shane_the_reading_rat's reviews
1030 reviews

probably the only time i will ever give a short story collection 5 stars, every single story was a banger
literally every one!!!

dnf’ed @ 77% (i think)
look, i started out really enjoying this book. some of my ancestors were sephardic jews who had to leave spain in the inquisition, so, yknow, i was extremely excited to see a book in this setting and time period? but the pace was incredibly slow and eventually i just couldn’t stay invested at all anymore. everything felt deathly boring. makes me really sad, i fully believed this would be a 5 star book for me :/

i am a man on a mission (desperately trying to finish all the many books i started before knowing i’d be traveling in less than a week)

ANYWAY!! i really liked this, it worked better for me than World of Wonders (at least personally). felt much more cohesive and like the food and the essay were genuinely connected. i also just love food writing so maybe im biased

i thought this was pretty much just fine. i liked it, but not enough to really warrant more than 3 stars. the sea witch was fun :) narration was generally quite good, but the villains having the most stereotypical southern accents i have ever heard will never not be funny. why do they sound like that??????

really beautiful little essay collection. favorites were Reservation Riot Grrrl, First Salmon Ceremony, and Black Cohosh.

be gay do botany (and raise your sapphic plant daughter)

this hit so hard that i don’t know if i even have the words for it :’)

this felt like pure nostalgia in a book, like i could practically feel everything Darby was around— the sun on his skin, the wind blowing through Oak Falls, the feeling of not knowing how to love a place— again, it hit pretty hard.

i also just love this style of time travel book and the trope of a trans person interacting with their former self. im so normal about it

i have a lot of complicated feelings on this book (the artwork is genuinely gorgeous, though).
i think it should be made more obvious before reading the whole book that this is definitely a Christian take on this kind of story. the kids in this book meet a pastor who helps them get out of North Korea, and he begins teaching them about Christianity. makes sense, pretty in character, there are definitely missionaries that do this kind of work. but the way the kids just immediately take to Christianity and begin applying the values doesn’t make sense to me? they’ve lived in a very restrictive society with no religion their whole lives, why do they immediately fully believe this pastor on it and act like the type of kids i was around as a kid who had been at church their whole lives? doesn’t make sense.
also the authors note rang a bit of an alarm bell for me mentally with it specifically only mentioning Christianity being persecuted in NK, not any other religions.
i think this story is amazing in itself, but the heavily Christian undertones that often jut into the story gave me some pretty odd vibes.

this was fine, but really didn’t live up to how much i enjoyed This Poison Heart. the pacing felt extremely odd to me (i swear for the first 50% all these characters did was stand around and yap), which kept me from getting invested for a long time. similarly, the beginning of this had zero recap of the events that had happened previously and i felt very :/ about that.
also, just to be honest, i dont like Marie. i dont like how violent she is, i dont know what Briseis sees in her, and i really don’t like the “immortal falls in love with teenager” trope. it gives me massive ick. marie feels like a character intended to be the “tough character who has a soft side”, but she just has no soft side.

i absolutely sped through this. so good, perfect amount of suspense and horrifying-ness (also gorgeous cover)