samarakroeger's reviews
585 reviews

Lizzy Dent can be relied upon for a 3 star read full of enough charm that I momentarily forget it’s meant to be a rom com and she omitted most of the rom part

I really liked this book!  Such a cute and well-executed holiday romance with some fun meta elements. Falon Ballard is turning into such a reliable romance author for me. 

too many characters, too many separate POVs to keep track of, not enough time covered for proper character development, not enough dialogue. lots of telling, not enough showing. there were some lovely sentences in this but lovely sentences do not necessitate a lovely novel.  frustrating that a good chunk of the interpersonal conflict relied on the unwillingness to communicate (not miscommunication, just no communication).

also, just because an author is Irish does not mean they are anything like Sally Rooney, lol.  this reminded me more of Marlowe Granados’ Happy Hour, if anything. 

I do NOT get the comparisons to the far superior Erik Larson. Johnson is a mediocre writer at best in desperate need of a better editor. He struggles to stick with a narrative structure and instead spends way too much of the book meandering down only somewhat relevant tangents that fail to add anything interesting or important to the book. Also, the title is misleading — this book is mostly about a few anarchists living in turn of the century NYC who occasionally blow some things up before being deported to Russia. The relevance of the anarchism to modern policing is barely explored and the connections to J. Edgar Hoover he attempts to make at the end of the book seem incredibly forced. 

I did manage to learn something from this, at least — Alfred Nobel (of peace prize fame) invented dynamite. How peaceful!

this would have been funnier when it was written in ~1999

I really enjoyed this! It never got bogged down in the weeds (or swamp) and explored various aspects of the past/present/future of the Mississippi, including indigenous perspectives, land use, geological context, and more. I’m personally interested in discussions about undoing previous “improvement” projects (i.e., dams, army corps of engineer things, etc.), and the last section focused on that. 

I just shouldn't have picked this up.  didn't realize it was the third book in a series (so didn't care about any of the pre-established characters), didn't realize I actually wasn't that interested until it seemed silly to not finish it.  oh well.

super interesting, but I felt it lacked focus in places and would have benefitted from tighter editing.

this is pretty gross, if you like that sort of thing.

one of the best biographies I've ever read.  it's very readable and well-organized, despite the length.