but it feels more manageable, in a way, than many other angsty romance novels because the heroine has approached this in a really adult, rational way, but recognizes that love isn't ever rational. This always feels so validating, to know that you can be at the top of your game and still fall in love, and to know that it could be devastating and that you'll pull through it. 

Jack, too, is super freaking delightful, and feels more fleshed out to me than some of her other heroes. He's a goofball and able to find sunshine at a point in his life where he's feeling mostly bad. Even though he's a non-narrative character, I think he's one of my favorite instances of someone with anxiety; the way he deals with his bridge phobia was incredibly real to me, a person who also really hates bridges.

The ending is what breaks me in a Katherine Center novel, and this was no exception. When I realized what was happening, my heart was truly beating out of my chest, and what had the potential to be a really not-great scene was equally humorous and gentle. Instead of treating a character as a plot point, Center works through the ending with incredible tenderness and thoughtfulness, ending where some authors would with a real lambasting of mentally ill people with nuance and kindness.

I love this book, and I can't wait to make a bunch of people read it. Thank you St. Martin's and NetGalley for the ARC!

CWs:

narrative character has lost a parent to alcoholism-related causes, was abandoned by a(nother) parent, witnessed domestic abuse as a child, experiences a non-life-threatening gun injury. main non-narrative character has a parent fighting cancer, has lost a sibling, has had a sibling fighting alcoholism, is experiencing familial estrangement. general warnings for guns, bad exes, stalkers, mental illness.