taliaissmart's reviews
2260 reviews

I mean, YA you can eat like it’s ice cream. Fun and fast-paced and flirty; court drama featuring a completely evil king and his hot & kindhearted son; a girl who’s somehow the top assassin in the country at 18 (and she’s been in prison for the past year), because, why not. The writing quality was far better than I feared it would be—the pages slide by without disruptive confusion or eye-rolling, which in YA-fantasy-land can be a bit of a high bar to clear (cough Crave cough). I shall read book 2!

Cute! It’s giving plot hole (and substance abuse) but I liked the found family vibe—though one could argue that maybe lovers should ultimately not end up related??

In this bloody, visceral novella, a captive mermaid sets her ferocious children upon her kidnappers and flees with the town's plague doctor. They travel together across a windswept taiga, drawing closer to each other and to unexpectedly familiar new dangers.

Khaw's language slices and stuns--this book is so original, stomach-turning, layered, and gorgeous despite its low page count.

A meta murder mystery that continually breaks the fourth wall, deconstructing the tropes of the genre as the clues & bodies pile up. Set at an elite hunting club's bicentennial 4th of July celebration, the mystery follows an outsider hired by an unknown lodge member to investigate an unknown goal.

I liked the premise, but the actual mystery felt lukewarm to me.

One of those books that feels like it probably could have been an essay or two in The Atlantic. The main idea is interesting, but the individual chapters don't dive deep enough to warrant the page count; it ends up feeling fairly redundant.

The biggest myth/assumption smashed for me: the scale of the American Revolutionary War. Such a relatively small conflict! For example, the Boston Massacre left 5 people dead...and that's a major historical event that we all still learn about! Wild!