mynameismarines's reviews
1076 reviews

Original recap for the Snark Squad here.

We open the book with some chick looking at herself in a mirror and trying on clothes. JESSICA WAKEFIELD? ARE YOU FOLLOWING ME?

No. It’s Nancy. Apparently 87% of all books geared towards teens must start with an attractive girl checking herself out in a mirror. I totally just made that statistic up, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Nancy is trying on clothes because this book takes her to the hallways of Bedford High for her new case. Her friends George and Bess, whom I affectionately nicknamed the Bovine Besties, try and convince her that high school will be hard. She's Mother Fucking Nancy Drew, though, and says it's no sweat.

Someone sends Nancy a creepy VHS stalker tape. It's not only creepy because it's a VHS, though, which makes me feel old and disgusting. The tape warns Nancy to stay away from the high school.

We get pages and pages of my biggest "girl detective" pet-peeve of ever, and that's questions used as a means of advancing the narrative. Probably helps when you are 10 and stupid, but when you are 25 and rereading this book, it effectively makes you want to poke your own eyes out.

Nancy reports to the high school where lockers are being broken into and video equipment is being stolen. Also, even though we are told that Nan has the hots for Ned Nickerson, she gets a little flirty with a high school kid named Daryl. We are told approximately 358 times that he has "blueberry" colored eyes, which is a really disturbing visual.



Nancy meets a whole cast of fishy characters and our theft mystery is quickly bumped up to a murder mystery, when one of those fishy characters ends up dead.

Will Nancy figure out who did it? Would you believe me if I told you Russian spies were involved? How many times exactly can we fit in the term "blueberry eyes?"

You can find out by reading "Secrets Can Kill." Or, you know, you can just read my recap. You're welcome.

I read the book because it was highly recommended by a friend. I knew nothing of the "drama" surrounding Clare and the supposed plagiarism. Browsing quickly through the other reviews wasn't quite enough to educate me, so this review stands apart from that.

I will say over all that I enjoyed the book. It wasn't the best thing I ever read, but it wasn't the worst. I liked the characters Clare created and unlike some reviews, I very much enjoyed the dialogue and character banter. Though people take issue with it in the midst of very dramatic plot points, it feels authentic to me, to have these sarcastic, irreverant 16 year olds.

I found myself skipping a lot of the descriptions Clare included. At the time, I thought I was just anxious to get to the action. In retrospect, I see that there was a substantial amount of "fluff" to sift through en route to main action.

I will continue reading the series. I'm not sure why this book has just a polarizing effect on people. I thought it was a good YA novel. It is what it is.

It's strange to think about reviewing this book-- the final writings and thoughts of a remarkable man, a scholar, a scientist, a neurosurgeon, a husband, a man once fascinated with death confronted by his own mortality sooner than he imagined. I listened to this on audio and having those words read out to me was an incredibly moving and thoughtful experience. Not to be too sentimental here, but there was a kind of honor in being invited into Paul's experiences, his family, his life and his death. He shares with us knowledge that he worked so hard for, but also that was hard-won through experience. It's a book not only about his death, but about his life and how he lived it when confronted with something that is true for all of us: we don't know when we'll die, and how we live changes as we consider the time that stretches before us.

Regardless of how you feel about his beliefs, from his faith to his clear view on the excellence/calling of doctors, you can feel how truly be believed these things. It made his memoir come to life.

In all, I'm glad I finally picked this up and experienced it and can actually imagine reading it again.

(Nonfiction November 2017, read during plane ride back from YallFest 2017.)

I've obviously owned this for a couple of years now, every since I became Hamiltrash, and never read it. I'm going to see Hamilton for the third time soon, and I figured it would be worth finally heading to some of the source material. It was long and dense, but it was fascinating both as a biography and as the source of another piece of media I very much enjoy. I honestly felt way too invested in past politics, to be honest. These founding fathers had me stressed. There is a pro-Hamilton bias in this telling, as is to be expected, but Chernow is pretty fair and open about it, and isn't afraid to tell us when Hamilton was wrong or what other biographers say about him.

Overall enjoyable and one more book read that's been on my shelf for too long!

I gobbled this up in a day and that readability and the premise are definitely the strongest pieces here. It's a mystery set at a magic school, I mean come on. I was sold immediately. The overall experience was good, but not great.

Because our protagonist was non-magic, it allowed Gailey to handwave over some of her world-building and some of the rules of magic. I was mostly okay with that while reading-- Ivy didn't understand things so we didn't understand things. After reading, I was more aware of how that hand waving left an indistinct impression of the story in my memory and feelings. This isn't one that will last.

The story was also super repetitive. We follow the main character Ivy closely, and get a lot of her thoughts about being a fish out of water inside the magic school. It could've been tightened up a lot. I liked her reflections on her decisions-- on the way that she was acting out a part with a confidence she didn't feel. I didn't think we needed to hear over and over the specifics of her feelings toward her sister or her resentment etc. Once established, the reader can carry that and connect the dots for themselves. Overall, I did like Ivy, though.

I don't think the identity of the murderer was particularly shocking. I did think it was a nice gray area motivation, however.

That said, I wanted to warn against some representation/content things. There are two queer couples in this story.

Spoiler

The first are teens who serve as minor background characters. Then, the murdered woman is a lesbian. And the murderer is her partner, though again it was an accident. I just figured it was worth mentioning that the prominently feature lesbian couple are murdered and murderer.

I'm sad to leave behind the potential of this world and this premise, to be honest. I enjoyed it while it lasted but I'm not sure how much will be memorable.

2.5 stars

My friends are all reading other Mark Lawrence stuff and I was like "I know! I'll read this short thing!"

It was fine. I'll admit that I've never played D&D and I think there is some amount of being in on the joke and the culture and the love that informs this story. I was missing that piece and it made it so that the repeated references became too much for me. I was invested enough in finding out what was happening and how it would end, but I wasn't overly invested in the characters. There was no emotional connection for me.

It was interesting to me that in a story that requires a certain suspension of disbelief, it was some of the characters that felt the most unreal to me. The villain specifically felt dropped into this story from a different story. He didn't match with the rest of the characters.

The beginning of this story has some detailed scenes about a cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy. That kind of gets pushed to the background as the rest of the plot develops, but definite content warning for anyone who struggles with depictions of cancer in fiction.

4.5 stars

This book is probably 5 stars for me on enjoyment alone, but it isn't without its faults. It doesn't always treat its women characters well and some of its characters feel dated and some of its concepts on the shallow side. Those are things I can "objectively" stand back and see, but they are flaws that didn't outweigh all of the positive I found in this weird, wandering tale.

I love journey books and this wanders and meanders at just the right speed for me. I love journeys whose stops are more for people and places than anything that has to do specifically with the plot. I also had a good entry point into the story with Shadow. That's kind of a crapshoot because he is, by design, a stoic sort of character. He's committed to letting the plot and characters take him along, again by design. That's just the sort of thing that might bother certain readers, but I found his stoicism endearing. Having him in the middle of this strange story, accepting, sort of checked out after great loss, provided an even greater dreamlike quality.

There's a lot to say about themes here, about American from the view of America as a patchwork created by immigrants, about the ideas of belief deep in the out of the way places across the country. It was always interesting, whether I agreed with the underlying hot take or not. It made me think and when I didn't want to think, it was just a good story.

I'm so happy I read this and I have an adaptation to watch now I'M SO EXCITED.