sarahweyand's reviews
378 reviews

If you don't know me, know I am a time travel HATER. The biggest hater. So I surprised myself when I was looking forward to listening to this audiobook, where "Time" is literally in the title. I appreciated that for most of the book, time travel was a catalyst for the story to occur and not a primary plot element.  I found the characters and their relationships with one another to be charming and endearing, if not fully realistic for the time periods they were from.

I enjoyed the spy thriller aspect of the novel as well, but not as much as the romance and character building. Unfortunately, this element takes over the plot towards the end of the book, and I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the first 75%. I won't get into spoilers, but more time-travel based plot also comes into play here which I also didn't like (and am a little confused on the ending).

All in all, I really enjoyed most of this book, but the ending fell a little flat for me. I think it's a very strong debut and I look forward to keeping an eye on Bradley in the future!

 Thanks to Regal House Publishing and NetGalley for providing me an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and feedback are my own. 

This was a perfect book for what I needed it for, which was a quick read to get my mind off a heavier book I'd just finished. This book reminds me a lot of YOU by Caroline Kepnes, but it was different enough to be interesting. I really hated our main character in a satisfying, love-to-hate them way, but was impressed with the author's ability to still make her a little sympathetic to the reader.

Apart from that, there wasn't a ton that I loved. The comparisons to Dante fell flat for me, and while I understood its purpose in the story, I really don't like the girl-on-girl hate that was so prevalent here. Overall this book served its purpose for me, but I don't see it being anything remarkably deep-cutting.

I didn't realize going into this book that it was a collection of perspectives, similar to WORLD WAR Z but with tangentially connected characters. The first chapter really pulled me in and I was admittedly disappointed to see that we wouldn't be continuing the story with characters and a plot I was drawn into. 

Nevertheless, I enjoyed most of the chapters and characters I was introduced to. My favorites were probably the opening chapter, the chapter about the theme park for terminally ill children, and the chapter about the search for a new home planet. I thought the scale, both in terms of the number of characters and the time frame for the story, was very impressive and well constructed. I appreciated the science fiction elements of the story paired with real experiences and thoughts derived from the pandemic in 2020.

I admit I don't think I fully understood or really enjoyed the final chapter, but I can appreciate it for what it was. This isn't a book to pick up lightly, but if you know what you're getting into I think it can certainly be impactful.

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories edited by one of my favorite horror directors, Jordan Peele. There were a number of stories here that I enjoyed (my rating is the average of my rating for each individual story). Here are my five favorites/most highly rated titles:

These stories had me captivated during my morning walks and commutes, and I loved how this audiobook was performed by a full cast. There was only one story that I had to skip because I could not understand the narrator (I didn't include this title in my rating calculation). I'm so glad I listened to this anthology and I would love to continue to explore works by these authors or other horror anthologies in the future!

Thanks to Feiwel & Friends and NetGalley for providing me an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and feedback are my own.

I'm always here to try out a book where the synopsis gives off Gothic or dark academia vibes. I enjoyed a good part of what I read, but at the 30% mark this book began to drag and get too repetitive for me. Anytime it takes me almost a week to make a 10% progress jump on a book I have to consider jumping ship to avoid putting myself in a slump.

I did like the writing and I enjoyed the start of what seemed to be an extended metaphor that was going to carry throughout the rest of the book. I was interested in our protagonist and the plot of her missing sister, but the rest of the story seemed to lack the substance needed to keep it going.

I'd consider reading something else by this author in the future because I really did like her prose, but this one just wasn't for me.

My penchant for niche non-fiction strikes again. I really enjoyed the framing of this book, from the author describing her own personal experiences with humor to telling other people's stories in a more serious manner. As someone who doesn't have any first-hand experience with romance fraud, I found these stories to be fascinating.

I enjoyed Becky's narration and found myself laughing out loud at some of her humor, even if a number of her jokes weren't my personal taste. At times, these jokes felt a little repetitive, but books don't often make me laugh out loud so I'm giving the hits more weight than the misses.

Holmes does a great job of bringing awareness to a underdiscussed topic and removing the shame and  guilt surrounding the issue. She gives the stories the weight they deserve while also breaking the tension with funnier or less serious anecdotes that are still relevant to the discussion. I also appreciate how she gives tips and advice to readers about how to recognize some of these schemes for themselves.

I think I read this book in a couple of days, and I found it to be memorable, informative, and humorous. Would recommend if the topic is of interest!

 Thanks to Tor Books and NetGalley for providing me an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and feedback are my own. 

