readingcat1832's reviews
233 reviews

 this started out really strong (the usual YA contemporary pitfalls were there, but weren't actually too grating for a change), but unfortunately it started losing me around the halfway mark, and certainly really lost me in the final third. the premise is great, and the romance between charity and bezi was pretty sweet, but i found that book just didn't build on it the way i wanted it to, i thought a lot more could have been done with charity's familiarity with the slasher genre when it came to playing with established tropes. and for such a short book, it took too long for the horror and the kills to get going, over halfway through the book. 

some other semi-spoilery thoughts:

i saw some other reviews complaining about the ending twist, and i have to agree, but more than that, there are just WAY too many twists at the end period, all kind of thrown at us one right after the other. the twist into the semi-but-not-really supernatural also just felt really out of place, and it felt like bayron just couldn't fully commit herself to writing a slasher, she had to do something BIGGER, and it left the book feeling pretty silly and hard to accept. i was all for accepting silly staples of the slasher genre, but not.... whatever that ending was. 

speaking of how non-slashery this was, i was really disappointed how few onscreen (on-page?) kills there were? there was gore, don't get me wrong, but almost all of them happened off the page, and to top it off most were just assumed kills. either tone done the slasher-typical gore by letting more of the main cast survive or go all in with the kills, imo.

this is more of a negative review than i intended to leave, bc i really was having a good time for the first chunk of the book, but the later half just ruined it a bit. oh well. 

 key takeaways in lieu of a proper review because we all know i will not write one: obsessed with lyra. worst father of the year award goes to asriel <333333 and will never not be broken up about tony and his fish. 

 I enjoyed this collection, though as a rule I don't bother with assigning star ratings to collections/anthologies most of the time because I'll always like some stories more than others. I really liked Kim Fu's writing style, and while I am not much of a short story reader, a number of the ones in this collection really grabbed me. As appears to be the case for most readers, my favourite was definitely the first one, "Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867." I also really enjoyed "Liddy, First to Fly," "Time Cubes," "#ClimbingNation," and "The Doll." Sometimes, I felt that the stories didn't really go anywhere interesting, and I did find that on occasion the stories were a little too on the nose, but as a whole this made for a solid read and a nice bridge between my last full-length novel and the series I'm planning to dive into next!