I haven't read any Veronica Roth since my DIVERGENT days, and I was really pleasantly surprised! This was a fast-paced, well-written, fun little novella that I got a kick out of. I enjoyed the worldbuilding and lore, I liked the relationships between the characters that were as developed as you'd expect in less than 200 pages. I enjoyed the twists and turns the story took, and I liked the ending. Not much to complain about!

My personal beef is that I didn't realize this was urban fantasy, and I'm much much more of a high fantasy girlie. I would have loved to see a novel-length version of this in its own developed world, but I'm not complaining about what we got! If you've been hesitating on post-DIVERGENT Roth, I think this is a great book to pick up.

First off, what an interesting book to be narrated by the author. Despite what you may think, Patric is a very engaging narrator and infuses her story with a lot of humor and tone I really enjoyed.

I want to try and keep this review brief because I know I could get really into it if I tried. I see some reviewers repeating a couple of points in the comments and I think they're interesting and want to address them in my own review.

1. Patric has no credentials and the Ph.D. she has is from an unaccredited university/degree mill/somewhere unreliable. Her dissertation can't be found anywhere online.

This is obviously questionable and leads me to doubt some of her academic expertise, but I don't think this takes away from the themes of her story. At its essence, the message of this memoir is to spread awareness of sociopathy/antisocial personality disorder and help destigmatize it. While it would have been really nice to have some more credible sources from an academic and research perspective, it doesn't negate Patric's lived experiences and the fact that her purpose in writing this memoir is a good one.

2. Patric is a sociopath and therefore must be lying/embellishing most of her story. She even said at the start of the book that some conversations were reconstructed and not exact.

I do think it's important to read this book with a grain of salt when it's been written by a self-admitted chronic liar. However, most memoirs are like this. People don't remember the minutiae of every conversation they've ever had with the expectation they might write a memoir someday and need to recall it. This was actually my exact problem with THE GLASS CASTLE, an incredibly well-received memoir that doesn't make this disclaimer but I found to be more egregious in this aspect of storytelling than SOCIOPATH.

I think this story is fascinating and well-told, so I'm willing to give Patric some trust and credit in what she's trying to do. It's not a perfect book by any means, but I couldn't put it down.

Sometimes I pick up a book to read for a reading challenge where I otherwise might not have. I always love when those books end up being a real hit. Right off the bat I would like to say that I really loved the narrator's job on this book, and when I went to see what else he's narrated, it's this singular hard-hitting environmental nonfiction and a TON of smut. Go off king.

The first part of FIRE WEATHER was my favorite and the most compelling to me, as it details the Fort McMurray fire in Alberta in 2016. I really enjoyed hearing about the history of the area, the specific conditions that made that fire so destructive, and how the town responded and was affected. It reminded me a lot of FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL, but I liked it even more than that. I loved the science mixed with first-person accounts and thought the storytelling was very impactful.

I also found the second half of the book, which is more concerned with the history of the politization of climate change to be incredibly interesting. However, this half of the book was also the hardest to listen to. Living in an area that is so directly impacted by climate change (with the evaporation of the Great Salt Lake and wildfire smoke that stays in the Salt Lake valley from nearby fires all summer), climate change is on my mind all the time, and I mostly feel entirely helpless about it. I know the author needs to present facts boldly as they are to raise awareness about the severity of the issue, but it was pretty depressing to me, especially with no "but here are groups doing good / progress being made" bit at the end - which I understand would be dishonest to do because things aren't good and this is reality and you can't make up a false positive ending for your nonfiction science book to make people feel better about themselves.

I think this book is outstanding, I really do. It may be hard for people to listen to, especially those already painfully aware of the dire situation we're in. But I do think FIRE WEATHER is important to read and share, and it deserves all the awards, nominations, and praise it's received so far.

 Thanks to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for providing me an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and feedback are my own. 

T. Kingfisher has created a strange, creepy little world for herself in the Sworn Solider series in which she can do whatever weird and dark things she wants. And it works so well. This book is very different in premise than WHAT MOVES THE DEAD, but our group of odd, loveable characters helps connect this gap and drew me right into the premise of this story just as quick as the first book. This was a quick read that never felt dull, but still managed to improve on the relationships established in the first book. 

I do think the premise of WHAT MOVES THE DEAD was a little creepier to me than this plot, but I still really enjoyed myself and think I'll probably pick up a physical copy at some point, which is something I almost never do with ARCs. I really enjoy the intrigue of the worldbuilding and atmospheric elements of this series and I really hope Kingfisher continues with these episodic novellas. A hit, as usual!